AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Chills crept up the girl’s spine. “We won’t, Lioness.”
Alanna smiled. “Thank you.” She drew a deep breath and went to bid good-bye to the children once more.
The Lioness had been gone for two days. Daine had collapsed early into her loft bed, worn out from her evening’s lessons.
She dreamed: it was a pleasant night in her badger set. With her belly full, she listened to the kits play. She was about to go for a cool drink of water when her dreams changed. Trees and a moonlit sky tumbled around her. Boats filled with men came onto the beaches, and men crept among the trees. Speaking softly and fast, they lit fires, scorching the roosts and blinding her. Into flight she tumbled, over the roaring cold and salty place with panic in her throat. There was the light ahead, the one the forest bats had sung about, a beacon of safety. She was the greatest of the People—she could protect them when strange men broke the night rituals!
Daine gasped and sat up. “Odd’s bobs, what was that about?”
With her excellent night vision and the light of the full moon that came in the windows under the eaves, she saw that the rafters overhead were thick with bats. A good thirty of them, mixed breeds, watched her with nervous eyes. Three were hoary bats, named for the frost on their brown fur. By themselves they would not have been a surprise: they weren’t sociable bats, not like the clusters of big and little brown bats that hung with them, or the handful of pipistrelles.
“Wing-friends, what’s amiss?” she asked softly. “Come and tell me.”
Within seconds she was a bat tree, with little bodies festooned on her curls and parts of her nightshirt. All of them trembled in terror.
“Hush,” she told them. Closing her eyes, she thought of deep and even breaths, of safety in caves, of the drip and echo of water in high chambers. Slowly the bats took her calm into themselves. Small talons changed their grip, this time so flesh was not caught along with the cloth. The trembling eased and became a thin vibration. Some of the bolder ones returned to the rafters, to give her air. She sent the calm out with them, enticing more of those who clung to her to take the perches they were used to, hanging from wood. The ones left were the hoary bats and the leaders of each group.
Daine opened her eyes. “Now. Let’s hear it—one at a time.”
It was all she could do to stay calm when they described what they had seen. It was her dream: men, strangers, coming from the woods and from boats on the water, hiding under the trees. She had to clamp down on her witnesses a little to make sure of the numbers they were describing. Bats tended to count by the way they roosted: their idea of numbers was flexible, and depended on the breed of bat. Daine knew she couldn’t tell the baron or the Riders her friends had seen six quarter-colonies or whatever the total was. Not only would that not be helpful, but they would think she was crazy.
To the hoary bats, who roosted alone, the men had arrived in flocks, like deer they saw grazing at night. Moreover, each bat had come from a different part of the wood that ran along the coast. After scribbling with a stick of charcoal on her drawing pad and squinting to read her own marks, she concluded that each hoary bat had seen nearly fifty men.
The big brown bats had seen at least two colonies—sixty men or so. Most of the pipistrelles were from one place and had seen less than half of one of their colonies—almost fifty. One lone pipistrelle from the wood north of the Swoop identified another half-colony. The little brown bats had come from the east and south. Each of their sightings came to two tenth-colonies; for them that meant two hundred men, all told.
All the bats assured her their counts had not overlapped, and that she took as truth. Their concepts of numbers might be odd, but a bat’s knowledge of territory was precise to a pin.
Daine looked at the numbers, her skin tingling in shock. If the bats were right, they had seen more than five hundred strange men coming overland or by sea and landing near the cove. The bats were more familiar with the locals than those humans might have believed possible. The little animals insisted the strangers were not their humans. Moreover, the strangers all wore metal over some parts of their bodies, and all carried or wore wood tipped with metal, and bars of metal. Daine could see their faces in the bats’ minds: they were the hard faces of warriors.
Carefully, without frightening the animals, she eased into her breeches and boots. In the process she talked two of the hoary bats into staying behind. The others, the head of each colony, the lone pipistrelle and one particularly scared hoary, clung to her nightshirt and hair. They would go with her, they said.
Sarge, who ran the trainees on night watch, and Kally sat in front of the stable, talking. From the look of things, the princess had been unable to sleep. “Daine?” Sarge asked when she emerged. The girl’s blue eyes widened.
Abruptly Daine saw herself as they—as humans—must see her: small, wriggling animals swarming on her, clinging to hair and clothes. They tried their best to be clean, but a couple of them had lost control of their bowels.
I must look like a monster. Daine swallowed a lump in her throat. She hadn’t realized how much Kally’s opinion—or Sarge’s—had come to mean to her.
“I have to talk to the baron,” she whispered without looking at them.
