Blade of Empire

by Mercedes Lackey

  * * *

  He was walking through the Flower Forest, thinking: no matter what happens in the world of the Folk, this will go on. No matter what the season outside, it was always springtide in the Flower Forest. Season of hope. Season of plans and possibilities. He wondered vaguely why anyone would ever wish to leave such a place.

  And then the ground turned soft and slippery beneath his feet, and his boot sole crunched down on a tiny delicate skeleton. The trees around him lost all color as their leaves turned to ash and blew away. Even the ever-living Vilya was leafless and dead. Runacar stood in the dust and ashes of the Ghostwood—a world of bone white and ash grey—but just as it occurred to him that this was a dream—the same dream he’d had since the Battle of the Shieldwall Plain, in fact—the colors changed.

  Ivory flushed to scarlet, pale grey became fulgent black. The Ghostwood became a fleshy slaughterhouse, carnal, pulsing with unclean vigor, branches festooned with bright wet red leaves.

  A woman stepped out from behind one of the trees. Her skin was the same scarlet as the leaves, rendering her nearly invisible against the blood forest, and her shining black hair fell all the way to her ankles. She was as tall as a Minotaur, but slender and wholly female, and when she smiled, she showed him a predator’s ivory fangs.

  “It’s unfair, you know,” she said, as if they were old friends encountering one another again. “If she’d never been born, how different your life would have been.” The woman reached out to a branch and plucked a fruit so ripe its skin was nearly black. She bit into it, and thick red juice ran down her chin.

  “Vieliessar,” Runacar said. Not the woman he faced here, but the one she spoke of.

  “Vieliessar,” the scarlet woman confirmed. “Who is lauded for her miracles of war, her grasp of strategy, her innovative tactics. And you, who are so much more than her equal, are simply … forgotten. Brushed aside. You would have been the hero of your age, had she not been born. You would have been High King.”

  “At what price?” Runacar asked warily.

  “Does it matter?” the woman asked. She took another bite of the fruit. “Here,” she said, tossing it to him. “Catch.”

  He caught what she threw almost reflexively, but it was not a fruit. He did not have to look down to see he held a skull in his hands. His fingers tightened on it reflexively, and he heard delicate bone snap. Around him the blood forest was fading, becoming the Ghostwood again, and even in the dream, Runacar closed his eyes. He did not want to see.

  “You shouldn’t bait them.”

  Despite himself, he opened his eyes. The forest was neither white nor red. It was green.

  And he knew who had spoken. A voice as familiar to him as his own heartbeat.

  “Vieliessar.”

  “Why are you here?” she asked, stepping out of the shadows. “Why aren’t you here?” she corrected herself, shaking her head. “Where did you go?”

  “I went home,” he answered. He knew this was only a dream, a fantasy born of his exhaustion, but he felt compelled to answer anyway. “Why didn’t you come after me?” Though what he would do if and when she did he had no idea.

  “I will,” she promised. “I am. Wait for me.”

  “Forever,” he answered. The words said more than he wanted them to. They didn’t say enough.

  * * *

  When he crossed the border between sleeping and waking Runacar knew he’d been dreaming, though he did not remember the dream. (One of the benefits of being Lightless was not having to constantly scour your dreams for Foretellings and portents.) Despair, he had long since learned, had this much in common with contentment: it left you willing to simply live in the moment, unwilling or unable to influence the flow of events in which you swam.

  All around him he heard the noise and clatter of the encampment, and his mind painted a picture of neat rows of pavilions, cook tents, and Healing Tents, grooms walking destriers up and down the lanes to exercise them, the distant lowing of the cattle any army must drive with it. The sun was warm on his skin, and he had the odd thought that he’d dreamed Caerthalien had gone to war in winter …

  Then the sounds resolved, becoming not the sounds of Caerthalien’s war-camp, but the sounds of the Otherfolk. The soft roaring was not wind in the trees, but waves upon the shore. He opened his eyes, blinking half-dazzled at the westering sun. Someone had thrown a blanket over him as he slept, and the vast bulk of Keloit was curled up at his side, sleeping the deep and carefree sleep of the untroubled mind. He wondered when Keloit had returned from the south, and why.

