Chapter XIV, Reading 6

Her thoughts were interrupted by one of the Rangers who handed her a cup of wine.  "Drink this, it will make you feel better," he whispered.

She looked at him and smiled.  "Thanks Ilgen," she whispered back.

He winked at her and walked away.  Ilgen was reassuring her.  Flindra remembered Leitho's words about how they were all in this together.  She just hoped she could stay with the Rangers and that Kalmyk wouldn't send her away.

To avoid working herself up to a state of panic, Flindra started to look at the chart.  She wasn't looking at anything in particular, just the overall appearance.  The colors were pretty, especially the blue of the sea.  She hadn't realized that they were this close to it.  By looking at the chart, she understood why the swamp was here - the river flowing from Ladh had slowed down enough that it didn't make it to the sea.  It was just slowly strangled in the swamp.

It made her sad to think of the river dying in the strangle hold of the swamp.  She hated to see anything trapped.  Maybe, the map was wrong.  Maybe, the river could fight back and there were channels through the swamp, channels that made it to the sea.  It gave her an element of pleasure to think about the river making it to the sea in spite of the choking vegetation and mud of the swamp.

"I wonder if you could sail a boat on them," she thought to herself.  "Boats like the ones I used to see on Lake Eghero."  Her idle speculation struck an uneasy chord in the back of her mind.  Instinct, or perhaps the Spirit, was cueing her to delve deeper into this thought.

"Boats, where could you go on boats?"  She looked at the nearness to the sea and felt another warning pulse of intuition.  "Not boats but ships," she thought to herself, "ships to sail the sea - to sail to Kazat."

As soon as she had voiced that thought in her mind, she realized she had stumbled onto the truth.  That was it.  The Duke's attack wouldn't come overland where his troops could be discovered long before he reached Deodar.  If he moved his troops by ship he could land his men close enough to Storos's stronghold to win a surprise attack.

Kalmyk was still puzzling over the map.  "Why would the Duke put troops here?" he muttered to himself.

"To hide their movements," answered Flindra.

Kalmyk looked up with a slightly irritated expression.  "They can't move them anywhere from here without the world knowing, so why bother?"