Sonata Form

by Carole Cummings

  Ellis’s eyebrows shot up. He bit back several retorts—You disowned your son, and What does it matter when you don’t respect any of them?—and merely said, “Let’s go with Ellis Morgan for now.” He shrugged, deliberately indifferent. “I reckon the need for any of the others will depend on what you’ve got to say.”

  Folant nodded, as though he hadn’t expected anything else, and blew out a slow breath. “I never intended—”

  “I don’t care.”

  “It matters. None of this—”

  “I. Don’t. Care.” It took all Ellis had not to shove it out between his teeth. “And the less you tell me about any motives you may or may not have had for things you may or may not have done, the less chance there is that your First Warden will have to step in.” Folant’s mouth clamped tight, anger this time, and Ellis didn’t care about that either. “Say what you came to say, and be done with it, or get out.”

  “You’re that tamping with me that you’d see me leave without giving you information you clearly—-”

  “D’you think I haven’t already guessed just from you showing up?” Ellis huffed a disbelieving laugh. “You were selling information to whoever happened to be on the other end of your coded messages. You’re a bloody enemy contact. Of course any spy caught out in Wellech would eventually contact you. D’you think we haven’t been watching?”

  Ellis’s efforts to unite Wellech under one banner had been working slowly but surely, but the hunt for the Riverfest saboteurs had done the rest of the job. And the continued search for the one who’d got away had entrenched it down deep. Everyone had been keeping their eyes open, everyone had been checking on their neighbors. Walsh had helped to throw a virtual net over the ports and waterways and rail stations. Even keepers of the smallest shops and grange halls had been on the lookout for unfamiliar faces.

  The problem was that Wellech had a lot of wilderness. If someone knew how to live off the land, they could last years and never be found. But with the extraordinarily harsh winter digging in deep, Ellis had been hoping the spy would poke their head out for supplies, even for a moment, if they planned to try to ride out the rest of the cold weather in the wilds. And he’d known too well who they’d have no choice but to go to.

  Folant looked away, fists clenched tight now, jaw set firm. “I’m not.” He swallowed so hard Ellis heard the click of it from across the kitchen. “An enemy contact. I’m not.”

  “You were. And willing. You sought it. You bloody volunteered.”

  “Only because the damned—”

  “I don’t care!” It rang through the house, slammed a silence into the walls that echoed high and tinny in Ellis’s ears. When Ellis could speak again without snarling, he said, “There are conversations I will never have with you again, Folant. That’s one of them.”

  Folant flinched, whether at the “Folant” rather than “Tad,” or the finality of the tone, Ellis didn’t know. It didn’t matter. None of this was what mattered.

  “Now.” Ellis kept his arms folded over his chest, kept his slouch against the bench relaxed. “You’ve got a location. Tell me.”

  HOLLYWELL WASN’T a surprise. There was almost a direct line through the Torcalon Wood from the Chwaer Bach down to Surreywitch Sound, roads and villages easily avoided if one had a mind to do it. A minor port town, too far south to be of use to the mines or to those on their way to Llundaintref. It was quiet compared to the near “big city” feel of Caeryngryf, and like most of Wellech, everyone not only knew everyone else, but their business as well.

  Ellis met up with the Home Guard contingent Walsh had assigned to Hollywell, agreed on a strategy with the lieutenant in charge, and pulled Zophia front and center.

  “Anything?”

  People with magical abilities of all sorts had been emerging from the woodwork over the past few months, most of them agreeing to allow Lilibet to teach them how to use the gifts they’d neglected or suppressed in a Wellech that didn’t appreciate them. Ellis was perishing to get as many as would agree into his ranks, but they all still had a way to go before they’d be as useful as they could be.

  Zophia, in contrast, had gone to a good school in Ostlich-Sztym—not quite as prestigious as the one Milo had attended in Llundaintref, but respected on the continent—and Ellis had come to depend on her when a situation called for magic or magical expertise.