  He sighed, sitting up and repressing a groan at the pull of muscles stiff and sore. He spared a reflexive moment of longing for the luxuries of a properly equipped campaign—not even Healers and wine and the luxurious meals little different from those served at the High Table of the Great Keep, but hot baths and soft beds and soft chamber-boots. It had been a privileged life, and he’d enjoyed it.

  But the cost was far too high. He frowned, wondering where the thought had come from. True, to live like the princes they were required the toil of an entire domain, all the wealth of those vast lands trickling, drop by drop, to the top. As Heir-Prince, he’d been as familiar with tax rolls and account books as he’d been with stables and training field. But there was something here he could not quite reason his way to: some flaw in the order of battle that would cost the war …

  Then he saw Bralros coming toward him and let the thought go.

  “Wake up, you lazy lump,” he said, prodding Keloit with his elbow. “Do you want to sleep the day away?”

  “Already have,” Keloit said, yawning. “And anyway, so have you. Got here about sunfall, and then we spent the whole night fighting, so I deserve a nap. Pelere sent me to keep an eye on you, to keep you out of trouble.”

  Runacar made an amused noise as he levered himself to his feet. At least she is still alive. “You can tell her you did an excellent job,” he said. “I slept very well.” But no. I dreamed, I remember that much. And nothing good. Small wonder, considering what he’d been chasing through the forest all night.

  “Bralros,” he said, as the Centaur stopped before him.

  “You say we can still win,” the Centaur said without preamble.

  “No,” Runacar answered. “I say we’re winning now.”

  Bralros looked unconvinced. “And if we continue as we are?”

  “Marching toward Daroldan Keep? We’ll be there in about a fortnight, I think. If they haven’t run by then, we’ll have to besiege them, and it will take about a Wheelturn to starve them out—a dehora, as you reckon it.”

  He’d hoped to make the Shore Domains run east, but the longer he fought, the less likely it seemed that they would.

  “And the attacks like the one last night?” Bralros asked.

  “Oh, they’ll continue,” Runacar said simply. “After a few more of them they’ll realize they can’t find the Gryphons, and change their tactics. But attrition is a good strategy, so I expect our losses will increase.”

  “Then how can you expect to win?” Bralros demanded in exasperation.

  “Because they can’t kill all of us before we get to the castel,” Runacar said flatly. The murderous exasperation he’d felt listening to Audalo had returned in full force. “But none of that matters now. Audalo intends to retreat, and I can’t stop him.”

  “And what would you have us do?” Bralros asked. “How can you ask hundreds—thousands—of people to die? And not even for victory, but for the chance to fight again somewhere else? It’s madness!”

  This is how they see you. For a reeling, unsettling moment, Runacar saw the Hundred Houses from the outside. As the Otherfolk saw them. Their round of endless, eternal, purposeless wars and deaths. It was true that few of the princes and the Lords Komen died of battle injuries—but few wasn’t none. There were always casualties. And the Otherfolk did not possess the Healing abilities of the Lightborn—they could Heal illness and injury, true, but not instantaneously. Most of th
eir magics were turned in directions Elvenkind had never thought of.

  “We can win,” Runacar repeated. “But not if we retreat now.” I could have been the greatest hero of our age. He wasn’t sure where the errant thought had come from. He ran his hands over his hair and then gestured for Bralros to wait.

  “They’re using Lightborn against us,” he said slowly, as the bones of a strategy began to lay themselves down in his mind. “Traditional doctrine states that if the enemy uses a resource against you successfully, you must find a way to deny him the further use of it. Bralros … how long would it take to evacuate all of Delfierarathadan—not just the south?”

  “Why?” Bralros asked suspiciously.

  Runacar smiled at him in unfeigned delight. “Because I want to burn it down.”

  * * *

  A moonturn. Four sennights. That was their best guess.

  None of his captains had wanted to listen to what Runacar had to say until Pelere and Keloit pointed out that the War Princes wouldn’t leave them alone just because they were leaving. That their losses would be equal whether they ran or stayed was clearly something the Otherfolk had not thought of.

