I did not expect Isla’s prediction to come true so soon, Kordas thought with utter resignation, seeing a stone-faced fellow wearing a tabard with Lord Hayworth’s device elaborately appliquéd on the front and back approaching on pony-back. At least Hayworth hadn’t had the unmitigated gall to pull one of his horses off barge duty to mount his herald “properly,” but had assigned him what looked like one of his household’s aging ponies. The pony was so short that you could not see its legs for the wooly backs of the sheep it was pushing its way through.

Did Hayworth have any idea how ridiculous this looks? That’s going to reflect on his standing in the mind of anyone who sees this. Probably not. In fact, Hayworth was probably laboring under the delusion that his herald was properly mounted, and the mere presence of such a functionary, resplendent in the trappings of the Imperial Court, was going to impress Kordas and make him uncertain.

When what had probably happened was that the herald got his orders, trotted off to the horsemaster and demanded a mount, and the horsemaster had given him one of the only beasts that wasn’t sick or towing. And no matter how the herald would have protested, it would have been in vain. Horses couldn’t be taken off towing without slowing everything behind them down, so it was a pony or walk.

He would have been laughable, with his knees up to his chin thanks to the short stirrups, but Kordas did not have the enthusiasm needed to muster a laugh right now. “Rose, please have Ivy tell Isla that I am going to need her and her books at the barge, because Hayworth is about to air his grievances. And then tell the other Dolls with my Councilors that I am going to need them there too for the same reason.”

His nose was uncomfortably cold, and he sniffled a little, and caught the herald surreptitiously doing the same while trying to scrape together a few shreds of dignity. Then he rode forward to meet the poor man—it wasn’t his fault that his master was about to pull a temper tantrum—and saluted him gravely. “It beats walking,” he sympathetically offered to the fellow. The herald sighed, as if hearing an unwelcome truth.

“My master, Lord Hayworth, lately Baronet of Hayworth, begs the favor of your attention, Baron Valdemar,” the herald said, putting just enough emphasis on Kordas’s new title to convey an entire world of meaning. To begin with, how the mighty have fallen, through you’re only one very short step above my master, you know, and I know it, and you know I know it, to end with you got us into this, and we’re not happy about it.

Well, there went any sympathy I was going to feel for him. He’s about to become a fireside joke. “Remember how Hayworth’s herald showed up with his knees at his chin mounted on a pony that was practically swimming through sheep?” Now, as he’d pointed out to Isla, most of the people who felt that way had gone straight back to the Duchy—was it still a Duchy? He supposed it must be, since Merrin was a Duke now. He had the sneaking suspicion, however, that Hayworth had seen this not as an escape or an exile, but as an opportunity. Hayworth had always had ambition, but had been unable to satisfy that ambition, either through advantageous marriage or through trade alliances. Hayworth had his own little private army, and he had been extremely put out that Kordas had not leapt to arm them with Spitters, but had, in fact, forbade them to carry anything that was lethal at a distance. This was in no small part because Hayworth had refused to relinquish them to help form the new Guard. Now, a charitable man would have assumed that this was because Hayworth was planning to take over guarding his entire section of the convoy.

And Kordas, being charitable, had assumed precisely that, until the Dolls informed him otherwise.

Nor were Hayworth’s servants joining everyone else in hunting, foraging, fishing, and wood-gathering for the common stores. Granted, Kordas had not specifically said this was supposed to happen, but most of the wealthy and nobly born were sharing out their excess with those whose luck was not so good, or who were busy with dawn-to-dark work.

Not Hayworth. The Doll Peridot had reported that any excess food was preserved by an increasingly irritated chief cook, and stowed away in unlikely places, as if Hayworth feared someone would come looking for it—and any excess wood mysteriously vanished into the “bilge storage” under the floorboards of the barges.

And Hayworth had made things very, very clear to his underlings that if he had been in charge, the whole convoy would have stopped right after they crossed the Gate, taken over that village by force of arms, and settled down right there with the former villagers reduced to serfdom.

Yes, Hayworth had somehow gotten infected with the “Imperial Disease.” He had realized that his ambitions would no longer be constrained by boundaries he dared not trespass as they had been back in Valdemar. In this wilderness, he could take over as much land as he and his household could hold. He could style himself whatever he wanted. Viscount? Earl? Duke?

