He did not forget the old lessons. There had been no place to use them. Earthworks and rapidly advanced entrenchments ill-suited a bandit war in the stony terrain of the foothills eastward. But defending a valley of villages and farms and a prosperous towns was another matter.

Tashfinen had dug in along the Lenfialim’s lower course in his war, combining mobility behind the fortifications with clever design, reshaping the land itself to make it more convenient for his enemy to do what he wanted his enemies to do. More, Tashfinen, relying, as Sihhé would, only seldom on war engines, and far more on mobility, had still set outlying defenses to make their use against him impossible. He had had no hesitation to attack in winter, at planting or harvest, or any other time inconvenient for the enemy—possible, since the Sihhé of those days had had a large standing army that did not go home on the annual schedule of farmers: it had been hellish famine in the lands where that war was fought, but Tashfinen had kept it out of his own territory, another lesson.

The warfare of the Marhanens had never been so elaborate or so deliberate: Grandfather had been one of Elfwyn’s generals, but, again, King Tashfinen had subdued the whole south when, consequent of a rift in the Sihhé royal house, a claimant to the throne had broken away and fortified himself, as he had thought, invincibly in what was now Imor Lenfialim. Grandfather in his day had faced no such advanced threat or tactical necessity: Grandfather in the wars he had undertaken for the Sihhé had faced nothing but what existed today, a matter of subduing isolated rebels and pacifying the perpetually troublesome Chomaggari border—skirmishes that required mobility over strength, and on which various lords of Men had gained fair reputations of generalship.

Entrenchments had not been the style, not for hundreds of years, not since Tashfinen’s dynasty had dwindled away in foolish grandsons, enabled by Tashfinen’s brilliance to be foolish and to base their court in luxurious, unwalled Althalen. The Art of War bad existed in one known copy, which his grandfather had taken and had copied for his own use along with various other Sihhé works—fortunately not burned by the Quinalt like so much else. It was one of his grandfather’s best acts, the saving of such Sihhé wisdom—granted Grandfather had burned the library at Althalen, not intending the fire, so he claimed.

And if a general taught by some other surviving copy of Tashfinen’s Art of Warwere ordering things on the Elwynim side, it was possible he could look not only for bridge-building across the river at several points, not one, and on the land border a series of incursions to establish fortifications at various points along the frontier, where the enemy would dig in behind steep wall-and-trench formations designed to funnel cavalry into brutal traps; that situation could last for several seasons, the enemy seeming to claim no more than a few hundred paces of territory.

But from those initial castellations, the enemy would extend wall-and-trench-works to the left and right until they formed a formidable earthwork, increasingly difficult to take, and a screen behind which the enemy might shift forces about and arrange surprise excursions into the countryside: then try to dislodge them, or prevent their taking one set of villages, and the next, and the next.

Considering the Sihhé wars, which had been fought on this very land, before, there was indeed a way to attack and hold a territory the size of a kingdom. Barrakkêth had done it first, through wars rarely involving siege; and the halfling Tashfinen, whether by his own genius or by relying on some other work now lost, had repeated Barrakkêth’s feat and written down his tactics.

But Barrakkêth, one of the five true Sihhé, had relied on magic, wizardry, whatever Sihhé truly used, as well as arms, and come down from the Hafsandyr, where Men were, if anything, a distant rumor and where, one supposed, wizards’ towers were common as haystacks—more common, granted there was, by other account, nothing but barren ice to live on, as far as the eye could see, and gods knew what sustained a people there besides magic.

What then, did one do, if one’s opponents could work magic? He had seen in the last two days the efficacy of wizardry at getting messages passed—while his own couriers could not. The whole question was a matter Tashfinen’s book had scanted, though supposedly there had been Sihhé and magic on both sides. And Tashfinen, mortally disappointing for the boy of nine who had expected magic as his reward for pressing on in a very demanding text, had not so much as mentioned it except in reference to Barrakkêth. He wondered why now. He wondered was it forbidden, or simply buried between the lines so matter of factly his eyes could not see it. Did the Sihhi5 put some sort of magical barriers about them? Did they curse their enemies? Was there simply some point of honor about war and wizardry?

There was Tristen. If they could find him, there was Tristen for advantage-if Tristen had any sense of what to do. He could lose abundant sleep on that score.

Worse, he was not in Tashfinen’s position, able to snap his fingers and move an army without destroying his own source of supply: he sat, instead, at the edge of harvest, with winter approaching, in a town vulnerable to siege, with no earthworks to defend it—although that was at least one thing he could change at Henas’amef, if he was willing to sacrifice the three-hundred-year-old orchards and pasture hedges.

But that fortification set him inside entrenchments that were a damned embarrassing trap to be in, a king of Ylesuin sitting still while the Elwynim hammered at him. They had gotten ahead of him with their bridges. He might try to take them down without their using them. But it was a long river, and action at one place might bring action at another-besides that he had limited numbers of men to take away from the fields to create such an elaborate defense.

They would more than lose their harvest for certain if Henas’amef fell.

And, with all disadvantages, the notion of making Henas’amef too tough a nut to crack did tie the Elwynim down to a siege in which they could be under attack from the other provinces, unless they wished to rush past an untaken town to attack Guelemara. That would be a mistake if they did it, exposing their supply lines to attack from Henas’amef.

Fortifying Henas’amef with earthworks would not please the peasantry, of course, nor the lords who derived income from those fertile, long-tilled fields, which in turn thrived on the sweepings of the lordly stables.

But fortifying that outer wall might be an answer to the town’s other defensive faults.

He had the book with him. It was in his small chest of personal items.

He was reading it again, had it under lock and key so as not to have it disappear to the Amefin, and hoped the Elwynim earls did not have a better book. They might. The Quinalt burning of the libraries had not gotten to their side of the river, and gods knew what they had, as gods knew what was sitting in Mauryl’s tower, prey to the mice and Tristen’s fancied enemy.

He wished he could see how magic worked into Tashfinen’s account.

Emuin had professed not to know, except to say the Sihhé had used it-or wizardry, which distinction Emuin had drawn in Tashfinen’s case, and an angry nine-year-old had not paid strictest attention: gods, he’d deserved the stick, and not gotten it at the right times.

He also wished he could believe he had months to prepare. But the system of scouts and post riders he had instituted (lacking magic or a wizard reliably willing to inform him) had been supposed to shuttle back and forth with messages regularly from a watch on every bridgehead on the river, and settling King’s men in way stations or villages, whichever happened to be feasible.