“All right,” he said at last.
Narina put a hand on his shoulder. “Stay safe. And take care of that boy.”
“Always.”
#
The next day they finally reached the plains, with the mountains behind them, layering higher and higher until the topmost peaks disappeared into the haze. Soon, the lower range disappeared into smoke and ash, and finally the hills. It was only midmorning, but felt like twilight.
The culprit was Manet Tuzzia to their rear. An otherwise minor part of the range, it had taken on a sinister, overpowering air as it continued to throw up so much ash that it blotted the sun.
A fine dusting of ash coated the trees and hedgerows, turning the sod-covered crofter homes gray and dingy. It also left Narina and her companions covered in grime. She coughed and spit it out, and blew her nose in a handkerchief when the grime caked her nostrils. Finally, around noon, a light drizzle began to clear the air, much to their relief.
The farmlands in these borderlands between Lady Damanja and Lord Zoltan lay fallow, with two-year-old saplings sprouting from formerly plowed fields, and farmhouses abandoned, their roofs collapsed and holes punched in wattle and daub walls. A watchtower next to the road lay in ruins with its roof gone and the door missing. The charred remains of several outbuildings surrounded it. This destruction looked more recent, a few weeks old or less.
Nevertheless, it seemed for a while as though they’d pass through without trouble, but in early afternoon they came suddenly upon a knot of armed men guarding the post road. Narina, Kozmer, and Gyorgy had their cloaks up against the rain, heads hooded and bent. Mud and wet ash streaked their clothes. Brutus was snorting, miserable and anxious to get out of the rain, but this was marshland with a thin ribbon of elevated road to carry them through, and there was no place to stop.
The soldiers numbered seven, with no horses, and only a few bundles that they seemed to have carried by hand. They were stretching canvas between poles to make a sort of tent, as they were apparently making a checkpoint or guard post. They looked up at the sound of Brutus’s hooves on the post road.
“What’s this, a goat?” The speaker was a young man, maybe only a year or two older than Gyorgy, although he already had a hard look about him that Narina’s student didn’t. He chuckled. “Hey, boys, look at this. We’ve got a goat wearing horseshoes.”
The other men turned from their work, and there were laughs, but some looked nervous, and one of the older ones, possibly the leader, threw back his hood and peered through the drizzle.
“Mountain people. What are you doing down here?”
Narina pulled back her own hood and drew her cloak to show the twin swords at her hips. The young man who’d made the barb about the goat snarled and reached for his sword, but the older man stopped him with a quick grab of the wrist.
“You know these weapons, don’t you?” she asked.
“Aye,” the older man said. “I recognize ’em.”
“Are you Zoltan’s men?”
“You can’t pass,” he said.
“You know who I am. Or you guess it, anyway.” Narina put an edge in her voice. “And you know that I will pass. You know that you will not stop me. That you cannot.”
Now all the men were on alert. They dropped their work stretching the canvas tent, and it fell to the ground, forgotten, while they moved into a half circle to face the bladedancers. There were eight, she counted, not seven. One man had been obscured by the others.
“My business isn’t with Lord Zoltan,” she said. “We’re only passing through to other lands.”
“Wrong crowlord, woman,” said the younger man who’d thrown taunts about the goat. “We have nothing to do with that treacherous bastard.”
“If you aren’t Zoltan’s men, then you have no reason to delay us. I have urgent business with Balint Stronghand, and he won’t be pleased if he hears you tried to stop us.”
The older man showed teeth. “Lady Damanja.”
Narina shook her head. “What?”
“You heard me. Damanja is our master, and Stronghand can rot, for all we care. He’s worse than Zoltan. Turn around, go back to the mountains. This is no business of the bladedancers.”
She let the cloak drop to cover the hilts of her swords. “Damanja? So far north? What are you doing here?”
This brought chuckles. A few made as if to return to their work with the tarp, but their leader held up a hand and stopped them. His posture remained tense.
