“Our informant, while handy with a bow, wasn’t particularly observant or astute. The best I could get puts Lilith’s main base a few miles from the battlefield. He described what seems to be a small settlement, overlooked by a good-sized farm with several cottages and a large stone manor house, where I’d say the gentry who owned the land lived. She’s in the manor house.”
“Ballycloon.” Larkin looked at Moira, saw her face was very pale, her eyes very dark. “It must be Ballycloon, and the O Neills’s land. The family we helped the day Blair and I were checking the traps, the day Lora ambushed her, they were coming from near Drombeg, and that’s just a bit west of Ballycloon. We would have gone farther east, to check the last trap, but…”
“I was hurt,” Blair finished. “We went as far as we could. And lucky for us. If she’d already made her base when we dropped in, we’d have been seriously outnumbered.”
“And seriously dead,” Cian added. “They moved in the night before your altercation with Lora.”
“There would have been people there still, or on the road.” It knotted Larkin’s stomach to think of it. “And the O Neills themselves. I don’t know if they’ve reached safety. How can we know how many…”
“We can’t,” Blair said flatly.
“You, you and Cian, you thought we should move everyone out, force them out if necessary, from all the villages and farms around the battleground. Burn the houses and cottages behind them so Lilith and her army would have no shelter. I thought it was cold and cruel of her. Heartless. And now…
“It can’t be changed. And I couldn’t, wouldn’t,” Moira corrected, “have ordered homes burned. Perhaps it would have been wiser, and stronger, to do just that. But those whose homes we destroyed would have lost the heart they need to fight. So it’s done this way.”
She had no appetite for the food on her plate, but she picked up her tea to warm her hands. “Blair and Cian know strategy, as Hoyt and Glenna know magic. But you and I, Larkin, we know Geall and its people. We would have broken their hearts and their spirits.”
“They’ll burn what they don’t need or want,” Cian told her.
“Aye, but it won’t be our hands that light the torch. That will matter. So we believe we know where they are. Do we know how many?”
“He started out with multitudes, but he was lying. He didn’t know,” Cian said. “However much Lilith may use mortals, she wouldn’t count them in her inner circle, or trust any with salient information. They’re food, they’re servants, they’re entertainment.”
“We can look.” Glenna spoke for the first time. “Hoyt and I, now that we have a general area, can do a locator spell. We should be able to get harder data. Some idea of the numbers. We know from Larkin’s trip to the caves and his look at their arsenal they were armed for a thousand or more.”
“We’ll look.” Hoyt laid his hand over Glenna’s. “But what I think Cian isn’t saying is whatever the numbers they have, whatever we have, in the end they’ll have more. Whatever weapons they have will be more. Lilith has had decades, perhaps centuries, to plan this moment. We’ve had months.”
“And still we’ll win.”
Cian lifted a brow at Moira’s statement. “Because you’re good and they’re evil?”
“No, and there’s nothing so simple as that. You yourself are proof of that, for you’re neither like her nor like us, but something else altogether. We’ll win because we’ll be smarter, and we’ll be stronger. And because she has no one like the six of us standing with her.”
She turned from him to his brother. “Hoyt, you are the first of us. You brought us together.”
“Morrigan chose us.”
“She, or fate, selected us,” Moira agreed. “But it was you who began the work. It’s you who believed, who had the power and the strength to forge this circle. So do I believe it. I rule Geall, but I don’t rule this company.”
“Nor do I.”
“No, none of us do. We must be as one, for all our differences. So we look to each other for what we need. I’m far from the strongest warrior here, and my magic is but a shadow. I don’t have Larkin’s skills, nor the steeliness of mind to kill in cold blood. What I have is knowledge and authority, so I offer those.”
“You have more,” Glenna told her. “A great deal more.”
“I will have more, before it’s done. There are things I must do.” She got to her feet. “I’ll return to work on whatever is necessary as soon as I’m able.”
“Pretty royal,” Blair commented after Moira left the room.
“Carrying a lot of weight with it.” Glenna turned to Hoyt. “Agenda?”
“Best to see what we can of the enemy. Then I’m thinking fire. It’s still one of our most formidable weapons, so we should charm more swords.”
“Risky enough to put swords in some of the hands we’re training,” Blair put in. “Much less flaming ones.”
“You’d be right.” Hoyt considered, nodded. “It will be up to us then, won’t it, to decide who’ll be—what is it?—issued that sort of weapon. Good men should be placed in positions as close to Lilith’s base as we can manage. They’d need shelter that’s safe after sunset.”
“It’s barracks you’re meaning. There are cottages and cabins, of course.” Larkin narrowed his eyes in thought. “Other shelters can be built in the daylight hours if need be. There’s an inn as well, between her base and the next settlement.”