  She was staring at her knees now, crouched beside Ellis in the snow, concentrating, bobbing her head in a slow nod. “Wards,” she said, low and through the thick scarf pulled up to cover her mouth, just as hushed as the rest of them, seeing how they were so close to their target. “Is Elfennol.” She turned, squinted around the quiet stretch of trees between the battered little hunting shed only a furlong or so off and the impatient gathering of Wardens and Home Guard cadets hunkered behind her. She pointed a gloved hand. “There.” Then turned and pointed again. “To there.” She frowned back at Ellis. “They are…” She rolled her hand, searching for the word she needed. “Unwell?” She shook her head. “Not good done.”

  “Badly,” Bethan piped in, muted but kind. “You mean the wards are done badly.”

  Bethan was another success story, though Ellis took no credit for her change of heart from the behavior she’d displayed when she’d confronted Milo on that bridge those years ago. That went to Andras somehow, and Zophia, Ellis reckoned, since Zophia was a likeable person to begin with, and was proving to be an excellent Warden besides.

  “Badly,” Zophia agreed with a grateful crinkle of eyes at Bethan before she turned back to Ellis. “Is a square.” Her brow furrowed tight in clear disapproval. “Easy to find the… how you call… anchor?”

  “Yes.” Ellis nodded. “Anchor. I understand.” He did, and he knew what Zophia was saying. Setting wards in a predictable pattern made it more likely someone could find the anchors and disable them before the person who’d cast them knew anyone had even come near. “Can you kill them without her knowing?”

  “Is Elfennol,” Zophia said, almost insulted, like Ellis should’ve known better than to even ask, and then she shrugged. “Is done.”

  Ellis grinned and pushed her toward Bethan. “You cover me, and Bethan will cover you.” He blew into his hands to warm up his fingers, checked his rifle, then jerked his chin at the lieutenant. “All right, Yelton. She’s clearly a sorcerer, so best let us take point, yeah?”

  “Aye, mate.” Yelton flashed a wry smirk and made a show of checking his rifle over. A thick hank of wavy auburn hair had worked its way from beneath his wool cap and fallen over his brow. He threw a grin at his cadets over his shoulder then shot Ellis a roguish look through his fringe. “Y’uns worry about the finessing bits.” He winked with a cocky glint in his bright green eyes. “We’ll see to the bits wot need a spot o’ muscle.”

  Ellis merely rolled his eyes with a snort. Yelton had come to Wellech with his mam when he was ten, but he’d managed to hang on to both his South Werrdig accent and smartarse charm in the years since.

  “Whatever makes you feel better,” Ellis muttered with a smirk as Yelton quietly directed his cadets to surround the dilapidated little shed. Amused when he shouldn’t be, considering the circumstances, Ellis huffed out a bracing breath. “Let’s go.”

  They moved slowly, Ellis motioning for the Wardens behind him to keep silent and be careful of where they put their feet and how they stepped. The calf-deep snow had partially melted and then frozen over again; the skin of it was therefore brittle and potentially noisy. They were close enough to the strait to the east that Ellis could hear the far-off rush of the tide, but it wouldn’t be enough to cover the crackle and crunch if they went thoughtlessly tromping through this intended ambush.

  The trees here weren’t sparse, but their trunks were all but bare and few of them were wide enough to provide much cover. So when the fog came out of nowhere and started to thicken, it was disappointing but not a complete surprise. They’d been spotted.

  Ellis gave up all stealth and shouted, �
�She’s doing a runner!” toward where Yelton was positioned, and took off toward the shed.

  Zophia just said, “Fin,” annoyed, and bloody damn, Ellis decided as she waved her hands in wide arcs, he was really starting to love it when she said that.

  And for good reason—the mist thinned immediately. The sorcerer-spy was clearly visible as the last ragged whorls of the conjured haze sank to the ground as though weighted. Caught in midsprint, out in the open now and too close to Yelton, she was brought down by a simple trip and a subsequent rifle butt to the temple.

  It was over so quickly, Home Guard and Wardens both just sort of stared at each other, wondering what to do with all the untapped adrenaline coursing through their veins. A silent, surprised moment later, Yelton slapped Zophia on the back hard enough Bethan had to steady her.

  “There a pub ’round here, then?”

  THE HAWK and Dove sat high on the jut of a cliff overlooking the Hollywell Port Authority’s piers on one side, and the long stretch of the Red Coral Strait on the other. Yelton assigned two of his cadets to secure the prisoner, and requested Zophia on the detail “in case of further magical shenanigans.” Ellis allowed how that would be the smart thing to do, and though he could tell Zophia was disappointed she wouldn’t be celebrating with the rest of them, she went without complaint.

