The Blood Knight - J. Gregory Keyes [121]
Only the fact that most of the singers were so terribly off-key kept her eyes open, though it did leave her wondering what the original could have been like. The only thing amusing in it was the physical portrayal of Robert, which involved a mask made of some sort of gourd and a nose that was noticeably, inappropriately made to resemble another, netherer, body part.
All because occupying the castles wasn’t enough; the countryside had to be wooed. Besides drumming up more troops, she had to make sure her canal boats could come and go to Loiyes, which was where her provisions came from. While Artwair and his knights reduced castles, she spent her time visiting the neighboring towns and villages, meeting with the landwaerden, garnering their support, and asking permission to leave behind even more soldiers to watch the dikes and malends that kept them drained. That turned out to be almost as grueling as her flight from Vitellia, although in an entirely different way, a daily march of audiences and dinners with town aithels and gravwaerds, flattering them or frightening them, whichever seemed more likely to work.
In the end most of them were willing to give her passive support—they wouldn’t hinder her progress, they would let her leave troops to occupy the birms so the canals couldn’t be flooded or chained—but few were willing to relinquish manpower. Over the course of the month only about two hundred joined their forces; that came nowhere near offsetting their losses.
Despite all of that, she somehow had it in the back of her mind that when they reached Eslen, they would still stage the final battle on the poel. What she found instead was what she was looking at now from the birm of the north dike. Artwair, Neil, and Cazio stood beside her.
“Saints,” she breathed, not certain what exactly she felt.
There was home: the island of Ynis, her stony skirts draped in fog, her high-peaked hills overlooking Newland, the city of Eslen rising on the greatest of those hills. Within the concentric circles of her walls were the great fortress and palace whose spires seemed to thrust into the lower provinces of heaven. It looked both impossibly huge yet ridiculously tiny from this strange vantage point.
“That’s your home?” Cazio asked.
“It is,” Anne said.
“I never saw such a place,” Cazio said, his voice timbred with awe, something Anne wasn’t sure she had ever heard before. Thanks to Elyoner’s tutors and Cazio’s quick mind, he did so in the king’s tongue.
“There is no other place like Eslen,” Neil said. Anne smiled, realizing that Neil himself had seen Eslen for the first time less than a year ago.
“But how do we get there?” Cazio asked.
“That will be the problem,” Artwair said, scratching his chin absently. “It’s the same problem we were always going to face, only multiplied. I had hoped he wouldn’t do this.”
“I don’t understand,” Cazio said.
“Well,” Anne said, “Ynis is an island in the confluence of two rivers: the Warlock and the Dew. So there is always water around it. The only way to reach Eslen is by boat.”
“But we have boats,” Cazio asserted.
That was true enough; they still had, in fact, every one of the fifteen barges and seven canal wolves they’d had at the beginning of the journey. There had been no river battle.
“Yes,” Anne said. “But normally we’d just be crossing a river, you see. This lake you’re looking at now used to be dry land.” With a wave of her hand, she indicated the vast body of water that now lay before them.
Cazio frowned. “Maybe I didn’t understand you,” he said. “Did you say dry land? Tero arido?”
“Yes,” Anne replied. “Eslen is surrounded by poelen. That’s what we call land we’ve claimed from the water. You’ve noticed