Chapter 15

Frances ate breakfast quickly, and was out on the drilling ground before the eighth bell had finished ringing.

Prince Corin was already there, with Sir Ulric beside him and the better part of the knights of Ironwatch drawn up in ranks behind them. It was a cold, bright morning. The knights’ breath hung in the air, and the low sun caught on a hundred and fifty hauberks at once, so that the whole yard seemed to shimmer.

“Commander,” Prince Corin said.

“Prince Corin. Sir Ulric.” Frances nodded to both of them. “Thank you for this. Sir Ulric, I’d like you to run through your drills exactly the way you would on any ordinary morning. Don’t change anything for me. I just want to watch.”

Ulric inclined his head. There was a stiffness in it still, a memory of five touches to none, but there was something else as well, something closer to pride. These were his men, and this was his yard, and he knew exactly how good they were.

“As you wish, my lady Commander,” he said, and turned and bellowed an order across the ground.

They began with inspection. The knights paired off and went over one another’s armor with the care of men who knew their lives might hang on a single ring. Sergeants walked the lines behind them. Frances watched one of them pull a knight out of rank and point, without a word, to a spot of rust under the arm of his hauberk, and watched the knight flush and nod. Another sergeant found a gap where two rings had worn through and parted, a hole no bigger than a fingertip, and sent the man off to the armory at a run.

From there they went to the pells: thick wooden posts sunk into the ground in a long row, each about the height of a man and scarred pale from years of use. Every knight took a post and went at it with a heavy practice sword, cut after cut after cut, then shield bash, then cut again. The sound of it filled the yard, a great rolling thunder of wood on wood. Frances noticed that almost all of it was cutting. Very little of it was thrusting.

Then they sparred. The knights paired off with blunts and ran through set sequences, attack and answer, attack and answer, each pair moving through combinations they had plainly drilled with each other a thousand times. The sergeants called corrections. Some of the pairs were quick and light and almost elegant. Others were brutal and heavy. All of them, Frances thought, were very, very good. She watched Ulric himself take a turn against one of his younger knights and dismantle him with three moves, and then stop to show him, patiently, what he had done wrong.

After the sparring, the knights formed a line.

They spaced themselves so the shields did not overlap, but still provided protection for the neighboring man. A sergeant called the halt, and they halted. Then a second line of knights formed up opposite them, and on the sergeant’s word the two lines met, shield against shield, and shoved. It was a grinding, heaving contest of weight and legs, men bracing and pushing and grunting. After a while the line on the left gave a few feet, and then a few more, and the sergeant called it.

Frances watched it closely. The line had held its shape well enough while it walked. Once the pushing began, it had bent. In two places it had opened up a gap.

Next came grappling. The knights threw each other, tripped each other, wrestled each other to the sand in full mail and fought on the ground for holds. It was ugly and exhausting and, Frances judged, very effective. She made a mental note that Aldo’s archers could do with some of it.

Then they ran. Laps of the yard, in full mail, with shields on their arms. They ran until even the strongest of them were laboring, and the sergeants ran beside them, shouting.

Finally, they stripped off their armor, inspected it once more, oiled it against the damp, and stacked it away.

When it was done, Frances walked out into the middle of the yard, where the knights were standing in their gambesons with their faces red and their hair plastered to their heads, and raised her voice.

“Knights of Ironwatch,” she said. “That was very impressive. You’re some of the best individual fighters I’ve ever seen, in this world or my own.” She let her eyes move along the ranks. “There’s probably some work we can do together on the shield wall. But individually, I’ve never seen better.” She didn’t say that there was a difference between fighting one-on-one or in small groups and fighting a battle. And they had only one rank. The entire thing would fall apart easily. Changes would need to be introduced.

The knights stood a little straighter. Sir Ulric, beside her, looked as though he had just been handed something he had been waiting a long time to receive. He nodded, very slightly, to himself, the satisfied nod of a man whose men had just been praised by someone who knew what she was talking about.

He did not appear to have heard the second part at all.

On the walk back, Frances sent a runner for Edmund. He met her at the foot of the Academy stair with a fresh tablet and a slightly harried look, as though he had been pulled away from something he very much wanted to finish.

