Lescari Revolution 03: Banners In The Wind by Juliet E. McKenna Page A

could deny those particular truths. They exchanged covert glances in the grudging silence.
    'You said you had urgent news,' the grave-faced woman said acidly.
    'Ill news, forgive me.' Failla braced herself. 'Not all the mercenaries our noble dukes hired have been driven off. You've heard what befell Wyril?' The women's shocked faces showed her they had. 'Those renegades are now marching this way.'
    'Who's to protect us with the Dalasorians gone?' cried the woman in pink.
    First she resented the rebels' army. Now she objected to it leaving.
    'You will protect yourselves.' Failla nodded towards the Guild Council chamber. 'When your husbands call on every household to send a man to serve in the militia, you can make sure every wife and mother understands her duty to see them answer. You can fetch water and carry messages, when the time comes to hold Ashgil's walls. Until the militiamen of Carluse, and of Triolle and Sharlac, drive off these curs snapping around your gates.'
    The hazel-eyed woman was merely the first to exclaim. 'Sharlac is marching on us too?'
    'They're marching to your aid,' Failla assured her, 'and the men of Triolle will fight alongside them. The common folk of those dukedoms want to live free from warfare just as fervently as you do. That cause unites you all, now that no dukes can stir up hatred and division. Tell your men to write to the guildmasters in Sharlac Town, and in Fawril and Maerdin. Send word to Triolle Town and Pannal. They all yearn for peace.'
    If she could convince these women of that, if such a notion prompted thoughtful conversation with a husband or son beside a glowing hearth late at night, Failla could hope she'd done more than just warn Ashgil of the immediate threat.
    'If all this is true, I don't know why we're sitting here clucking like hens.' The grave-faced woman stowed her sewing in her work bag. 'Come and tell my husband your tale.'
    Failla rose with her. 'Gladly, Mistress . . . ?'
    'Mistress Kinver. My husband's the master mason.'
    The grave-faced woman threw open the door and Failla meekly followed.
    Then, once she had told the guildsmen what threatened them, she had to find Dinant. The mercenary sergeant had commanded her escort travelling here. Failla was confident he'd agree to offer the Ashgil militia his advice. Hopefully, they'd be glad to have him.
    Just as long as Tathrin didn't make a liar of her, by failing to bring Triolle's militia to their rescue. As she smiled at the startled sergeant-at-arms, who stepped back hastily as Mistress Kinver rapped on the council chamber door, Failla stifled her fears. How many more battles could her honest-hearted lover still come through unscathed?
    Come the morning, though, if Kerith thought she would be taking to her heels, he was sorely mistaken. She would show him, and anyone else who doubted her, that she was as committed to the cause of freedom in Lescar as any man who could take up a sword. She would show them all she was far more than some discarded whore.

Chapter Five
     
    Tathrin
    The Ashgil Road, North of Tyrle,
    in the Dukedom of Carluse,
    13th of For-Winter
     
    The column trudged sombrely along the high road, pursued by the stink of burning. Tathrin could taste wood ash tainted with lime plaster and all the lost possessions that still smouldered amid the ruins of Tyrle's narrow houses.
    A more nauseating reek drifted from the pyres along the Carluse Road. The dead were still being found under broken walls, crushed by the rafters that now fuelled their funeral rites. Even with the cold weather, Tathrin hated to think of those corpses. It was thirty days and more since the town had been overrun.
    They had passed on the eastern side last night. As they had camped beneath Tyrle's shattered towers, townsfolk had flocked to their fires, begging for food, for news and, most desperately of all, for any scrap of hope that their wretched lot would improve.
    The Triollese had shared their bread and bacon, many going hungry