Valour

CHAPTER SEVENTY-ONE

VERADIS

Veradis looked out along the giants’ road. He was stood part way up a ridge.

‘There are a lot of them,’ Bos said beside him.

‘Yes.’

‘What’s the plan, then?’

Veradis was silent a while. His warband was camped below, spread along the giants’ road that they had marched upon. Two days it had taken them since they had parted from Nathair and marched through these looming mountains. Cywen’s face formed in his mind, turning back in her saddle as she rode away, staring at him with her dark eyes. He shook his head.

They were almost the rearguard, a position that he was becoming used to. Rhin’s warband stretched ahead, a sprawling mass filling the giants’ road and its embankments.

‘Geraint will push ahead at dawn on the morrow, then we’ll see what the warriors of Domhain are like.’

‘So we’ll be watching, from the back.’

‘Most likely. These warbands we march with — they don’t want us stealing their glory.’

‘Against a warband of that size I think there’s plenty of glory to go round,’ Bos said. ‘And this road is made for the shield wall. We should be in the van, not the rearguard.’

‘I know. But there’s nothing I can do about it. Geraint is battlechief here, not I. We’ll just have to wait and see how things go.’ He looked up at the hills either side of him. Bos followed his stare.

‘It’s a good spot for an ambush,’ Veradis observed.

‘Aye. We should put some men up in those hills.’

‘We don’t have them to spare. I’ll talk to Geraint about it. Bos, you make sure our camp is tight tonight; all are to stay on this road — no tents set close to these slopes — and double guards.’ He looked up at the hills, dense with pine and scrub, black boulders of granite looking like bones of the mountains poking through the hill’s green flesh here and there. There could be a thousand men up there and he would not see one.

In the distance, high above them, a sound rang out, eerie and ululating. A wolven howling. Throughout the camp heads turned, fear spreading like seeds on the wind. Veradis and Bos looked at each other.

‘I think I’ll go and see Geraint right now. You see to the camp.’