A great map of the Republic of Uelland lay spread out on the table before Hobb, painting a vivid picture of intolerable inconvenience.

  “Mr. Robe,” he announced, “this map is intolerably inconvenient.”

  Robe, who was also bent over the map, peered up over his new spectacles at Hobb. These were rimmed in gold, now, and stood out tastefully against a coat of fine black velvet, trimmed in silver lace. An elegant steel dagger was at his belt in a sheath of black leather. The angry scar on his face was the only flaw in his countenance.

  “I’m afraid the vicissitudes of geography are, for the moment, outside the authority of the Government,” Robe replied gravely.

  The Herald was gone. This was the starting point for the inconveniences that smirked at Hobb from the flat surface of his map. The Herald was gone, off to who-knew-where in the far North to gather his Giant-men and his dragon, then to sweep down into that remote northern valley that Rufus Snugg had appropriated to himself. He had left behind him, in the vast cavern beneath Hoel, only inert towers, heavy, still air, darkness—and that odd metallic smell that Hobb could not quite identify. Whatever the Herald had come for, he had retrieved it and left.

  “I must get there first,” muttered Hobb to himself, his eyes drifting back to the tiny dot on the map that was the valley. “There is something there that he wants, and he must have it in a certain time. We must have it first.”

  “You mean Rufus Snugg?” asked Robe. “He’s already there.”

  “Not Snugg,” snapped Hobb irritably. “One impudent little merchant band does not rank highly among our adversaries.”

  “Ah—the Svegnians, then,” surmised Robe eagerly. “You think they mean to move north from Enderly before we can throw them out in the spring.”

  Hobb did not correct him. Instead, he sent Mr. Robe away to chair a meeting of the Committee on Public Safety in his place, after gently but firmly relieving him of the dagger. The memory of his fixer’s feral eyes and bloody mouth as he crouched over Snort’s body on Sheepford street convinced Hobb that the man had no business possessing weapons. Hobb was not normally one to carry a knife himself, but he fancied the look of the hilt, and so fixed it on his own belt.

  Then he summoned General Sir Thomas Howe from the nearby Guard barracks.

  “It is the necessity to move quickly,” he explained to the young Knight-General, “that gives rise to a certain inconvenience. Three hundred miles lie between Uellodon and this valley that the Snuggs have seized. After the farmland of the Great Basin around Roosterfoot, the land becomes broken and increasingly ill-suited to the passage of large armies.”

  “Will we need a large army?” asked Sir Thomas skeptically. “Firearms or no, the Snuggs don’t have a large force in the valley, and their supply line runs across leagues of dense forest from Hog Hurst in the west. With a bit of careful planning, we can nullify their technological advantage using mobility and dispersed attacks. The Guard units we’ve been cycling in from the countryside are improving quickly.”

  “We will need as many men as we can bring to bear, as quickly as possible,” insisted Hobb, shaking his head. He had not yet decided how to explain to his new commanding general about the twelve-foot-tall, armored behemoths—and the dragon—that would invade the northern reaches of the Republic in the spring. He assumed they would be easier to grasp in person.

  Sir Thomas looked doubtfully at the map. “Troops can move swiftly by river once we reach the East Branch,” he observed, “but the upper stretches won’t be clear of ice until late April. And, unless you want to be slowed down fighting Anne’s forces at every farm and hamlet, we’ll have to march on foot through the farmlands of the eastern Great Basin, where the rebels have less strength. Carrying boats, no less,” he added.

  “I don’t suppose you could prevail on your colleagues in the Heavy Arms to move up their invasion of the North, so as to distract her?” Hobb asked plaintively. “Hyden and Watt are holed up at Swallow Hall like two mother bears hibernating for the winter, and the most I ever hear from them are terse requisitions for more and more supplies the Republic can barely afford.”

  There had been no reply to Hobb’s overture of peace, after Anne’s initial encouraging letter. He had sent the reliable Michael Rider with his proposal north through the front—but nothing came back, neither by bird nor man.

  Sir Thomas shrugged. “The other generals tell me very little. From what I’ve heard from my old mates in the cavalry, they plan to press east against the Svegnians in the spring and oust them from the Tharma River valley first, then turn north and campaign against the Pretender once the Svegnians are dealt with. Whatever you choose to do with the Republican Guard—they will have to do it on their own.”

  Hobb made a tent with his fingers and stared at the map. Three hundred miles, the Great Basin, the distant east branch, invading Svegnians further to the east, and a hive of rebels and bandits around Green Bridge, all added up to an insurmountable wall.

  “It will be impractical,” he said finally, and reluctantly, “to risk moving north with the Guard before Anne is bottled up.”

  And before that happens—he added to himself—the thing that lurks behind that metal face will have seized whatever it is in the valley that is so urgently important to him, and I will have lost what little leverage I had.

