The scouts were a sensible precaution. The Tsurani were no match in forest craft for the likes of the Natalese Rangers or for Kethol himself, granted, but they were learning quickly. Too quickly.
That was the trouble with making war on people without eliminating them to the last man: you killed the weak, stupid, and unlucky, leaving the strong, smart, and fortunate to face later on. If it was up to Kethol, the war would end with the Tsurani pursued to whatever vile pit they’d emerged from, and slaughtered right down to the last infant – despite the obviously preposterous stories about how many of them there were on Kelewan – but, at least for now, that issue wasn’t even on the table.
All told, it was more than a good argument for Kethol, Pirojil and Durine getting their pay and getting themselves out of here, just as soon as this council of barons was over, and the ice had cleared in the south.
Warm winds and soft hands …
Soon, perhaps. Although … He sniffed the air. He couldn’t have said how he knew, but there was a storm coming. Not soon, not right away. The sky to the west was clear and blue-grey, only the puffiest and most distant of clouds scudding across its surface. But there was a storm coming, and of that Kethol was sure.
Kethol glanced over to where Baron Morray waited, motionless, on his equally motionless mottled bay gelding. He was a big man, who would’ve seemed more pretty than handsome, if it wasn’t for a certain calculated ruggedness in his plain-cut greatcoat and the utilitarian dragonhide grip of the great sword that hung from his saddle in counterpoint to the short rapier that hung from his hip. His features were just too regular, too even, his clean-shaven face too smooth, his movements too fine and precise, when he moved at all.
His look at Kethol was filled with disdain.
‘As you can see, there was no reason for you to fear,’ he said, his voice pitched low enough to carry only as far as Lady Mondegreen and Captain Tom Garnett.
Kethol didn’t rise to the bait. What the Baron thought of him as he sat still while LaMutian regulars rode forward to scout was of no concern to him. He could more feel than hear Durine stirring behind him, while Pirojil’s face held that studiously neutral expression that spoke volumes about his opinion of people who criticized professional men in their work.
Tom Garnett came to their rescue, his nervous horse taking a few prancing steps that Garnett managed with just the bare twitch of his fingers on the reins, and a tightening of his knees against the saddle. ‘I’m afraid, I’m sorry to say, Baron Morray, that you misunderstand Kethol’s reluctance to ride ahead.’
‘Oh?’
Kethol shook his head minutely. Tom Garnett, too, eh?
As usual, it was for some reason incorrectly understood by people who really didn’t know the three of them that he, Kethol, was the leader of the three. Durine was too large and too quiet, and Pirojil was grotesquely ugly; for some reason, that tended to make people think that Kethol was somehow in charge of the other two.
‘I was with the Swordmaster when he assigned the three of them to protect you, Baron Morray,’ Tom Garnett went on. ‘I don’t remember him telling them that they were in your service.’
Unspoken was the fact that the Swordmaster hadn’t put Tom Garnett’s company under Baron Morray’s command, either; a distinction that seemed to escape Baron Morray more than occasionally.
Which was not surprising. Nobility tended to be punctilious about such things around other nobility, but less so around commoners, no matter what their military rank. That was one thing Kethol liked about working in the Western Realm of the Kingdom; while soldiers everywhere understood that nobility was no substitute for judgment and experience, out here you found the armies refreshingly free of ambitious office-seekers. Had Tom Garnett been back in the Eastern Realm, angling for a squire’s rank or marriage to a minor noble’s daughter, he’d have been kissing Morray’s backside and asking politely which cheek he preferred smooched first.
The forest loomed ahead, all grey and stark. It would be spring, soon, bringing green life back to the woods. That was the nice thing about the woods: you could count on a forest to regenerate itself, both from the ravages of winter and those of invaders.
People were different.
Tom Garnett signalled for the column to proceed, and Kethol kicked his horse into a quick canter that put him ahead of Baron Morray, while Durine and Pirojil took up their places beside the Baron.
After years of working together, he could almost read the minds of his companions without the need for any word being spoken between them. Kethol would take the lead, not because he was any more expendable than the other two – any more than he was the leader of the three – but because he had been raised in forested land, and his early years had tuned his senses to the smells and sounds and the silences of the forest in a way that could only be learned from birth.
Off in the distance, a woodpecker hammered away, almost loud enough to hurt his ears. Apparently the clopping of horses’ hooves on the hard, frozen ground wasn’t threatening enough to cause the bird to go silent.
Raising his hand for attention, Kethol gave out a forester’s shout, and the hammering desisted for a moment, only to take up again. Good. The bird was sufficiently wild to go silent in the presence of men, but sufficiently used to men to resume his work quickly; and that helped to verify that they were still alone in the forest.
He smiled as he rode. You could develop quite a legendary ability for being able to hear things in the woods if only you let the woodland creatures help you.
A cold wind picked up from the west, bringing a chill and a distant scent of woodsmoke, probably from some nearby franklin’s croft. Birch mixed with the tang of pine, if Kethol was any judge of woodsmoke, which he was.
Morray kept up a steady stream of complaints about his franklins, which Kethol listened to with only half an ear, and then only because the Baron griped better than most grizzled cavalry sergeants.
By edict of the Earl, and probably the Duke himself, the borders of a franklin’s croft were inviolable by the barons – who were always looking to increase their own holdings, and settle bondsmen on any vacant land – but the actual house itself was, in law and in practice, the property of the Baron, and while franklins were forbidden from expanding their wattle-and-daub buildings, the barons were required to make necessary repairs to ‘their’ property.
If you believed Baron Morray’s complaints, not only had Tsurani troops put the red flower to every thatched roof in his barony last autumn, forcing the Baron now to spend sizeable sums for the hire of carpenters, daubers, and thatchers, but the mud and straw of LaMut invariably crumbled if a harsh thought was sent in its direction.
Arrangements would have to be made with Baron Mondegreen, the earldom’s Hereditary Bursar, for some loans of Crown money, no doubt, and Baron Mondegreen was as famous for being stingy with Crown money as he was for his own personal generosity, and it was likely that there was some other conflict between the two, given that Morray was serving as the Earl’s wartime Bursar, if only because he was more mobile and healthy than Mondegreen was. His position would enable – and require – Morray to pay soldiers, fealty-bound or mercenary, as well as provisioning troops and suchlike; it would not permit him to dip into the Crown purse for repairs to his own barony.
For Morray to be tupping the Baron’s wife while trying to get him to authorize a loan was probably not the wisest of ways to proceed, but Kethol had long since decided that wisdom and nobility seemed to go together only by coincidence.
The farming road they were using to make their way through the North Woods wound down into a draw, and then up and out through a shallow saddle between two low hills. The Earl’s