Ellis almost couldn’t fit it into the proper places in his head. Reprieve from an immediate answer came in the form of the pub’s holder calling Walsh over to collect her chips.
When Walsh sat down again, digging right in, Ellis had to ask, “Are you telling me some of those MPs were allowing their country to potentially lose a war out of spite?”
“I’m telling you,” Walsh said around a greasy chip smothered in gravy, melted cheese, and chunks of bacon, “that politics can be a ruddy great boil on the arse-end of any good government. And Alton didn’t manage to lance this one in time to avoid a loss that shouldn’t’ve been a loss at all.” She shrugged, said, “We think he got the resulting infection in time, though,” and went back to inhaling her chips.
Ellis was trying very hard not to reel. He shook it off, because it wasn’t why he was here.
“We’ll come back to that.” Because boy, would they. He pushed his beer to the side and leaned in again. “I’m going to tell you what’s going to happen, because there’s a reason I’m here in Wellech and not off with the Royal Forces somewhere with a gun in my hand. You know my mam Dreams.” When Walsh merely nodded and kept eating, Ellis went on, “And you know my cariad is dragonkin.”
Walsh stopped chewing and narrowed her eyes. “Your mam is under orders to relay any Dreams of consequence directly to my office.”
Ellis blinked. Because that was news to him.
“Are you telling me my mam’s a spy for the RIC too?”
Walsh stared, peered around to make sure no one was close enough to have heard, then rolled her eyes at Ellis. “D’you really think I’d tell you if she were?”
“You sort of just did.” Again, Ellis had to push it aside, but bloody damn if he wasn’t going to be taking that one up with Lilibet right after he was done with Walsh.
“Has she told you about a Dream?” Walsh wanted to know, harsh. “Has she been Dreaming of this dragonkin cariad and now—”
“No.” If only Lilibet would. Ellis shook his head, unwilling to say that he’d been the one Dreaming, though he reckoned that was going to have to come eventually. “No, bloody—”
“Then what’s the point of even—?”
“The point,” Ellis said through his teeth, “is that she Dreams for me. And she Dreamed that if Milo went off to do what he’s doing for Alton, Wellech would need me here. And now I think I know why.”
Walsh stared, still chewing, then rolled her eyes again. “Well, get on, then.” Annoyed. Clearly assuming Ellis was wasting her time, and wanting him to get it over with.
“Because I know Milo.” It came out fierce and angry. “And Milo wouldn’t have volunteered unless Alton agreed to send him to find out what was happening with the dragons. And once Milo did find out, there was no way he wasn’t going to do what he could to fix it. Except fixing it means taking away a weapon that Taraverde worked very hard to cultivate, and isn’t easily replaced.”
“Uh-huh.” So far Walsh was unimpressed.
“So where,” Ellis said slowly, “d’you think would be a good place to look for those replacements?”
Walsh paused with a chip dripping cheese and gravy into the basket. “Same place they got the last ones, I expect.”
Ellis shook his head. “They’d already been messing with the migration path over there. Dragons aren’t stupid. They know when there’s a threat, and from the trouble Milo was having the past few years, enough had already veered off the central paths to be noticed before we had any clue full-out war was coming. Who knows how many have started to skip Colorat altogether, now that it’s not a safe haven for them anymore?
“I had a sick redcrest cow that apparently wandered off that path, or more likely was set loose from captivity, and she’d managed to stumble all the way from Caeryngryf down to Silver Run and was well on her way to Corstir before Aleks finally managed to come get her. Thing is, I’m pretty sure she was following me for a while there, like a puppy that’s got nowhere else to go, because the dragonkin she trusted betrayed her, the one who set her loose couldn’t stay to help her, and she was lost and didn’t know what else to do.”
