The Dark Queen Read Online Free PDF Page A

high rustling grass, watching as the
     Istarian commander signaled to raise his battle standardsthe white tower on the red banner
     in the weak morning light. The elf slowed his heartbeat, his breath shallowing until he
     stood motionless, his skin collecting sand and ash from the passing wind, crusting and
     knotting. Serenely, he sank into a stony quietude, indistinguishable from a thousand
     stones that littered the rubble- strewn edge of the desert.
    When the Istarians had passed, he would slip from the stone disguise, appear in their
     midst with surprise and havoc. The elf rises out of the ground ... His company of
     followers, the Que-Nara, hid in the high grass behind him, their faces painted brown,
     black, and yellow to match their flowing robes, the hard shadows, and the first slanting
     rays of the sun.
    He was the rock amid the reeds. He was the stony heart of the army. The left flank of the
     Istarian infantry passed not fifty feet from where Stormlight and his party lay hidden.
     The horsemen spread out before the advancing army, a dark-haired Solamnic Knight in the
     vanguard with three of his subordinates. It was just as Fordus had predicted. The desert
     storm had gathered; a huge cloud of sand and hot blasting wind scoured the edge of the
     battlefield, seeming to await his command. The Kingpriest's army consisted of two thousand
     infantry, five hundred archers, and five hundred cavalry, among those a division of
     Solamnic Knightsthe most formidable cavalry in the world. And yet the expected army looked
     curiously dwarfed, diminished, as though half its number had deserted in the night.
     Stormlight stood serenely in the howling storm as the horsemen passed and the legion
     followed, heads lowered against the harsh, corrosive wind. The sterim had allied itself
     with the rebels. Whenever an army arrayed itself against Fordus, it seemed that even the
     weather plotted to shape the fortunes of the day. Fordus stood on a rise, in waving
     knee-high yellow grass, and faced the advancing Istarians. Bran- dishing a vicious-looking
     short axe, he shouted to his troops, challenged the approaching Solamnic cavalry... Then
     he ducked and vanished. The Solamnic outriders gaped and scanned the ranks, but Fordus was
     gone, true to his ghostly leg- end. Almost at once, a volley of arrows and stones rushed
     to meet them. Raising their shields against the onslaught, they forgot all about the rebel
     commander. Meanwhile, Fordus slipped and dove through the high wind-driven grass. He moved
     swiftly, in a crouch, racing through the no-man's-land between the armies into the midst
     of the Solamnic horse. He weaved almost soundlessly amid churning legs and huge equine
     bodies, bound at unnatural speed for the western wing of his armyLarken's wing, waiting in
     hiding along the right Istarian flank, with the bard's hawk spiraling above like a
     solitary predator. Running with uncanny, sure instinct, he sidestepped the first Istarian
     legionnaires, the blare of their trumpets canceling his soft footfalls on the dry ground.
     It was the moment of battle he loved, the first confusion in the enemy ranks, when he
     reveled in his fleetness of foot, his gift from the gods, his greatest deception, racing
     from one place on the field to another far-flung outpost with the speed of an antelope or
     the leopard that pursued it. He ran so swiftly that survivors would claim that Fordus
     Firesoul was in two, three places at once. That he was not even human, but a phenomenona
     prince of the air and the shifting weather. Crouching even lower, nearly tunneling through
     the rustling waves of grass, Fordus raced by the last of the cavalry so closely that his
     shoulder brushed against the white flank of a Solamnic mare. Into the far field he rushed,
     and suddenly two shadowy forms emerged from the nodding undergrowth. Istarian infantry.
     Swordsmen. In one immaculate movement, Fordus