The Spirit Stone - Katharine Kerr [162]
When they reached the encampment, Dallandra took Grallezar to her own tent to eat and rest, then did what she could for the two injured men. Both would recover, as she told Grallezar later that day, when the Gel da’ Thae leader woke after a long afternoon’s sleep. Since they were alone, they could speak in the strange mixture of Elvish and the Horsekin tongue they’d developed on their various visits.
‘The army will camp here tonight, so we won’t have to move them immediately,’ Dallandra said. ‘We’re waiting for scouts to return.’
‘I see.’ Grallezar paused to rub her face with both hands. ‘Dalla, we’re really here, aren’t we? I’m not just dreaming this or meeting you on the astral or some such thing, am I?’
‘You’re not. You’re safe in my tent.’
Grallezar looked up with a long sigh. For a moment she stared out at nothing, then sighed again. ‘It’s an evil day indeed,’ she said, ‘when my city would open its gates to savage tribesmen.’
‘Is that what happened?’
‘Yes. The Alshandra people got themselves elected to the council, you see, then voted an alliance with the northerners—those are the people who settled Taenalapan. When I objected, they stirred up their mob against me.’ But Grallezar suddenly smiled, revealing her long teeth, filed into points like fangs. ‘My city may be lost to me, but I’ll pray that Zakh Gral pays the price for it. I hope to every god that your army razes it to ashes. I hope they kill every man in it.’
‘Oh, if they can, they will. Have no fear about that.’
Dallandra had some hard questions to ask Grallezar, but the leaders of the army were as eager to talk with her as she was. A page came with a polite summons and interrupted their talk. Dallandra accompanied her to Prince Voran’s peaked tent, where Gwerbret Ridvar, Prince Daralanteriel, Warleader Brel and Envoy Kov stood waiting. In the rising evening wind their banners, carried by the heralds who stood behind each man, snapped and fluttered with their devices, the gold wyvern, the red rose, Cengarn’s blazing sun, the dwarven axe. At the sight Grallezar caught Dallandra’s hand and squeezed it.
‘Courage!’ Dallandra murmured. ‘They won’t dare harm you, not with me here.’
Indeed, Prince Voran behaved like the flower of courtesy. He had his canvas stool brought for Lady Grallezar, as he called her, and a stoup of Bardek wine as well, which he personally handed to her. Yet Dallandra was aware of the other lords eyeing the Gel da’ Thae women with a mixture of awe and suspicion, the way they might view some huge Bardekian lion brought to them in a cage. Even Daralanteriel—Dallandra stored up a few choice words to say to him later.
Prince Voran knelt beside Grallezar’s chair with a friendly smile. Someone must have told him that she spoke a dialect of Deverrian, because he addressed her in that language. ‘My lady, if you’ve rested enough, it would gladden my heart if you’d tell us your tale.’
‘My thanks,’ Grallezar said. ‘It be a familiar tale, here in the Northlands, but no doubt not one you hear off to the east. Once there were six cities of Gel da’ Thae, though Taenalapan and Braemel were the largest. Now there be six towns ruled by Horsekin savages. Braemel, it were the last to fall to these loathsome dogs of priestesses and prophets. The price they did pay for those towns, it were high, a price of blood, not that these madmen count death as a peril.’
‘These savages,’ Voran said, ‘are they your northern tribes, then? We’ve heard about them.’
‘Some are, but their leaders, they be bred inside town walls as Gel da’ Thae. In the end they did prove themselves as brutal as any northerner, and all in the name of their goddess. This Alshandra poison, it did well up among the tribes, but then it did spread to the cities. One by one they fell to Alshandra’s people. Mine, it were the last. Their leaders did corrupt our troops and win them over.’
‘They have well-armed regular troops, then?’
‘They do, officered by our own rakzanir, driven mad by dreams of loot and pasture land, all promised by the false prophets who think this Alshandra