Kozmer had come up alongside Narina while she tried to gently get these men to stand aside. Now he poked his staff at a puddle forming on the road.
“This might be a good place for the demonstration we discussed earlier,” he said.
“What?” she said in a low voice. “I’m not killing these men.”
Kozmer made no attempt to guard his words, and, in fact, raised his voice. “Kill all but the commander. He seems sensible, and the others will believe him when he carries word back to his camp.”
This brought angry comments from the men on the road. Swords began to emerge from sheaths, and this time the commander didn’t stop them. His expression hardened, but he didn’t look as though he relished a fight. She imagined him lying on his back with his throat cut and shuddered.
Narina turned back to Kozmer. “They’re not even Zoltan’s men.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Kozmer said. “In fact, all the better. You might even share a little of what happened at the temple so they’ll understand why we’re angry when the survivor carries word back to his captain.”
“Kozmer—”
“People are going to die,” the old man said. “I can see that now. Better a few here and there than a massive slaughter, wouldn’t you agree?” His voice was louder than necessary, and she realized it was not for her sake that he was speaking.
“Listen, all of you,” she said. “We are from the Divine School of the Twinned Blades. The bladedancers. And I’m a sohn.”
“She’s the sohn,” Kozmer said. “Sohn Narina, master of the temple. I suggested that she kill most of you to spread the word that we’re not to be trifled with, but she has demurred. Such mercy is rare in the lowlands, I’ll wager. But whether we must kill you or not, we’re going through.”
“You can’t pass,” the leader said. “We have strict orders.”
Kozmer sighed. “You see? Now, one of us has to clear the road. Gyorgy could do it, I’m sure, but he’s your pupil, and you’d need to give him permission. I’m an elder sohn, and I don’t need permission, so I’m tempted to fetch swords from the cart and give it a go.” Another sigh, this one deeper. “I’m ashamed to admit that it might end badly. I can master the auras, but my joints are creaky and slow.”
“You keep saying that,” Narina replied. “I don’t believe it.”
Narina drew her swords. She closed her eyes and took two steps forward. Lady Damanja’s men shouted warnings. The leader gave them orders, told two of them to hold the line against the old man and the boy while the other six fought Narina.
She gathered her sowen and felt outward with her mind to touch the auras of the men and their weapons. The leader had some skill, she sensed. So did the brash younger one who’d started the conversation in such an unpleasant way. These two moved apart from the others to give themselves separation, readying their posture and making sure they had range of motion. The others were an indifferent lot.
Narina made her move.
Everything seemed congealed, from the men, who seemed to be holding their breaths, to the raindrops falling lazily from the sky to plop on the puddles gathering on the road. None of the eight seemed to have even noticed that she’d moved before she’d closed the distance with her swords flashing.
Her demon blade slammed onto the commander’s sword just above the hilt and shattered it. The dragon blade thrust into the younger man’s shoulder, even as his eyes were widening as he finally saw her approach. She let the tip penetrate a half-inch, then withdrew the blade.
After ducking past a sloppy swing that would have missed her anyway, but impeded her movement all the same, she slammed her elbow into a third man’s belly, slashed three others with her blades—arm, thigh, belly—deep enough to slice into leather armor and raise blood, but not so much as to cut through muscle to the bone.
An instant later, she was on the far side of their would-be blockade, standing about fifteen feet away. She let her sowen relax, and the men shook themselves free from the spell that seemed to have slowed them to a stupor, but was really Narina moving at an accelerated speed. The injured cursed and groaned, while the commander stared at the shattered hilt in his hand, his disbelief slowly turning into a grimace.
“Where did she go?” someone demanded.
“Behind you,” she said. They turned, gaping, and she added, “That was a poor blade, commander. Too brittle, and it shattered easily. I’ll wager the rest of you are similarly armed, which is beside the point. None of you have the strength to best me.”
