“How far until the ambush site?” Lorna asked.
“A few more miles,” Leah and Davydd responded together.
“So soon?” Lorna and Tomaz responded.
“Yes,” said Davydd and Leah.
“Good,” said Lorna and Tomaz.
“Stop that,” said the Prince.
“What?” asked all four together.
The Prince threw his hands up in the air in exasperation, his nerves on edge. After a few moments of silence, he asked the question that had been burning in his mind since Vale.
“What exactly is Aemon’s Stand?”
The four exchanged glances, and the Prince saw Leah’s shoulders tighten.
“I’m on your side now, remember?” the Prince said. “It might help me to know the secret, since we’re supposed to meet there anyway if we survive this stupid,stupidambush plan.”
The plan, which had seemed good in concept when Elder Crane had rattled it off in Vale, now seemed terribly foolhardy. With only some fifteen hundred troops, they planned to divert and hold off Ramael and his whole army? The Prince had told them all how foolish the plan was, but none of them believed him.
“Stop saying the plan is stupid,“ Leah said. “The plan will work, all we are supposed to do is buy the others time, and we’ve already bought them at least a few more hours by leading the army away from Vale. If we’re lucky, the ambush will force the Prince of Oxen to slow down and it will take him days to track us to the Stand, and by then we’ll have gathered—”
“Ramael won’t be slowed by anambush!” the Prince exclaimed with a healthy note of disdain in his voice. All of them looked at him, surprised by the outburst.
“Ramael is the Prince of Oxen! He doesn’t care about the lives of his men, he doesn’t care about morale, he doesn’tcare! He’s a man completely concerned with domination, control, and single-minded annihilation. You need to understand this! No matter how effective this ambush is, it will stall him only as long as it takes him to force his army back into motion. He will not slow down. He will not pause. By now he’s past the illusions, so he can use his scouts to track us. We can buy the main army a day at most, unless we try to lead him back toward the mountains, and even in that case he is smart enough to figure out that we’re a decoy force. He’ll turn around and burn the countryside until you march out to face him. He’s past the Pass, he’s past the enchantments, he knows he’s in the right place, and with a huge army! From what it feels like, hemust have at least a hundred thousand, if not more, following him—that’s the entire southern Imperial army. You need to be ready for that!”
A brief silence followed this outburst.
“Well, that brightened up my day,” Tomaz rumbled.
“This plan is still out best chance,” Leah insisted. “And the Stand has never been conquered.”
“So it’s a fortress?” the Prince asked.
“Yes,” Davydd said at the same time Leah said “no.”
“It’s a fortress built around a city that contains all of the history of the Kindred,” Lorna said in compromise.
“History of the Kindred?”
“All of the original accounts of the Founders,” Tomaz said, “including Aemon himself. It has documents dating back to the early years of our nation, when we fought against the Empire in earnest. It has information about the first Spellblades and about the time when the enchantments were placed around the nation to make it impregnable to outsiders.”
“And the time when the Empress herself led an army to the Stand and was defeated,” Leah said. The others nodded in seeming reverence.
“You said that before,” the Prince broke in. “What do you mean? I have never heard of the Empress leading any attack here, and certainly never of her being defeated.”
“It is considered the greatest battle the Kindred have ever fought,” said Tomaz. “It was decades after Aemon fled the Empire and came here to establish a new nation, not one that imitated the old ways of the land across the sea. The Empress came, leading an army. The sky was blackened by her very presence, just like the sky is around Lucien. But the Kindred stood strong in the newly raised castle, and around Aemon, the newly crowned Prince of the Veil.”
A shock went through the Prince.
“Prince of the Veil?” he asked, forcing his voice to come out even.
“Yes,” Leah said. “When a crisis occurs, the Council of Elders are called to elect a single Prince of the Veil that will remain in power until the crisis is over. Aemon was the first.”
The Prince felt like he’d just been hit with a mace upside the head. It couldn’t be. The Prince of the Veil? But that was….