  “Oi, mate, you look like you just lost a sure bet instead of catching a spy.” Yelton nudged in beside Ellis, gave him one of his wide, easy grins, and propped his elbows to the railing overlooking the strait. He made a show of looking down, as though trying to decide what Ellis was staring at. “’S freezing up here. And that’s a thinking face, don’t say it en’t. G’wan, then.” He pushed in close, the length of his arm warm against Ellis’s, and dipped his head so he was looking at Ellis through his red fringe again, friendly and cautiously coy. “Give over.”

  Ellis knew what this was. Invitation, clearly. There’d been a few months back when they were boys it would be so easy to revisit, and Yelton had been all but telegraphing it with his sly looks and shifting eyebrows since they’d met up to start strategizing. And Ellis thought about it, honestly. Yelton had no magic and Ellis didn’t Dream well enough for it to count; a simple conjugal contract between them wouldn’t even have to go through the Sisters. Approval from the Wellech Council would do just fine, no fuss. Technically, Ellis could even approve it as Pennaeth, though it would also be just as technically improper, and he had no interest in stepping even a toe into Folant’s footsteps when it came to abusing his office.

  I could do, Ellis mused as he pulled his coat tighter against the steady winter wind and contemplated the churning dark water. A shifting tide of He left me rolled through him, capped with a silt-soupy froth of Why shouldn’t I? and tugged toward the deeps by a rippling undertow of It would serve him right.

  Lies, really, like the ones he told himself when he had too much time to think and the loneliness started to drag at him. I’ll always be the man who didn’t deserve you but loved you ’til the end, and though the “didn’t deserve you” bit invariably made him clench his teeth, the rest of it was what Ellis hung on to. What he chose to believe with all his heart, even when it felt impossible. Ellis believed impossible things all the time. He still had the contract dissolution papers locked in his desk drawer, the envelope still sealed, because he’d had a mulish notion that if he never opened it, the contents would never be true. A more sensible man would’ve taken the papers for the answer they were intended to be, and done what had been asked of him.

  Sensible had its place. Apparently, just not in Ellis’s heart.

  “I’ve just been thinking.” Ellis pulled back from the railing, away from Yelton, and peered up instead at the sky just melting into the heady pastels and streaks of feathered cobalt of approaching twilight. “That mist she conjured. The fog.”

  It wasn’t a new thing. A common tactic in battle since before recorded history. Given more respect and prominence in strategy once the tales of the Black Dog Corps became part of the common parlance of war. Even Ellis, in his limited experience, had seen it used before.

  Except.

  Combined with the sound of the tides churning in the strait, it had nagged at something as Ellis led the way back to the various horses and farm trucks they’d all used to get to the meeting place before the raid.

  Images of Milo tearing off into the night, gunfire aimed at his back and fog rolling from his mouth. The burble of a stream against muddy banks. A glimpse at a half-burnt map with too-familiar landmarks and streaks of red possibility leaking from it in every direction.

  He hadn’t Dreamed much of Milo for months, though not for lack of trying. Glimpses here and there. Milo hunkered in a small room derelict enough to look abandoned, a blood-spotted bandage across his chest and fever blooming high on his cheeks. Milo sleeping against the concave bole of a thick, moldy oak. Milo hovering at the edge of a marketplace somewhere, jaw tight and fixed gaze tracking a woman haggling over what looked like a bolt of wool.

  If the hints in the broadsheets were any indication, though, there’d been at least one other liberation of captured dragons before winter had set in across the continent. This time in Taraverde itself. The Confederation had started with, from all reports, twenty-seven dragons. Counting the ones set free from this last raid, they were down to eight, only six of which had been recently spotted in battle and confirmed alive and still active. The reports couldn’t get over the audacity of whoever was doing the liberating. There were no accounts of any Black Dogs, but it didn’t stop everyone Ellis knew from eagerly assuming Captain Ceri Priddy had answered the call of her country once again.

  There was no denying she had, of course. But Ellis would bet blood that if it had to do with dragons, they could thank the Black Dog’s son. And yet Ellis couldn’t speak a word of it to anyone. Because Milo—his Milo—was a spy in a foreign land. Just like that woman in the woods. And Ellis couldn’t pretend he didn’t know what fate awaited her when Walsh and then Alton were through with her.

