pushed the boy away, scowling. Zvain made no attempt to reattach, seemingly resigned to losing this battle, but threw himself instead back onto his lair and scowled up at him.
Was Ruari paying visits to the grove? It was possible. Ruari held himself apart from the farmers and druids who drilled twice every day, trying to transform themselves and their tools into fighters and weapons. Ruari wanted personal instruction from both him and Yohan and the assurance that he wouldn’t be standing in a line of hoe-toting farmers, but doing hand-to-hand hero’s work; an assurance neither he nor Yohan would give. And knowing a bit of the way Ruari’s mind worked, it was more than possible that he was sulking in Telhami’s grove rather than his own.
Ruari and Zvain together in the same thought sent a shiver down Pavek’s back.
The youths were talking, perhaps plotting. Telling himself that he’d have to warn Yohan, if not Telhami, he turned his back on the scowling face.
“You risked your life to save a farmer’s brat.” The voice from behind him had taken on a new maturity in the past six days, one he could hear, now with his back turned. “You defied that old woman to save a half-elf that tried to kill you; but you won’t say a word in my behalf-me, who saved your life, templar, after you took my mother’s… And left me behind.”
He almost turned, then, to defend actions he couldn’t explain to himself, but:
“Why, Pavek?” The whine was gone, and the maturity, leaving only a soft quiver.
A quiver far more dangerous to all he fought for than all Escrissar’s unknown forces. Pavek pried himself free of Zvain’s insidious influence and made a clean escape to the barren land outside Telhami’s grove.
He was still on the path between the fields when he heard frantic hammering on the hollowed log that served as Quraite’s general alarm.
* * *
Most of Quraite had assembled by Telhami’s hut by the time he got there. Telhami herself stood beside the door, waiting. Her gray hair stood out from her head in windswept wisps, and her eyes were weepy from the sun.
In the last few days, Pavek had heard her say many times that she watched over Quraite. He remembered how she’d been the first to know that Yohan was crossing the Fist, first to know that Pavek and his companions were returning with her and Zvain; but he’d assumed that she’d used some trick of the Unseen Way to accomplish that. He’d never guessed, until now, that she literally and actually hovered above her guarded lands.
“They’re coming,” she said, flatly and firmly. “From the southwest, straight out of Urik.”
“All ten thousand?” an anxious farmer asked.
“Fifty men and women, give or take a handful. They’ve lost some coming across the Fist, but those I saw will finish the journey before sundown.”
Fifty sounded better than ten thousand. The farmers sighed with relief, but Pavek didn’t. He thought of fifty fighters, probably including Rokka and other renegades from the Urik templarate, and shook his head grimly.
Any templar could take battlefield commands and carry them out. And even a desk-bound procurer like Rokka had to put in his time on the practice fields.
Pavek held himself a competent fighter with the weapons he knew—better than competent, his size, strength and Dovanne’s sword would give him a real advantage. But when the fighting was between one man and many, the wise man placed his bets on the many.
He didn’t think Escrissar could have recruited fifty renegades in Urik; Hamanu’s grip was firm, and his vengeance swift. He thought ten templars was a more reasonable number, with the rest hired rabble from the elven market, only marginally more skilled than the farmers who’d have the morale advantage of fighting for their home and their lives. The odds would still be long, but, if Telhami could contain Escrissar’s mind-bending, they’d have a chance.
Yohan had made his own analysis of what they faced:
“They’ll be parched and exhausted. Maybe they’ll make camp.” And his eyes sparkled with thoughts of an ambush. Telhami looked at Pavek.
He shook his head. “Unless it’s so dark they don’t see the trees.”
“My thought as well,” she agreed.
She took a long moment to study the Quraiters, one by one, looking straight into each pair of eyes with a confident smile. “We’ve done everything that we could do in advance,” she said. “You know what we must do now, and I know that you can do it.”