Prince?

King?

None of these titles were out of reach. And he thought, because he was rich and accustomed to thinking that way, that the silver and gold he surely had stored away (given the steady guard on one particular barge) was actually valuable out here. And very likely, because they had not missed so much as a single meal yet, his men thought the same. It didn’t occur to any of them that in the situation in which they all found themselves, you couldn’t eat or burn money, and the good will of your fellow travelers was going to be the coin you traded in.

Well, don’t let him see he’s irritated you.

“By all means,” Kordas said, genially. “I will be happy to see him on my barge immediately. I will meet him there.”

And then he rode away before the herald could counter with a demand for Kordas to come to Hayworth.

Hayworth’s strings were near the tail of the convoy, which gave Kordas plenty of time to assemble mage Dole, Isla, and the rest of his Councilors, and have some of his own tail-riding guards discreetly move in on Hayworth’s people as soon as he and his escort were out of sight. And Dolls. Lots of Dolls. And Ponu, Wis, and Koto. They were all going to be carrying out orders Hayworth did not anticipate. Hayworth might even think there was going to be a coup. And if so, he would be right—but not about who he thought was going to come out on top.

Lord Hayworth arrived wearing completely inappropriate Court garb of the sort that Kordas had been forced into wearing at the Capital. Not as rich or as elaborate, but it was ill suited to the cold of this late-autumn day, and his Lordship arrived shivering in his saddle, sniffling just as Kordas had been a moment ago, and looking thoroughly miserable. He was riding a rather delicate palfrey, as were the men of his entourage. At least he’d had the sense not to take towing horses off the barges. He and his entourage started to dismount. From the deck of the barge, Kordas interrupted them.

“Just you, your Lordship,” he said politely. “I was just having a meeting with my Councilors and there simply isn’t room for your people.”

Hayworth, a strongly built man of late middle age whose personality inclined him to the sort of extremely “masculine” activities, like daily fighting practice, that kept him fit—mostly so that he could boast about how fit he was—looked as if he was about to object, then shrugged, rode a little ahead of the moving barge, had his herald hold his horse while he dismounted, waited for the barge to get to him, and climbed aboard, disdaining Kordas’s outstretched hand.

He looked a bit taken aback when he saw how many people had squeezed into the first two rooms of the barge, but the welcome warmth of the place took him off guard, and he made the mistake of allowing the heat to relax him. Kordas read it in the slight slump of his shoulders, and knew at that moment that the battle was over and in his favor.

About half of his Councilors were seated, either on the bed or on folding stools in the walkway. The rest stood. Kordas took the second seat at the tiny table—Isla had the first one—and did not offer Hayworth a seat.

Hayworth puffed out his chest a little and smoothed down his dark hair, and the tone of his voice when he began to speak was that of someone admonishing a child. “Now see here, Baron,” he began. “What the hell are you doing, dragging us past perfectly good land into gods only know what kind of forsaken wilderness is ahead of us?” His cold gray eyes narrowed a little, perhaps in anticipation of a fight he was certain he would win.

He surely expected Kordas to counter with all the reasons he’d given for leaving Crescent Lake—that the Empire was eventually going to come looking, that they needed to put enough distance between them and the Duchy of Valdemar—and enough Gate-crossings—to throw them completely off the scent. That there was no such thing as “too far from the Empire.”

He might have suspected that Kordas would add that all the Landwise thought this was a poor place to settle. Surely someone who was Landwise would have told him this . . .

Well, maybe not. If they already knew he either doesn’t believe in the Landsense, or thinks they’re all in my pocket, or if they just don’t like him, they might not have bothered.

So instead, he simply smiled and cut straight to the chase. “Well, Hayworth, I have made it clear all along that anyone who cares to leave us is absolutely free to do so. So if that is what you want to do, I am not going to lift a finger to stop you.”

Hayworth, who had his mouth open for whatever demands he was planning to make, looked as if Kordas had actually struck him. His hard mouth worked as his brain tried to reconcile what it had expected to hear with what Kordas had actually said. And his eyes glazed over for a moment in sheer shock.