  He looked again at the map.

  Intolerably inconvenient.

  ???

  The King was no help at all. Lying semi-comatose in his bed, his face pale and beaded with sweat, he focused with difficulty on Hobb, as the First Minister presented his case. The details that were too incredible to include were, of course, the very most critical to his argument.

  “I will not divert the Heavy Arms from the task of dispersing the Svegnians from our sovereign territory, Hobb,” said the King with obvious difficulty. “And particularly not to oust a gaggle of merchants from some patch of wilderness that might or might not be in Uelland, and which no one has bothered with at any point in recorded history. I don’t know why you keep pestering me about this damnable valley, but I would be grateful if this were the last time. I have not been feeling myself.”

  Indeed, the ailing King did not look himself. He had lost weight, and his face had a pale, sickly color to it. There was a foul smell that lingered in the room. The physicians hovered over the royal bed like well-dressed vultures, waiting for some wounded animal to die.

  Hobb turned to leave, sighing in resignation, and nearly ran into Boris, who had entered the room quietly behind him.

  “What have I told you about sneaking up on me?” hissed Hobb as they slipped out of the King’s bedchamber, Hobb directing his secretary firmly by one wiry elbow. “When I am ready to die of a heart attack, I will give you leave to appear suddenly and mysteriously behind me just as I am about to turn around. Until that day—don’t.”

  “My apologies, First Minister,” replied Boris contritely, “but I came with urgent news. There is a man in custody who I think you’ll want to see.”

  “Does he have an army?” snapped Hobb. “Or at least several wagonloads of good sense and political will that I can distribute among the leaders of the Republic?”

  “Probably not,” admitted Boris. “All he has is a diary and a sword, which he insists he must give to King Leeland.”

  ???

  The man was fearful and unkempt. His hair and beard were long, and his clothes tattered. He was old; perhaps in his late sixties. He sat nervously on a bed in a small servant’s room in the basement of Palace Naridium. Two guards stood alertly outside the small chamber. On the floor at the feet of the unkempt man was a sword. It was long, of the ‘hand-and-a-half’ variety, and Hobb immediately recognized the crest of the Enderly family on its hilt. It was sheathed in black, unadorned leather. Next to the sword was a thick book, with a sturdy but battered cover also of leather.

  “What is your name, goodman?” asked Hobb.

  “Harold the Horse, sir,” replied the man.

  “Delightful,” said Hobb sardonically. “Another Harold arrives to disturb the counsels of the great and mighty. And what is this sword and diary that you wish to give to the King, Mr. the Horse?”

  “They were ‘trusted to me by Sergeant Guillam, who got ‘em from Sir Richard Enderly,” replied Harold the Horse with evident pride. “And I been journeyin’ through mountains and snow and beasts and Giant-men to bring ‘em home to ‘im. ‘Twas a long journey, an’ fraught, an’ my friends Gil and Wognut fell ‘long the way, but ‘ere I am all ‘lone at the end of it.”

  Hobb thought about this for a long moment.

  “Boris,” he said quietly, “I want you to fetch paper, quills, and ink, and then return here. Be quick about it. You will remain and assist me with recording the interrogation of Harold the Horse.”

  ???

  It was an outrageous tale. Had Hobb not possessed extremely compelling proof to corroborate it, he would have walked out after five minutes. There were the ruins of lost civilizations, enormous underground chambers filled with rotting machinery, an ancient language with words of power hidden in a modern tongue—and, of course, Giant-men. There were a great many Giant-men.

  Harold the Horse told of his long journey to the north with Sir Richard’s company, and of their initial capture and escape from the Giant-men. Harold knew little of Sir Richard’s activity once they were captured again near the giant city of Nipol Grotsvor, for he and the others had been imprisoned—but he had seen the Crown Knight again briefly when they were rescued. Sir Richard had given his diary and sword to Guillam before they escaped, with instructions to return them to King Leeland. Then he had, inexplicably, gone deeper into the enormous temple complex, leaving his men with words they could say to any Giant-men, that would compel them to stand aside. After their escape, Guillam had dispatched Harold the Horse and two others to return the sword and book to Uelland, while he himself planned to attempt the rescue of their leader, Sir Richard.

  Hobb’s mind raced as the narrative unfolded. Sir Richard and the Herald—the Herald of God, not Harold the Horse—were one and the same man. How had he gone from a stern but obedient Crown Knight to a tool of some mechanical being with delusions of divinity?

  Harold the Horse did not have the answers. His own view of Sir Richard’s tale ended with the escape from the temple.

  The journey of Harold the Horse, Wognut, and Gil back to the south was fraught, and the three had very nearly been recaptured by Giant-men. Gil had frozen to death in the mountains, and Wognut had grown too weak to continue on in the spring. At last he had closed his eyes to die of starvation. But Harold the Horse, now alone, had endured, and crossed the Green, and returned to Uelland.

