Brigman resumed his tirade: “I won’t let you squander our lives merely to assuage your pride. Stay if you must, but—”

“Quiet!” Roran bellowed. “Keep your muzzle shut, or I’ll shut it for you! Baldor, watch him. If he does anything you don’t like, let him feel the point of your sword.” Brigman swelled with anger, but he held his tongue as Baldor raised his sword and aimed it at Brigman’s breast.

Roran guessed that he had maybe five minutes to decide upon a course of action. Five minutes in which so much hung in the balance.

He tried to imagine how they could kill or maim enough of the horsemen to drive them away, but almost immediately he discounted the possibility. There was nowhere to herd the onrushing cavalry where his men might have the advantage. The land was too flat, too empty, for any such maneuvers.

We can’t win if we fight, so—What if we scare them? But how? Fire? Fire might prove as deadly to friend as to foe. Besides, the damp grass would only smolder. Smoke? No, that’s of no help.

He glanced over at Carn. “Can you conjure up an image of Saphira and have her roar and breathe fire, as if she were really here?”

The spellcaster’s thin cheeks drained of color. He shook his head, his expression panicky. “Maybe. I don’t know, I’ve never tried before. I’d be creating an image of her from memory. It might not even look like a living creature.” He nodded toward the line of galloping horsemen. “They’d know something was wrong.”

Roran dug his nails into his palm. Four minutes remained, if that.

“It might be worth a try,” he muttered. “We just need to distract them, confuse them.…” He glanced at the sky, hoping to see a curtain of rain sweeping toward the camp, but alas, a pair of attenuated clouds drifting high above was the only formation visible. Confusion, uncertainty, doubt … What is it people fear? The unknown, the things they don’t understand, that’s what.

In an instant, Roran thought of a half-dozen schemes to undermine the confidence of their foes, each more outlandish than the last, until he struck upon an idea that was so simple and so daring, it seemed perfect. Besides, unlike the others, it appealed to his ego, for it required the participation of only one other person: Carn.

“Order the men to hide in their tents!” he shouted, already beginning to move. “And tell them to keep quiet; I don’t want to hear so much as a peep from them unless we’re attacked!”

Going to the nearest tent, which was empty, Roran jammed his hammer back under his belt and grabbed a dirty woolen blanket from one of the piles of bedding on the ground. Then he ran to a cookfire and scooped up a wide, stumplike section of log the warriors had been using as a stool.

With the log under one arm and the blanket thrown over the opposite shoulder, Roran sprinted out of the camp toward a slight mound perhaps a hundred feet in front of the tents. “Someone get me a set of knucklebones and a horn of mead!” he called. “And fetch me the table my maps are on. Now, blast it, now!”

Behind him, he heard a tumult of footsteps and jangling equipment as the men rushed to conceal themselves inside their tents. An eerie silence fell over the camp a few seconds later, save for the noise created by the men collecting the items he had requested.

Roran did not waste time looking back. At the crest of the mound, he set the log upright on its thicker end and twisted it back and forth several times to ensure that it would not wobble beneath him. When he was satisfied it was stable, he sat on it and looked out over the sloping field toward the charging horsemen.

Three minutes or less remained until they would arrive. Through the wood beneath him, he could feel the drumming of the horses’ hooves—the sensation growing stronger every second.

“Where are the knucklebones and mead?!” he shouted without taking his eyes off the cavalry.

He smoothed his beard with a quick pass of his hand and tugged on the hem of his tunic. Fear made him wish that he were wearing his mail hauberk, but the colder, more cunning part of his mind reasoned that it would cause his enemies even greater apprehension to see him sitting there with no armor, as if he were totally at his ease. The same part of his mind also convinced him to leave his hammer tucked in his belt, so it would appear he felt safe in the presence of the soldiers.

“Sorry,” Carn said breathlessly as he ran up to Roran, along with a man who was carrying the small folding table from Roran’s tent. They placed the table before him and spread the blanket over it, whereupon Carn handed Roran a horn half-full of mead, as well as a leather cup containing the usual five knucklebones.

“Go on, get out of here,” he said. Carn turned to leave, but Roran caught him by the arm. “Can you make the air shimmer on either side of me, as it does above a fire on a cold winter’s day?”

Carn’s eyes narrowed. “Possibly, but what good—”

“Just do it if you can. Now go, hide yourself!”

As the lanky magician sprinted back toward the camp, Roran shook the knucklebones in the cup, then poured them out onto the table and began to play by himself, tossing the bones into the air—first one, then two, then three, and so forth—and catching them on the back of his hand. His father, Garrow, had often amused himself in a like manner while smoking his pipe and sitting in a rickety old chair on the porch of their house during the long summer evenings of Palancar Valley. Sometimes Roran had played with him, and when he did, he usually lost, but mostly Garrow had preferred to compete against himself.