“So there it is.”

“So there it is. You see now the sense of what I am suggesting? As King you would be untouchable.”

He jumped to his feet, stalked across the room with his mind in a maelstrom. Himself a king—absurd, utterly absurd. He would be a laughing-stock. Torunna would be the joke of the world. It was impossible. He reeled away from even the contemplation of it.

And marriage to this woman. Oddly, that disturbed him more than the idea of the crown. He turned and looked at her, to find that she was standing before the fire staring into the flames as though waiting for something. The firelight made her seem younger, though she was old enough to be Corfe’s mother. That old.

“Would it be so terrible to be married to me?” she asked quietly, and the prescience of her question made Corfe start. She was a witch, after all. Could she read minds as well as everything else?

“Not so terrible,” he lied.

“It would be a marriage of convenience,” she said, her voice growing hard. “You would no longer have to come to my bed. I am beyond child-bearing age so there would be no question of an heir. I do not ask you for love, Corfe. That is a thing for the poets. We are talking about a route to power, nothing more.” And she turned her back on him and leaned her hands on the mantel as a man might.

Again, that pain in his heart when he looked at her, and imagined the golden hair turned raven, the green eyes grey. Ah, Heria. Lord God, I miss you.

He did not want to hurt this formidable yet vulnerable woman. He did not love her—doubted if he would ever love her or any other woman again. And yet he liked her, very much. More than that, he respected her.

He strode over to the fireplace, stood behind the Queen and placed his hands on hers so that they were standing one within the other. She leaned back into his body and their fingers intertwined, the ornate rings on hers digging into his flesh. Pain, yes. But he did not mind. Nothing good came without pain in this life. He knew that.

“I would have you as a wife,” he said, and in that moment he believed he meant it. “But the kingship is too lofty a prize for me. I am not the stuff of Royalty.”

Odelia turned and embraced him, and when she drew back she looked strangely jubilant, as though she had won something.

“Time will tell,” was all she said.

F IFTY leagues from where Corfe and his Queen stood the new winter camps of the Merduk army were almost complete. Tens of thousands of men were toiling here, as they had toiled ceaselessly in the days since the King’s Battle. Their redeployment—it was not a withdrawal, or a retreat—entailed a massive labour. They had felled a fair-sized forest to raise a series of stockades which stretched for miles. They had dug ditches and set up thickets of abatis out to the west, all covered by dug-in batteries of artillery. They had erected tall watchtowers, created roads of corduroyed logs and set up their tents within the new defences. A veritable city had sprung up on the plains west of Ormann Dyke, the new roads leading to it thronged with troops coming and going, supply-waggons, artillery limbers, fast-moving couriers and trudging gangs of Torunnan slaves serving as forced labour. Farther east, nestled within yet more lines of field fortifications, a vast supply depot had been set up, and boxes, sacks and barrels of food and ammunition were piled in lines half a mile long and twenty feet high. Crates of blankets and spare uniforms and tents were stacked to one side by the thousand. Waggons plied the bumpy log roads between the depot and the camps continuously, keeping the front-line troops fed and clothed. Perhaps ten square miles of the Torunnan countryside had been thus transformed into the largest and most populous armed camp in the world. Although Aurungzeb, Sultan of Ostrabar, was commander-in-chief of this mighty host, it now included large contingents from the sultanates of Nalbeni, Ibnir and Kashdan. The Merduk states had set aside their differences and were finally combining to settle the issue with the Ramusians once and for all. They aimed now at nothing less than the conquest of all Normannia as far as the Malvennors, and had decided to stop there only because of the dread name of Fimbria.

Aurungzeb himself and his household were not in the winter camps, but had relocated to Ormann Dyke in order to pass the cold weeks of waiting more comfortably. Ostrabar’s Sultan stood this day on the tower from which Martellus the Lion had once watched the Merduk assaults break upon the dyke’s impregnable defences, and silken Merduk banners now flew above the Long Walls that Kaile Ormann had reared up centuries before.

“Shahr Johor,” Aurungzeb boomed.

One of the gaggle of soldiers and courtiers who hovered nearby stepped forward. “My Sultan?”

“Do you know how many of our men died trying to take this fortress?”

“No Highness, but I can find out—”

“It was a question, not an order. Almost thirty thousand, Shahr Johor. And in the end we never took it, we only outflanked it, and forced its evacuation. It is the greatest fortress in the world, it is said. And you know what?”

Shahr Johor swallowed, seeing the flush creep into his sultan’s swarthy cheeks. “What, Highness?”

But the explosion did not happen. Instead, Aurungzeb spoke in a low, reasonable tone. “It is utterly useless to us.”

“Yes, Highness.”

“The Fimbrians, curse their names, constructed it that way. Approaching it from the east, it is unconquerable. But if by some chance you happen to capture it intact, then it is worthless. All the defences face east. From the west, it is indefensible. Very clever, those Fimbrian engineers must have been.”

The courtiers and soldiers waited, wondering if this strange calm were the herald of an unprecedented rage. But when Aurungzeb turned to face them he looked thoughtful.

“I want this fortress destroyed.”

Shahr Indun Johor blinked. “Highness?”

“Are you deaf? Level it. I want the dyke filled in, I want the walls cast down and the tower broken. I want Ormann Dyke wiped off the face of the earth. And then, using the same stones, you shall create another fortress, on the east bank of the river, facing west. If by some freakish chance the Ramusians ever manage to push back our armies, then we shall halt them here, on the Searil. And we shall bleed them white as they did us. And Aekir, my new capital, it shall be safe. Golden Aurungabar, greatest city of the world. See to it, Shahr Johor. Gather together our engineers. I want a set of plans drawn up for me to see by tonight. And a modell. Yes, a scale modell of how it will look, Ormann Dyke obliterated and this new fortress in its place. I must think of a name…”

Shahr Johor bowed, unnoticed, and left the summit of the tower to do his master’s bidding. The courtiers who remained looked at one another. Never before had they heard their master speak of anything save advances and victories, and now here he was planning for defeat. What had happened?”

A flabby, glabrous palace eunuch piped up, “My Sultan, do you truly believe that the accursed Unbelievers could ever push our glorious armies back to the Searil? Surely, they are in their death throes. We shall soon be feasting in the palace of Torunn.”

Aurungzeb stared moodily out at the ancient fortress below him. “I wish I had your optimism, Serrim. This general of the red horsemen. My spies tell me that he is now commander-in-chief of all the Torunnan forces. He and his damned scarlet cavalry have saved the Torunnans from destruction twice now.”

“Who is this man, lord? Do we know? Perhaps our agents—”

Aurungzeb snorted with mirth. “He is, by all accounts, a hard man to kill.”

Then his mood soured again. “Leave me, all of you. No—Ahara, you will remain.” He broke into halting Normannic. “Ramusian, you stay here also.” And in Merduk again: “The rest of you, get out of my sight.”