  Even back in his native land, he found little safety. Hearing of Anne’s rebellion in the north, he had made his way to the far eastern districts of the Kingdom, traveling south slowly and carefully so as not to draw attention from the combatants. He had been delayed again by the invasion of Enderly, and in desperation crossed over to the Svegnian side of the Tharma to avoid suspicion. But now here he was, back in Uellodon.

  “Your quest is finished,” said Hobb gently. “I will take the sword and the book to King Leeland.”

  “Guillam gave the task to me,” said Harold the Horse doubtfully. “I was to give them to the King myself.”

  “I am the First Minister of Uelland,” replied Hobb reassuringly. “The King is just upstairs.”

  Harold the Horse picked up the sheathed sword and book, and set them on his lap.

  “I have to give ‘em to the King!” he howled suddenly, his eyes lighting up with an unhealthy and obsessive glow.

  Hobb stood up and motioned Boris to follow him. They left the room.

  “Go in there and retrieve the sword and the book,” he instructed the guards outside the room. “And see to it that the journey of Mr. the Horse is definitively concluded.”

  The two large men went in and shut the door. It didn’t last long. There were a few thumps, and one anguished scream. Then the two guards returned, and wordlessly handed the sword and the book to Hobb. His arms sagged as they held the enormous weapon cradled in both arms.

  “Clean up the room,” he instructed Boris shortly. Then he turned and strode down the hallway, staggering under the weight of Sir Richard’s sword.

  ???

  That night, Hobb read the diary.

  “What a bore,” he remarked to himself, midway through. “Nothing happening at all. Just ‘on march’ day after day.”

  Then they were captured by Giant-men, and Hobb began to pay attention.

  “Dreadfully obvious,” he remarked to himself when Sir Richard began writing in cipher, fearing his ‘hosts’ were reading his diary. “Misspelled words make up the message. Don’t they teach anything better than that in the officer corps?” But then he reflected that the Giant-men, apparently unfamiliar with the Uellish language and learning on the fly, might well miss the finer points of its notoriously irregular rules of spelling.

  He read Sir Richard’s final page and stared up at the ceiling.

  Two things were immediately, inescapably, clear. First: King Leeland must never see the diary. Sir Richard of Enderly’s shameful and unnatural feelings for his King—whatever their former relationship—were not fit for Leeland’s eyes.

  And second: Sir Richard had made a discovery that entirely changed the nature of his relationship with the Giant-men and their Herald.

  In the morning, he sent once again for Thomas Howe.

  “I have changed my analysis of the situation,” he informed the young general. “Begin mobilizing the Republican Guard. Pull in every man that isn’t absolutely necessary in the provinces, and stage supplies as far north as you can. We will march for the northern frontier as soon as the river ice begins to break up. And I will be going with you.”

  ???

  They did not meet in a palace, or in a comfortable lounge in some discreet inn. There were no glasses of wine, or cigars, or pipes. No pleasurable entertainment was set aside for later. They met, instead, on a cold barge in the middle of the Green River. A mid-March snowstorm raged outside, and the cabin belowdecks was barely heated by a small iron brazier. The four delegates huddled in long wool cloaks and pulled their hats down over their ears.

  “We think the Fourth War of the Cornerstones has gone on long enough,” announced the Brassen, “to facilitate the domestic aims of everyone involved. It has outlasted its usefulness and threatens to become a net negative on our economies.”

  There was a silence, as the four men shivered.

  “There is little downside to Carelon,” said the Carolese eventually. “None of you has managed to coordinate even a proper raid into our territory. But if you wish to conclude hostilities, we will consent.”

  They looked at the Svegnian.

  “We will end the matter,” said the tall, bearded minister, “if Brasse returns the riverport of Kakronda to us. Otherwise, we have a force poised to strike where you least expect it.”

  The Brassen snorted. “No one takes your army seriously, Svegnia. But if we are discussing the return of territory, I wonder what Uelland has to say about Enderly, and the Tharma river valley?”

  All eyes turned to Hobb, who had so far remained silent during the conference. He sat, staring at the flames in the tiny brazier. He thought of the vast bulk of the Herald’s dragon, and of ranks of glittering Giant-men, marching south with grim inevitability.

  “All of you have violated the terms of our agreement,” he said at last. “This war was to be raids and maneuvers only; yet you permitted your greed for territorial acquisition to outweigh your good sense. Why should I make terms with liars?” He gazed at each of them with cold eyes, drinking in the offended shock on their faces.

  “There will be no peace,” he concluded. “And we will not meet again.” Then he rose to his feet and walked out of the cabin, to the boat waiting to take him back to Uellodon.

  ???

