“They’re out to break us this year because if they don’t they won’t be in a position to try again. This has been a slow, cautious, methodical war so far. On our part, it was a delaying action. It won’t be anymore.”

Saints were invoked—which might actually do some good, now—and there was a flicker of men crossing themselves. Maugis de Grimmond shrugged and spoke lightly:

“At least the High King didn’t have to sneak into the Prophet’s domains and throw something into a volcano.”

That broke the momentary dismay, and turned it to grim amusement. Tiphaine nodded thoughtfully to the young nobleman, took a sip from her brandy-spiked coffee cup, put it down and went on. The point of her weapon traced lines above the silk of the map.

“That’s the good part; the bad is that the Temple in Corwin isn’t going up in smoke or falling into a pit and his armies aren’t going to flee in despair either, even though the High King has the Sword. They’re massing here outside Spokane, and here at Lewiston on the Snake, we think to keep their horses from stressing the grazing too badly in either place. They can’t move directly west out of Spokane; too dry once you leave the Palouse and hit the Columbia plateau.”

The red-haired baron of Tucannon nodded: “I hunted antelope there with my father a few years ago. I saw the skeleton of a jackrabbit lying beside an empty water canteen it had been carrying.”

A few chuckles at that; a lot of that country had been irrigated from Grand Coulee, but while the dams still stood the giant pumps that filled the canals had stopped flowing at six fifteen p.m. Pacific time, 1998. Those of the population who’d survived had ended up in places like this, where rainfall or windmills or simple gravity-flow ditches provided enough water. Nobody went there anymore except a few hunters.

Tiphaine waited impassively a moment and then went on: “There’s no fodder there this time of year either. We could hold the north-south line of the Columbia above the bend forever, especially with the Free Cities backing us up and supplies and reinforcements easily available from the Yakima valley and the baronies in the east-slope valleys and the Okanagan.”

Her pointing dagger went south of the great river, into what had once been Oregon.