Sir Ruffin Velin was delivering the bad news. He was the Grand Constable’s second-in-command right now, a hard-looking man in his thirties with thinning brown hair, and one of her vassals and hatchet men. You had to be careful around them. They’d been the Lady Regent’s kill-squad before Baroness d’Ath went into the mainline military. He wasn’t going to take Ruffin on lightly. Tiphaine d’Ath . . . made his skin crawl. He wasn’t the only one. Nor was the Regent called the Spider without good reason.

In fact, it’s going to be a very bad day, Guelf thought.

He was head of the Barony Gervais contingent here today, as senior fighting vassal in the absence of his nephew Baron Odard . . . who was off somewhere to the east on a quest like something out of one of the Dúnedain storybooks, hopefully making the runaway Princess Mathilda helpless with admiration of his heroism as they tailed along behind the Mackenzie brat.

And what I’m doing today won’t be in front of a beautiful . . . well, passably good-looking . . . Princess who’s heir to immense wealth and power. Hell, let Odard get her flat and I’ll be content to be his uncle and shake the patronage tree in his shade.

They’d been up before the dawn, working like mules to set up the siege machinery along the bank of the Umatilla. He was sweating like a pig inside his suit of plate and wishing he’d switched to an old-fashioned mail hauberk; the interior was still beastly hot this time of year, and they were a long way from the Pacific’s cool breezes. Plate might as well be waxed canvas as far as keeping the air out was concerned. All he was getting was the occasional tantalizing draught through the joints when he moved. Little metallic clanks sounded as men jostled around the map and their harness rattled, or the leather straps and padding beneath creaked.

The stated objective—Right up till now, thought Guelf, casting an irritated eye at the quarter high sun—had been to install the machines to sweep the bridges across the river, then advance to take out the city wall of Pendleton by the Emigrant Gate when the beaten forces of the Round-Up tried to hold the city. Meanwhile the rumor was that the Dúnedain were to do something unspecified but wonderful, if it worked.

“The whole operation got blown,” Ruffin said bluntly. “They pushed in more forces at precisely the wrong time for us. We don’t have very much information yet, mostly from enemy deserters, but the Grand Constable . . .”

Sir Ruffin was looking at Sir Érard Renfrew, who was also Viscount Chenoweth, heir to the Count of Odell, and his younger brother, Sir Thierry Renfrew, who was something of an artillery specialist.

Sir Guelf allowed himself the luxury of a grimace of distaste and a quick turn of his head and spit. With enough dust to make your teeth gritty every time you swallowed no one could prove it was a statement of opinion. Of the Grand Constable, and of House Odell, d’Ath had been Conrad Renfrew’s protégé as well as the Lady Regent’s; the families were tight, part of the glacis around the Lady Regent’s position.