Kordas continued, concealing his glee. “Now, of course, if this means any of your people wish to stay with us rather than going with you, you are not going to be allowed to coerce them. I have explained this to all of you. While we are on the move, and until we have established something like a stable settlement, we are all equal. You cannot make life decisions for them. Only they can do that.” He looked over at Rose, who took the cue.

“Indeed, Lord Baron, and even as we speak, we are asking every member of the good Lord Hayworth’s household if they choose to remain with him or go with the convoy.”

Hayworth’s thick eyebrows furrowed, but beneath them, his usually hard gray eyes just looked dumbstruck. He’d barely gotten a sentence out and found himself outmaneuvered.

“Now, Lord Hayworth,” Isla said, with a charming smile on her face as she opened up the first of the ledgers she had piled up beside her. “Since you will be departing, we’ll need to go over the inventory of what belongs to you and what belongs to the convoy. Specifically, supplies.”

By the time it was all over, half of Hayworth’s entourage had “mysteriously” disappeared with their horses. The personal barges in Hayworth’s strings had all been detached from the convoy, reorganized, and ferried over to the other side of the river, because Kordas had no intention of making it easy for him to just trot his people back to that village and do what he’d intended to do. Given the chance, at the moment he had even more impetus to do so, since about half of his household of a thousand had elected to stay with the convoy. That village was a nice stand of already-built houses and already-worked fields. Very tempting.

So Kordas elected to put temptation out of reach. He was fairly certain that there was no way Hayworth would be able to cross the river as it was, and he had no way to build a bridge. It was too deep to ford, too cold to swim the horses across, and while the current wasn’t excessive, it was too dangerous to try in this weather.

And if he tried, he’d only find himself faced with rebellion. The freezing, wet riders would be disinclined to do anything but build a fire to try to warm themselves, not march on a village to conquer it.

Following which, they would probably curse him under their breath and ride back up the bank to catch up with the convoy.

Meanwhile, thanks to Isla’s bookkeeping, all he’d be granted besides a reasonable portion of grain and seeds was what was in his personal barge. She knew exactly how much of the common supplies he had been entrusted with, and as soon as she knew how many people were going to “leave his service” on the spot, she also knew exactly how much of those supplies she was going to order the Dolls and guards to take back.

“For your convenience, your loyalists are being moved to the western bank, where you all should be safer from the harshest weather on the way. You can keep the barges I’ve loaned you, of course; I’m not a monster,” Kordas finished, trying not to relish how Hayworth looked as if he’d just been run over by a farm cart. “That way you’ll have nice, cozy shelters to spend the winter in, and, as a gentleman farmer, I advise you to put off building anything but barns and stockpens until you’ve got enough land under plow to support all your people. Food on the table is going to be far more important than a replica of Hayworth House.” He stood up and clasped Hayworth’s hand. “No hard feelings. I perfectly understand not wanting to go any further. And who knows! We might still protect you by being a diversion. Any Imperials that come looking for us are likely to roll right past your little settlement without even noticing it.”

He worked very hard not to put emphasis on the word “little.” Call yourself whatever you like, Lord Hayworth. It still won’t change the fact that you are “King” of just over five hundred people.

Hayworth shook his hand, limply.

“Off you go, then!” Kordas continued, turning him and gently moving him toward the door with a not-at-all-subtle hand on the small of his back. “You’ll have a lot of organizing to do and not a lot of time to do it in!”

If his mind was working at all, he’d take that as the urgent need to get back to his barges and figure out how to keep from losing roughly half the common supplies that had been entrusted to him.

But from the way he looked . . . Kordas figured that he was still trying to make sense of the fact that Isla had been coolly ticking off things in her ledgers with “Yes, you can keep half that,” and “these Tow-Beasts and Chargers here, here, and here, are actually Valdemar property,” and “Now, we’ll be having that back; it came out of the Imperial Armory, as you can see noted right here . . .”

Not Poomers and Spitters, but he does have a lot of crossbow bolts and quarrels from the supplies that never made it to the front lines, and he doesn’t get to keep them all. It’s purely “coincidental” that Ilsa’s number came in at enough to hunt with, but not to take on a defended town.