“I need you to write some things down,” she said. “While they’re fresh.”

They found an empty alcove off the corridor, and Frances dictated while Edmund wrote.

“One. The shield wall carries only swords. No spears. I think that’s for historical reasons. The knights grew up fighting small skirmishes, where the duel is everything, and the sword is the weapon of the duel. But if that shield wall ever comes up against a well-trained group of men with spears, they’ll be cut to pieces before they can even get close enough to use their swords. One solution is to make a spear the primary weapon and the sword the backup weapon. Or maybe get spearmen interleaved with the heavy infantry. I don’t know the answer. But I don’t think the current weapon fit out will stand the test of time.”

“Two. They practiced in one rank. I can’t see them holding the line if there is a breakthrough. Maybe that is why they practice dueling so much—they expect battles to devolve quickly into one-on-one exchanges.”

Edmund’s stylus moved steadily.

“Three. The knights didn’t drill with the archers or the spearmen at all. They train completely separately.

“Four. They never practiced raising their shields together against a volley of arrows. No shield roof. Nothing to protect themselves when arrows are coming down from above.

“Five. No signals that I could see. They worked through drills that were all decided beforehand. Nobody gave an order in the middle that changed what they were doing, because I don’t think there’s any way to give one that the whole line can hear. Maybe there is nothing we can do about it.”

She stopped.

“That’s it. I’ll need to talk to Prince Corin about all of this at the war game. Sir Ulric is very proud of his men, and he should be. We need to work out how to bring this to him without him dismissing it.”

Prince Corin arrived at the door of the Study Pocket with the whole of the military group from the day before: Sir Ulric, Aldo Fletcher, Bram, Aelfric Halfhand, and Haldor. Aelfric had brought a walking stick, which Frances suspected was more for effect than for need.

She looked at them, and then thought about what they were about to do.

“Marguerite,” she said, turning to where her lady-in-waiting stood a few paces off. “We’re going to need Magnus. If we’re planning a war against an enemy who knows we have Oracles, then the Oracles are part of the strategy. Actually, bring all four of them, if they’re free. Magnus, Lucien, Benjamin and Giovanni.” She paused. “And bring food. Quite a lot of it. I think we could be in there for a while.”

“At once, my lady.”

Edmund had been working in the pocket for what Frances suspected had been days of pocket time, and when he led them inside, through the study and out into the large central room of Lucien’s house, she understood why.

The map filled the room.

It stood on a long, low table that someone had built specially for it, ten feet wide and thirteen feet long, and every inch of it was Valdoria. Edmund had shaped it in clay and then painted it: grey-brown mountains rising in sharp ridges along the north, with the passes cut through them as narrow notches; the dark green of the Thornwood and the Westwold, made of thousands of tiny painted dabs; the blue line of the Silverrun winding from the mountains past Ironwatch and down through the Heartfields to the sea at Aldricspire, with the smaller rivers branching off it. The Saltmere Fens had been painted a dull marsh green, stippled with brown. Roads were thin lines of pale ochre. Every castle had its own small carved wooden tower, and each one was painted in its baron’s colors. Beyond the mountains, a strip of Eldrenmark and Rathmere ran along the top edge of the table, and Serath ran down the left side, all three painted a flat, unfriendly grey.

Frances stood at the edge of it and simply looked for a long moment.

“Edmund,” she said. “How long did this take you?”

“I spent more than a week of time within the pocket, my lady,” Edmund said, with the careful modesty of a man who is very proud of something and trying not to show it. “With a good deal of help. I brought in two of the Academy’s map-makers, a potter, and four apprentices for the clay. And I drew upon every survey and road-book and baronial record the library holds.” He hesitated. “It is made to scale, my lady, as near as the records allow. Where the records disagreed, I chose the more recent.”

“It’s very impressive,” Frances said, and meant every word. “It’s exactly what I wanted. Thank you.”

