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  “I hope so,” Wells said, “but we need to think about what point we turn back at. How far do we go before we need to return home?”

  “We go as far as we need to,” Olivia said, her determination absolute. Right then, she knew that she would follow Genevieve into the midst of a blazing fire if she had to. “And we’re wasting time sitting here when we could be riding. Every moment we sit still on our horses is a moment when she is getting further away from us.”

  Olivia set off in the direction that their information had said King Carris’s court was in, kicking her horse into a canter. She didn’t care if the others managed to keep up or not. Their horses hurried into place next to hers, and from a distance, they probably did look like a noblewoman riding along with her protector knights.

  Eventually, they rode through some stands of trees, and then up onto the brow of a hill. From up there, Olivia could see King Carris’s army spread out below, banner after banner raised as nobles had joined him to show their support. There were thousands of men there, ordinary soldiers and knights, archers and spearmen. The nobles and the knights had their tents separate from the others, each with their small entourages of servants and hangers-on.

  There was a keep at the heart of it all, solid and imposing. Instinctively, Olivia knew that was where Genevieve would be. Altfor would have gone in there to find the king, and Genevieve would have gone in there to find Altfor. She might have spent a little time out in the camp below, but Olivia guessed that it would have been only a little. She would have marched up in the direction of the doors, the way…

  …the way she had at Olivia’s home.

  Maybe that was part of what made her want to find Genevieve so badly. She knew that someone who would just come there like that, demanding to see Royce, wouldn’t stop at that. She would never just go away. She rubbed the ring she wore again…

  “I’m going down there,” Olivia declared, kicking her horse forward once more.

  Haam was there, grabbing for the horse’s reins.

  “My lady, you are not going down there,” he said.

  “You don’t get to tell me what I will and won’t do,” Olivia snapped back, surprised by how she sounded, even to herself. “I have to do this. I need to—”

  “We need to go home,” William cut in. “We’ve come too far. We’re right outside the enemy camp!”

  “You can go home if you want,” Olivia snapped. She dismounted, heading off in the direction of the keep. “I’ll find a way to do this.”

  “No,” Wells said. “It’s suicide.”

  He and William dismounted and grabbed hold of Olivia, holding her back. It took everything Olivia had not to fight to break free and just run down there. She had to find Genevieve… she had to.

  “My lady, this is not sensible!” Haam said. “We can’t just walk into the camp of the enemy, no matter the reason. Think, we have already achieved something to get this far. We have seen the forces that they have. If we get back now, we will be able to tell the others what we will be facing in the battle.”

  “We don’t even know that the woman you’re looking for is there,” Wells said.

  Olivia felt herself calming a little, and she was ashamed to admit that Wells’s point had a little more to do with it than Haam’s. If she had been able to see Genevieve there, Olivia suspected that she would have run down there, and that nothing would be able to stop her.

  As it was, she could at least seek out some kind of certainty.

  “You’re right,” she said. “But that just means that we can’t go back yet. We need proper sketches of what we’ve found, and we need to find out if there are any weaknesses to be seen. Come on.”

  Brushing them away, she started to lead the way around the encampment. It meant that Olivia could look down, trying to find the thing that she truly wanted: a safe way in. There had to be one; with an army that size, it was impossible that everyone would be accounted for. There would be coming and going, with people delivering food from the surrounding farms and messages from the world beyond.

  Olivia thought of the challenges that faced their army. They were gathering people every day, and that process was one that brought risks with it. Already, there had been plenty of chances for spies to slip in, and controlling the flow of people here looked as if it would be almost as bad. Perhaps if they could find some way to fit in with a group trying to join the king’s forces, she would be able to get into the keep, and from there, find her way to Genevieve…

  Olivia found her thoughts interrupted by the sound of booted feet cracking twigs. She spun and found half a dozen men exiting a stand of trees, all dressed in the king’s colors. One held a bow, half drawn, another a spear, while the rest were all armed with swords.

  “My lady,” Haam whispered, “you need to be ready to run.”

  Olivia nodded, edging away toward her horse.

  “Well, well,” the one with the spear said. “What’s all this then? Spies lurking around the edge of our camp?”

  “Not spies,” Olivia said quickly. “These men are my escort. I am on my way… on my way to join my father, who is down in the camp.”

  “Oh really?” the guard said. His tone said that he didn’t believe her. “And just who is your father?”

  “Lord Illyne,” Olivia said, picking a lord she knew to have a daughter, and whose standard she could see down there among the king’s forces.

  “Nice try,” the man said with a sneer, “but Lord Illyne’s daughter fell in a hunting accident two days ago, and she’s been in bed since.”

  Olivia cursed her luck.

  “I was trying to be discreet,” she said. “The truth is that I have messages for the ears of Lady Genevieve, Lord Altfor’s wife.”

  She should have thought of that before. It was a ploy that would both explain her presence here and see her safely through the cordon of the army to wherever Genevieve currently was.

  It was also news that made the guard’s eyes widen. “It’s her, the one they said to look for! The one his lordship’s wife was meeting with. Grab her!”