If Hayworth noticed that he was far short of the number of guards and underlings he’d had when he arrived, he didn’t show it. “His people” were deserting him already. Probably the smart ones, who had figured out that his money was worth nothing now.

Well, good. If they joined Kordas’s Guard, they’d be treated decently. If they had betrayal in mind, they’d be further every day from Hayworth’s place to run to, and it would be on the opposite bank of the river.

Meanwhile, Hayworth might be too stunned by the way he’d been outmaneuvered to notice much of anything for a while. If luck was with Kordas, his lordship wouldn’t realize how badly he had screwed himself until they were long out of reach. Oh, he could hitch his own, personal horses, only a few of which were as heavy as the Tow-Beasts, and any of his tenant farmers’ oxen (if there were any left) to the barges and try to catch up. But Kordas had confiscated at least half of his towing power, so the going would be very slow, even if he decoupled some of the lighter barges and managed to get saddle horses and ponies to submit to harness and pulling.

And if he did catch up?

He’ll have to get the vote of at least sixty percent of the people here to be allowed to stay. That seemed . . . unlikely.

Not my henhouse. Not my chickens. I’ll worry about it if it happens. If he has any brains, what he will do is sit put for a few days, see what he has, organize what he has, then go back and negotiate with that village to join them. He can make a bridge out of barges for his animals if he just takes the time to work it out.

Just as Kordas pressed Hayworth out of the door, Hayworth hissed, close enough for Kordas to feel his breath, “This is trickery! I’ll get you for doing this, you—”

“Hush, Hayworth. I don’t think you’re a good enough swimmer to afford finishing that sentence,” Kordas murmured back, and pushed him through.

Things pretty much fell out with the separation of Lord Hayworth from the convoy as Kordas had expected. Kordas made sure his people were absolutely scrupulous about what they took to common stores. He even left Hayworth’s household a supply of chopped wood, because his people had a surplus. He made sure their barges were anchored firmly to the riverbank and that the charms on their herds were working properly, and even got a couple of volunteers from the mages to make a ramp into the river so they could easily pull their boats ashore if they decided to make a settlement where they were, and didn’t want to winter in barges amid the cold water and ice. Kordas didn’t actually know what would happen if the barges were completely encased in ice. Would the hulls be strong enough to survive? They did all right with simple collisions, although absolutely nobody wanted to make a test of that in rough water full of rocks and rapids. Would the pressure on the hulls by the ice just serve to pop them up out of the water to balance on the ice itself?

Well, that was one question the entire convoy was going to face eventually.

All of that sorting, reclaiming, and rearranging was accomplished while the main convoy continued to move forward at an unaltered pace.

He himself did not oversee this, but he had his proxies in the form of the Dolls, who were doing a lot of the work of culling out the things going back to the main group. The Dolls, of course, did not respond to begging, threatening, cajoling, or any other attempts at interference, and they were much stronger than humans. Now, they had never used this strength against humans, and it was possible that the spells locking the vrondi into those wood and cloth bodies prevented them from doing so. But Hayworth didn’t know that. Fortunately, as it turned out, Hayworth’s people were wary of them, and the Dolls didn’t have to display their strength—just their complete indifference to anything the humans said to them.

Kordas did briefly wonder about the people who remained with Hayworth as he settled in next to Isla the next morning to go over her notes, having enjoyed a very different breakfast meal than his household cook usually prepared, courtesy of Hayworth’s former chief cook. Kordas would have been suspicious of poisoning were it not for the cook’s near-endless, truthful vitriol about Hayworth’s whims. “He wouldn’t let me cook,” the man growled. “Not really cook. Can you imagine being able to do magic, and then being told, ‘No, you’ll only use magic to make little pies, because no one but me gets little pies’? That’s what he was like.” The cook had made a savory boiled pudding with oatmeal and meat scraps. A good thick slice of it, along with a sort of “bread” made of mashed tuber, mixed with flour and a little butter then fried, sat in front of Kordas now.

This was new to him, but absolutely delicious.

It was now far too cold in the mornings to eat outside, so he’d had their shares brought to them in the barge. He didn’t often exploit his rank, but since he was also conferring with Isla at the same time they were eating, he felt it justified.

