Guelf didn’t answer, limiting himself to a duck of the head and thump of fist on breastplate in salute. He took off looking for Sir Harold Czarnecki, the other Gervais knight here, and waved their squires forward. But he bared his teeth in a sudden angry grin.

The Dúnedain, huh? Hope that bitch and her sidekicks all bought it. That would be a nice little dividend on Gervais’ arrears of revenge for my brother Jason’s death back in the Protector’s War! Baroness Mary will be pleased. And they promised me, uncle to the King, they did indeed promise me that. Which doesn’t mean throwing this fight. Uncle to the King of As Much As Possible, that’s the thing.

“Chezzy! Get the menie together; we’re on dirty tricks! Grab some mantlets, one of Thierry’s engineering wagons and let’s go burn and destroy!”

His men-at-arms and footmen . . .

Odard’s men! he thought. But I’m here and my nephew isn’t.

. . . roared with pleasure.

“Valentine! Valentine! St. Valentine for Gervais! Let the arrows fly! Valentine will suck them up! Face Gervais, face Death!”

The battle banner of the barony waved in the hot sun with its black-andred image of St. Valentine, transfixed with arrows, on a yellow background.

Looks painful, he thought, not for the first time.

The crossbowmen slung their weapons and put their shoulders to the heavy wheeled shields, heaving them up on their props like wheelbarrows.

“Six men pulling, six pushing on each!” Guelf snapped. “Get to it!”

The spearmen moved their shields to their right shoulders and fanned out in a protective screen between the mantlets and the city walls.

“Dismount the lancers,” he decided. “We won’t have time to get the mounts out and warhorses can’t be wasted.”

There was grumbling at that, but Association knights trained to fight on foot when they had to, and being armored cap-a-pie the men-at-arms would stiffen the footmen nicely. The mantlets trundled along, bouncing on their spoked steel wheels over the irregular ground.

“Idle bastards,” Guelf said, looking around at the ruins of what had been Pendleton’s northern half.

Nobody had to ask who he meant. The wreckage of the suburbs here had mostly been left to decay naturally, with only occasional efforts to clear a field of fire on the north bank of the river—or perhaps that was simply people salvaging building material. Concrete floor-pads and basements and the ruins of burnt-out houses were still thick, and others had been converted into workshops or storage or piles of rubble had been shoved aside for truck gardens and turnout pasture. There were even occasional rusted automobile hulks littering the dirt-drifted, sagebrush-grown roadways, though they’d been stripped of useful items like springs and glass windows. Anywhere in the Association territories—or at least anywhere with an inhabited countryside and a city in the middle of it—would have been a lot neater.

The wagon with the engineering supplies followed behind, lurching and jerking as the heavy horses dragged it up the footpath east along the bank opposite Pendleton’s walls.