Renegade's Magic (The Soldier Son Trilogy #3)

Renegade's Magic (The Soldier Son Trilogy #3) Page 145

Then he turned away from me. It was not silencing me so much as it was him refusing to allow himself to hear. There was no point to my speaking. Instead, I was a silent witness to all he did that day. My father would have been proud of him. He was efficient and relentless. The only emotions he allowed to show were the ones that were useful to his cause.

He took my suggestions. In the days that followed, I watched him as he silently implemented his plan. He conferred that day with Sempayli, treating him more like a lieutenant and less like a feeder. At first the young man seemed confused by the change, but before their review of the troops was over, he had begun to offer bits of advice and suggestions. He knew the warriors better than Soldier’s Boy did, and before the day was done, he quietly offered to help sort them into those who truly wished to annihilate the intruders and those who merely hoped to win glory and perhaps plunder. Soldier’s Boy consented to that, and further charged him to select a dozen men to be his personal guard, based solely on skills with weaponry rather than on which kin-clan they belonged to. He also listened to Sempayli when the young man suggested that the troops would respond better to being treated as if they were hunting parties rather than troops marching in formation. I was uncertain of the wisdom of that, for it would create many individual leaders rather than a chain of command, but Soldier’s Boy didn’t consult with me on that and I no longer cared to offer him my thoughts on anything. He might be a traitor but I was not.

When he needed information from me, I refused him, but it was a useless show. I had little success at keeping my barriers raised against him. He could not absorb me, but he raided my memories as he wished for information and military tactics and knowledge. I gained some knowledge of his forces. They were not impressive, but I knew they were not to be dismissed, either. They would not fight us as Gernians fought, nor as the Plainsmen had. As the days passed, Sempayli’s suggestions bore fruit. It was tedious to have a variety of leaders reporting directly to Soldier’s Boy, but he endured it, and began to set small competitions among them, ones that built endurance or emphasized stealth or marksmanship.

I was surprised to discover he had a small mounted force. I had seen the horses that Dasie had used the night she had taken Kinrove down. Now my suspicions were confirmed. They were cavalla animals, some bartered for but most stolen. Some of them were old animals and none of them were in the best condition. The tack they had was very well worn and often in poor repair. Keeping horses was not a Speck tradition, and the forest did not offer good grazing, especially in winter. Soldier’s Boy took it upon himself to intervene in their care and grooming. That was when I discovered to my shock that Clove was among them. Evidently the day I’d turned him loose in the forest, he had not found his way home. The huge beast knew me immediately and came to Soldier’s Boy for comfort. I was glad he gave it, ordering that all the horses be moved to the coarse meadows near the beaches where they could actually graze rather than being forced to browse on whatever they could reach. When he announced that he would take Clove for his own mount, the current owner offered no resistance. I suspected that very few of the mounted Specks enjoyed their new vocations; the dense forest and often steep paths were not conducive to breeding horsemen. Soldier’s Boy wanted to begin some mounted drills, but the open space required simply didn’t exist near Lisana’s lodge. Finding proper grazing was difficult enough; the salt marshes gave them grass, but only of the coarsest sort. With reluctance, he had to give up his hope of a mounted force that could spearhead a swift attack.

As I had suggested, he showed special attention to those warriors who had come from Olikea’s kin-clan, taking time to meet separately with each one of them and to ask gravely if any of their family or dear ones had been summoned to Kinrove’s dance. Every one of them, of course, had lost someone to the magic. Soldier’s Boy made that pain the mirror of his own, and spoke earnestly to them of how their only hope of regaining their lost kin was to give their utmost to drive the intruders from our territories. He urged them, too, to recruit others from among our kin-clan, brothers and cousins and uncles, in the hope of winning our struggle and being reunited with all our lost kin in peace and joy. He rallied his troops with stirring speeches in which he reminded them of all the wrongs the Gernians had done them, and promised them that they would right those wrongs. Over and over, he reminded them that if they fought well in the upcoming battle, they would drive away the Gernians, save their ancestral trees, and put an end to the need for Kinrove’s dance. Every one of them would be a hero to his people. His efforts at making the struggle against the Gernians even more personal succeeded. The force drawn from our kin-clan doubled and then tripled in less than a week.