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that Kyrtian had rescued her from the rebels, and it probably would not be the
last.
"Entirely possible, my lady," the sour-face Councilor said, with a
slight bow. "And now what do you plan, young com-mander?" he continued,
turning to Kyrtian.
Kyrtian sighed. "Now, my lord, comes the most tedious, most
time-consuming, and least-rewarding part of this cam-
paign," he replied. "We hunt down the fugitives one at a timeand
bring them back to the Council for judgment. I'd calculatedthat something like
this would occur, and planned for it from the beginning; this is a task for
smaller parties of men, and if you will permit me, my lords, I would prefer to
use my ownmen if possible. I can count on them not to damage the fugitives
when they are caught. As for the rest of the force well, if it were my
decision to make, I would disband it. An army is es-sentially a great beast
that is all mouth and stomach out ofwhich no useful work can be gotten when it
is not engaged in acampaign."
"We will take that under consideration," Lord Kyndreth replied, with
a glance at his fellow Council members. "It doesmake sense, however."
He's thinking about the Wizards.Kyrtian took a sip of wine and tried
to look unconcerned.
"Oh, come now, Kyndreth, the boy's right," said the sourone,
appropriating a tidbit from one of the trays and examiningit as if he expected
to find a bug on it before putting it cau- tiously in his mouth. "There's no
point in keeping these men sitting about doing nothing more useful than
military maneu-vers when we could have them all back on our estates doingsome
meaningful work, even if it's only in the breeding pens."
He's not. And he might not be in favor of another Wizard Warif the
subject were broached at the moment.
"And Levelis," pointed out a Council member in midnightblue and deep
green, who was making steady inroads on thewine without showing the least sign
of intoxication, "would im- mediately advise to keep these men out here under
his com-mand."
"And you know how I feel about" Levelis," Kyndrethacknowledged with
a faint smile. "Another salient point, but one that is better discussed in
Council, don't you think?"
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"Hmmm," said the fellow in blue, but didn't add anythingmore.
How is he drinking so much and staying sober?
Kyndreth immediately changed the subject back to the cur-rent
victory, but Kyrtian couldn't help but notice that there was
an aspect of it that he didnot touch on the rebels' ability to
counteract his own levin-bolts. It was the fourth member of Kyndreth's party
who brought it up.
"I had no notion that you had so much magic of your own andhow were
those brats managing to dodge your levin-bolts, Kyrtian?" he asked,
incredulously. "I thought they hadn't but driblets of magic of their own!"
He shrugged. "I never saw anything like it," he admitted."Even if
they had been using shields as I know them, the levin-bolts wouldn't have
acted in that way when contacting a shield. I'm baffled."
"Huh. I wonder if they found anything in my library.. .." Moth mused,
as if thinking aloud but her sly glance at Kyrt-ian alerted him that she was
about to present him with an op-portunity for something.
But what?
"Your library, my lady?" Kyrtian asked, obeying her prompt- ing.
"What do you mean?"
"Oh, when I got into the Great House on the estate, the li-brary was
in a right mess," she replied promptly, "books downoff the shelves, piled up
on the tables, left lying open some-thing on the order of the huggle-muggle
your father used to cre-ate in there when he was doing his research, Kyrtian,
but on alarger scale. My household is cleaning up the chaos now, but totell
you the truth, it's as if they were following his lead and looking for
something."
"Perhaps they found it " Kyndreth said slowly, speculation creeping
into his gaze as he looked from Moth to Kyrtian and back again.
"Perhaps having discovered that the son's little eccentric hobby was so deadly
to their cause, they thought to counter it by following the father's example."
Kyrtian did his best not to stare at Moth with his mouth openin
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