And he was really not looking forward to leaving the warmth of the barge for the raw wind and a trip on Arial’s back. She and the other smooth-coated horses in his herds had all been growing very furry coats over the last few sennights, and he sincerely hoped this wasn’t a portent of a terrible winter to come.

“I hope you aren’t having second thoughts about Lord Hayworth,” Isla said, when he had been quiet for a while.

“Not really.” But his tone was as uncertain as his feelings. Not that he thought he’d done the wrong thing; he was just concerned that he’d punished the innocent along with the troublemaker.

She reached out and took the ledger away from him. “They’re upstream from that village, which will make it a lot easier for people who decide they’ve made the wrong choice to get away from the group and see if they can’t talk the villagers into taking them in. And right now, if all my information from the Dolls is correct, he’s lost most of his little army. They are currently figuring out which households will take them. I made it clear we’d take any that weren’t otherwise claimed. They all figured out the obvious: winter is soon, and even if we find a place to settle before then, it will be years, even decades, before money in the form of gold, silver, and copper has any value to us. So any ideas he had about squashing the villagers in Imperial fashion are not going to happen. So if he does the humble but smart thing, and travels back upstream to ask them nicely if he can move in, he and his people will be fine. They can haul their barges out of the water and into the village and live in them quite comfortably.”

What sounded like a riot broke out right outside their windows.

Shouts of anger, the squeals of pigs hurt or terrified, and a strange cry, like someone tearing canvas.

He leapt to his feet, grabbing his crossbows and the quiver, and ran outside without a coat, just in time to see a strange, black, winged shape struggling into the air just off the bow of his barge with a young pig in its claws.

The pig screamed in agony; blood ran down from the wounds where the creature’s claws pierced its fuzzy hide. He fumbled a bolt in place, aiming and firing.

And he screamed, in frustration, as something about the thing’s feathers made the bolt bounce harmlessly off it. It craned its head around on its long, snake-like neck and hissed at him, then sadistically bit the pig, making it squeal, all the while pumping its huge black wings in a labored effort to get away.

There were more strange creatures in the sky, swooping and feinting down on young pigs and young sheep, although so far only this bastard had gotten prey. The animals on the bank milled around in a panic, all sense lost under the attacks of these things they had never seen before, blundering against the barge, making it rock and throwing his aim off.

A toddler is the size of a pig—

“Pelias!” someone shouted, and threw a fishing net to someone on the next barge, someone he recognized as one of the Valdemar mages, a gangly young teenager. What—he thought, and then instantly understood, as if by alchemy, as the same person yelled “Kordas!” and threw one at him.

He caught it, wadded it up like a ball, and flung it as hard as he could at the creature making off with the struggling pig. It was all instinct at this level—a whirl of mage energy to keep it in ball shape, a tailwind of more energy to send it farther than he himself could possibly throw. And at the very last moment, as it sailed just over the creature’s head and into its flight path, an explosion of energy to splay the net out to its fullest.

With a surprised wheeze that sounded like a whistle, the thing flew right into the net. The net obliged without Kordas’s help to foul and entrap the creature’s wings.

And with a croak and a horrible squeal, creature, pig, and net plummeted to the ground. Men with spears swarmed it. Enemy dispatched, Kordas turned to see how Pelias was doing.

Pelias had already imitated his master, and a second, unlucky monster landed among the pigs, which set on it with squeals of rage, trampling it and snapping at it. In no time at all it was as dead as the one Kordas had taken down.

All up and down the line nets flew into the air. Anywhere there was a mage nearby, the creatures were knocked out of the sky and set upon with spear, axe, sword, and hoof.

And before he could get his breath and look for another net, it was over.

Another of those tearing-canvas screams came from somewhere above, and the creatures abruptly cut off their attacks and headed for the low-hanging, gray clouds filling the sky from horizon to horizon. In a moment, except for the panicked animals and the last, futile struggles of the ones that had been brought down, it was as if there had never been an attack at all.

“Rose, please relay my orders to bring every carcass of those things to the mage’s barge,” he croaked, suddenly aware that his heart pounded hard enough to break a rib, and he was wet with fear-sweat, and very, very cold. “Tell the Five Old Men I want them there too.” He turned back to the door of the barge, intending only to get his coat and leave.

