Page 54 of Valdemar

Kordas knew very well that the warhorse in the room would have to be discussed very soon—but an attack or attempted invasion was not going to be in the works for some time, and the need for the bridge was now. The covered bridge did not hold anyone’s interest for long; the design was quickly approved, a royal commission for the building was written out, requisition permits were written out, the price was agreed on as fair and authorized, and the entire packet went off by page to the shipbuilders in half a mark.

“All right,” he said, once that had been dealt with. “So . . . how long does it take to train a lot of civilians into an Imperial-style army?” The question was directed at the Lord Martial, who was in charge of the Guard.

“Normally I would say not more than a year, but—” He hesitated.

“But?” Kordas prompted, as the others stirred restlessly.

“But your spies just revealed that the leader of this city-state is not just a powerful mage, but an Adept. That changes everything. Your mages can put information into a person’s head, but only one at a time. Is it possible that an Adept can create an army out of nothing by dumping weapons training and military discipline into this group of people all at once?”

Kordas ground his teeth a little, because he knew the answer to this question. It was how the Empire was able to fight on many fronts at once. “Yes,” he said with resignation. “But they won’t be in military fighting condition, physically or mentally. Even an Adept can’t give someone that with magic. They would know how to wield a pike or a crossbow, but have no practice. They could use a shield, but not feel instinctively when to raise it.”

The Lord Martial nodded thoughtfully. “Four moons. Two moons to form up the basics of a garrison. That would do it. At the end of twice that, especially if the Adept can keep them at training from waking to sleeping, she’ll have a competent army that will follow orders. Only follow orders, not adapt or improvise—but enough to slaughter a hamlet or holding.”

Kordas grimaced. Not the best answer. But not the worst. “Lord Legenfall is an adequate leader. Not brilliant. Not creative. And not a quick thinker. He also wasn’t in the Imperial school as long as I was.” He thought for a moment. “What does the land in that direction look like on the other side of the border?”

The Lord Martial consulted his fat notebook, and folded out a hand-drawn map from the many he kept at hand. “Largely unsettled. No point in extending the border though, since no Valdemarans have settled close to it in that direction, and the few people who are out there are either cautiously waiting a few decades to see what kind of people we really are or are just mistrustful; in either case, they don’t seem inclined to take advantage of our protection.” Then he grimaced. “Not that we’d be all that good at protecting them. The other reason not to extend the border is because we’d be stretched too thin.”

“So we can booby-trap the border without putting any of our people at risk?” Kordas grinned. “Excellent. I was trained in insurgency tactics. Legenfall wasn’t.”

“Neither was I,” the Lord Martial said mournfully.

“I’ll give you the benefit of my expertise. You can decide how to implement it. Loath as I am to give the mages yet more work . . . we should use both magical and physical traps and alarms.” He looked over at the two of the Old Men who were representing the mages. “You mages need to think like Adepts, and try to come up with something an Adept would not be expecting. Then we can move a contingent of the Guard away from places where they are not particularly needed, and reinforce the border with conventional troops at that point. We should aim for a strategy of attrition.” He smiled grimly. “One thing those people will not be, and that is used to the idea of getting hurt or dying. When that starts, expect a high level of desertion, especially if the Adept is not there in person to enforce her will.”

“She won’t be,” Ponu said sardonically. “Mages gone to the bad never risk themselves when they can put arrow targets in the field.”

The next couple of marks involved the two of them as well as Ponu and Dole (who were representing the mages) putting their heads together over how to best fortify that border with traps, because there was a lot of border to consider, and that assumed an enemy wouldn’t somehow just Gate into Haven. They needed to avoid the sort of traps that an Adept might detect or be ready for, but Ponu and Dole both had plenty of ideas. Before the first mark had passed, Kordas had ordered the “Hawk Flag” flown, with a second flag of a pair of bendlets in gray on a red field below it, raised on the Palace’s signal poles. Assuming the Hawkbrothers surveilled their neighbors regularly, he and Silvermoon had agreed that a hawk silhouette on a red field would catch a bondbird’s eye, and show that the Valdemarans were in need of contact, and the flag below it would show the urgency by the number of stripes.