He wasn’t pretty sure that was how it happened—he was proper certain. She’d come back a handful of times before winter hit. It had become a local joke after a while, but the first time she showed up, she’d swooped in over Corstir, settled in far too close to Ffrwythlon for the villagers’ comfort, and wouldn’t leave until the Wardens’ office had got flooded with frantic messages and Ellis had gone to investigate. He probably shouldn’t have been as pleased as he’d been. She’d scared half the village to drinking. But she’d also looked better, scales growing in, petrol pong intense enough to singe nose hairs. Glynn saying in a letter how the dragon was healing was one thing; seeing it was entirely another. And since all it had taken to get her to head back to Old Forge was Ellis telling her he was pleased she was feeling better but she should get back to home and kin, he was fairly confident in thinking she’d made the trip just to see him. Check up on him. And then had done it again. And again.
It was bizarre. It was, as far as Ellis knew, unprecedented. And it warmed him right through.
He huffed and asked, “How many more like her are out there, either too sick or too abused to even try to find their path again? Or avoiding it altogether because they know it’s not safe anymore. Has anyone thought to ask Aleks how many breeds he’s seeing that don’t belong here on the western path? Because I don’t think Kymbrygh’s ever seen a redcrest before, and I know Milo was seeing other breeds that didn’t belong as far back as two years ago.”
He sat back and knocked his fist against the table. “They’re coming for Kymbrygh. Tirryderch have got the food, Wellech’ve got the mines and livestock, but Whitpool have got dragons. That’s what they really want now, because Milo’s been taking all of theirs away, and they’ve yet been able to stop him.”
Walsh was frowning down into her chip basket, gone still now, and pensive. Ellis had clearly hit something somewhere in all that ranting.
“They’d want to do it during Sowing,” Walsh said slowly then shook her head. “No, it’s as you say. Take it before, and then wait. Catch the clans on their way through, get as many healthy ones as they can before all that’s left are the ones that can’t make the trip.”
“They all stop at Old Forge.” Ellis drummed his fingers on his jar. “Reaping or Sowing, they all stop there. All of them.”
Walsh swirled her droopy, gravy-soaked chip through congealing cheese but didn’t eat it. “They can’t get in through Tirryderch. And no one’s ever going to take Whitpool from the sea.”
Whitpool’s shores were all towering sheer cliffs that sat atop what Ellis suspected was a not-so-secret force of military and former military spies from which had emerged the Black Dog Corps. Whether or not the enemy knew what Whitpool harbored beneath hire car drivers’ caps and porters’ smiling faces, the geography alone would make an attempt from the water foolhardy at best. From the air… possibly. But certainly not during Sowing when the skies over Whitpool were full of dragons. That would be just asking for midair collisions and a lot of dead pilots.
“Not even with dragons,” Walsh mused. “Especially with dragons.”
Ellis opened his mouth to ask why, but it clicked before he’d even taken a breath. Because that wasn’t the way they’d done it in Taraverde or Colorat or anywhere else they’d tried to steal whole clans from and ultimately came away with fractions of them. They’d come for the dragonkin first, taken them away, and put their own in instead. And then it had been a matter of poisoning and manipulating and finally subjugating the dragons that both survived and displayed the reactions to the poison Taraverde had been after.
Dragons were territorial. A dragon that wasn’t clan showing up and attacking a preserve wasn’t going to make it out alive. Ellis had never seen an actual fight between dragons, but he’d seen them get annoyed enough with one another to snap and swipe, and even that did enough damage to kee
p Milo busy with poultices and patches for weeks after.
Moreover, their territorial nature applied to dragonkin as well. Milo was clan to the dragons at Old Forge, and now so was Aleks. So, for that matter, was Ellis, really, as long as he had the dragonstone. Ellis didn’t know of any anecdotes involving dragonkin -vs- dragonkin, each attempting to influence their charges one against another, but if it had ever happened, he imagined it hadn’t been pretty. A dragon swooping into Old Forge and going after other dragons—even the sick and hurt ones—wasn’t going to end well for that dragon. And there was always the chance that it might switch loyalties to the dragonkin that ran the preserve. Because dragonkin were supposed to care for dragons, not use them, and, as Ellis had already pointed out, dragons weren’t stupid.
