Red Read Free Page A

battle!”
    â€œYou’ll be back in time for plenty of battle. I depend on you, William. Both missions are critical. You have the fastest horse and you’re best suited to travel alone.”
    Although William needed no praise, it shut him up in front of the others.
    Thomas faced Suzan, his most trusted scout, a young woman of twenty who could hold her own against ten untrained men. Her skin was dark, as was the skin of nearly half of the Forest People. Their varying shades of skin tone also distinguished them from the Horde, who were all white from the disease.
    â€œTake two of our best scouts and run the southern cliffs. We will join you with the main force in two hours. I want positions and pace when I arrive. I want to know who leads that army if you have to go down and rip his hood off yourself. In particular I want to know if it’s the druid Martyn. I want to know when they last fed and when they expect to feed again. Everything, Suzan. I depend on you.”
    â€œYes sir.” She whipped her horse around. “Hiyaaa!” The stallion bolted down the hill with William in fast pursuit.
    Thomas stared out at the Horde. “Well, my friends, we’ve always known this was coming. You signed on to fight. It looks like Elyon has brought us our fight.”
    Someone humphed. All here would die for the forests. Not all would die for Elyon.
    â€œHow many men in this theater?” Thomas asked Mikil.
    â€œWith the escorts out to bring the other tribes in for the Gathering, only ten thousand, but five thousand of those are at the forest perimeter,” Mikil said. “We have fewer than five thousand to join a battle at the southern cliffs.”
    â€œAnd how many to intercept these smaller bands of Horde that intend to distract us?”
    Mikil shrugged. “Three thousand. A thousand at each pass.”
    â€œWe’ll send a thousand, three hundred for each pass. The rest go with us to the cliffs.”
    For a moment all sat quietly. What strategy could possibly overturn such impossible odds? What words of wisdom could even Elyon himself offer in a moment of such gravity?
    â€œWe have six hours before the sun sets,” Thomas said, pulling his horse around. “Let’s ride.”
    â€œI’m not sure we will see the sun set,” one of them said.
    No voice argued.

2
    CARLOS MISSIRIAN stared at Thomas Hunter.
    The man lay on his back, sleeping in a tangle of sheets, naked except for boxer shorts. Sweat soaked the sheets. Sweat and blood. Blood? So much blood, smeared over the sheets, some dried and some still wet.
    The man had bled in his sleep? Was bleeding in his sleep. Dead?
    Carlos stepped closer. No. Hunter’s chest rose and fell steadily. There were scars on his chest and abdomen that Carlos couldn’t remember, but no evidence of the slugs Carlos was sure he’d put into this same man in the last week.
    He brought his gun to Hunter’s temple and tightened his finger on the trigger.

3
    A FLASH from the cliff. Two flashes.
    Thomas, crouched behind a wide rock, raised the crude scope to his eye and scanned the hooded Scabs along the floor of the canyon. He’d fashioned the spyglass from his memory of the histories, using a resin from the pine trees, and although it hardly functioned as he suspected it should, it did give him a slight advantage over the naked eye. Mikil kneeled beside him.
    The signal had come from the top of the cliffs, where he’d positioned two hundred archers each with five hundred arrows. They’d learned long ago that their odds were determined by the supply of munitions almost as much as by the number of men.
    Their strategy was a simple, proven one. Thomas would lead a thousand warriors in a frontal assault that would choke the enemy along its front line. When the battlefield was sufficiently cluttered with dead Scabs, he would beat a hasty retreat while the archers rained thousands of arrows down on the crowded