Nyssara counted the Horde from a pine above the Splintertree road for two days and a night, and came down with a number nobody wanted.
She kept it on a cord, a knot for every hundred, because ink ran and memory flattered. Orcs first, in Warsong red and in colors she did not know. Tauren walking beside their own wagons. Trolls who moved through the ferns at the road's edge and looked up into the trees more often than she liked. A company of the dead under a black banner, and behind them a quarter mile of road where no bird sang. Goblins riding on canvas-covered shapes as long as ships' boats, on wheels as high as a rider. By the second dusk the cord was knotted as thick as a net, and she had begun another.
She counted the wagons with more care than the soldiers. An army will lie with its banners and tell the truth with its flour. There was flour on that road for a month.
She had been on Captain Moonspear's roll long enough to wear out three issue cloaks. She had learned three names and the villages where their mothers lived, and had gone to each door in daylight, and had been let in at two. The rangers called her Duskwhisper to her face and had stopped lowering their voices when she came to a fire. One of them, an owl-keeper of nineteen named Kelis who talked on watch, had twice asked to be taught to walk quietly, as though it were a knack.
Shaleth's camp lay in a fold of ground west of Astranaar: sixty rangers, nineteen sabers, a dozen owls. The fleet had sailed south three weeks before with the best of the army aboard, because the south was where the war was supposed to be.
"Eleven thousand," Nyssara said, and laid the cords on the map. "On one road. There are three roads. I did not see the other two."
Shaleth looked at the knots. Her left arm lay strapped across her breastplate in a steel brace, as it had for years. She had had a buckler riveted to it, so that it was at least good for standing behind. "Siege?"
"Under canvas. Twenty that I saw. More wheels than that in the ruts."
Kelis's owl went west within the hour. The answer came back before dawn in a hand Nyssara did not know. Shaleth read it twice and then read it aloud, which was her habit with things she disliked. The Horde was known to be moving south. What had been seen in Ashenvale was a raiding force, inflated by darkness and distance. The scout was to count again.
"I counted in daylight," Nyssara said. "From forty feet."
"I know you did." Shaleth folded the bark small. "They don't want it counted again. They want it counted smaller." She put the message in the fire. "How long before your eleven thousand reach the Darkshore road?"
"Unhindered? Three days."
"Then we hinder them," said Shaleth, "and see what three days can be made to stretch to."
It stretched to five.
Nyssara kept the account as she had once kept a harbor's: hours in one column, rangers in the other. It was the only way she knew to tell whether a thing had been worth doing, and it left no room on the page for anything else.
The wisps at Raynewood. The druids woke them in the old groves by the hundred and loosed them through the trees at dusk, and for one night the forest was full of small cold lights that led wolf-riders into bogs and whole companies in circles around their own cook-fires. By noon the Horde's shamans had learned to tell a wisp from a lantern. Six hours. No rangers.
The defile below the old watch-post. Shaleth put forty bows on the two rims and let the vanguard walk in. It was a fair ambush, properly laid. Nyssara lay on the north rim and thought about ferns on the Raynewood road, and which side of this she had last seen it from. The orcs died in the bottom of the cut. Then the ones behind them climbed both rims at once, faster than anything in plate had a right to climb. An hour and a half. Fourteen rangers.
The river bridge was hers. She went under it at dusk with two skins of lamp oil and found a troll there before her, a scout, sitting on a crossbeam with his feet over the water, eating an apple. He was watching something downstream. A heron, perhaps. She came along the beam behind him and did it as she had been taught, a hand over the mouth and the point up under the skull, and held him until he stopped. The apple dropped into the river and went away under the arch, bobbing, with one bite out of it.
She had learned that stroke on a straw man, from a woman who held that a blade was an answer. Nobody under the bridge had asked anything.
She oiled the timbers and fired them. The bridge burned very well. The tauren on the far bank put their axes to the nearest pines and had the river spanned again before the embers were cold. One hour. One troll, who belonged in neither column, and whom she counted.
By the fifth night the right-hand column stood at twenty-three and the left at something under two days. The forest behind them was alight along its whole width, a red seam under the smoke that Nyssara took at first for sunset, until she remembered which way she was facing.
Shaleth walked the line of sleepers with a waterskin, counting heads without appearing to. She stopped where Nyssara sat with a whetstone idle in her hand.
"Say it."
"Two days, bought with twenty-three. They would have reached the coast regardless."
"Yes."
"Then what did we buy?"
"Two days," said Shaleth. "Every village on that shore has grandmothers. Somebody has to go in and tell them, and they have to find their shoes. Two days is a great many shoes." She capped the skin. "You want it to come out even. It doesn't. You do it anyway, and you keep the names."
They fell back up the coast road in the grey before dawn, thirty-seven of them, with Nyssara last, where she belonged.
Where the road came down out of the trees it ran through a cutting with a ditch on the seaward side. Kelis lay in the ditch. Shaleth had sent her ahead at midnight, with her bird, to see whether the road was clear, and here was the answer: an arrow under the collarbone, black-fletched, and the owl sitting on her chest with its feathers puffed, turning its head all the way around to look at Nyssara and all the way back.
So the outriders had got around them in the night. That was the fact, and it wanted carrying to Shaleth at a run.
Nyssara got down into the ditch instead. It was only to close the girl's eyes and slip the jesses off the owl so that it could go. Six breaths. She was tired past the place where tiredness is a feeling, and Kelis had talked too much, and had been nineteen.
At the well, Maethril had said. You stopped to feel sorry. That is where they would have had you.
