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Play cat-and-mouse? Get rid of—of—bad elements? If you think that’s cruel, you should go to Phaxia!”
    He glanced round then. His eyes were still and sad and gave an odd impression of grief not only suffered but relived.
    â€œYou needn’t defend her, Captain.” He sounded almost tired. “I understand. I probably understand far better than you.”

Chapter II

    He did not mention it again. Only he looked away from the next Assharran fendel whose pure gold and beautifully minted moontree had formerly delighted him, and some of his pleasure in the land itself was marred. Between what he did and what he made me do and his effect on the men, it is small wonder I grew distracted, and was careless with the weather, as no commander ought to be.
    It was the second day in Thangar that I bypassed an over-early halt, then compounded the error by misreading a Thangrian storm. We were in the high cold broken country that lifts sharply to the range crest, and we had watched the storm march from left to right across our front, veiling the black crags and thick emerald rucks of forest about Vallin Taskar, the Horned Gate. Having picked those irregular swaybacked jambs from the skyline I judged we would evade the storm, but I reckoned without the lie of the land. West of Vallin Taskar the waters run back to Kerym Scaur’s fathomless blue pit, and they run with the pace of a bolting horse. The storm was still on our flank when we found a ravine that held a tangle of rent timber, undermined piers, and a brown torrent coming down like a Phaxian cavalry charge, more than wither deep. Worse still, a glance told me the storm had veered. It was going to clinch its attack with a frontal assault.
    Too risky to advance, pointless to retreat. The men were muttering. “Kestis’d never’ve done it. . . . Should’ve known. . . . What’d you expect?” I bit my lip. The worst of a parade unit is that you have no chance to blood yourself in with them, and precedent dies very, very hard.
    The storm trumpeted in the crags. The one fault worse than negligence is vanity, and I was guilty of that too. At the last change, perhaps in some unadmitted rivalry with the gray mare’s rider, I had let them saddle us with four or five green colts. My own flattened his ears and spun tail to the wind, another began to plunge. The light became the gloom of a storm’s skirmish line, the narrow gorge resounded to its advance, the beetling cliff vanished in a boil of white. Furiously I yelled at the guards, “Shut up and hang on to your horse!”
    Our sole mercy was that no one drowned. It was a ferocious storm, bad lightning that struck with shattering, numbing cracks, earsplitting thunder, water coming off the ravine-side knee deep, vision lost in a white murk lit by fitful whiter flashes that showed me horses standing on their heads in rain fit to wash away your skin. When it passed I was wet under my very helmet crown. To make it worse, we were nearly in the dark. The stream was impassable. A bitter wind had got up. We were stuck on the mountain, tentless, rationless, shivering drowned rats.
    The sole choice was to make the best of it. “You and you,” I said, still too angry to give them names, “go and scout. Cover. Dry wood.” It was asking the impossible, and I did not care. “The rest of you get the horses back in the lee of the hill.”
    By then we were all shivering, horse and man, the gray mare and her rider by far the worst. Probably, I thought, they never had storms in Hethria. In the uproar I had had no time for more than a glimpse of the mare braced head down and quarters humped into the rain with a crouched shape on her back, and halfway through, an odd sense that the colt was easier to handle, which I somehow connected with him. But it was time to pay attention now.
    I got off my played-out beast and sloshed over, trying not to sound as mortified as I felt.