(Eritepin Varns)

In that first winter -- so the bards' tales had it -- Anduir had led small bands of eight to ten swordsmen-archers -- the same men often fought with both weapons, as needed -- all on horseback, who had roamed the snowbound countryside, making furious surprise attacks on small groups of Tuvelain soldiers.  In these raids, they were singularly successful: Anduir seems to have won every engagement.  Some said this was due to shrewd tactics, and when the details of attacks were known they sometimes did exhibit cunning.  At the least, Anduir seems to have been able to discern just what battles he could win and fight only those.  Also, the Tuvelains who were ordered to march about in small bands were generally not the Tuvelains' best troops; some were lightly armed slave convoys.  but what made the greatest impression was the way Anduir always led from the front, landed in the thickest part of the fighting, killed enemies, and came away unscathed or lightly wounded.  By mid-winter at least a hundred or so Tuvelain soldiers had been killed or captured in skirmishes with Anduir's bands of raiders which never numbered more than ten or twenty at a time.

Enemy survivors were treatedly leniently, even carelessly.  Sometimes they were taken prisoner, but when no Poynese-held fortress or friendly village was nearby, they were often merely disarmed and released.  This practice, so wasteful from the perspective of the military rationality of the emperor's commanders that they thought Anduir must be some sort of fool, had an extraordinary effect.  Among the Poynese peasants it raised Anduir's esteem immensely, not only because they admired mercy and chivalry, but also because of the confidence, even bravado, it showed, as if Anduir were saying: I need not fear to release them, since if they take up arms again, I can defeat them again.  And it made the tales of Anduir's exploits suitable to be told even to children.  But also, when those Anduir released spread the rumor about his merciful ways, Tuvelain soldiers, or at least the lower orders of soldiers, especially slave-soldiers, began to think it much better to surrender and live -- and meet the famous "bandit" Anduir -- than to fight and die.  This began to make at least some of Anduir's victories suspiciously easy.  After one incident in February when a supply convoy of forty slave-soldiers surrendered to Anduir's men without a fight, and walked into the main Tuvelain camp on schedule but stripped of their arms and their cargo, the emperor flew into a rage and ordered every third man executed.  But this had an unintended effect.  Slave convoys were no more likely to fight, but, having surrendered, they ceased to return to camp.  Instead, they deserted.  Some of them became beggars, some bandits, but some -- and this came as strange news to the emperor's ears -- were accepted into the wooden houses of Poynese peasants, and fed at peasants' tables.  And this came to happen more and more often, as Anduir and his comrades encouraged it.  "A man is not to blame because he was born a Tuvelain and compelled to fight us, but only if he sees that he is doing wrong and keeps doing it," they said.  "Deserters have done the right thing and should be welcomed as guests."

Anduir's comrades varied.  Constant fighting thinned their ranks, which had to be replenished by recruitment, and in every village where Anduir and his men arrived -- sometimes within a few hundred yards of where a Tuvelain garrison was encamped -- he would attract a crowd and then ask men to join him.  Sometimes he would entertain the audience with a musical performance, luring a crowd with a haunting or heroic melody, then making his appeal.  Anduir did not say, directly, why they should fight.  He was not an orator.  The music was eloquent.  It seemed infused with the soul of Poynese soil, it filled the heart with patriotism and beckoned to adventure.  And then he would simply describe his operations and say they needed an archer or a swordsman.  He always had weapons to spare, and he would speak frankly about the engagements in which they were captured or the fallen men who had carried them.  He took for granted that every Poynese felt just as he did, and no explanation was needed, yet it could be inferred from his phrases, and it was strange.  Above all, Poyn was a free, Tuvel was a slave country; and freedom, not only one's own but everyone's, was an imperative, more valuable than any comfort or safety.  Anduir and his men, riding whither they will, disdaining danger, seemed to embody freedom.  But soon it was not just death that parted the companions.  Anduir began to split his forces, sending part of his company to pursue one engagement while he pursued another.  Or a trusted man, who had begun to make his own name, would set out on his own, to recruit his own company, though still vaguely in Anduir's service.  "We are a hand with many fingers," Anduir said once, when someone asked him why former members of his company were recruiting and finding on their own.  And once he said: "We want swords of liberty to fight wherever we can."  Thus he coined the phrase, The Swords of Liberty, which became the name of his order.

In that first winter, the main danger to Anduir's operations was treachery.  Not until the next year were expeditions organized large enough to constitute much of a threat; the few who pursued him, Anduir evaded easily.  But Anduir's most desperate battles occurred when one of his own company betrayed him to the Tuvelains for money, enabling them to surround and attack him.  This happened three times that winter.  The last time Anduir was almost surprised in his sleep, and only a desperate fight saved him, and half the men were killed and all the horses captured as Anduir's company escaped by plunging into the thick of the forest, where the horses could not follow, then crossing a frozen swamp and smashing the ice with axes behind them.  It was shortly after this that Eritepin Varns joined the company, promising that he knew how to identify traitors.  By this time the bounty on Anduir's head was 10,000 imperial drachmas, a sum that scarcely any duke or lord in the realm of Poyn possessed in cash.  Varns rode with Anduir for a year, interviewing each recruit, and had a way of breaking men merely by looking into their eyes, or by asking penetrating questions.  Varns had been a blacksmith in the north country, born to the trade in a family that had long enjoyed the protection of a minor baron in those parts, but he had a fierce spirit of freedom and left his trade to wander.  It was said he had wandered northwards as far as the Witching Wastes, and it was there that he was alleged to have learned dark acts that gave him power over minds.  No one knew his age-- he looked a bit over forty, but tales that circulated about his youth made him as old as sixty.  Why he fought no one knew, for he seemed little moved by the spirit of Anduir's chivalrous escapade, though he loved "freedom" in his own, quite different, way.  He was not zealous to be in the front of any battle, but he was stalwart and immensely strong.  He would pursue fleeing enemies with his crossbow and they would never escape.

It was to Varns, too, that another innovation of Anduir's fighting order was credited: the birds.  There was in the far north a type of hawk called a vonocon, rarely seen in the Poynese realm but native to the northern mountains (and, some said, to the Witching Wastes).  In the northern forests men used vonocons for hunting, but Varns used them as battle weapons, charging into the faces of enemy warriors with a high-pitched scream, and carrying messages among the wandering bands of irregular fighters that had sprung from Anduir's order...