The boot came down on her right wrist before she heard the step. She rolled, got the left-hand dagger out and up, and then she was on her back in ditch water with an orc standing over her and an axe at the top of its swing.
He was big even for an orc, and not young. There was grey in his braids and a scar that dragged at one corner of his mouth, and his Warsong red had faded nearly to rust. His left ear had a notch cut from the rim: a neat V the width of a blade, long healed and gone white.
The axe did not come down.
She knew a pause. She had been taught what one was worth by an expert. Her left hand had laid the dagger's point against the inside of his thigh, high, where the great vessel runs close under the skin. He was looking at the other dagger, the one under his boot: the leaf-shaped blade, the grey cord on the grip.
"That knife," he said. His Common was slow and exact, the kind learned from prisoners, or as one. "Ashenvale. I was a boy. You had that knife here." He touched two fingers to his throat. "You took the ear. All my life I ask why an elf takes an ear and leaves the neck."
"So you would remember," Nyssara said.
"I remember." He breathed out through his tusks. "I told my father a branch did it. He laughed for a year. He knew a knife cut."
Her point was still on the vessel. One push and a turn and he would be dead inside a minute. The axe would fall anyway, and the two of them would lie in the ditch with Kelis until somebody's wagon rolled over all three.
"Yes, I feel it," the orc said. "Put it away. Once. For the ear. After this I owe you nothing and you owe me nothing. If I see you on a field I will kill you, and you will try to kill me, and that will be fair."
He took his boot off her wrist.
She drew the point back an inch. Then all the way. He let the axe down onto his shoulder, and for a moment neither of them could think what came next.
"Dragha," he said. "If you want a name for it."
"Nyssara."
He nodded, as at a fair trade. Then he looked north along the shore and his face changed. "Listen. Do not go to the town to fight. Get on the water. They bring the throwers to the beach. All of them. Forty, I counted, and nobody wheels forty throwers to a beach to kill fishermen." Through the gap in the trees the crown of Teldrassil stood up out of the sea haze, enormous, with the first sun on its upper boughs. He looked at it for some time. "I came for a war," Dragha said. "I do not know what this is. Run, elf."
She ran. The owl lifted out of the ditch behind her and passed over her head without a sound.
The shore road north of the cutting was full of people.
They came out of every track and fishing hamlet on that coast in the order of who could walk fastest: boys, then women with bundles, then the old, then handcarts, then goats. All of them were going north to Lor'danel and the boats.
Shaleth had already chosen her ground. The cliff the sea had made, the year Auberdine drowned, came down there to within a cart's width of the surf. Thirty-six rangers were dragging a fishing boat across the gap and filling it with stones.
Nyssara told it in order. Outriders around them in the night. Kelis dead. Forty engines to the beach, by an orc's count. She did not say whose.
"Forty." Shaleth looked across the water at the tree. Nyssara watched her arrive at it, and watched her set it down again because there was a wall to build. "Then somebody has to say forty in Darnassus, in front of people who would like it to be four. Go to the boats."
"I can stand here."
"You cannot. You have never stood in a line in your life. You would last a minute, and I would have spent the best eyes on this coast on a minute." She pulled the buckler strap tight on the dead arm with her teeth. "Tell them to empty the tree. All of it, tonight, by any door there is. Do not let them count it smaller."
"Shaleth."
The captain looked at her. It was the look she had once sent up into the rafters of a guarded room in Darnassus: unhurried, taking in exactly what was there. Then, as she had that day, she looked away, down the road toward the cutting, where the first wolf-riders were coming out of the trees.
That was the order. Nyssara went.
A woman ahead of her was carrying two children and losing her grip on both. Nyssara took the heavier one and ran beside the handcarts with it for two miles. Behind her the noise began, and it went on for longer than thirty-six had any right to make it last. She kept that count as well. It came to a little over an hour.
Nobody who stood on that road came to the boats. Nyssara asked afterward, in every place there was to ask. Captain Shaleth Moonspear was not seen again.
Lor'danel's jetty was a shoving mass of people and every hull that would float. The bell they had dredged from Auberdine harbor hung in a driftwood frame at the jetty head. A boy was ringing it without stopping. Nobody could have said what for, except that it was what the bell was for.
"Clerk!"
Lirelle Tidegrass stood in the stern of a net-boat with a patched brown sail, with fourteen people aboard and room, prudently, for eight. The stoop beginning in her shoulders was her father's. The rest she had from the one night he was not afraid. Nyssara handed the child down to its mother and followed along the jetty's edge, on the stringer, where the nails were.
The wind was fair. Even so the crossing ate the afternoon, and the tree grew until it filled the west. Lirelle sailed as if settling a grudge. "This is my second," she said. "There's time for a third."
"There are siege engines coming onto the beach."
"Then I won't land on the beach."
"Lirelle. Tie up at Rut'theran. Go up into the city and find a door."
The woman who had once crossed a falling pier looked at her along the tiller. "There are four hundred still on that jetty," she said. "Who's telling them where to put their feet?"
Nyssara had no answer that was true.
At Rut'theran the dock was crowded with people who had arrived and could not think what to do next. The last of the fourteen was not yet over the gunwale when Lirelle put the tiller across.
From the dock the Darkshore beach was a pale line under the black of the forest. There were lights on it now that were not campfires. They stood in a row, evenly spaced, and they were being moved slowly into place. Nyssara counted them, since somebody had to. Dragha's forty came to forty-three.
Between her and the lights a brown sail was going back the other way, already small.
She turned and went up the dock toward the gate. Above her Teldrassil rose into the evening, bough over bough, and all along it the lamps were coming on, as they did at every dusk.