Jaryd said bitterly. “I am nothing. I was angry at my family's so-called friends for stripping me of everything that I had. Now, I wonder if I ever truly was anything. Perhaps father knew best when he called me worthless. Perhaps Family Nyvar could never truly have amounted to anything with me at its head. The only thing I was ever good at was riding and fighting, and now when the last people left in the world whom I love require my assistance, I can't even do that.”
“Captain Tyrun is dead, and you take the opportunity to feel sorry for yourself,” Sasha said angrily. She felt for Jaryd's suffering, but she simply didn't have time for this now. “You look around you, Jaryd. You look hard. Many families have ended here, and more tragedies unfolded than I care to count. These men fight for something bigger than themselves or their families. If you can't feel that, if you can't understand what it was that Tyrun died for, then maybe you'd be better elsewhere.”
Jaryd stared at her, his jaw tight, his stare as hard as stone. “If my services are not required,” he said coldly, “then I shall leave.”
“Your services?” Sasha replied, incredulously. “What do you believe in, Jaryd? Why be here, if not for a cause?”
“I believe in nothing. My family is no more, and my brother is dead. All the ideals of Verenthane brotherhood and Lenay honour I had been taught to believe are lies.”
“Then why are you still here? Why come this far at all?”
Jaryd looked down at Tyrun. The lateness of the day cast all colour, all life, all joy to shadow. The light, falling mist gathered at the tips of his lank hair as it fell about his face. “The Falcon Guard are all I have left,” Jaryd said quietly. “Yet with this arm, I cannot serve them.”
“Then just be here to pick up their wounded when they fall!” Sasha retorted. “Jaryd, you're…you're such an arrogant, pigheaded…man!” It was, for the moment, the worst insult she could think of. “You're so accustomed to the glory, and the place in the lead, that you can't see the honour in following. Just be there! That's what old Cranyk in Baerlyn told me, he said it was the greatest lesson he had to teach about life. Just turn up!”
Her vanguard were waiting for her, and her officers were moving further downhill into the town. From somewhere in the town, a cry went up. “Usyn's coming! Usyn's coming!” And not before time, either. Sasha placed a final, gentle hand on Jaryd's arm and departed after them in haste. Master Jaryd, of the family once known as Nyvar, stood over the body of his captain in the misting rain. He stood with his weight on one leg, a dark sentinel amidst the sudden confusion of shouts, yells and hasty preparations. If he noticed, or feared, he gave no sign.
Sasha, Captain Akryd and other officers, either from the line companies or appointed from amongst village chiefs, gathered on the field beyond the main gate of Ymoth's wall. Men were leading horses back from the river in great groups as others ran to retrieve them. The air was filled with yells of instruction and question, galloping hooves and the urgent whinnying of horses who knew that something more was afoot. The fields nearby remained littered with dead, mostly Banneryd, as men continued even now to reclaim the bodies of comrades, and check to see if any still lived. Already the grey sky had grown dim with the approach of evening, and Sasha thanked the spirits that it was late summer still and the days remained long.
“The road comes like thus,” Jurellyn was saying, drawing a line with his sword on a patch of bare turf amidst the grass, “upon the other side of the river. It's not far, as you can see. He'll be here by nightfall. My best guess is that he has six thousand in the valley—half cavalry, half infantry. This column seems also half-and-half, cavalry to the front and rear, infantry in the middle. But being stretched so long upon the road, we could not see the column's end, so we have no means of guessing their number.”
“Well,” said Captain Akryd, with a thoughtful glance across the Ymoth wall and the fields about, “these defences will serve us better than they did the Banneryd. Usyn won't have dussieh riding with him, he'll be unable to exploit the gaps in the