None of the others had seen anything like it. They moved slowly around the table in silence, bending to look at the passes and the rivers, tracing roads with their fingers. Bram found the village he had been born in, and stood looking at it for a long time. Haldor found the iron mine that supplied his forge and grunted at it in recognition. Sir Ulric stood at the northern edge and stared at the Eldren Pass.

It was Aelfric who finally spoke. He was leaning on his stick at the corner of the table, looking at the mountains with an expression Frances could not quite read.

“If we had had such a thing fifty years past,” he said slowly, “we would have saved a great deal of time. And a great many men.” He reached out with his maimed hand and touched a thin line of ochre that ran up a side valley below the Eldren Pass and over a low ridge. “This road, here. And this one. We did not know of them. We marched three days around the long way when there was a shorter path in front of us all along.” He shook his head. “There look to be passages through these hills we never knew existed.”

The door opened then, and Marguerite came in with Magnus, Lucien, Benjamin and Giovanni behind her, and two kitchen boys carrying baskets. The mages stopped at the sight of the map exactly as the soldiers had. Lucien, whose house it was, looked around his own central room as though he had never seen it before.

Frances gave them a minute, and then rapped her knuckles on the edge of the table.

“All right,” she said. “I’m calling this war game to order. Some of you won’t have heard the term before. A war game is exactly what it sounds like. We work through possible invasions, one scenario at a time, and for each one we work out how we’d defend against it. And the way to do that is to start by putting ourselves inside the enemy’s heads. What would we do, if we were them?”

She looked around the table.

“First, what do we know? We know the invasion will come from at least two countries, and possibly three. Let’s assume the worst, and plan for all three. Now. How would they do it?” She turned. “Prince Corin, why don’t you start. Tell us what you’d do if you commanded the enemy.”

Prince Corin studied the map for a long moment before he answered.

“I would assume,” he said slowly, “that each realm will wish to keep its own army separate, under its own command, and to invade through its own border. They are allies, not one people. None of them will wish to place his army beneath another’s banner.” He walked along the northern edge of the table as he spoke. “And I would assume they believe an attack in many places at once has the best hope of success. It divides us, and forces us to choose where to stand.”

He pointed.

“So. Eldrenmark comes through the Eldren Pass. It is the great road from their lands into ours, the way they came fifty years past. Rathmere comes through the Westway Pass, here, where the Silverrun rises, for it opens straight onto the river road down to Ironwatch.” He moved to the western edge of the table. “And Serath comes across its border, somewhere along here. There is no pass and no great river to guide them. Only open country and low hills.” He spread his hand along the line. “I could not tell you where. Anywhere along this stretch would serve them.”

“Good,” Frances said. “Let’s take that as our first scenario. Edmund, record it as Invasion Plan One. Eldrenmark through the Eldren Pass, Rathmere through the Westway, Serath somewhere along the western border. Now we come up with our options for defending against it.” She turned to the Oracle. “Magnus. Could a Foretelling tell us whether they’re actually going to come through those passes? And if so, how far in advance?”

Magnus folded his hands and considered the question with his usual gravity.

“The certainty of a Foretelling follows the certainty of the decision being foretold, my lady,” he said. “For Eldrenmark, there is but one road through the mountains. Unless there are passages we do not know of, they have no choice to make. And a thing that is not chosen cannot be hidden. We shall very likely read their path with great accuracy. Though not, I fear, the hour.”

“And Rathmere?”

“Rathmere has a choice. The Westway or the High Pass.” He touched the two notches in the clay mountains. “They will know that we shall seek to foretell their path, and so they will not decide it until the last. I would expect them to gather their army where it might strike at either pass, and to choose between them only in the final days, and march swiftly. Serath likewise, along its border. A choice that has not been made cannot be foreseen.”

“And the timing?”

“The timing is worse.” Magnus’s mouth tightened slightly. “There are means, my lady, well known to those who guard against Oracles, of hiding a date even from oneself. I will not trouble you with the particulars. But in short, a date may be chosen by chance, and sealed, so that no living soul knows it until the day itself arrives. Against such a thing, no Foretelling can prevail. We should learn the day of the invasion only when our enemies themselves learn it. Which will leave us very little time indeed to answer.”