  Olivia had the feeling of something happening that she had no idea about, but she also knew that there was no time to do anything but run. Haam, Wells, and William moved to protect her.

  William cried out as an arrow struck him through the guts, with a sickening sound that Olivia knew she would hear in her darkest nightmares from now on. He didn’t fall, though. Rushing forward and striking at the spearman with his sword, he managed to get a couple of solid blows in, one ringing off the man’s armor, the next embedding deep into his skull.

  Then a second arrow struck him in the chest and he fell, clutching at it as he died.

  Olivia stood there in shock for a moment, her heart breaking at the thought that a boy who had come there only because she had talked him into it was dying now, gasping his last breaths on a muddy hilltop. She wanted to find some way to help him and make it all right, but she knew then that she had to get to her horse.

  She took step after stumbling step toward it, hurrying as quickly as she could. An arrow flashed past her, followed by an angry shout.

  “That one alive, idiot!”

  Then there was just the clash of blades behind her, the sounds of a battle that she didn’t dare turn to watch. Olivia made it to her horse, pulling herself up onto its back and looking back the way she’d come. What she saw filled her with even worse horror than before.

  Haam was on his knees, parrying blow after blow, but without the skill to do more than that. Wells was trying to fight his way clear, but two men were blocking his way, each cutting at him whenever he turned to the other, so that he bled from a dozen wounds or more.

  Even as Olivia watched, she saw another of the guards come up behind Haam, and although she tried to scream a warning, it was too little, too late. Steel slid in and out of her protector’s chest, as efficiently as a farmer killing cattle, more butchery than war. She didn’t even see the moment when Wells fell, because he died somewhere in
the long seconds that she was staring at Haam’s demise. By the time she looked back, he was down, and all of the remaining guards were advancing on her.

  Olivia turned her horse to run, and she heard the bow sing out again, heard that horrible, wet thud as it struck flesh. Olivia looked down, half-expecting to see the shaft sticking from her chest, but no; instead, it was embedded deep into the flesh of her mare, the horse crying out in pain and rearing.

  It fell, and Olivia threw herself clear, striking the ground far harder than she would have wished and knocking the air from her lungs. By the time she had enough for a gasping breath, strong hands were already taking hold of her, dragging her to her feet.

  “The king will want this one,” one of the remaining guards said. “Let’s get her to the dungeon with Duke Altfor’s traitorous wife.”

  The worst part, the very worst, was that even among all of this, a part of Olivia was pleased by that. Pleased to be taken to Genevieve, even while good young men lay dead in the mud behind her, and while the only thing that could come from all of this was her own death.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Raymond was starting to get a sense of what it must be like to be his brother. Around him, people walked expectantly, the crowd of them, the army, following from village to village. With every step, Raymond could feel their eyes on him, their expectations, and their adulation.

  “Royce, Royce!” a boy called out, far too young to be there.

  “What is it?” Raymond asked him.

  “I want to be just like you when I’m older. I want to fight the king’s armies and save everyone.”

  Raymond smiled at that. “But when you’re older, we’ll already have won. Roy… I’ll be the king. Are you going to fight against me?”

  The boy looked horrified by the prospect.

  “It’s a good thought,” Raymond said. “But you’re too young to fight now. You need to go back home and make sure that your parents are safe.”

  He ran off, and Raymond cursed himself for his near slip. It was so hard, pretending to be his brother, because his instinct was to be honest. It wasn’t as if the two of them even looked that similar. Royce was taller and broader, younger and clearly different from all of the brothers. If they’d been side by side, it would have been easy to see which of them was the heir to the rightful king.

  “If he were here,” Raymond pointed out to himself, “there would be no need for any of this.”

  No need to lie to people, no need to pretend. Raymond wished it could work like that, but he’d tried it that way, and he’d quickly found out that people had no interest in joining a cause when its leader wasn’t there. They thought that it was just another noble sending out whoever he could find to round up peasants to die to him. Raymond needed to be Royce, because it was the only way he could find the people they needed.

  “Where are we heading next, my king?” one of the peasants called out.

  Raymond had to resist the urge to flinch at being called the king and simply pointed onward. “To the next village. We need everyone to rise, up, so many that King Carris can’t hope to stand against us.”

  “Won’t he send an army anyway?” the man asked. “Men like him don’t let go of power easily.”

  “He will.” Raymond hesitated a moment, then held up his hand. It was still astonishing that everyone there halted when he did it, listening to him while he spoke.

  “Listen to me, everyone. We are going from village to village, and we are gathering people, but I want you to be clear why we are gathering. We are an army, and we will be fighting the king.”

  Astonishingly, that got a cheer from the people there.

  “We will have allies,” Raymond said. “Earl Undine has lent his forces, and even now my brothers are out gathering those knights and Picti who will fight with us, but we will have to fight.”

  Another cheer echoed around him, and Raymond swallowed. Couldn’t they understand what he was saying?

