The tent was hot and felt stuffy, yet every time Daren looked at this man, he got a chill down the back of his neck. Better dead, he’d have been better off dead. Poor bastard.

“Lead us, m‘lor’,” replied the nameless man, who until a year ago had been a simple farmer, with no cares of who ruled and who did not. “Lead us. We got nothin, now. Our families is dead, or as good as. Our homes is gone. Our fields is weeds an’ wild things. Lead us.”

“Thrice-dead Horneth,” Daren muttered under his breath. Lead them, he says. Farmers on horseback. Whatever cavalry skills they had vanished when the mage controlling them died. And here I am, with a horde of undisciplined, half-mad farmers with no memory of what to do with swords and lances.

And yet-they were half-mad, and had nothing to lose. Ancar had stolen everything from them, including their names, for none of them remembered exactly who he was. All they had left were the memories of what had been done to them, and to their loved ones, memories so hedged about in rage that nothing the mages could do would erase them, and so those memories had been blocked off until Daren had given the fateful, desperate command to the earth-put everything back the way it was.

Some things, of course, were impossible; the dead could not be brought back to life, nor memories that had been destroyed be regained. But the troops’ minds had been given back to them, and the land was already beginning to heal, free of Ancar’s bondage.

“Professionals are predictable, ”, ran one of Tarma’s proverbs. “But the world is full of amateurs. ” So long as he kept his troops out of their way, where was the harm in taking these men with him and unleashing them on Ancar’s forces?

“Let me think about this,” he temporized, “I’m not sure I have the right to lead you. You’re not my people, and frankly, you may not like my orders. If I don’t have any real hold over you, you could decide to strike out on your own, and then where would my plans be?”

“But—” the man began, when he was interrupted by the arrival of Quenten. The mage was excited, his red hair going in all directions, and he made matters worse by running his hand through it every few moments.

“My lord, we intercepted a mage-message from Ancar’s commander a few moments ago,” he said. “We—”

Then he noticed the nameless man sitting there, and shut his mouth with a snap.