  He huffed, shook it off. With a smile that wasn’t real, he pushed his cup of cider at Yelton.

  “I think I need to go see Walsh.”

  “THEY’RE COMING for Kymbrygh. And they’ll do it before Sowing.”

  Walsh lifted her eyebrows, pausing with her jar halfway to her mouth. She stared at Ellis, narrow-eyed, before she lifted the jar the rest of the way and took a gulp of beer.

  She’d already left her office on the Home Guard’s base by the time Ellis had got back from Hollywell. He’d felt a little bad about pounding down her door and dragging her from her supper, apparently one of the few she’d managed to get home in time to have with her cariad since she’d transferred in from Werrdig. He’d done it anyway, and bullied her into the closest pub because, she’d snapped, “If you will insist, you’re at least buying me a damned beer and some chips.”

  Come to think of it, it was more like she’d bullied him. Since it resulted in her sitting across from him in the otherwise empty pub and consenting to listen, he took it as a win.

  She set her beer down. “They’ve been coming for Kymbrygh.”

  “No, they’ve been coming for Tirryderch. The rest of Kymbrygh was incidental, a bonus, and maybe leverage to take all of Preidyn. Or that’s what we thought they were doing. And maybe it was, but it’s changed.”

  “Tirryderch, last I checked, is part of Kymbrygh.”

  “Yes, of course it—” Ellis huffed. “No, you’re not listening.”

  “You haven’t said anything yet that I don’t already know.”

  Ellis sucked in a deep breath, calmed himself, because she was right—he wasn’t coming at this properly.

  “All right.” He leaned over the table, hands around the beer he hadn’t otherwise touched yet. “We’ve all been assuming that Tirryderch is the goal because it would choke off the food supply, and that’s what we would do. But Taraverde is doing countless things we’d never thought of before. Trying to take control of
an entire continent. Using planes to bomb whole cities, and not because they’re strategic sites necessary to their campaign, but for the shock of it.”

  “We’re using planes, and we’re proving much—”

  “Using dragons.”

  It made her pause, thoughtful, before she shrugged concession and motioned Ellis to go on.

  “The first dragon attacks sent us reeling. And in our shock, they managed to gain ground they shouldn’t’ve, however temporarily.” Ellis paused, mostly for effect, because this was important. “A full third each of the Whitpool and Tirryderch Home Guard have been stretched the length of Kymbrygh north to south, and are now patrolling Wellech’s western border. Alton has pulled Whitpool’s Wardens into his own troops and made them a bulwark between the border and the Whitpool base—which just happens to sit down the road from Old Forge. Now I don’t know about you, but that tells me Alton had been expecting Taraverde to try using dragons against us. So why wasn’t Preidyn?”

  The thud he’d wanted that to hit with wasn’t apparent in Walsh’s demeanor. She was quiet for a while, blank-faced, watching Ellis across the table, clearly thinking. Ellis waited, patient on the outside, but jittering nearly out of his skin on the inside, until Walsh finally tipped her head with a purse of her lips.

  “A country’s intelligence,” she said slowly, “is only as good as the boffins at the top who are meant to do something with it.” She looked away. “You forget the Purity Party had very loud support in some corners of Parliament until very recently.”

  Ellis hadn’t forgot. He’d just assumed it had been got past when the Queen’s Constitutional Party managed to gather enough votes to purge a good portion of the MPs who’d shouted the loudest.

  “And it must be said,” Walsh went on, “that a nameless, faceless spy on the ground can sometimes be much more effective than any mastermind.” She smirked when Ellis sat up straight. “Did you think his ‘promotion’ after the Green Coast War was a reward?” Her mouth went tight again. “It was punishment. Too many messages from Command not getting through. Too many flashy missions that couldn’t be called off because of faulty communication.” She shook her head with an admiring little chuckle. “He bloody invented the Black Dog Corps, and what’s more, he was there on the ground with them. They may not have won the war all by themselves, but they bloody well had a large part in the winning of it. And some of those commanders who went ignored while the Black Dogs plowed through enemy country went on to become respected Members of Parliament.”