Read War in Tethyr for Free Online

your gown off? It's fearfully stuffy in here."
    For answer Zaranda rolled on her side, facing away from the head, and pulled the counterpane, which had been part of the Tuigan chieftain's trove and was inexplicably covered with embroidered elks and penguins, to her chin.
    "Surely you are not by nature so grim and cheerless, Zaranda Star."
    "No," she said. "I'm not. Good night." And she gestured out the candles.
    * * * * *
    The tower of Gold Keep was still visible away up the valley behind them, shining like its namesake in the morning sun, when Vander Stillhawk turned the head of his blood bay back and signed to the column behind him, Smell smoke.
    "Me, too," Goldie said. "Wood, cloth, straw."
    "A farmhouse," Zaranda said grimly. Her eyelids were ever-so-slightly puffy. For all the welcoming softness of her bed, her sleep had been fitful, troubled by dreams of blackness gathering like a thunderhead on the western horizon, and whispers at once seductive and sinister.
    Father Pelletyr came jouncing up on his little donkey. Zaranda's stablehands had bathed the beast and plaited colorful ribbons into its mane and tail. Goldie forbore to pin her ears at it.
    "Zaranda, what seems to be the difficulty?" the priest asked.
    She pointed. A sunflower of smoke was growing rapidly in the sky to the northwest, pale gray against pale blue.
    The priest clutched his Ilmater medallion. "Merciful heavens," he said.
    Zaranda turned Goldie sideways on the wagon-rut path that wound its way through short spring-green grass. "Balmeric! Eogast!" she shouted to her sergeant of guards and her dwarven drover-in-chief. "Get the mules off the road and the men into a defensive circle around them. If any armed strangers come within arbalest range, drop them!"
    "Must it then be raiders, Zaranda?" Farlorn asked in his lilting baritone, riding up on his gray mare. "It could be some farmer's been dilatory about cleaning the chimney of his cot and set his thatch alight."
    "This is Tethyr," she said grimly. She turned Goldie and booted her after Stillhawk, who was already riding at a slant up the ridge to their right. The ranger had unslung his elven longbow from his shoulder. Farlorn shrugged and spurred his mare to follow.
    "What of me?" the priest called.
    "Stay and watch the caravan," Zaranda called back over her shoulder.
    "Be careful, Zaranda!"
    "You're wasting your breath, good father!" Farlorn shouted cheerfully back.
    She charged for a quarter mile across country that had not entirely settled from the Snowflake foothills into Tethyrian flatland. The ground rolled like gentle ocean swells. Zaranda crested a rise and saw a prosperous farmhouse of at least three rooms. The walls were stone, but the insides and most of the thatch roof burned fiercely.
    A woman ran toward Zaranda, rough brown homespun skirts hiked high, round cheeks flushed with fear and exertion. As Zaranda watched, a horseman in blood-sheened leather armor rode up behind her and drove a lance into her back. She uttered a despairing wail and pitched forward on her face.
    Zaranda gave forth a wordless falcon-scream of fury, whipped her sword from her scabbard, and spurred Goldie forward. Blue witchfire crackled along the saber's curved blade.
    The mounted man had his back to her, tugging at his lance and laughing at the way it made the woman's body move across the ground. Intent on his game, he had no hint of danger. Three rough-clad men in the hen yard, though, spotted Zaranda and loosed a volley of arrows at her from their short bows.
    It was a fatal mistake. Like the elves who had raised him and trained him, Stillhawk was no horse-bowman. He had already dropped to the grass without reining in his bay, and was running off his momentum with his long brown lean-thewed legs. Even as he ran, he nocked an arrow and released, then, running, reached into his quiver for another.
    The arrows that struck the second and third short bowmen down were already in flight when the two men turned their heads