Chapter 156

RHYS

Nobody tells you what to do with three hundred bears who have stopped.

I had been a soldier for two hundred years. I knew armies coming and armies running and armies wanting terms. I had never seen one simply sit. They sat in the trampled snow of the Veyle Reach where the hand had let go of them, with their spears lying beside them like dropped spoons, and some wept, and one big lad near the ford stones sat looking at his own hands as if he had never been introduced to them.

By the second morning they were still there. The snow had come down in the night and laid itself over them, and they had not shaken it off.

“They’ll die of it,” said Corwin, beside me on the bank. “If nobody tells them to get up.”

“Then somebody had better.”

“You’re the Beta.”

“I was afraid you’d say that.”

***

I did the one thing I know to do with frightened young men. I fed them.

The green coats had left their camp at the Sallow ford stand