He plans a feint to the west, but will attack both over mountains and up the great river. I have sent word to Kostandan. The rest of the scroll was a crude map with a line across the mountains from a square marked “fort” to somewhere in southern Lyonya. The map showed the coastline of the Eastbight and north to the Honnorgat in careful detail, but inland only crudely. Aarenis was the wrong shape, and the Immer drainage nowhere near reality, with four cities marked at equal distances along it. The man must have drawn it from hearing it described, not from seeing it or any good map. But the “fort” lay north of the circle for Rotengre … Kieri’s mind leapt to Dwarfwatch.

Snow pummeled the windows, coated the courtyard, veiled the view beyond. Kieri tried to remember his own trip across the pass at Dwarfwatch when he was Aliam’s squire, but the wounds he’d taken getting Aliam out alive and the fever that had followed left him no clear notion where that pass came out. Not too far from Halveric Steading … where Estil and the family were alone, all the soldiers having come north with Aliam.

He could do nothing in the teeth of this storm. Aliam was days away in Riverwash. He could but hope that Alured had not sent any substantial force across the mountains before the pass closed.

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

Aarenis

Spring came early to the island, bringing the tangy fragrance of flowering white-bush, the bleating of newborn goats, the chink and scrape of hoes working house-gardens. Stammel, on his way to fetch water one morning, stopped short. Smoke. Not the village’s cookfire smoke, but a more acrid smoke from somewhere at a distance. He knew that smell. The smoke of war … death, destruction, ruin.

“What’s wrong, Matthis?” asked Rimmel.

“Smoke,” he said. “The wrong smoke. Tell everyone: douse all fires here.” It was too late, he knew, to pretend no one lived here; enemies would already have seen cookfire smoke rise pale in the morning sun against the slopes of the mountain. And enemies already knew their way up from the sea; they had been here before. “Pack up,” he said. “What I told you—” Someone cried out, a youngster he thought by the sound—panic in that cry. Stammel said, “Be quiet,” in a voice that no recruit had ever disobeyed, and none here disobeyed either.

“We can’t be sure they’ll come,” Rort said.

“We can’t be sure they won’t,” Stammel said. Another gust of wind from the east brought a stronger whiff.

“I smell it now,” Rort said; others muttered agreement. “It’s early for pirates.”