She felt the woman’s eyes upon her for some time, a full four or five breaths, and then Serap exited the tent, leaving Renarr alone.

Rising, she approached the map table, replacing the anchor stones to force down the curled edges of the map. Then she leaned over it and studied the thin inked lines denoting the terrain. ‘Ah, that hill there, then, should do us well on this day.’ Conversations of greed with glinting eyes. Sharp laughter and cackling, crude jests, and if the men and women we took last night soon lie cold and still in the mud of the valley below, well, there will always be others to take their place.

Avarice makes whores of us all.

* * *

Captain Havaral rode at a canter down the slope, the wind skirling dead leaves across his path. The broad basin of the valley ahead was not quite as level as he would have liked, with a slight climb favouring the enemy. From the crest of the rise behind him, where Ilgast Rend had arrayed his army of Wardens, the lie of the land here had seemed more or less ideal, but now he found himself picking his way around sinkholes hidden by knots of leafless brush and small, twisted trees, and here and there thin but deep run-off tracks crooked their way downward, inviting a horse’s ankle and then the sickening snap of bones. The Wardens were a mounted force, relying upon speed and mobility. What he was seeing of this slope troubled him.

He had been a Warden all his adult life, and had in Calat Hustain’s absence often taken overall command as senior officer. It was not easy to simply shrug off his sense of betrayal in learning that Lord Ilgast Rend had supplanted him in this responsibility, but he would follow orders nonetheless, without a word of complaint, nor an instant’s resentment in his expression. Personal slights were the least of his worries this morning, in any case. That the Wardens had marched on Urusander; that he and his companions were now preparing for battle, all for the sake of a few hundred slaughtered peasants in the forests, was, to his mind, utter madness.

To make matters worse, they had no reliable intelligence on the Legion’s complement. Was it fully assembled? Or was it, as Rend clearly believed, yet to achieve that? Pragmatic concerns, these. On this day they could find themselves facing the full might of Urusander’s Legion.

Civil war. I refused to think on it. I stripped the hides off my Wardens whenever they even so much as hinted at it. Now here I am, an old fool, laid siege to by knowing looks. Best hope, then, that I’ve not burned the last vestiges of respect among my soldiers. Nothing fashions a fool quicker than a hollow tirade.

But even fools could possess courage. They would follow his orders. To think otherwise was inconceivable.