  “Then what are we supposed to do?” Audalo demanded, flinging back his head and addressing his words to the sky. The sun was setting, but it wouldn’t be dark for hours yet, and the sky was filled with fire. At the edge of the tide line, pyres of the dead awaited burning. “You have destroyed us!”

  “I never said there would not be casualties,” Runacar said, keeping his voice even with an effort, his teeth clamped tightly shut. “This is war. There are casualties.”

  Audalo swung back toward him, gilded horns gleaming, and time seemed to stop. In that moment Runacar suddenly realized the army was not just on the verge of retreat, but of mutiny. By every metric Runacar had been raised to understand, he had been conducting a perfectly normal military campaign. The Otherfolk saw things differently. Looking back, he could suddenly see the thousand times one of them had asked him if things must be done this way. If it was necessary to take so much risk. If he couldn’t find some way to better protect them.

  The losses in the Battle of the Kraken had been terrible by Otherfolk standards, but the fact that the enemy had lost so much more had kept the army with him. The fire set in Delfierarathadan had angered all of them, but they had been focused on saving the Brightfolk, and part of that was continuing to march on Daroldan. But last night’s attack had been the final straw.

  The Otherfolk don’t understand war, a small voice inside him said. They understand raids, ambushes. Everything you did with the war band in the Western Reach was a matter of a sunturn or two, a sennight at most. And they came and helped as much for the novelty of it as because they wanted to learn war tactics. Most of them just want to be left alone. Of the half who can fight effectively, half won’t. It took Leutric moonturns to gather an army large enough to take the Shore—and that was after a decade of military successes conducted nearly without losses.

  “Our whole strategy hinges on scaring the War Princes so they’ll run, not just in slaughtering all of them. If that would be enough, it could easily be done. But this way is better.” Runacar spoke this time with more caution, feeling his way, watching the Otherfolk around him for clues.

  “You want to destroy Delfierarathadan,” Andhel said. “Make up your mind, won’t you? You’ve spent the last fortnight trying to save it.”

  “Not to save the forest. To save the people,” Runacar said. “I don’t give a damn about a bunch of trees, and if the Lightborn need them to cast spells, that’s all the more reason to turn them to ash.”

  He thought momentarily of the Shrine in Delfierarathadan. Of course no one—meaning no one Elven—had ever used it, because the Flower Forest was too dangerous to wander through. Would it survive the fire? Would the Silver Hooves exact revenge against those who destroyed it? He wondered if there was anyone here he could ask.

  He wondered if he cared.

  “Will you two stop butting heads like stags in the spring?” Pelere demanded crossly. Her shoulder and torso were wrapped bulkily in something that looked and smelled like seaweed, and she was entirely too pale, but she had insisted on being here for the debate. “Nobody wants to see any more people dead. And this might work.”

  “And it might not!” Andhel said vehemently. “All of you are so englamored by the idea of a Houseborn willing to take your hand and teach you all his Houseborn ways of killing that you never ask why!” Andhel cried. “Why is this Houseborn so different from every one of the others—how many times did one of us beg with our dying breath to be seen as something other than an abomination and been denied?”

  “Something, Andhel, you have never and will never experience.”

  Runacar blinked. He hadn’t been the one to speak, though certainly he’d said something more than similar to Andhel not so long ago. It was Frause, who now came muscling her way into the circle surrounding him.

  “It is true, what you say. True for Bearward, for Gryphon, for Centaur, for Minotaur—for many races of Folk. But not yours. It is true that the alfaljodthi treat their own kind worse than a Centaur treats a henhouse fox, and that the Woodwose are the children of the left-for-dead. But never would the Children of Stars deny you were people,” Frause said.

  Andhel inhaled as if she’d been struck, her eyes wide. Audalo put a comforting hand on her arm.

  “We would, though,” Runacar said, bowing slightly to Frause in acknowledgment. “Your Woodwose came from our Landbond, and we treat the Landbond like animals instead of people. Animals we don’t particularly like,” he added. “It’s why Vieliessar won, I think. She told them they were people and set them free.” From the corner of his eye, Runacar saw Andhel glaring at him with undisguised loathing.

