Bastion

a position like the one Milles had been in. The bandits had been all but defenseless against the Guardsmen—highly trained, heavily armored, heavily armed. Most of them hadn’t so much as a shield; they’d just picked up whatever weapon was closest to hand, tried to fight their way out of the valley, and been met by arrows everywhere. The ones that survived that had been insanely desperate, or they would never have tried to fight their way past the Guard.
    Then there had been the fights with the ones trying to hide in the caves. That hadn’t lasted past the Guard tossing in balls of pitch and tar that were on fire and put out huge clouds of choking smoke. Again, there was no choice: choke to death on the smoke or face the Guard. And for whatever reason, few of them seemed to consider a third option—surrender.
    Maybe because they knew they’d probably be hung anyway if they did. According to the reports that Mags had seen, they’d been responsible for hundreds of deaths that the Guard knew of. Which meant there were probably two times more that they didn’t.
    “Give me a nice clean battlefield any day,” Milles was saying fervently. “I never want to do that again.”
    “There’s a lot to be said for that,” Jakyr agreed. “Although sometimes a battlefield is no cleaner. I’d rather have been in your shoes than face Karsite demons.”
    Since that was a conversation Mags really didn’t want to listen in on—having far too vivid memories of the Karsite demons still—he had Dallen drop back to the caravan again. Lita had slowed the vanners; the caravan was pitching a little on the uneven track.
    “Problems?” Mags asked.
    She shook her head. “As long as it gets no worse than this.”
    “It don’t, milady Bard,” offered one of the Guardsmen. “In fact, this’s the worst of it.”
    Sure enough the track smoothed out again, and it wasn’t more than a candlemark later that they found themselves threading an entrance between two sheer stone faces. It looked as if a giant had cleft the hill with an ax, making a passage between two halves of an exceedingly tall hill. A small mountain, he would have said.
    It was a good thing that he was used to the mines, because that passage would have been claustrophobic. As it was, a couple of the Guard looked very uneasy until they came out on the other side.
    And the other side was a pretty, if unremarkable, tiny pocket valley, ringed completely by hills with very steep—in fact, he would have said, sheer—cliffs on the valley side. It was as if that same giant had taken his fist and punched a cup into the hills.
    “Now . . . this is odd,” Jakyr said, looking around himself. “Very odd . . .”
    “How odd?” asked Milles.
    “Well . . . I’ve been to a lot of strange places, so I’ve seen a bit more than your average Herald,” Jakyr replied. “And if I had just come on this place . . . I’d say it was a Hawkbrother Vale. . . .”
    A Hawkbrother Vale?
    :You know, he’s right,: Dallen said. :It has the look of a Vale, a long abandoned one, but a Vale nevertheless.:
    “Huh.” Milles looked surprised. “I thought they were a myth.”
    “Not even close.” Jakyr dismounted. “I’ve met ’em. I’ve been to two Vales. The only thing missing here is the giant trees, but those won’t flourish once the Hawkbrothers leave, and they’d have fallen a long, long time ago. Or got cut down. Those big trees, they’re mighty tempting to a woodsman. You could build your entire Guardpost from the wood from one, and who knows? Maybe someone did. One way to know for sure. Go on, Jermayan. You’re better at this than me.”
    The Companion shook his head briskly, then closed his eyes and raised his nose as if he were sniffing the breeze. Then he trotted straight over to a little grassy depression, like a bowl about the size of a four-room cottage, and pawed at the center of it.
    “That tears it,” Jakyr said with some satisfaction. “He says that’s where the Heartstone was. It was a Hawkbrother Vale, but it’s been abandoned for a long, long time. Probably long before Valdemar took this piece into its borders.”
    “Couple hundred years, then?” Milles replied speculatively.
    Jermayan trotted back to his Chosen. “Oh, at least,” said Jakyr. “I’d reckon more than that. There’s no hint that there’s anything uncanny in all the Guard reports hereabouts. If you had the weirdling beasties you generally find around a Hawkbrother