  On the twenty-seventh of April in III Leeland:16, Hobb’s army of fifteen thousand Republican Guard marched out of Uellodon, bound for a nameless valley in the far northern wilderness. He thought of it as ‘his’ army, as he rode along in his carriage amidst the command staff. Though General Sir Thomas Howe gave orders to the officers, it was Hobb that gave orders to the general. King Leeland had seen to that before they left, closeting himself for a short, private conference with Howe to give his final instructions.

  Though the King’s condition had not grown worse, nor had he recovered from his wound. He seemed to be stuck in a limbo of agony, slowly wasting away without actually dying. The King would not be accompanying the Republican Guard on its northward march, but Sir Thomas Howe had emerged from his conference with a clear view of the chain of command. He followed Hobb’s instructions, after giving his own views, without further comment or complaint. Hobb found their new relationship quite agreeable.

  With Hobb in the carriage rode Chancellor Wembley Pearsy. Chancellor Pearsy did not find his own presence in the carriage agreeable at all, and had initially objected, with all the pretension at his command, that he was absolutely indispensable at the Royal Academy. This had gone on for several days, until Hobb finally had enough.

  “Chancellor,” Hobb told him at last, “if you remain behind, I shall appoint you Archdeacon of Uellodon. Since the practice of religion is illegal in the Republic, you shall then take up residence with the last man to hold that office.”

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  Pearsy’s complaints ended immediately after that.

  Boris, too, rode in the carriage, dutifully taking notes, sorting through the dispatches that caught up with them from the capital, and writing out Hobb’s replies. Speaker Robe—Hobb had arranged for him to be elected to the Assembly from one of the Uellodon districts, and then to be elevated to Speaker—had been left in charge. Nonetheless, Hobb insisted on a steady flow of updates, and frequently gave his input on economic policy, city administration, and matters of criminal justice.

  Of this latter, there were a great many. Despite the best efforts of the new Administrative Courts, Uellodon’s rash of inexplicable violence continued to spread, and the Yute Devices at Hoel were kept busy.

  Howe pushed the army hard, but there is a limit to the distance fifteen thousand fighting men and their support personnel can move together in one day. Large wagons, stacked tightly with light, thin canoes, trailed along after the army in the baggage train, slowing them further. Hobb chafed at the delay, but found there was little he could do about it.

  In three weeks the army reached Roosterfoot, where Hobb found that General Logwall had placed the recalcitrant market town under siege with a large contingent of the Heavy Arms. While the two armies made camp near each other for one night, Hobb stopped in briefly to pay his respects to the stiff knight-general and encourage a swift resolution of the conflict. Logwall promised confidently that Roosterfoot would soon be returned to the proper authorities, and that he could then move quickly to cut off Green Bridge. Hobb departed in satisfaction.

  General Howe looked on at the siege works sadly, but said nothing.

  The army’s progress slowed as it moved north from Roosterfoot, and the well-maintained trade roads gradually narrowed into rutted farm lanes. Several late-spring snowstorms blew in from the west, forcing the troops to slog through a foul mixture of mud and snow as they trundled their way north. Hobb’s carriage was nearly useless in these conditions, and he finally abandoned it in a little village along the road. He, Boris, and Pearsy rode on horseback instead, shivering miserably in the cold, sleeting wind. The boats were unladen from the wagons and carried, each on the shoulders of a pair of men.

  At night, Hobb read and re-read the appendix of Sir Richard’s diary by the light of a single dim oil lamp, absorbing into his brain the precious but maddeningly incomplete cache of words in the language of the Giant-men. A grudging admiration for the troublesome knight began to grow in his mind. Sir Richard had discerned from his hosts not only a small treasury of vocabulary and grammar, but also a hidden, older language buried within the alien tongue.

  Hobb wondered if the thing behind the metal mask remembered writing the diary—or even remembered who it had once been.

  Skirting far to the eastern edge of the Great Basin, Sir Thomas had expressed some optimism that they might be able to avoid contact with Anne’s trade mercenaries. And at first, it looked as if they might escape without fighting. As the northern edge of the Great Basin drew closer and closer on the map that Sir Thomas showed Hobb each night, his hopes rose that there would be no fighting at all.

  The scout cavalry gave the first warning that something was wrong. Ranging out nightly in small squadrons from the main body, they reported contact with enemy scouts, and then sighted the campfires of a larger force to the west. Sir Quarterfoot, commanding the scouts, inspected the enemy force personally and put their number at three thousand.

  “But their numbers may be deceptive,” ruminated Sir Thomas over the map that evening, sitting alone with Hobb. “With their advantage in technology, I would count each of their men as three of ours. If they choose the ground for an engagement, the odds will be even closer. We should not fight if we can avoid it.”

  “We must reach that valley with all possible haste, General,” replied Hobb sternly, “and with enough force to defend it. I leave the tactics to you, but our strategy cannot be compromised.”

  Sir Thomas nodded grimly as Hobb departed, and called in his officers.