“I suppose that was some sort of demonstration,” Kozmer called from the other side. “Not the one I wanted, but perhaps it will do. Do you think the lesson got through?”
“I don’t know,” Narina said, still speaking to the commander of the small company of men. “Did it?”
The man slowly relaxed his clenched jaw. His words were tense, angry and frightened. “You want to pass? That’s the extent of it?”
“I said that quite clearly from the beginning.”
“You could have killed us all.”
“I didn’t want to. I feel bad for the pain I caused, in fact. Your friend with the cut leg will suffer on the march, I think.”
The man glanced to the soldier in question, who clenched at his thigh, wincing, while a trickle of blood leaked through his fingers. He turned back to Narina.
“What do you want, anyway? Why do you want to pass?”
“Does that matter? You mind your business, and I’ll mind mine. I don’t care about your army or what you’re doing in Zoltan’s lands. We’re traveling to see Lord Balint, nothing more concerns you.”
It wasn’t entirely true. Narina had business with Zoltan, regardless of what happened between these three crowlords, all fighting over the fertile lands of the plains. Whatever had happened with Miklos and his men could not be allowed to stand without all involved understanding the consequences.
“Balint is an enemy, too,” Damanja’s man said. “Zoltan, Balint, and his allies to the north—they’re all the same.” He studied her as if sizing up her moral strength in the same way he’d sized her up physically moments earlier. “We could use you in the fight, bladedancer.”
“You could what? Demons and demigods, do you take us for sellswords? We’re here to do our duty, not get involved in your pointless clashes.”
“Then what are you doing here? What’s in the cart, anyway?”
“We won’t spy on you, and you won’t spy on us,” she said. “If we can agree to that, and you will let us through, then all will go well. If not, there will be real bloodshed this time. And it won’t be ours that is spilled.”
The commander glanced at Kozmer, Gyorgy, and Brutus, perhaps wondering if he could use them as some sort of leverage while he held the sohn at bay. Then he took in his wounded men. There were no life-threatening wounds in the group, but he would know that was only because of Narina’s restraint.
A crow suddenly cawed overhead. All looked up as a flock of them appeared, squawking and carrying on as they weaved patterns against the gray, rainy sky while they flew north.
At last Damanja’s man nodded. “We’ll step aside. But events up ahead will turn you around all the same.”
Chapter Twelve
Miklos approached the battlefield at the head of twenty horsemen. He and his riders left the post road, crossed a pair of swales, and jumped over a low-slung wall meant to hem in cows. An hour earlier they’d stumbled across a reserve force of around two hundred of Lady Damanja’s troops, marching hard up the road, and if not for a quick flight from the road, Miklos would have found himself in trouble.
But the enemy troops had no more than a dozen riders of their own, and they were not Damanja’s vaunted wolfhead riders. Instead, the mounted forces seemed to be officers, and by the time they recognized the riders as enemies, Miklos and his men had slipped free and ridden to safety.
The battlefield would be easy to find for either side, given the huge flock of crows wheeling overhead to the northeast. And like men and horses, new crows were flying in to join the excitement. Following them was a simple matter. Among the flock were the darker, more numerous crows of Lord Zoltan, along with the larger, raven-sized crows of Lady Damanja. Hard to say if any of Balint’s were on hand, but Miklos didn’t think so. Not yet.
Riding cross-country slowed their pace, and so Miklos kept hooking back toward the mountains to regain the post road. His company would ride down the brick surface for ten or fifteen minutes, only to run into various choke points Damanja’s troops had set up. These enemy forces grew larger and larger as they approached the battlefield, soon large enough to pose a threat, and he couldn’t afford to start a fight.
Not with twenty riders. Maybe if he hadn’t sacrificed sixty men at the bladedancer temple and left several more behind with serious wounds, abandoned at Hooffent to recover beneath the baleful eye of the volcano trying to bury the village with lava. Miklos had gathered the remnants and ridden hard for the plains.
