At first they were very silent and sober. Everyone kept glan
cing at Mitt, walking in the midst of them with the crown gleaming orange against his hair. He seemed taller. Nobody knew quite what to say. At last Maewen decided that someone must say something.
“Do you want us to call you Your Majesty?” she asked.
“Flaming Ammet!” said Mitt. “Don’t you dare!” He grabbed hold of her hand. “Don’t any of you treat me different,” he said. “I’m going to need you all around for sanity.”
Everyone broke into relieved laughter. After that they were able to talk together quite normally until Moril said, “Hush a moment.”
His cwidder was humming, and humming louder for every step they took forward. Something dark was rising out of the mist ahead. The cwidder was almost growling as they reached it. It was the waystone, but it was not small any longer. It towered in a mighty arch above them, even bigger than the one Maewen remembered outside the station.
Moril murmured, “Wider than the world, or small as in a nut.” It must have been a quotation. Kialan recognized it and grinned at him as they all stepped through the waystone together, with Ynen, who was last, almost treading on Moril, who was just ahead of Kialan.
They were back on green grass under a gray morning. The waystone was waist-high behind them, and they were in a battle.
The fighting was noisy, it was vicious, and it was all round them. Everywhere they looked, people ran and struggled and hacked at one another. Riders and loose horses galloped and screamed. They had a glimpse of Luthan, still on horseback, furiously hacking at someone in a wavy helmet and shiny armor that gave him a chest like a pigeon. Luthan’s face was bright with blood that clashed with the red of his clothes. One of his arms was the wrong red, too, and the mail was dangling from it in strips. They just had time to see this before the horses and fighting swirled and both Luthan and his opponent vanished. The air was full of drifting puffs of white smoke, shouts, clangs, and the slurring whisper of crossbow bolts, which were even crueler than the guns, because you could barely hear them coming.
Kialan threw himself behind the waystone. “Get down, all of you!”
The waystone was a tiny piece of cover, but it was the only one available. The rest crowded up against Kialan, kneeling or crouching, Mitt on one knee with one hand steadying the crown.
“What’s going on?” Moril gasped. He was doubled protectively across his cwidder. “Those look like Southerners! That armor!”
Ynen took a look through the hole in the waystone. “They are, too! I think they look like Andmark.”
“Earl Henda!” Mitt exclaimed. Everyone except Maewen bobbed up for a hasty look. “Hundreds of them,” said Mitt. “Where have they all come from?”
“It must have been them we heard in the night—Ynen and me,” Kialan said, doubled over his own knees. “I remember thinking I heard supply wagons.”
Mitt bobbed up again to look through the savage smoky confusion. He bobbed down again, almost at once, and a speeding crossbow bolt whizzed above all their heads, but he had had time to see a row of big black wagons drawn up some way beyond the green road. “They’re using the wagons for cover,” he said. “The ones with guns.”
“Who do you think’s winning?” Kialan asked.
Mitt shook his head. It felt heavy with the crown. The battle had obviously gone long beyond the stage where you could tell what was going on, but there had looked to be far more Southerners than Northerners. He had a feeling the Northerners were getting beaten.
There was another noise now. It was hard to pick out among the din. Mitt thought he had noticed it only because he seemed to feel it in his bones as much as his ears. For a moment, he wondered if he had accidentally said the name of the Earth Shaker. The earth seemed full of drumming.
There was a tremendous shouting behind.
They all whirled round to find a wall of horsemen galloping down upon them. The world seemed full of thousands of pounding horse legs, flying divots of turf and hollow drumming thunder. Kialan spread his arms out and pulled the four of them into a tight bundle in front of him. “Down!” he yelled, and fell forward on top.
Even so, they all ducked and flinched as the horsemen swept up to them. Horses were all round them, all over them. One rider actually hurtled over their heads, leaping the five of them and the waystone, too. The ground shook in earnest.
“O great One!” Kialan groaned, with his head up to follow that particular rider. “That was my father. Now we’re in the soup whatever happens!”
The noise of fighting suddenly doubled. They could almost feel the riders from Hannart crash into the battle. Beyond the edge of the waystone Maewen saw a horse rear, screaming and gushing blood. Something else tumbled into view, with a clothy thwump, and she saw it was the rider, thrown down like a broken doll in a strange position. He was not moving, but his horse went on screaming, and so did others she could not see. She nearly screamed herself. She wanted to be sick. Her eyes felt twisted and hot. Mitt had been right to say she did not like war. It was horrible. And the worst of it was that she had helped cause it by riding the King’s Road instead of Noreth. The only reason she did not scream and kick and beat the grass with her fists was that it would be letting Mitt down. She crouched, swallowing.
A bullet went whang on the edge of the waystone. That nearly hit me! she thought. Beside her Kialan yelled out an extremely filthy word. Maewen jumped round to find him clutching his arm. There was a slice of granite standing out from his sleeve and blood was trying to flood out around the slice. His sleeve was soaked red already. Kialan repeated the filthy word and took hold of the piece of granite to pull it out.
“Don’t do that!” Mitt shouted at him. “Stop the bleeding first!”
“But it hurts,” Kialan said. There were gray-green smudges of shock under his eyes.
Maewen could see how much it hurt. And Kialan had had his arms spread out to keep them from being trampled. He didn’t deserve this. She wanted to do something to help. She bobbed up. The fighting was a frantic seething out beyond the green road. The space in between was full of loose horses and quiet, doll-like dead people. One of the horses wandering there was her own—or Noreth’s, except that poor Noreth would never have any need of it now. Here was something she could do.
“I’ve got a roll of bandage in my saddlebag,” she said, and jumped up to get it.
Mitt and Moril both screamed at her to come back, but there were scarcely any bullets now. The fighting had rolled back again and was now around that line of black wagons. Maewen covered the space to her horse in perfect safety and told herself she was being brave at last. The horse stood docilely. She heaved and fumbled at the straps on her baggage roll. Quick, quick, before Kialan bleeds to death! It seemed to take a hundred years just to undo two buckles.