Valley of Silence by Nora Roberts

bided his time.”
    â€œEat something.” Hoyt dished food onto Moira’s plate himself. “So Lilith knew that Moira would go to the stone today.”
    â€œShe has her ear to the ground,” Cian confirmed. “Whether or not she’d planned to send someone to try to disrupt the ritual, and the result before Blair tangled with Lora is debatable. She was pissed,” he said. “Wild, according to our late, unlamented archer. As I’ve said before, her relationship with Lora is strange and complicated, but very deep, very sincere. She ordered an archer chosen for this while she was still half-crazed. Sent him on horseback for speed—and they have only a limited number of horses.”
    â€œAnd how is the little French pastry?” Blair wondered.
    â€œScarred and screaming when the man left, and being tended to by Lilith personally.”
    â€œMore important,” Hoyt broke in, “where is Lora, and where are the rest of them?”
    â€œOur informant, while handy with a bow, wasn’t particularly observant or astute. The best I could get puts Lilith’s main base a few miles from the battlefield. He described what seems to be a small settlement, overlooked by a good-sized farm with several cottages and a large stone manor house, where I’d say the gentry who owned the land lived. She’s in the manor house.”
    â€œBallycloon.” Larkin looked at Moira, saw her face was very pale, her eyes very dark. “It must be Ballycloon, and the O Neills’s land. The family we helped the day Blair and I were checking the traps, the day Lora ambushed her, they were coming from near Drombeg, and that’s just a bit west of Ballycloon. We would have gone farther east, to check the last trap, but…”
    â€œI was hurt,” Blair finished. “We went as far as we could. And lucky for us. If she’d already made her base when we dropped in, we’d have been seriously outnumbered.”
    â€œAnd seriously dead,” Cian added. “They moved in the night before your altercation with Lora.”
    â€œThere would have been people there still, or on the road.” It knotted Larkin’s stomach to think of it. “And the O Neills themselves. I don’t know if they’ve reached safety. How can we know how many…”
    â€œWe can’t,” Blair said flatly.
    â€œYou, you and Cian, you thought we should move everyone out, force them out if necessary, from all the villages and farms around the battleground. Burn the houses and cottages behind them so Lilith and her army would have no shelter. I thought it was cold and cruel of her. Heartless. And now…
    â€œIt can’t be changed. And I couldn’t, wouldn’t,” Moira corrected, “have ordered homes burned. Perhaps it would have been wiser, and stronger, to do just that. But those whose homes we destroyed would have lost the heart they need to fight. So it’s done this way.”
    She had no appetite for the food on her plate, but she picked up her tea to warm her hands. “Blair and Cian know strategy, as Hoyt and Glenna know magic. But you and I, Larkin, we know Geall and its people. We would have broken their hearts and their spirits.”
    â€œThey’ll burn what they don’t need or want,” Cian told her.
    â€œAye, but it won’t be our hands that light the torch. That will matter. So we believe we know where they are. Do we know how many?”
    â€œHe started out with multitudes, but he was lying. He didn’t know,” Cian said. “However much Lilith may use mortals, she wouldn’t count them in her inner circle, or trust any with salient information. They’re food, they’re servants, they’re entertainment.”
    â€œWe can look.” Glenna spoke for the first time. “Hoyt and I, now that we have a general area, can do a locator spell. We should be able to get harder data. Some