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from his back. He clung weakly to a badly lathered horse. Neither appeared likely to survive the day. Both wore a thick coat of road dust. They had been running hard for a long time. The man’s scabbard was empty. He was otherwise unarmed.
    She glimpsed his face as he thundered past. “Rolf!” she gasped. “Rolf Preshka!” Then, “Uthe, get ready.” While the bowmen thrust arrows in the mound for quick use, shewaved at Bevold. A lot of horses were coming. She had no idea who their riders might be, but Preshka’s enemies were her own.
    Rolf had been her man before Bragi, though Ragnarson didn’t know the relationship’s depth. She still felt guilty when she remembered how she had hurt him. But his love, rare for the time, and especially for an Iwa Skolovdan, was the unjealous kind. The kind that, when at last she had set her heart, had caused him to help her snare Ragnarson.
    Preshka, like Bragi, was a mercenary. After Elana’s marriage he had joined Ragnarson as second in command. When Bragi had gotten out, Preshka had joined the party that had beat its way in to the landgrant. But he had been unable to put down roots. Two years later, Bragi’s foster brother, Haaken Blackfang, and Reskird Kildragon had come by. Rolf had gone off with them, leaving a wife and child mystified and hurt.
    In her own way, Elana cared for Preshka as much as her husband. Though their relationship had remained proper since her marriage, she missed him. He had been around so long that he had become a pillar of her universe.
    Now he was home. And someone was trying to kill him.
     
    III) Sons of the Disciple
    A flash-flood of burnoosed horsemen roared from the wood. Elana had a moment to be startled by their appearance so far from’Hammad al Nakir, another to wonder at their numbers-there were forty or fifty, then it was time to fight. “Go!” she shrieked.
    Her bowmen leapt up, loosed a flight that sent the leaders tumbling over their horses’ tails, caused tripping, screams, and confusion behind.
    Bevold’s group swept round the mound, loosed a flight, abandoned their bows for swords. They crashedthe head of the line while confusion yet gripped their foes. In the first minute they looked likely to overwhelm the lot.
    “The riders!” bellowed Uthe Haas. “Aim at the riders.”
    “Don’t count your chickens, Uthe,” Elana replied from the grass. There was little she could do with her crossbow. “Take what you can get.” Haas, smelling a victory still far from certain, wanted the mounts as prizes.
    They almost pulled it off. Half the enemy saddles were clear before they recovered.
    The wild riders of Hammad al Nakir had never learned to handle the Itaskian arrow-storm. The appearance of Itaskian bow regiments had ordained their defeat during the wars. In a dozen major battles through Libiannin, Hellin Daimiel, Cardine, and the Lesser Kingdoms, countless fanatics had ridden into those cloth-yard swarms, through six hundred yards of death, and few had survived to hurl themselves upon the masking shieldmen.
    But the commander here wasn’t awed. He seized the ground between Lif s men and the barrow, eliminating the screen Bevold could have provided, then sent everyone unhorsed to get the bows.
    “Those are soldiers, not bandits,” Elana muttered. “El Murid’s men.” Royalist refugees from Hammad al Nakir were scattered throughout the western kingdoms, but they were adherents of Haroun’s. They would not be after Preshka. Assuming Rolf was still a friend of bin Yousif.
    She got her chance to fight. Two quick shots with the crossbow, then the attackers arrived. Her first had deep, dark eyes and a scimitar nose. His eyes widened when he recognized her sex. He hesitated. Her rapier slipped through his guard. She had a moment before she engaged again.
    The man had been middle-aged, certainly a survivor of the wars. If these were all veterans, they were El Murid’s best. Why such an investment to take one man, nearly a thousand