  The following day, the army turned east, hoping to avoid an engagement. But they ran into a small river that wasn’t on the map, and were forced to turn north again. The scout cavalry reported in throughout the day, and Sir Thomas’s face did not lighten. As the sun set and the army began to set up a cold camp, Hobb went to meet with his general.

  “There will be a fight tomorrow,” Sir Thomas stated simply. “Unless you want to turn around and march south again.”

  “I do not,” replied Hobb, shaking his head emphatically.

  “If we want to make progress to the north, we’ll have to bleed for it,” said the young general with a shrug. “We think their numbers are about thirty-five hundred, and they are deployed on both banks of the river to prevent us slipping by on the other side. The scouts found several pontoon bridges linking their positions. They’re digging in on low ridges now and setting up their gunnars.”

  “What will you do?” asked Hobb.

  Sir Thomas looked up at him through his eyelashes. His eyes were weary, and there were dark circles beneath them.

  “I will see about neutralizing their advantages, First Minister,” he said. “If you will excuse me, I need to speak with my officers. Get plenty of rest if you can. Tomorrow there’s a good chance you’ll spend some time running for your life.”

  Hobb sat gloomily around a low campfire with Pearsy and Boris, poking despondently at a bowl of watery bean soup that refused to make any effort at all to be appetizing.

  “Fighting tomorrow?” asked Pearsy.

  Hobb nodded silently.

  “We could still go back,” suggested the academic cautiously. “There’s no reason we have to stay with the main body. We could wait a few miles behind the battle until Howe sends for us.”

  “No!” snapped Hobb. “We are not going back, Chancellor, and we are not going to be cut off from the Guard. These men are patriots of the Republic, and they are our best chance to reach the valley in time.”

  “In time for what?” demanded Pearsy incredulously. “What, precisely, are we chasing? What has you so excited, First Minister, that you are prepared to march fifteen thousand men off the edge of the map in the middle of a war and an insurrection? And why must you and I march off the map with them?” He gesticulated wildly with his pewter camp spoon, spilling soup on his robe. Guardsmen nearby looked over curiously at his outburst.

  Hobb set down his own bowl slowly.

  “Because Giant-men from the north, led by a man with a metal face, are coming to seize an ancient library full of secret knowledge, and I want to get there first. They are in a hurry for some reason I do not yet know, but I plan to use the threat of delaying them to extract concessions. I may also, if we are all extraordinarily lucky, have found a way to compel them to ally with us.” He paused for a moment. “Ah—and they have a dragon. I almost forgot the dragon.”

  Pearsy stood up.

  “Your sense of humor is even feebler than usual, Hobb the Wise,” snapped the Chancellor. “If you have nothing better to do than inflict it on the people around you, I’ll leave you to torment your secretary. Good night.” And he stormed off toward his small, flimsy tent.

  Hobb picked up his tasteless soup again and sipped at it slowly. He glanced over at Boris, who was smiling slightly.

  “How do you find my sense of humor tonight, my friend?” asked Hobb.

  “Precise,” replied his secretary, the faint smile still dancing on his lips.

  The night grew dark and cold, and they said little more to each other. As the stars began to come out, Hobb went off to find comfort in his bedroll.

  ???

  Hobb’s eyes snapped open to the sound of a harsh, rattling crackle. It was like the sound of the river ice shifting in January, but repeated a hundred times in quick succession over the course of perhaps twenty seconds. And it was very nearby.

  Emerging from his small tent, he found the camp astir with frantic activity. It was still dark, but the sky to the east was beginning to show a light gray. Men of the Republican Guard were hastily seizing their long spears and struggling into their red coats and breastplates. Hobb shivered. The night air was still cold, even in mid-May. He thought for a moment as the activity swirled around him, and finally fished the date out of his foggy brain: The seventeenth.

  Another tearing rattle ripped through the air from the western edge of the camp, and several small holes appeared in the tent fabric nearby, as if summoned by magic. Hobb blinked in surprise, and then some instinct drove him to pat his chest and arms. His left hand, feeling his right shoulder, came away with a warm, sticky wetness. Drawing the hand up to his face, he saw that it was covered in red.

  He sat down unsteadily and wondered what to do next.

  Pearsy dashed up, bumbling madly in his haste.

  “It’s an attack!” he gasped breathlessly. “The mercenaries are attacking! The west side of the camp is collapsing! What do we do?” His eyes were wild and confused.

  Hobb shook his head vaguely, groping ineffectually at the hilt of the long, elegant steel dagger in its black leather case, which he had taken from Mr. Robe and now kept at his belt.

  “I suppose we’d better find Howe,” he muttered. Hobb stood up, meaning to draw the dagger; but then, finding that his legs had other ideas, fell forward on his face.

  Hobb’s memories of the next few hours were disjointed and riddled with more holes than his tent. He later tried to reassemble them in his journal, but found that the best he could manage were impressions.