“No. Not Whitpool.” Ellis traced the routes in his head again, just to be sure. “We’ve just caught our second spy on Kymbrygh’s east coast. And neither of them was even trying to get to Tirryderch. I’m thinking they were setting things up to try the Red Coral Strait.”
And not because of the glimpse of the map he’d caught in a Dream, or because the southern end of the strait was plausibly accessible from the Surgebreaks, or even because the shore of the strait was where he’d been when it started to click into place in his head. The Red Coral Strait was the water corridor between Kymbrygh’s east coast and Preidyn’s west. Which could feasibly take anyone getting through it all the way up to Llundaintref. But Llundaintref, while unquestionably strategic, wasn’t where they’d been trying to get since all this started. And if one managed to get control of Wellech, seize the roads and waterways and railroads, one could reasonably expect to have a much better prospect of taking all of Kymbrygh from the inside than it had been proving from the outside.
Walsh sipped her beer. “Too shallow. They’d never get the kinds of ships they’d need through it.”
“All right. Point.” Ellis thought about paddleboats trying to sneak their way into Wellech through the Chwaer Bach Estuary, and the just barely prevented carnage when only one of them made it. “Small merchant boats. They’re up and down the strait a dozen times a day. Disguise one or twelve, load them up with soldiers instead of goods, slip around the Surreywitch Sound. Once you’ve got a good landing force entrenched, it’d be easy to take the ferries and bring in more, fan out all up the coast and just keep moving.” Ellis set his teeth. “If they manage that, they’d have their pick of targets. All they’d have to do is come up the Aled through Hollywell, or try the Chwaer Bach again like they did at Riverfest. Or, they could just conjure one of those fogs laced with spells or that sleeping gas, like the one that sorcerer used at Old Forge—and try telling me that wasn’t a test run to see how difficult an assault on Whitpool might be.”
The more he thought about it, the more his heart pounded. Cennydd and his accomplice hadn’t only been trying to steal a dragon—they’d been testing how easy it might be to go after Milo the same way the Elite Constabularies had gone after Aleks on his preserve in Colorat.
Ellis shook it away, teeth clenched. “No, they’ll try to force an opening then overwhelm us with numbers. Offload assault troops up and down the coast in a burn-it-all approach. Go for the shock of it, try to take our heart before we’ve even started to fight back. That seems to be the way the Confederation are going anyway.
“Sowing’s less than three months off. You’re right—they’d want to hit us before that. They’d want to secure Wellech before they go for Whitpool, because they won’t want to send dragonkin in until after they’ve got us down. If they’ve got Wellech, they might be able to take Tirryderch eventually, but I’m thinking they’d try to mow through us and then swarm in west to Whitpool. And then all they’d have to do is wait at Old Forge for a whole new crop of migrating dragons. Because, as far as the dragons know, Old Forge is still safe.”
Walsh finally ate her chip. She chewed slowly, watching Ellis all the while, then said, “I like how you think you know more than the generals.”
“I don’t. I just know Kymbrygh. I know what it has to offer an enemy who thinks everything is theirs for the taking. And I know how I’d take it. Alton said he came to me because I know Wellech’s weaknesses, which means I know Kymbrygh’s weaknesses. This is the one that could break us.”
“And you’ve brought it to me instead of Alton because…?”
“Because I’ve met you. And I know you get the job done.”
“Or you know it’s my arse if you’re wrong.”
“More like I think you’ll make sure whatever needs to happen next happens fast.” Ellis shrugged. “I’m not wrong. And you don’t think I am.” He peered across at Walsh with a half smirk. “It doesn’t hurt that whatever does happen next will be coordinated through the Home Guard’s Wellech office.”
Walsh snorted. “And you want to make sure your Wardens aren’t left out of it.”
“I don’t think that would be a worry with you. But I can’t forget the lessons trying to work with Crilly taught me.” Ellis picked up his jar, tipped it toward Walsh. “I’m a practical man, Colonel Walsh.”
“You’re a bloody amateur, Rhywun Ellis.”
