Raj Ahten turned and scrambled up the trail fifty yards, through dry grass filled with yellow tansy, to the base of the Eyes of Tor Loman. A stone stair spiraled three times outside the circumference of the tower. Raj Ahten scrambled up it, limping painfully, one shoulder five inches lower than the other. Though his face looked beautiful, he seemed from the back to be little more than just another twisted hunchback. His right arm hung askew, and his right leg might have healed, but it looked shorter than the left.

Orden panted, sweated with exertion, tried to breathe in air that felt thick as honey. The grass near his head smelled so rich, he wanted to lie in it a moment, to rest.

On the heath, Iome and Gaborn rode side by side through the great throng. Gaborn held a shield high, and carried one of the Duke’s lances. Tied atop it was a bit of a red curtain from the windows of the Duke’s Keep. A white circle of cloth pinned in its middle would make it look, at a great distance, much like the Orb of Internook.

That is, it would appear like Internook’s colors to anyone watching twenty miles away. Gaborn suspected Raj Ahten’s far-seers would be watching. It was standard tactics during any siege to place scouts all around the battle.

For the past half-hour, Gaborn had been busy worrying about the logistics of what he did: trying to drive a couple of hundred thousand head of cattle and horses across the plain was hard work. Even the experienced drovers and horsemen in the retinue could not manage the task easily.

The work was made harder by inexperienced boys who tried desperately to help but who tended to startle the cattle at every turn. Gaborn feared that at any moment, the huge herd might stampede right or left, tramping the women and children who bore shields in a great line before the herd, as if they were warriors.

Yet as he watched the skies above Longmot, fear seized Gaborn even more. The skies looked gray overhead, but far on the horizon darkness flashed as Raj Ahten’s flameweavers pulled fire from the heavens.

Gaborn feared he had caused it, that his ruse had led Raj Ahten to hurry his attack on Longmot rather than to simply drive the Wolf Lord off in terror, as Gaborn had hoped to do.

As he rode, words began to form in his mind, a half-remembered spell from an ancient tome. Though he’d never fancied himself as one with earth powers, now he found himself chanting,

“Earth that betrays us, on the wind,
become a cloak to hide us, wrapped within.
Dust that reveals us, in the sky,
Hide our numbers from the predator’s eye.”