  “This will not be safe,” Raymond said. “Some of you will die in this; we may all die. There was a boy here before, and he should not have been with us at all. If there are people here who cannot fight, you should go home. If any of you are having second thoughts, you should go home. If you think that this will be easy, or that King Carris will not fight, then you should go home.”

  Yet another cheer sounded from the people there, and Raymond couldn’t understand it. He’d just told some of them to go home, and they were treating it as if he’d just given them a rousing battle speech. Raymond gave up and continued on the road toward the next village.

  It wasn’t long before a figure stepped from the crowd: a young woman in dark clothes, who offered him a curtsey as she approached that was far too courtly for most villagers.

  “Your Majesty,” the woman said. “King Royce, my name is Jani. I have been sent by the Lady Genevieve.”

  Genevieve’s name made Raymond instantly suspicious, because while his brother might trust her, he didn’t. On the other hand, she had helped to save him, Lofen, and Garet from the duke’s torture.

  “What does she want?” Raymond asked.

  “Actually, I was originally sent by her sister,” Jani said. “But Lady Genevieve sent me with news about the king’s intentions.”

  “He’s coming north with his army already?” Raymond asked. He’d hoped that they might have a little more time.

  “It’s more than that,” Jani said. “He is coming, yes, but he has a plan to encircle you, sending most of his forces by boat to strike from the north while you turn your attention to the south to meet him.”

  Raymond took a sharp breath in at that news. It was the kind of thing that could turn around the whole direction of the fight. More than that, if the king was coming now, that meant that they’d run out of time to gather forces.

  “If what you say is true, then we need to gather together,” Raymond said. “I need to send messengers to my brothers; it’s time for us to meet back at the healing stone.”

  ***

  Raymond rode ahead of his forces, back in the direction of the healing stone, hoping that his brothers would be there by the time he got there. He had with him those farmers who had horses of their own, those men who could move quickly, but there were few enough of those.

  They’d picked the healing stone both because it was a good marker and because it seemed safer to gather Picti troops there than it was to bring a whole horde of them down through the villages, where people might react to them in fear. As he rode through the forest that covered the hillside below the healing stone, though, Raymond couldn’t help wondering if they could have found a better place to gather than here.

  His memories of this place were not good ones. This was the place where he and his brothers had been about to be executed. This was a place where they’d been surrounded by Picti, having to run for their lives.

  As he made his way through the forest now, he saw that there were Picti there again, and Raymond couldn’t tell if they were friends or foes, happy to see him there or about to attack. They stood silently, simply waiting as he and the villagers passed, moving closer to the healing stone and the tower that it sat below.

  Raymond came out into the clearing that housed it, and there were still more Picti there, several of them wearing the golden torcs of leaders, their tattoos proclaiming them to be of different clans. Raymond could only guess at how many there were there, and how many more there would be in the woods beyond.

  Around him, he could see some of the common folk he’d brought with him growing nervous.

  “When you said that your brother had gone to the Picti, I didn’t think there would be this many,” one man said.

  Another had his hand on the hilt of his sword, looking round as if expecting the Picti to attack at any moment. “They say that a man walking into Picti lands can have their entrails wound around a tree.”

  “They come onto our lands and they steal. They kill anyone who tries to stop them.”

  Raymond hel
d up his hand. “Stop it! These are our allies. There is to be no violence here.”

  He dismounted, finding one face he’d hoped for among them. He ran forward to hug Lofen, his brother squeezing him back so hard it hurt.

  “Lofen, you did it!”

  “It seems like you did too, Raymond,” his brother replied.

  Raymond winced, hoping that people wouldn’t hear, but he could see several of those closest glancing at one another and frowning.

  “Where’s Garet?” Raymond asked, hoping to distract attention from the rest of it.

  “I was hoping he might have joined up with you,” Lofen said. “He went to get the nobles, with…”

  “Moira,” Raymond said, shaking his head. He hadn’t trusted her even when she’d set off with Garet. Now he was sure something must have happened.

  “We have to hope that he’s just delayed,” Lofen said.

  They had to hope it, but Raymond couldn’t help thinking about all the dangers Garet might face. He was going to try to recruit nobles who were supposed to be loyal to the old king, but it would only take one who had switched his loyalties, or who didn’t believe in the cause. It would only take one bandit along the way, one rogue group of deserting soldiers.

  “He’s old enough to make his own choices, Raymond,” Lofen said. “He gets to take this risk.”

  Raymond was about to answer when one of the villagers came forward.

  “That’s the second time he’s called you that, Royce,” the man said. “What’s going on here?”

  Lofen looked at him blankly. “Royce?”

  Raymond knew he should have found a way to get to Lofen before the others arrived. He should have explained the subterfuge that he’d been forced to employ, should have made sure that Lofen was willing to go along with it, at least until the real Royce arrived. Now it seemed that there was no time.

  “Royce,” the man said, loud enough for all the others there to hear him. “That’s who this one has been claiming to be while he went walking through our villages to recruit us! Now here you are, calling him… what was it? Raymond?”