Kally walked over hesitantly. She stopped, then reached out to touch a furry body. The little brown bat transferred his affections to her in a leap. She squeaked, then let him snuggle into her collar. “He smells you on me.” Her tiny smile trembled and held.
Sarge got up, his brown eyes kind. “Come on, girls.”
The master of the Swoop was in his study. The queen and Josua, the captain of the Swoop’s guards, were there as well, seated in comfortable chairs, while Numair stared out one of the windows.
“What’s all this?” George asked. His sharp eyes took in Daine’s riders as well as Kally’s small hanger-on. Thayet yelped when she saw Daine; Josua was on his feet, dagger half-drawn. Numair looked around, frowning.
“Please—don’t startle them.” The bats caught the surge of her own fears. She made herself take a deep breath and get under control. Don’t open your eyes, she cautioned the bats. The room was cozily lit from a human standpoint, but not from theirs. “They won’t hurt anyone.”
“It’s only bats, Mama.” Sarge’s mouth twitched: it was impossible to tell that Kally herself had been upset by them only a few minutes ago.
Thayet and Josua stared at Daine.
“It’s important, sir,” she told the baron. “I wouldn’t have brought them if it wasn’t.”
“May I?” Numair asked, pointing to the hoary bat.
The animal’s nose was already questing, having located interesting smells on the sorcerer’s clothes. Gently Daine handed him over: in one of Numair’s gigantic palms, the bat was dwarfed.
“What news have your friends brought for me?” George asked. Daine looked at his face, but saw no trace of mockery or disbelief.
Either he’s the world’s finest Player or he believes in me, she thought. “Have you a map?”
He gestured behind her. She turned and saw a table covered with sheets of parchment: on top was a map of Pirate’s Swoop. Holding down a corner of it was a box of small, colored pebbles. Consulting with her friends, she put one at each location where strangers had been seen, explaining to the adults as she worked. “All this since twilight,” she said when she finished. “We think it’s more’n five hundred, all told.” She looked at the picture she’d made, and blanched. The stones formed a half circle a mile away from the castle and village of Pirate’s Swoop. They had been surrounded in the dark.
NINE
SIEGE
Things moved so fast Daine’s head spun: Pirate’s Swoop was more than prepared for night attacks. Within minutes Captain Josua, Thayet, and Sarge had left to quietly wake the village and bring the people back to the castle.
With them they took Daine’s promise the livestock would move quietly. Once she had explained things to them, the village animals were eager to help.
She felt ashamed of herself for showing them images of the raiders’ imaginary stewpots in such gruesome detail, but told herself the cause was a good one. Even the geese and chickens had been willing to go along after that.
Next she asked the bats to return to their friends in her stable. You won’t like the people I’m going to talk to now, she assured them, and they believed her. George had asked her for spies who would spook less easily than the bats, and that meant only one thing: owls. Daine had to admit owls were unnerving to deal with, and she liked them—the bats did not. While they weren’t natural enemies, there was always a chance an owl could make a mistake, and apologies meant nothing to a dead bat.
With the bats gone, she went to the limits of her range, contacting owls and explaining her problem. She wasn’t surprised to find that the silent predators were already angry about the invasion: the strangers had chased all the game worth hunting into burrows in earth and tree.
Waiting for the owls’ report, she and Numair went to the observation deck. From there they watched as the Swoop’s gates quietly opened and guards and Riders headed for the village, to help the people pack and move. Daine noted with approval that the hooves of all the horses and ponies were muffled. With the moon full and the night clear, they didn’t need torches—a small blessing, since the invaders also had used moonlight to keep their arrival secret.
The owls reported, and Daine wrote their information on her paper. When they finished, she added the total with fingers that shook. She checked her numbers and came up with the same total. A third check bore the same result.
Her voice emerged as a squeak. “Lord Baron?” He had come while she was working. “I have the whole thing.”
He raised his eyebrows. “So soon?”
“Owls are fast.” She pointed out the total—a little more than six hundred men had infiltrated the woods. “The owls say they aren’t moving. They’re camped. No fires, but they’ve settled.”
“Waitin’ for dawn,” the baron said. “Waitin’ for that.” He nodded at the sea. Two miles out a fog bank lay on the ocean, its top as high as the tower on which they stood. It took her a minute of looking before she saw what was wrong: the curved dome was clean, as if the thing were shaped by a sculptor. It was also dead on the water. Fog was neither tidy nor slow. It moved fast and overwhelmed everything in its way. This close, she should not have been able to see the sky, and she ought to have seen it move by now.