  Pearsy and Boris were there, faces grim, binding the wound in his shoulder and propping him up against a barrel. There was no one else around. The sound of gunfire, scattered and constant, seemed to come from all directions.

  He was carried across the little river in a boat, Pearsy and Boris struggling awkwardly to get him in and out of the unstable vessel.

  There were screams and cries all round. He saw Sir Thomas’s face, covered in dirt and blood, peering over his, and then whirling around suddenly and disappearing.

  Riders in black leathers, chain armor, and steel helms surrounded them—perhaps a dozen. Hobb was roughly lifted from the ground and hoisted up in front of one of riders. As the pain screamed out in his shoulder and he began to lose consciousness, he realized by the shape of the figure behind him that it was a woman. Another rider, seated nearby, gave commands in a soft, urgent voice. In his delirium, he thought he saw the green eyes and finely chiseled features of Anne Linsey Gray. But then darkness passed over him.

  He vaguely remembered the bobbing, jolting sensation of a galloping horse. This went on for some indeterminate time, and by the snatches of shouting that reached his ears, it seemed there was a chase. But who was carrying him, and who was chasing, he could not tell.

  He was awakened from his shocked delirium by the hard jolt of an impact. His face plunged into mud, and he struggled to lift it up, spluttering for air. He was too weak; he collapsed again into the mud, unable to breathe. There were heavy thuds, and he felt shuddering impacts around him. Struggling mightily, he worked his way onto his side, spitting out mud and wiping some of it away from his eyes.

  His vision was of the ground. The heavy, deadly hooves of horses danced around his head, smashing inches from his face. He wiggled feebly away from them. Thunderous booms crashed out from overhead, and the sound of steel on steel. Voices screamed and shouted, and a body fell next to him. The helm rolled away, and he saw the face of a young woman. He looked up, and there again, mounted on horseback and swinging a light sword, was the tall, green-eyed figure that he had thought was Anne Linsey Gray. Hobb gave up on making sense of the world, laid his head in the mud, and went to sleep.

  ???

  Sense returned slowly. There was, first, sound: a muted murmuring of concerned voices, and the faint crackle of a wood fire. Then a bit of light and motion came with them. He saw flames dancing from an open fire pit, framed by an irregular blob of light. Finally there was the sensation of cold. His whole body felt cold.

  A human face materialized over him; one of the army’s medics, by his dress. The man took stock of Hobb, and placed another blanket on him. Through the opening of the tent he could see a small wood fire.

  The face of the medic was replaced by another face, and Hobb’s mind, slowly re-acquainting itself with the particulars of his reality, recognized General Sir Thomas Howe.

  “Well now, First Minister,” said Sir Thomas, “I see you’ve decided not to abandon us quite yet. How do you feel?”

  “Cold,” said Hobb. His lips and mouth were dry. Sir Thomas gently tipped a small bit of water into Hobb’s mouth, and he drank gratefully.

  “Your body is in shock,” stated Sir Thomas with a clinical detachment. “You lost quite a lot of blood before we managed to recover you and bind up the wound.”

  “Recovered…” Hobb muttered, finding his voice annoyingly slurred. “Recovered from whom?”

  “A squadron of the enemy’s light cavalry,” said the young general, his eyes twinkling just a bit. “They snuck into the camp from the south while our forces were engaged on both sides of the river. A bit of opportunistic raiding, perhaps, or maybe they were looking to disrupt our headquarters. But they found you, wounded and guarded only by Pearsy and your secretary.”

  Hobb blinked. “I remember a boat and a horse,” he managed faintly.

  Sir Thomas nodded. “Indeed. Pearsy had moved you across to the east side of the river. I suppose he thought the attack was less heavy on that side. The riders picked you up there and made a dash off to the north. You’d have been on your way to Green Bridge right now—or dead—but your man Boris came back across the river and found me at the front. Don’t know how he did it; the fight on the western side was a dreadful mess. But as soon as I learned what had happened, I sent Sir Quarterfoot out with our own scout cavalry to chase you down.”

  Hobb sorted through his memories.

  “I fell off,” he croaked. “There was fighting.”

  Sir Thomas rubbed wearily at the stubble on his face. “There was fighting everywhere. But Quarterfoot guessed they’d be heading west again and managed to ride ahead and cut them off. There was a skirmish, yes. I’m afraid you fell from the horse of the rider who was carrying you. But the physician tells me you managed not to break anything. If your body can endure the loss of blood, you should make a full recovery. I’ve arranged for you to go back to Swallow Hall with our other casualties.”

  Hobb sat upright in the improvised bed, and then promptly fell back down again. Sir Thomas laid a gentle hand on his shoulder, but Hobb struggled up on his elbows.

  “No!” he gasped. “I will not go back. I am going to the valley.”

