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"Please, Pavek? Please?" The whine was back; Zvain reattached himself around Pavek's ribs. "Don't leave me here. Take me with you. Make them forgive me-like you made them forgive Ruari after he busted the zarneeka stowaway."
And how had Zvain learned that?
He 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.
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."
Pavek admitted to himself that for a woman who'd spent her life growing trees, Telhami did a credible job of marshalling her forces for what she, at least, had to know was going to be an all-out, to-the-last-survivor battle. His own confidence rose as he watched the farmers and lesser druids gather the long-handled tools that would serve as their weapons. Calmly determined, they laid the hoes, flails, scythes and rakes beside their stations along the waist-high dirt rampart that encircled Telhami's hut.
In six days they had transformed the village from a cluster of comfortable dwellings and pantries to a bare ground clearing in which they had hastily created three trench-and-rampart rings. They'd hacked stakes from the sacrificed trees and homes and set the largest point-up in the outer bank of the first two ramparts to slow the enemies' advance. Smaller stakes had become make-shift spears heaped in sheaves at each station of the innermost rampart.
The farmers and druids, everyone old enough to fling a stick or bind a length of cloth over a wound, would fight from behind the third ring's rampart, while he and Yohan would add their skills wherever, whenever the circle threatened to break.
And while they were holding back the physical attack, inside the hut Akashia would be shaping and focusing the guardian's power as Telhami combined druidry and the tricks of the Unseen Way to fend off whatever Escrissar sent at them.
And if they failed-if the circle broke and the enemy stormed Telhami's hut, or Escrissar got around Telhami and; the guardian to flood them all with nightmare monsters... Well, every druid had wrought unique spellcraft to hide his. or her grove. Escrissar would be hard-put to locate them all, and if he found them, the likelihood was that the zarneeka plants, and everything else the Quraite druids had nurtured for generations, would be dead.