But Isla stopped him. “Finish your breakfast,” she said firmly. “We do not ever waste food on this journey. Every mother with picky children is making that a commandment, and I am commanding you.”

His gorge rose. A natural reaction after terror, of course, but—

“I can’t eat,” he said, wondering if he looked as green as he felt.

“Sit down. Drink your tea. Tell me afterward if you can’t. It’s going to take people some time to collect those bodies and deliver them to the Old Farts, and you know it. You can take the time.”

Obediently, because he had the feeling her head was a lot clearer than his was right now, he did as he was told. The spicy, minty tea somehow settled his stomach, the breakfast still smelled amazing, and before he quite realized it, he had scraped the plate clean.

By that time the rest of him had settled down as well. His head cleared, his hands stopped shaking, and the sweat dried. He stood up, she passed him his sheepskin coat, and he went out. “Rose, please stay here,” he said, then collected his saddle and bridle from their box on the prow of the barge and hopped off into the still-upset herds to whistle up Arial.

Getting through the jumpy herds of animals proved to be quite the challenge. Normally he’d have been able to just have Arial shove her way through them, but with them agitated, he had to be careful and move without any impression of threat. The hens, apparently, refused to come out of their coop-barges at all, and the geese and ducks had taken to theirs as well, and not even corn tempted them out.

By the time he actually got to the mages’ barge, the most intact of the bodies had already been draped over the roof and there was quite a gaggle of interested parties examining them. He stood in the stern of the barge and watched as they poked, prodded, picked up, put down, and whispered to each other. And the patient Tow-Beasts, first to calm down from the attack, kept right on towing the barge along.

Now that the creatures were dead, if anything, they looked even more terrifying than when they had been in the sky. Long, narrow heads with both teeth and a hooked thing like a beak at the end of their snouts sat atop necks like a heron’s. And the size of them! That was a lot harder to estimate when they were in the air. The wingspan was enormous; wings trailed over the side of the barge and into the water on both sides. They were covered in metallic, black feathers.

“Six limbs?” he said incredulously. It hadn’t registered with him during the fight that the creatures had had forelegs, hindlegs, and wings.

“Made creatures,” Dole said definitively. “There is no living thing that isn’t mage-made that has four legs and wings. Of course, if you just look at them with mage-sight, you’ll know that anyway.”

He could have smacked himself in the forehead for not thinking of that. Maybe he was more shaken up than he thought. Cautiously, he did just that, and the creatures lit up with rapidly fading magical energies that were draining away as the bodies cooled.

“Feathers will be useful,” Dole said dispassionately, as if he wasn’t talking about winged monstrosities that could have hurt or killed not just animals, but some of their children, had things turned out differently. “Feathers retain magic for quite a long time, and we can make use of that.” Now he turned to face Kordas directly. “I assume you brought the carcasses here because they’re ours, now? The carcasses belong to the mages, I mean.”

“I can’t think of a better use for them,” he said. “Oh, and Pelias was outstanding. I think you can elevate him out of his apprenticeship now.”

“I’ll tell his master. Timon will probably agree with you.” There was a gap in the crowd. Dole took Kordas by the elbow and eased him to where he could handle one of the things himself. And it was then that he saw in these creatures what he had seen in the snake-dogs.

“Look at this, Dole!” he exclaimed, holding up the creature’s head nose on to Dole’s gaze. From that position it was obvious that one eye was very much higher than the other in this monster, but not the next one. “And this!” He dropped the head to pick up the two foreclaws. Both of them showed evidence of malformed toes. In one, the claw pointed up instead of down.

“Inbred?” Dole ventured, stroking his bare chin thoughtfully.

“Inbred,” he said decisively. “Just like those snake-dogs. You think there’s someone around here who made these things, scryed and saw us, and is setting their pets on us?”

“Not bloody likely,” snorted Ceri, tossing his head so that the tail of white hair on the top of it lashed the air like the tail of a restless horse. “First thing is, the snake-dogs attacked that village, not us. Second thing, these ugly birds aren’t big enough to cause us much trouble, just inconvenience. Although . . .” He paused and stroked his chin, in an unconscious imitation of Dole. “. . . both raids could have had the purpose of filling someone’s winter larder.”

