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they’d bag the whole stinking army, and Rising Rock, too. This way, they just get Rising Rock. Happy day! And once we’re done running, Thraxton’ll make it sound like a victory to King Geoffrey. He always does.” He spat on the ground in disgust.
    “What can we do if they run us on into Peachtree Province?” Biffle asked.
    “Hit back some kind of way, Colonel. That’s all I can tell you,” Ned replied. “You want to know how, you’ll have to ask Thraxton the Braggart. It’ll be a fine thing, him commanding the Army of Franklin when it’s really the army that got run clean out of Franklin.” He spat again.
    Colonel Biffle wandered off, shaking his head. Ned of the Forest didn’t wander. He stalked. He’d eaten his fill with Thraxton, but he checked the cookpots from which his riders ate to make sure the cooks were doing their job. Count Thraxton, no doubt, would have turned up his nose at the food—but then, Count Thraxton turned up his nose at just about everything and everyone. This was what Ned ate most of the time. Not least because he ate it most of the time, it wasn’t bad.
    His troopers, those of them still awake, tended their unicorns, currying the white, white hair or picking pebbles out from between their hooves and the iron shoes they wore or doctoring small hurts. Ned nodded approval. “Way to go, boys,” he called. “Take care of your animals and they’ll take care of you.”
    “That’s right, General,” one of the riders answered. “That’s just right.”
    “You bet it is.” Ned nodded again, emphatically this time, and the rider grinned at having his commander agree with him. Ned grinned, too. What a liar I’m getting to be , he thought. Oh, he took good care of his unicorns when he wasn’t riding one of them into a fight, too. But when he did take saber in hand . . . He tried to remember how many unicorns he’d had killed out from under him since he went to war for King Geoffrey. Eighteen? Nineteen? Something like that. The generals who were known for their mounts—Duke Edward of Arlington, for instance—didn’t take their beasts into battle.
    Ned shrugged. He didn’t care about any one unicorn nearly so much as he cared about licking the southrons. He could always get himself another mount. If King Avram prevailed, he couldn’t very well get himself another kingdom.
    There was his pavilion, and there were the serfs who took care of the cavalry’s baggage wagons and the asses and unicorns that hauled them. The big blond men—some of them bigger and stronger than Ned, who was a big, strong man himself—gathered round the general. They were all his retainers—not quite his serfs, since he had no patent of nobility, but he looked out for them and they looked out for him.
    They all carried knives. Had they wanted to mob him and melt off into the countryside or run away to the southrons afterwards, they could have. They didn’t. By all appearances, it never entered their minds. One reason for that, perhaps, was that Ned never let it seem as if it entered his mind, either.
    He ruffled the pale hair of the biggest and strongest serf. “Well, Darry, what do you hear?” Folk with dark hair often ran their mouths as if serfs had no more notion of what was going on than did horses or unicorns. Ned had taken advantage of that a good many times. His drivers and hostlers made pretty fair informal spies.
    This time, though, Darry answered, “Is it true we’ve got to skedaddle out of Rising Rock? Don’t want to believe it, but it’s what people say.”
    “They say it on account of it’s true, and may the gods fry Thraxton the Braggart for making it true,” Ned answered. His serfs already knew what he thought of his commander. They chuckled and nudged one another, vastly amused to hear one dark-haired lord pour scorn on another.
    A sly blond named Arris asked, “How will we keep Franklin if we can’t stay in Rising Rock?”
    “That’s a good question,” Ned answered.