Free Hallsfoot's Battle by Anne Brooke

your
people and your lands will live.”
    A silence. The mind-executioner can sense the
Lammas Overlord’s longing for his people’s protection and his
land’s renewal. It is so strong, he could almost stretch out his
hand and touch it. Tregannon is concerned for his own safety and
position, too, naturally—what man or woman is not?—but, strangely,
not as much as he was before. What has changed? As Gelahn waits for
his companion to respond to his enticements, he performs a quick,
unnoticed search through the Lammasser’s mind. Even though
Tregannon is a Sensitive, the mind-executioner is skilled enough to
do this without discovery. He needs no mind-cane for that. A
Gathandrian child could do it.
    Tregannon’s eyes are clouded. And there is a
hint of…something green about him. What is it? Gelahn spins his
thoughts through the man’s mind again but finds nothing. He is only
imagining it. Tregannon has nothing the mind-executioner cannot
conquer, or use for his own purposes. Even now, his companion is
speaking and Gelahn withdraws from his thoughts. Speech can
sometimes reveal secrets of its own.
    “My lands,” the Overlord whispers, as if
speaking only to himself, as if he no longer realises who is with
him, “will not be the same again. It will take the power and mercy
of whoever comes after me to make us what we once were.”
    In only three strides, Gelahn is face to face
with Tregannon. He reaches out and grabs the Overlord’s tunic,
still stained and crumpled from his recent ride, and shakes him.
Tregannon holds his ground, doesn’t cry out, in spite of the
burning sensation Gelahn knows is sweeping through his shoulder and
up over his face from the mind-executioner’s touch. For a moment,
Gelahn even allows himself to be impressed by that; he will need
such small courage in the days ahead before Tregannon’s inevitable
and long drawn-out suffering.
    “No,” he says, searing the word like a deadly
fire through the other man’s thoughts. “There is no room in our
mission for such thinking, because, together, the two of us have
fortitude and lust enough to destroy forever any opposition that
dares to fight us. Believe me, Tregannon, against such things, the
mind-cane has no law and no strength. The army we create between us
will be such a conquering force as Gathandria has never seen. Our
future—your future—will be glorious. Nothing can stop it.”
     
    Annyeke
     
    It was time. She hadn’t prepared for this,
but she’d known all along it was inevitable. The heat of a
Gathandrian mid-day cycle, even in winter’s approach, shone down on
the middle of the Square of Meeting. Around her, she could see the
destroyed glass towers of the Council buildings, the sun sparking
off the jagged fragments, lightening the stone to a near silver.
Lining the wide shattered streets were the withered husks of the
once glowing orange and lemon trees. How she longed for the scent
of them now and to hear their soft song. Three hour-cycles since
the snow-raven had arrived and she was here at last. Had the bird
sparked off something in her? She didn’t know and now wasn’t the
time to ponder it.
    She had decided to gather the people of
Gathandria together and to talk to them. She’d had enough of
distant voices making plans and subjecting her to them. The elders
had done too much of that. She wouldn’t follow in their footsteps.
Not if she could help it, anyway. She’d explained her ideas to
Simon and Johan. Now it was time to explain them to the rest of her
fellow-citizens. A bead of sweat trickled down her face. It had
been a long three hours. Just long enough to send out a string of
mind-messages across the city to ask people to come. Some, of
course, wouldn’t. Trust in the elders had been destroyed during the
recent Wars and Annyeke fully understood the doubts she’d sensed
about her own leadership, such as it was. Those absentees were, of
course, the people she most needed to speak to.
    No matter. From a brief