Davian, one of the men who’d stayed with the horses during the failed attack on the bladedancer temple, rode alongside him as they cut away from the post road yet again. Davian was a veteran of numerous wars, with twenty years of campaigning for Lord Zoltan to his credit, and a terrible scar that ran from his mangled right ear, down his cheek, and disappeared into his beard. More scars on his arms, chest, and legs attested to other battles, other sacrifices in the service of the crowlord.
Two months ago, Miklos had turned Davian to his side with one single sentence. “All those scars, all that blood spilled, and you’re still earning a common soldier’s wage? What has your loyalty earned?”
Now, Davian said, “The lady herself is on the battlefield, if the crows are to be trusted. And all those checkpoints. This isn’t a punitive attack, this is something more.”
“Did you think it would be so simple?” Miklos asked. “We offended Damanja’s honor—she had to respond. All these crowlords are the same, all ready to go to war over a slight.”
The two men slowed to a trot at the head of the company, carefully eyeing a flat, grassy expanse that would leave them exposed while crossing it. The way to the other side looked clear, but there might be archers hiding in the trees to the far side. Damanja’s archers were the best in the land. Better to skirt the field than ride straight across.
“Yes, but a war?” Davian said. “We burn her village, she burns ours. Maybe a second reprisal if our lord responds in kind. Isn’t that the way of it?”
Miklos shook his head. “Damanja once mounted a raid of nine hundred troops because her daughter was insulted by a crowlord’s son. The man called the child a buck-toothed wench and the lady went to war over it.”
“Well sure, for her daughter,” Davian said. “But those villagers we harassed were nothing but peasants. And this is a full-scale invasion.”
“Yes, it’s perfect.”
The truth was, Lady Damanja’s response was more than Miklos had hoped for when his men had approached the frontier dressed as brigands and then thrown on the green cloaks of Zoltan’s horsemen as soon as they crossed into the woman’s lands. Let them be seen wearing their crowlord’s colors as they entered Damanja’s lands. Zoltan himself would have been livid with rage had he seen what his men were about. But the fool was oblivious, as always.
Miklos’s riders had raided one of Damanja’s villages, committed a few outrages, and followed that up with several days of riding back and forth across the frontier to play up the double-sided ruse. Once they sp
otted Damanja’s troops on the move, Miklos ordered them into the mountains to visit the bladedancers as Zoltan had initially commanded.
Miklos had only hoped to stir up trouble along the frontier, and was surprised upon returning to the plains that he’d opened an entire second front to Zoltan’s war. Balint on the north, and now Damanja to the south.
Perfect.
He waved a hand at the riders and gestured to the trees. They advanced under cover. By the time they circled the open fields and gained a vantage point above where the river snaked its way through a green patchwork of rice paddies, the crows were only about a mile distant to the northeast.
To the east lay the market town of Belingus. It straddled the river behind its thick walls, bristling with towers, bested in height only by a pair of church spires of the demon and dragon cults, one black stone, the other a gleaming white.
An ancient bridge of red brick crossed the river to connect the two sides of the town, and also served as a choke point for those who attempted to bypass Belingus without paying the town’s steep river tolls.
Those tolls were a major part of Lord Zoltan’s wealth, and along with Belingus’s markets, arguably as important as the taxes levied on the thousands of small rice farmers throughout the fiefdom. Miklos didn’t care for it. Belingus was a dirty, plague-infested place, and Zoltan himself rarely visited, but he’d have been forced to respond had Lady Damanja laid siege.
A stream of people on the road looked to be entering the town for protection. There was no army visible at its gates, and the flock of crows that indicated the site of battle lay farther to the north.
“Not a full-scale invasion, then,” Miklos told Davian, “or she’d be trying to capture Belingus or burn it to ash.”
He felt a vague sense of disappointment at this, but perhaps it was better not to push too far, too fast. Things could easily spiral out of control with Balint at the front and Damanja at the rear. He needed to manage this war carefully.
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