“Actually,” King Orden said, “I hoped to reserve that spot for another, the captain of my guard. A very formidable fighter.”

“Ah, aha!” Dreis said. Now that he was considering it, he did not seem at all certain he wanted to fight this battle. “Well, perhaps that would be best.”

“But we can reserve the spot after him for you, milord,” Orden said. He knew that he did not have to reserve a place of honor for this nincompoop. Once Dreis gave his endowment to the captain, Orden would be free to put the Duke anywhere in the serpent. Someplace close to the middle would be nice.

“Very well, then,” Dreis said in a tone of dismissal. Then he made it clear to his servants that he was not to be disturbed before dawn, for he would need his sleep.

So King Orden went back to the battlements and fretted and watched for signs of aid, signs of trouble. He put his far-seers, men with many endowments of sight, on the highest pinnacle of the graak’s aerie, then sent scouts out to keep watch on the hills and roads both east and west for sign of Raj Ahten’s occupying army.

But they caught no wind of it.

Instead, hour by hour, all through the night, men came riding in to give aid—three hundred more farmers from the area around Castle Dreis, all with longbows; they had no armor, but wore woolen vests that might keep out a poorly sent shaft. Borenson’s regiment came racing in near dawn—eighty warriors who bore many wounds from yesterday’s battle.

They told how Raj Ahten’s troops never showed for the ambush at Boar’s Ford. Said they’d heard no word of Gaborn.

From the west came a regiment of two hundred lancers on force horses from out of Castle Jonnick, men who’d ridden when they heard Castle Sylvarresta had fallen, then had neared it only to hear that a battle would be fought at Longmot.

From the east, Knights Equitable trickled in from freeholds, a dozen here, fifty there. Mostly they were older men who had nothing to lose, or young men still naive enough to believe that war is glorious. All of these added to the fifteen hundred knights and archers that the Earl of Dreis had brought in, and the two thousand from Groverman.

Then there were the farmers’ sons and the merchants out of towns that bordered the woods. Boys with grim faces, some armed with nothing but an axe or a scythe. Young men from the cities who were dressed in finery, who bore light swords that had too much gold in the baskets of their ornate hilts.

Orden did not relish the arrival of such commoners, hardly counted them as defenders. Yet he dared not deny them the right to fight. This was their land to protect, not his.