Eventually everyone’s stomachs began to growl, the Lord Martial decided that he had enough to work with for the moment, and Kordas called for food and drink while they adjourned for a brief time.

Kordas left the Council Chamber intending to track down Sai—but the sound of muffled crying caught him off guard. It was coming in through a window that overlooked the gardens; concerned that anyone in the Palace was distressed, he found a door and went in search of whoever it was.

He found Jonaton hunched over on a garden bench, sobbing messily into one of his sleeves.

The mage looked up at him at the sound of his footfalls, and blurted, before Kordas could ask, “It’s Sydney. He’s been gone two sennights. By now—whatever his fate—”

Kordas felt a lump in his throat; of all the cats in the Palace these days, Sydney was the one who never went “missing”—very unlike his younger days. He always turned up punctually for meals, and registered his displeasure when his punctuality wasn’t met. He always turned up to sleep on Jonaton, whenever Jonaton wasn’t moving, and sometimes when he was. But in the last year he’d been getting slower and slower, doing more napping than mischief, and his muzzle had gone completely gray.

“He’s—he’s past twenty,” Jonaton continued, wiping his eyes with his sleeve. “I never thought about it, though. He felt like a constant. I just—I guess I just assumed he’d be—”

The last came out in an anguished wail. “I thought I’d have more time with him!”

And he broke into sobs again.

Kordas knew better than to ask if Jonaton had used magic to search for him. He probably had since the day after the Companions appeared, and chalked up the lack of results to interference from the event. “The last time I saw him was when the Companions arrived,” Kordas said around the lump in his throat and the sensation of burning in his eyes. “He was with you. You set him down, then he walked into the woods . . .”

He couldn’t say anything more. Jonaton nodded wordlessly. “He never wanted me to see any weakness, and he hated it when I had to help him. I think he did what cats do. When it’s their time, they go off to—to be at peace.” Jonaton took a deep breath. “I went back to the Grove and called for him, day after day, bringing food. When I couldn’t find a body, I held on to hope that he was off adventuring.”

Maybe he is,Kordas thought. After he’d witnessed how interconnected the Companions, Powers, and even the vrondi were—and the Moonpaths—it was easy to visualize Sydney just vanishing from Valdemar, to—to be an asshole in the spirit realms.

“I think he waited. He must have wanted to make sure everything was going to be—all right. I can’t explain it, I just feel that he—he wanted to see it through. That we’d be all right, and the Companions’ appearance must have—told him it was all right now. He could take his end of watch at last.” Jonaton scrubbed at his eyes. “I have to let him go,” he said, broken-heartedly. “I have to let him go now.”

Kordas went to his old friend, sat down beside him, and hugged him while Jonaton wept into his shoulder. To tell the truth, he shed some tears too. Sydney might have been Jonaton’s cat, but the old bastard had a penchant for watching over Restil, Hakkon and Jon too. Particularly Jon. Jon had gone through a period of nightmares—not a surprise, given what all the boys had seen—and Sydney had slept on his bed every night during that period, patting him gently to wake him up when a nightmare started, even before he could make a sound to alert his parents. The cat hadn’t stopped sleeping with Kordas’s son until the nightmares had subsided.

Finally Jonaton gained fragile control over himself. “We should go back to the meeting,” he said.

“Do you think you’re up to that?” Kordas asked—knowing, as well he did, that losing a beloved pet was just as hard as losing a member of your family. Maybe harder, because everything with a pet was wordless. You never really knew if they understood what you meant all the times that you told them you loved them. Their love was openly (if sometimes oddly) displayed. And they left you far too soon. The old dog that had been his childhood guardian. His first pony. His first horse. It hurt, and it never got easier. And when that pet was as special as Sydney had been . . .

Well, there was no consolation.