Alberich’s lip curled a little. He didn’t much care for the Holderkin, but they had surely proved to be too tough for the Tedrels to digest. And it wasn’t that they’d actually formed any kind of a defensive army either. By law and custom, they kept enough food in storage at each of their Holdings to keep everyone minimally fed for two years—and in that way, no single bad year could bring them to their knees. So when the Tedrels descended last summer, instead of fighting them, the Holderkin had locked every man, woman, child, and beast into their fortresslike compounds and sat the Tedrels out. After looting what little hadn’t been locked up, and burning the crops, there wasn’t much the mercenaries could do, except circle the walls, trying to get in. That wasn’t a very successful strategy, and they wound up getting shot full of arrows for their pains any time they got within range. The places were too small to justify the amount of effort it would have taken to breach those walls, and there was no real loot of any kind if you did. The Tedrel recruits being what they were, they fought for the loot as well as the promise of a land of their own. Yet you couldn’t leave the hundreds of Holds intact if you intended to occupy the land; that wasn’t merely asking for trouble, it was inviting trouble in and offering it a cup of tea, so to speak. So last season when the Tedrels had tried to take Holderkin territory, the season had been singularly profitless and unsatisfying for them. Perhaps that had added to the impetus that impelled them to put in their final push now. They could not afford two lootless seasons in a row; too many of their recruits were not fighting for a new homeland, and would break ranks and desert if they saw no profit coming for a second year. You couldn’t even tempt them with the Holderkin women; if the walls were breached, as had happened in one or two instances, the ones that didn’t kill themselves were slain by their menfolk.

Given that the Holderkin would only follow precisely the same strategy a second time, it was vanishingly unlikely that the Tedrels would attempt the conquest of the entire country of Valdemar from there. It was far more likely that their plan was to conquer all of Valdemar and then cut off the Holderkin, dealing with them one Holding at a time at their leisure.

“I haven’t much else to tell you,” Talamir admitted. “Only that they’ve fallen for our ruse, that they believe we have been beaten down and depleted, and that they are gathering every resource they can for that final campaign.”

“ForeSeers?” Alberich asked. He hoped the ForeSeers were getting something, although his own rogue and unpredictable Gift hadn’t even warned him of this news.