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good a rider as most deghans.
    The banks of the ditch were only a few feet high, but it was five feet across, and most streams in this part of the foothills were deeper than they looked. Jiaan hoped he wouldn’t find out about this one the hard way.
    Rakesh, who knew more about jumping than Jiaan ever would, quickened his stride to a rapid lope, shortening his paces as he neared the earthen barrier. Then he gathered his muscles and surged upward.
    Jiaan suppressed his shout of exaltation, for it didn’t do to startle your horse as you sailed through the air, one with your mount, one with the sky. Then, as it always did, the ground arrived.
    Rakesh’s hooves thudded to the earth, and Jiaan slammed into Rakesh’s withers, trying to grip the horse’s slippery hide with his knees and mostly failing. Only his fists, clenched on a double handful of mane, kept him from falling—though Rakesh’s forward surge into a rocking canter helped him to regain his seat. He glanced aside in time to see Fasal’s mare sail over the ditch and land daintily. Fasal took the landing much better than Jiaan had, but Jiaan had no time for envy—the rest of his troop was approaching theditch. Only three men fell, and they quickly rolled to their feet and remounted, cantering across the field after the others. Jiaan followed the last of them, tracking the Hrum’s progress with his ears. When the Hrum neared the ditch, he pulled Rakesh to a halt and looked back.
    The idiots tried to jump it. Perhaps they had seen the Farsalan chargers going over and assumed it was something any horse could do. Fortunately, their horses knew better.
    Approaching a barrier that had been almost too big for the larger, stronger chargers to jump, with water of unknown depth on the other side and awkward, unbalanced riders on their backs, the Hrum horses planted their feet and stopped.
    Several of the Hrum promptly discovered the depth of the water, hurtling over their horses’ heads and into the ditch. It
was
deeper than it looked, Jiaan noted—almost five feet deep, and muddy, too. The riders floundering in the ditch were the lucky ones. Other Hrum riders hit the ground when their horses stopped, and the horses behind ran into the horses in front, stepping on the fallen men and unseating their own riders. Only a handful of Hrum, riding at the rear of the pack, managed to remain in their saddles.
    Shouts of pain arose amid the storm of cursing, and Jiaan winced. He had fallen off his horse at the Sendar Wall, when the Hrum had suddenly raised a hedge of long lances, and broken hiscollarbone. It was barely healed even now, and he vividly remembered how much it had hurt.
    Then he remembered the slaughter that had followed, and any impulse to sympathize with the Hrum died.
    He turned Rakesh and cantered after the others. They would reach their remounts and be gone long before the Hrum sorted out that mess. In fact, with the extra time this had given them, they could probably lead their tired horses instead of having the local peasants return them later. The risks involved in having the horses returned were small, but Rakesh had been his fathers horse—Jiaan hated to take any risk with him.
    Fasal was waiting for him at the entrance to the valley that led to a track in the foothills—the track that would ultimately take them to the small mountain meadow where their army had been hidden for so long.
    “They’ve not going to give up, you know.” Fasal turned his mare to walk beside Rakesh. “This is probably that Hrum officer your peasant spy said was assigned to hunt us down. They’ll send the foot soldiers to look for our riders who left the main force. They’ll probably find at least a few of them.”
    “They probably will,” said Jiaan.
    “But the Hrum will torture them! They’ll reveal the location of the croft!”
    “I’ve been told that the Hrum don’t torture prisoners,” saidJiaan. “But they won’t torture our men in any case. I told them that