Sovran at War (Kingslayer Book 2) by Honor Raconteur

Author:Honor Raconteur [Raconteur, Honor]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Raconteur House LLC
Published: 2018-02-09T05:00:00+00:00

The skirmish gave them some injuries, but nothing debilitating. They lost eleven men to the fight, which Darius counted as a minor miracle, and the rest of the wounds were treatable. Darius chose to stay in the town for the night rather than move on. He had two reasons for this: one, it would give them the chance to augment their food supplies with whatever they could scavenge before they were forced to destroy the rest, which would take a few hours. Two, they needed time to paint the cats.

The men happily conceded to the idea of sleeping somewhere with a roof and a fireplace, so they had no trouble with the first order.

Now to convince them of the second.

Darius sat on top of a roof, so he had the visibility the men needed to see him, and to hopefully project his voice a little better. Odds were his words wouldn’t reach everyone, but the more it did, the less chance of a garbled version being passed on. A matter of playing the odds. With the prickly thatch poking holes through his pants, Darius kept his explanation short and to the point.

“In order to fight the barbarians, you have to play to their fears,” he boomed out as loud as he could manage without hacking a lung. “And they have a lot of them. One of their greatest fears is cats.”

A ripple of disbelief went through the soldiers standing around him.

“I know, it’s ridiculous, but that’s how I convinced them to go home when fighting in Niotan. I sent cats to them in a wagon and they readily retreated without even engaging the next day. We don’t have enough cats here to pull the same trick, but I hope that by painting cats on your shields, they’ll falter. They won’t like striking at anything that even has the symbol of a cat on it. Their distraction will give you an edge.”

“Sir!” one of the soldiers in the crowd called up. “Is this why General Behnam demanded that King Baros send for you? Because you know the barbarians’ superstitions?”

“Because I know of them and how to use it against them,” Darius corrected. “Yes, this is one of the main reasons.” That seemed to satisfy most of them and Darius decided to move on. He’d address concerns later, if they arose, but they were losing valuable daylight. “Those of you that can paint a convincing cat silhouette, focus on drawing an outline on shields for the ones more artistically challenged. If you can’t paint a convincing stick figure, then help gather up food and get ready to burn anything we can’t carry with us. Dismissed!”

Thankful to have orders issued, he hopped off the roof and found Sohrab and Roshan waiting for him, off to the side. The stallion had half an apple in his mouth and an expression of bliss on his face as Roshan scratched at just the right spot under his jaw. Darius was reasonably certain that the stallion would throw him over in order to be Roshan’s if the boy would allow it.

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