  “Out of the question,” replied Sir Thomas, shaking his head firmly. “You’re in no condition for overland travel into the wilderness, much less any more fighting. I will see to the mission, First Minister. But you’re on the casualty list now—and the King made it abundantly clear that my first priority is your safety.”

  Hobb lay back in the bed, staring up at the low ceiling of the tent.

  “You’re going on,” he mused at last. “Then we weren’t beaten. There’s still an army?”

  Sir Thomas smiled gently.

  “We weren’t beaten,” he said, a note of pride sounding in his soft voice. “Their numbers weren’t as great as we estimated, I think. They launched an attack at dawn on both sides of the river; I assume the plan was to spook the army into retreating. But I’d positioned skirmishers and archers away from the main body last night to fall on their flanks as they advanced. They almost had us on the west bank, but their left flank broke on the east. We’d have killed more of them on that side, but they escaped across the pontoon bridges. When we stopped them from destroying the bridges and began to cross ourselves, they withdrew.”

  Hobb rubbed his eyes wearily.

  “There were women,” he said quietly. “With the riders who captured me. I saw one die on the ground, and another on horseback. I think it was their leader. She looked like the Pretender.”

  Sir Thomas regarded him closely, his face grim. “Quarterfoot reported the entire squadron was women,” he answered. “They fought hard. The Snuggs must be hurting for mercenaries, to be sending out women. But this lot knew their business. We suffered more casualties than they did, but they broke off and escaped after they lost you. I expect we’ll see them again.”

  “And the captain?” asked Hobb.

  Sir Thomas rose to his feet, drawing his cloak around him.

  “I wasn’t there,” he said. “And Quarterfoot didn’t have a chance to make introductions. But he said the leader had a golden circlet bolted to her helm, had green eyes, and carried a standard with three fish. Make of that what you will. Now if you will excuse me, First Minister, I must make arrangements for our wounded. Rest now.”

  ???

  In the event, Hobb refused to be shipped back to Swallow Hall. When Sir Thomas pointed out that all the casualties were being sent back, and Hobb was on the casualty list, Hobb simply instructed Boris to scratch his name off the list. Sir Thomas, sensibly, gave up and adopted the expedient of pretending that Hobb had never suffered any injury at all.

  This fiction flew in the face of all available evidence, which was that the First Minister was seriously wounded. Though he insisted on riding with the command staff when the army moved on, Hobb had difficulty concentrating and swayed frequently in the saddle. His right arm, more or less useless, was bound up in a sling. The chief physician changed and inspected his bandages every few hours, cleaning the wound and applying fresh herbal poultices. His face was grim. The wound ached mightily, but Hobb gritted his teeth and refused to acknowledge it. He would not be a casualty.

  The farms grew more and more sparse as the army moved north. Quarterfoot’s scouts, ranging far across the countryside at night, reported that the Snugg force had moved south toward Roosterfoot, and that no serious opposition now stood between the Republican Guard and its destination on the East Branch. Though there was some danger to the supply lines, stretching as they did through contested territory, Sir Thomas pressed the men hard. They began to turn west as well, following the circumference of the broad depression of the Great Basin and arcing toward the East Branch where it emerged from the great, endless forests of the north to make its way toward Green Bridge.

  When they reached the banks of the East Branch, Hobb was rather disappointed. He had expected some mighty, rushing watercourse, carrying the swollen weight of the northern snows to fuel the Green’s inevitable flood season and the equally inevitable rise in administrative headaches that flowed along with it. Instead, it looked like a second-rate irrigation ditch. The banks were low and partly obstructed with scrubby growth; a scraggly forest lay on the other side, the tree branches just beginning to put out their leaves. A ragged wind gave a depressingly pedestrian undertone to the sounds of the army around him.

  “This is it?” Hobb asked Pearsy, riding nearby. “We’re supposed to move an army north along this?” The wound in his right shoulder ached ferociously, and he rubbed at it absently.

  Chancellor Pearsy shrugged. “It’s wet,” he replied, “and I understand boats will float in it.”

  And indeed, the men of the Republican Guard brought forth a host of small, slim boats from the baggage train. Some were laden with close-packed supplies and just one or two paddlers, while other, somewhat longer vessels could fit up to five men. To Hobb’s surprise, most of the baggage train was left behind, under a light guard.

  “We’ll need all the boats to move the army,” explained Sir Thomas. “We have enough supplies for about two weeks, on half rations. According to the maps, we should reach the valley with enough time to send most of the fleet back and begin ferrying the supplies upstream.”

  “What does half-rations mean?” asked Pearsy nervously. Hobb noticed that he’d already lost weight in their travels.

  “It means cold breakfast, cold lunch, and no dinner,” answered Sir Thomas with a droll smile.

  “I shall find the enemy and surrender to him,” announced Pearsy. “No civilized man would treat a prisoner of war as badly as we treat our own soldiers.”

