Free The Gathandrian Trilogy 02 - Hallsfoots Battle by Anne Brooke

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 glance across the Square, with its background of poplars framing the park, she estimated that