Warautumn by Tom Deitz Page B

exists. She’s like a shadow. You don’t think of her as real—not since her husbanddied—Avall and Merryn’s father. Before that, you should’ve seen her. Then again, you should’ve seen him. You know he and I were bond-brothers?”
    “I did not,” Lynee confessed. “It never occurred to me to wonder, much less ask. In any case, Evvion is … where?”
    “With what remains of Eemon’s elite in one of Stone’s summer holds down near the coast.”
    “I thought Evvion was Criff.”
    “There
is
no Criff anymore, not really. Certainly not since almost fifty of them were poisoned on Mask Night, including the top ten chiefs at one sitting. But long before that Criff—Clay—was part of Stone, and Stone had already effectively reabsorbed it through necessity after the plague. In any case, Evvion has Averryn and between them and these wretched usurpers lies what is supposed to be the most unassailable clanhold in the Kingdom, save those that belong to War. Oh, Priest can dig them out—or starve them out in time. But it will
take
time. Right now, they’re counting on chaos in Tir-Eron and the absence of the royal levies to cement them into power. That and Common Clan support, which, as you can see, is not universally in favor of the Face—and clanless, which is mostly concentrated here and south of here, where the war did the most damage.
    “The problem is,” Ilfon went on, “those people are used to appealing to Priest-Clan when times get hard, and Priest has suddenly found its resources at a low ebb when demand is at its highest.”
    “So you think they may fall?”
    Ilfon shrugged. “I have no idea. The Kingdom has at least four aspects right now. There’s the army, to start with, and whatever they’re up to at Gem. They might return soon and they might not, and if they do, I wouldn’t want to be Priest-Clan.
    “Then there are the northern two gorges, in which, so we are told, affairs are much as they were before the war, since they couldn’t get involved in it because of the weather. Theirbest soldiers are off with the King, of course. But their leadership is, we believe, mostly intact, so it’s quite possible that Avall might start a government-in-exile in, say, Mid-Gorge, then work south to retake Tir-Eron.”
    “Which leaves the south,” Lynee said.
    Ilfon nodded. “Which leaves the south. It has its own problems, because most of the war was fought there. A lot of the High Clansmen there were in Tir-Eron for the summer, coordinating rebuilding with their Chiefs, or else sourcing supplies. A lot of
them
bore the brunt of Mask Night, so there are whole clan-septs down south with no one in charge—which means that the crafty among Common Clan are moving into the positions they’ve vacated, which makes them Royalists by default because they won’t want to lose what they’ve so lately acquired. But there are a lot of homeless people down there as well, and Priest is having to send its more traditional, least political, and most altruistic folks there to try to placate more hungry people than we’ve ever had, while trying to shift the blame away from themselves. It’s a neat little dance—to watch, but not, I imagine, to be involved in.”
    “And Tir-Eron?” Lynee dared.
    “It all meets here,” Ilfon sighed. “And now I must depart. You have what you came for and more. Tell Tyrill I appreciate her efforts, but to be careful. But tell her also that Avall’s heir still lives.”
    “He’s Eddyn’s child,” Lynee corrected automatically.
    “Avall’s heir,” Ilfon repeated.
    And on that small note of tension, Lynee withdrew.
    Dawn found both Lynee and Tyrill in bed, and Ilfon a dozen shots downriver.

CHAPTER V:
W HAT D AWN B RINGS
(NORTHWESTERN ERON: MEGON VALE–HIGH SUMMER: DAY LXXV–BEFORE DAWN)

    “Lord Regent?”
    Vorinn was awake by the time the second word began and alert before it concluded. He prided himself on that trait, though it had been born into him, not ingrained