“Fair,” Ellis agreed, because he absolutely was, but he also wasn’t done yet. “The fog Cennydd and his accomplice used at Old Forge—that wasn’t as thick as one would need, but it was widespread and only took the one sorcerer. Add in whatever gas was mixed in there and another sorcerer or two, and it would be possible for at least a small force to sneak up through the strait for a surprise assault on Wellech.” He sat back with a shrug. “If I weren’t a bloody amateur, I’d start keeping a very keen eye on the weather maps.”
Chapter 21—Variation
: the compositional process of changing an aspect(s) of a musical work while retaining others
The problem with trying to rid a country of powerful mages was that it left the country without powerful mages. Granted the Confederation had more than its share of witches and sorcerers. But the number of mages who’d been expelled from their homeland before that homeland decided to just cut to the chase and start killing them outright was considerable. And a great many of those mages who’d survived and fled had since joined the armed forces of their adopted countries. Unfortunately, while all the expelling and adopting had been going on, Wellech had been run by a Pennaeth who’d done everything he could to make sure none of the adopting would be happening in his parish.
Now, Ellis remembered his chat with Howell very clearly. The outrage bubbling beneath Howell’s calm narrative of powerful magic folk sent directly to the frontlines. The subtle anger in his tone when he spoke of the unfairness. Ellis also remembered the discussion in Nia’s study and the conclusion of Tirryderch’s Pennaeth that if her country wasn’t going to look out for the best interests of her parish’s magic folk, she’d do it herself.
And, morally, Ellis understood it. Supported it. Agreed with it.
Practically, though, he could absolutely appreciate the want for powerful magic on any frontline. Because damn him to the nether and back if he couldn’t use some on his own right now.
“That’s more than we were counting on,” Ellis told Tilli, crouched behind the berm of the main coastal road, and watching too many soldiers dispatched from a small frigate and onto the rafts that would bring them to Kymbrygh soil. He winced at the thunderous volley of big guns from the ships still battling it out at the mouth of the strait, but didn’t wait for his ears to stop ringing before he said, “We either need more ammunition or better marksman.”
Tilli gave him a glare. “I’ll just pull a few of each from out my arse, shall I?”
“That’s the spirit.”
It had taken a mere three weeks for Ellis’s warning to be proven right. He hadn’t been surprised to learn it hadn’t really been news to Alton, who’d already had an approach ready when Walsh brought it to him. The fact that the approach included a swift and orderly absorption of the Wardens into its own division of the Home Guard, on the other hand, was
definitely surprising, but since Walsh had left Ellis in command of it, he took it in stride. He trusted Walsh, he more or less trusted Alton, and he couldn’t deny there was a comfort in knowing there were people who knew more than he did telling him where he needed to be and what he needed to be doing. And also listening when he suggested a tweak to a plan based on his own knowledge of the geography, or a rearrangement of assignments to better utilize the talents or accommodate the weaknesses of Ellis’s Wardens.
The Confederation had tried the assault-teams-disguised-as-merchants-cloaked-in-magical-fog tactic twice. The first time, Zophia had apparently been too subtle about dissipating the thick mist as it swarmed the piers of the Preidyn Ferry Harbor, because the small boats, clearly thinking themselves safely hidden inside it, merely withdrew as the haze did, then tried it again the next night. When it didn’t work the second time either, they’d evidently got wise.
They were bolder this time. Actual gunships barreled at the Surreywitch patrols at dawn, harrying them, while rafts dropped one after the other into the strait, the too-numerous soldiers in them rowing like mad toward shore. Zophia had spent a good part of the night magicking any ammunition they’d put in front of her, so it was easy enough to wait until they were within range then bullseye the rafts, pepper them with enough holes they sank with little fanfare. The problem was, even with the tide in, the waters of the strait weren’t that deep, and the current steered whoever was floating on it right to shore. And then the closest enemy ship turned its big guns toward the beach, laying down covering fire for the soldiers working their way to land. The blasts pocked wide strips of the shallow cliff holding up the road, gouging out new fissures big enough to house a dragon.
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