  “And none of this addresses the point,” Bralros said argumentatively, folding his arms over his chest. He looked around the circle, meeting Audalo’s, Pelere’s, Keloit’s eyes. “I say ‘go’ before more of us die. Audalo says ‘go.’ Runacar says ‘stay’—and says we’ll be slaughtered if we go. Do we fight or do we run? And whichever we do, how do we stay alive?”

  “Their tactics are the same whether we stay or go,” Runacar said. “So our defense must be as well. I will help you all I can—but I will tell you now, they will cut you to pieces as you run and there is nothing I can do to change that. So tell me whether you mean to let me carry out King Leutric’s orders or not. He told me to give him the Shore. I still can.”

  “How?” Audalo asked wearily. His shoulders drooped with exhaustion.

  “You want the strategy that involves the least loss of Otherfolk life. Very well. If we burn Delfierarathadan to ash—we’ll still need to put out the fire in the south first, because I need the whole army here and we have to evacuate it before we burn it down—we will have destroyed the only source of Light—of magic—for the Western Shore Lightborn.”

  “But not of ours,” Frause said quietly. “The witches’ magic is a magic of taking, while ours comes from breath and bone, just as it always has. So we will have power and they will have none.”

  “And the Shrine?” Runacar asked. He didn’t want to. He didn’t want to hear the answer. But he refused to win by trickery and misdirection.

  “How can a fire burn a thing which exists beyond Time?” Frause asked, and now she sounded amused. “It will always be, whether it is buried in ash or at the bottom of the sea. Fear not, Elf-child. Your gods will still hear you.”

  “They haven’t listened yet,” Runacar muttered under his breath.

  “How does burning Delfierarathadan give us victory when the witches set it afire first?” Pelere asked. There was curiosity, not accusation, in her voice.

  “Because if we burn it—and we do that only after it is empty of Brightfolk—we destroy the entire remaining wealth of the Western Shore,” Runacar said. “You can’t defend a thing when the thing is gone. We’ve already destroyed their fields. They will have nothing left to fight
for, and very little left to fight with. They will have to flee, or starve.”

  He looked around the gathering. The Otherfolk closest to him he knew: they were his commanders, his students, people he’d known for Wheelturns. But in the way of the Otherfolk, they were not the only ones privy to this decision: the circle was ringed, and ringed again and again, by all those who wished to listen. Even the Ocean’s Own were clustered as near to the land as they could come, listening.

  “My companions, I apologize to you all,” Runacar said, bowing without irony. “I attempted to conduct this war as I would among the Houseborn, without taking into account your strengths and your desires. But as a learned general of my people once said: The purpose of war is to win. The purpose of this campaign is not to outlast Daroldan as it kills dozens of us each night. It is to make Daroldan run, so that in the end we can drive them to Areve, and then drive Areve and all its inhabitants through the Dragon’s Gate. That you are here today—alive—tells me it is possible to hide in Delfierarathadan. What you have done in the south tells me we can burn this forest without loss of Otherfolk life. I know that many of your folk refused to join this army that King Leutric created—will they come, not to fight, but to save Brightfolk lives? If they will, if this is what you choose, then the Shore shall be yours.”

  It was a performance, an act, a rallying speech such as he had given to the meisnes he had commanded more times than he could count, but it was also true. The best lies are made of truth, Elrinonion Swordmaster had said, over and over. And this was both. He would count anything short of mutiny as a victory today. And if he must retreat … well, he would learn all he could from the doing. He would not give up.

  “We cannot decide such a thing in a hora,” Audalo said at last, gesturing toward the westering sun. “So how do we survive the night?”

  “We spend it here at the waterline,” Runacar said instantly, striving to conceal his relief at discovering Audalo still sought his counsel. “We’re far enough from the edge of the forest that Rangers would have to leave the forest to shoot at us. I don’t think they will. In the open, we cannot be ambushed. Tomorrow … well, that depends on what you decide.”