  “Since the enemy is, in this case, a woman,” countered Hobb, “your expectations are categorically unrealistic. Also, if you desert, I shall have you caught and towed behind us by your beard.”

  “First Minister,” said Pearsy seriously, “you look deeply unwell. I fear your wound has begun to putrefy. I had better accompany you back to safety at Swallow Hall.” He looked imploringly at Boris, who blinked.

  “By the beard, Pearsy,” Hobb reminded him. And he went and sat in one of the boats, waiting for a soldier to come and propel him.

  Pearsy did not, in the end, decamp for better rations with the rebels. He even managed, after they all embarked, to remain relatively silent. But this turned out to be because he had a deathly fear of boats, and spent the entire trip huddled under a blanket, pressed to the hull of his canoe.

  The land was entirely wild now, and at night the army made a rude camp on either side of the river. The land became densely forested, and rocky hills began to rise up on either side of the narrow, winding watercourse.

  The ministrations of the army physician assigned to Hobb began to have a positive impact, and the wound began to scab over. But the pain grew more intense, not less, and it hurt to move his right arm at all.

  “Did it come out?” he asked the physician once, while being treated.

  “Did what come out?” asked the gruff, bearded medic.

  “The shot. The thing that made that hole in me. Did it come out the other side?”

  The physician shook his head.

  “Then it’s still in there,” Hobb concluded, logically.

  A nod from the doctor. “Taking it out would be risky, especially with your body so weak. You’d lose too much blood in the operation. It’ll have to stay in.”

  “Well,” said Hobb calmly. “That’s annoying.” But in his head, a surge of panic welled up.

  He could not write.

  The mood of the men grew nearly as dark as Hobb’s as they drew farther and farther from civilization. The forests and hills seemed quite prepared to go on utterly forever, and there was an unearthly quiet to them. At night the men slept in their boats, pulled over to the side of the river and secured to tree branches. The two red-clad men propelling Hobb’s canoe muttered darkly to each other, and then, as the days passed, stopped talking altogether. The ancient trees seemed to frown down on the army as it trickled upstream, strung out over the miles like a long, red centipede.

  And then, quite unexpectedly, the boat in which Hobb was riding pulled over to the east bank of the river, the men cursing and muttering softly under their breath. Hobb looked up out of his own private misery, curious as to the source of the halt.

  “Lead boats called an early stop,” said one of the Guardsman. “Don’t know why. But the command was to disembark and draw up on shore.”

  Hobb staggered unsteadily out of the boat, stretching his legs for the first time all day. He made his way forward along the line, as the men around him drew the canoes up and into the trees on the steep riverbank. Eventually he found Sir Thomas at the front of the line, conferring with his command staff.

  “Why the halt, General?” Hobb asked.

  Sir Thomas looked up at Hobb darkly, then waved away his officers.

  “Come and see,” he said.

  Pearsy and Boris came up as well, and Sir Thomas led them up a steep slope, crowned at its top by an open swath of granite ledge. Hobb found that he had a clear view of the land to the north for many miles. Ahead, a pair of steep hills formed a narrow ‘V’-shaped cleft, and beyond it he could see an open, grassy valley, mostly empty of trees. The wind howled fiercely around him, and he had to lean slightly to stay on his feet.

  “There,” said Sir Thomas, pointing at the cleft. “That’s why we stopped.”

  There was a small wooden fortification on the top of the hill, and a series of smaller redoubts lower down on its slopes. But Hobb’s eye quickly slid off these, captured by something far more outrageous.

  There was a face in the hill.

  It was perhaps fifty feet tall, carved into the bare rock of the steep hillside, above the fort. It was a woman’s face; stern, cunning, beautiful, and with a twinkle of merriment playing around the corners of the lips. Scaffolding surrounded the carving, not obscuring the face, but supporting the tiny figures of workers laboring at the edges and details.

  Hobb felt a catch at a part of his heart, the existence of which he had entirely forgotten. He sat down on a nearby outcrop of rock, staring at the face in dazed amazement. He recognized it. It was a face he had once loved; and, as he now recalled, he still loved. He hated her, and he loved her, and here she was, carved fifty feet tall, standing implacable and unyielding over his destination and smiling slightly. The woman was insufferable, even in death.

  “This isn’t real,” he said. “It’s another bout of the delirium. I shall speak to the physician about it. I’m still in the boat, and soon the man will tell me it’s time to pull over and sleep. It isn’t real.”

  Beside him, Chancellor Pearsy dropped to his knees. Hobb could hear muffled sobs coming from him. And then they stopped being muffled, and he began to wail. He beat the ground and pulled at his beard and screamed, and tears flowed down his face.

  Beatrice Snugg stared down at Hobb the Wise and Wembley Pearsy, and she smiled.