“Huh.” Dole raised his voice. “What do you lot think? Are the snake-dogs and these things connected? Could their master have been looking to steal food animals?”

Well, that set off a virtual avalanche in which each of the mages had to have their say. This wasn’t all of the mages with the convoy, but it was all of the most senior ones, and they represented a pretty even cross-section of the varied nations in the Empire. Unlike the native Valdemarans who, like virtually everyone in their part of the Empire, were dark of eye and hair and definitely brown-skinned, the mages—the ones whose hair hadn’t turned entirely gray or silver, that is—had every possible shade of hair and eyes and skin. It made them a bit of a startling group when you saw them all together like this.

Normally they were scattered through the convoy, doing the things only mages could do, or assisting with things that magic made easier. Bringing down dead wood from the tops of trees, for instance—there were spells to do that. Or something that Kordas had not even thought of when he’d implemented the Plan, because he hadn’t known there was a spell for it: making the grass grow. Not just grow, but grow fast enough that it was knee-high in a single mark, so that there was always something to browse on for all their herds, no matter how far back in the convoy they were. It couldn’t have been done at all if the animals hadn’t been liberally crapping everywhere they went, because there simply wouldn’t have been enough nourishment available to sustain such an insane rate of growth. But they were leaving trails of poop, and there was plenty of nutrient to feed the grass, and that had alleviated Kordas’s biggest concern about the animals.

It wasn’t going to work when the grass died, which it was likely to do any day because of the cold and frost, but as long as it was alive, the mages could literally work their magic on it.

Kordas had offered to learn the spell himself, and all five of the remaining Six Old Men had turned on him and scolded him for even thinking of it.

“This isn’t a spell for just anyone!” Dole actually yelled, his curly hair seeming to double in size with his exasperation.

“Have you any idea what that takes out of a mage?” Ceri demanded, as if he was a particularly stupid schoolboy.

Koto placed a fatherly hand on his arm, which was somehow worse than being yelled at. “There is only one Baron Kordas,” he pointed out, as if Kordas himself was not aware of that fact. “We have dozens of mages, but only one of you. Do what you do best and leave us to fill in what’s needed.”

It would have stung less if that hadn’t been exactly what Isla had been telling him, almost every other night. And he was trying! But just as he had in the Capital, when he saw a need it was very hard not to jump in and personally fill it.

I suppose I should be grateful they aren’t shoving me toward Arial and telling me to get back to doing my duty.

Finally the ruckus among the mages stopped. One middle-aged woman—so enveloped in an enormous shawl over a bulky knit tunic and loose, thick trews that it was impossible even to guess at what she looked like under all that wool—raised her hand.

“The consensus is that yes, it is entirely possible, in fact likely, that the wave of terror-birds was sent to harvest meat from our convoy. Some of those snake-dogs did get away, and they would have had no difficulty in following your trail back to the river. If the master of the pack controls the pack from afar as would have to be the case if he expected the dogs to bring home meat instead of eating it, he too would have seen the convoy and our herds.”

And that’s why you don’t try to do everything yourself, Kordas. He sighed. You are only one brain, and one set of eyes and ears. They are dozens, and most of them have entirely different experiences than you.

Not that long ago, he might have rushed back to the barge that held his magic books to try to find out what the damned things were, and maybe how they could fend them off better next time, or—

But he stopped himself right there. “As you know, you have every resource I can dig up to figure out what to do about these things and their master, or masters.” Meanwhile, I need to track down those men who were formerly in Lord Hayworth’s personal train, find out what they can do, and assign each of them to a guardsman. I’ve wanted to have the guards going about in pairs. This is a good time and reason to start. “For now, revise the herd-minding for better defense. Double up the Guards into pairs, armed for range. Set a walking line of donkeys on the landward side of the herds, if they aren’t towing. They can smash anything smaller than a pony, and we may as well use them as walking guards.”

“We’ll take it from here, Baron,” the woman said, with a quirk of her eyebrow that said, wordlessly, It’s about time you stopped mother-henning everything.

He flipped the long rein tethering Arial lightly to the barge over to the land and jumped off the barge. Arial had already moved off the path for the towing animals, and waited patiently for him to mount.

Was I that obvious? he thought ruefully. But of course, he already knew the answer to that question.