LITMIR.BIZ

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grace the foal was born healthy not long after that. Miranda waited to see if the mare accepted him, then she left the stall, grabbed an old spear propped in a corner of the stable, and hurried out into the rain to join the women and their half a dozen ranch hands on the wall-walk behind the wooden barricade.

      As it turned out, it was just the women, Ibero the cleric and lame old Rebeño the groom that she joined. Fernan had already taken the ranch hands with him outside the walls. For an ambush, one of the house women said, hesitantly. Miranda, with no precious horses nearby, permitted herself a stream of entirely unmitigated profanity. Then she swiped at her brow again and climbed the wet steps to the high walk along the western side of the wall, to watch and wait. Someone offered her a hat to keep the rain from her eyes.

      After a while she decided the spear was a waste of time, and exchanged it for a bow and a quiver full of arrows, taken from one of the six small guard shelters along the wall. There were no guards in the shelters. All the soldiers were in Esteren, or with Rodrigo.

      The boys can handle trouble, he had written. Blithely.

      She imagined seeing her husband riding home just then, emerging from the trees into the wide, grassy space before their walls. She imagined shooting him as he rode up.

      The land around the Belmonte ranch was level and open in all directions, save to the west and southwest where Rodrigo’s father and his grandfather before him had left a stand of oak and cedar undisturbed. Rodrigo hadn’t touched the trees, either, though for a different reason.

      There were holy associations with that wood, and with the pool in the midst of it, but young Fernan Belmonte had been taught by his father years ago, when he could first ride a proper horse, that the forest was deceptively useful for defense, as well.

      “Think about it,” he could remember his father saying. “If you wanted to attack this place unseen, which way would you approach?”

      Fernan had looked around at the exposed grassland stretching in all directions. “Have to come through the trees to get close,” he’d said. It was an easy answer.

      “So we can be almost certain any attack will come that way, because otherwise, if our outriders aren’t asleep, we’ll be able to observe anyone’s approach, won’t we?”

      “Or if Diego sees something,” Fernan had added, “even if they come through the woods.”

      “That’s true,” his father had agreed briefly, though not happily.

      In those early days his father and mother were still struggling to come to terms with what Diego could see and do. Fernan didn’t have any such problems, but he knew Diego best of all, of course.

      Years later, on a morning of soft, unseasonable summer rain he was with two of their friends and the six ranch hands in the twin gullies on either side of the natural exit from the woods. The gullies weren’t natural, of course. Rodrigo’s soldiers had hollowed them out in the grassy plain to make a place where they could lie unseen and watch anyone coming out of the trees.

      Fernan had four other boys with bows posted halfway between the ranch buildings and the southern pastures where the mares and foals were that morning. There were two messengers with these four, to bring word if anyone appeared from the south. A last horseman was alone east of the ranch, just in case.

      Diego, riding up breathlessly a few moments before, reported that he’d relayed instructions to their mother, who would be up on the wall, then, with the other women. She knew what to do. They were as ready as they could be. Fernan turned up his collar against the rain and sat in the gully under the wide brim of his hat, waiting.

      There were two possibilities. If someone was approaching Rancho Belmonte with ill intent, they might be coming for the ranch compound and the people inside the walls or, more likely, they were here for the horses. Or both, Fernan corrected himself. But that would mean quite a lot of men, and in that case they might actually be in trouble. He didn’t think that was the case. He wasn’t much worried, in fact. He was thirteen years old.

      “I have them,” he heard his brother say softly. “They just entered the trees. I know who this is,” Diego said.

      “De Rada?” Fernan asked calmly. “The younger one?”

      Diego nodded. They had both read their father’s last letter.

      Fernan swore. “That means we can’t kill him.”

      “Don’t see why not,” said Diego matter-of-factly.

      “Bloodthirsty child,” Fernan grinned.

      An identical grin on an identical face showed through the softly falling rain. Fernan was fifteen minutes older. He liked reminding Diego of that. Diego was hard to tease, however. Very little seemed to bother him.

      “About twenty men,” he said. “They’re on the path in the woods now.”

      “Of course they are,” said Fernan. “That’s why the path is there.”

      He had lost his hat at some point, and during the period of walking north one of Garcia de Rada’s boots had split at the heel. He was, accordingly, wet at crown and sole, riding through the copse of trees west of the Belmonte ranch compound. There seemed to be a rough trail leading through the wood; the horses were able to manage.

      Despite his discomfort, he was fiercely happy, with a red, penetrating joy that made the long journey here seem as nothing now. His late, unlamented cousin Parazor had been a pig and a buffoon, and far too quick to voice his own thoughts on various matters. Thoughts that seemed all too frequently to differ from Garcia’s own. Nonetheless, during the trek north from Al-Rassan, Garcia had been sustained in his spirit by a sense of gratitude to his slain cousin. Parazor’s death at the hands of a lice-ridden Asharite peasant boy in a hamlet by Fezana was the event that would deliver Miranda Belmonte d’Alveda into Garcia’s hands. And not only his hands.

      Once Rodrigo Belmonte had recklessly ordered a de Rada of rank to be executed by a peasant child, against all codes of conduct among gentlemen in the three Jaddite kingdoms of Esperaña, he had exposed himself—and his family—to the response that blood demanded for such an insult.

      The king could and would do nothing, Garcia was certain, if the de Rada took their just measure of revenge for what Rodrigo had done. The just measure was easy enough to calculate: horses for their own horses taken, and one woman taken in a rather different way for the execution of a de Rada cousin after he had sued for ransom. It was entirely fair. There were precedents in the history of Esperaña for a great deal more, in fact.

      Garcia had resolved upon his course even while walking and stumbling north through darkness after the raid on Orvilla. Blood dripping from his torn cheek, he had kept himself going by visualizing the naked figure of Miranda Belmonte twisting beneath him, while her children were made to watch their mother’s defilement. Garcia was good at imagining such things.

      Twenty-four of his men survived Orvilla, with a dozen knives and assorted other small weapons. They took six mules late the next day from another hamlet, and a broken-backed nag from a small-farmer in an imprudently isolated homestead. Garcia claimed the horse, miserable as it was. He left the Asharite farmer and his wife and daughter for his companions. His own thoughts were a long way north and east already, over the border in Valledo, in the lands between the River Duric’s source and the foothills of the Jaloña mountains.

      There lay the wide rich grasslands where the horse herds of Esperaña had run wild for centuries until the first ranchers came and began to tame and breed and ride them. Among those ranchers the most famously arrogant, though far from the largest or wealthiest, were the Belmonte. Garcia knew exactly where he was going. And he also happened to know, from his brother, that the Captain’s troops were quartered at Esteren this summer, nowhere near the ranch.

      There ought to have been little danger for Belmonte in leaving his home unguarded. The Asharites had launched no raids north for twenty-five years, since the last brief flourishing of the Khalifate. The army of King Bermudo of Jaloña had been beaten back across the mountains by the Valledans three

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