The Lost Daughters

by Leigh Grossman

  Nemias had sent a few replacements to keep the machines working, and I had made sure everyone got a hot meal and at least a few hours sleep.

  Now, last night’s winch crew was rolling barrels of harrowflame into the center arm of a thrower. The side thrower arms, their buckets loaded heavily with iron spikes and old spearheads, had been winched down perpendicular to the center arm. I’d asked the engineers to cut the harrowflame fuses down to almost nothing, so the loaders cleared quickly once they secured the barrel in the throwing arm.

  “Go,” I said to the sergeant of engineers who nominally commanded the machine.

  “What elevation, ’captain?” the sergeant asked, puzzled. “It hasn’t been set.”

  “Don’t care,” I said. “Just shoot the thing.”

  “Don’t you care what we’re aiming at?”

  “As long as it clears the fortress, not really. Anything down there isn’t in our hands, and I don’t really care if it does any damage or not.”

  “Very well.” The sergeant restrained a reaction, and signaled to the trooper on the arm release.

  The barrel ignited almost the instant it left the thrower. It left a long, fiery trail in the sky over the fortress, then arced toward the causeway below. I didn’t bother walking to the edge of the battlement to see where it hit.

  “Again, sergeant.”

  “No elevation setting again?”

  “Where you have it is fine,” I answered “Just keep throwing those barrels.”

  “Seems like a waste,” he muttered. A little louder than he should have. I ignored the remark. Once more, the barrel left a fiery trail off into the darkness.

  “Again, sergeant. And keep your crew lively. They need to clear the arm the instant that barrel hits, not linger.”

  The engineer sergeant’s heart may not have been in it, but he gave the orders.

  On the fourth throw, the dragonet came.

  It swooped in just as the barrel settled in the arm and grabbed the harrowflame. In a heartbeat it would soar upward to drop the short-fused barrel on the fortress’s defenders.

  “Now!” I shouted.

  The winch crews released the two side arms. Iron spikes tore into the dragonet. The two arms snapped together pinning the creature just above the center arm, barrel still in its claws. Then the harrowflame exploded, filling the air with the smell of burning dragonflesh.

  The creature thrashed hideously. It made piteous noises as its chest and belly burned away. When the harrowflame’s intensity had eased to a safe level, I motioned soldiers forward to put the creature out of its misery.

  “Sorry about your rig, sergeant,” I said, looking at the sagging center arm, its struts bent from the heat of the harrowflame and the deadweight of the dragonet.

  “We’ll have it back in service tomorrow, ’captain.” The skepticism in his voice had been replaced by something closer to wonderment. I would have preferred a little imagination to either, but the engineer had done his job.

  “You do that, sergeant. We’ll see if we can find you another lizard to kill.”

  I doubted that would happen. The lingering smell of roasted lizard would discourage the creatures from coming too closely, I suspected. The fey didn’t fight like an army, but like a mob of magical creatures. They all wanted to drive the humans from the mountains, but that desire wouldn’t be enough to make them coordinate their efforts past the opening hours of the assault. When the defenders won, I knew, there would be no orderly retreat; the attacks would just gradually dwindle as individual fey stopped attacking.

  Until then, the attackers could be fierce and creative.

  A row of flames suddenly appeared well inside the defensive perimeter. The small houses across from the hospital were burning.

  “Cougars, to me!” I shouted. “They’re attacking the hospital.” I turned to the engineer as the roving patrol formed up quickly. “Get a messenger to Nemias to send help to the hospital. We’ll hold it till he gets soldiers there. And keep your crews pushing here.”

  Before the sergeant could respond, I had vanished toward the flames.

  * * * *

  The row of cottages burned fiercely, an unapproachable inferno. I saw the cottage where I had spoken to my wife, behind a wall of flames. I wondered if she’d been in it. Had my daughter’s whereabouts died with the woman I’d been ordered to love and then ordered to forget?

  Scanning the area, I saw no sign of attackers or survivors around the cottages. The fight seemed to have moved on to the hospital.

  The flames from the cottages reflected on the high glass windows of the hospital—at least from the panes that hadn’t been shattered by attackers. The hospital’s front door lay on the lawn in two pieces. I could hear sounds of fighting inside, but it seemed to have moved on from the entrance, where the sentries assigned to the building had died quickly. If the sentries are dead, who’s fighting?

  I ran through the door, followed closely by the roving patrol Cougars. The sentries had been killed by thrown darts. Two small fey lay in the rubble with them—pixies or something like them. Small enough to sneak in here and set fires and kill by surprise. But too small to tear a door off its hinges. There would be something else here, too.

  Signaling the squad leader, I pointed to the fallen pixies. The soldiers fanned out: No use making an easy target for throwing darts.

  Shouting came from the hall to our left. Two troopers took cover near the hallway entrance to act as rear guard and the rest followed me toward the shouting.

  A crowd of small fey was throwing darts at a makeshift barricade near the end of the hall. Beds and tables had been heaped to block the passage. The mattresses seemed to be absorbing most of the pixie darts. Defenders behind the barricade threw bottles, jars, and other improvised missiles back at the fey, along with whatever darts made it past the barricade.

  A heavy ironwing—not just fey, but an actual messenger of a god—lay face-down near the top of the barricade. An ironwing would have been strong enough to destroy the door, and probably to fly all of these pixies over the walls of Whitmount. But someone convalescing in the hospital had managed to put up a better fight than most of the soldiers defending the palace in the Drowned City had done. I wondered how they’d done it.

  We hit the pixies from behind. My blade cut one in half and beheaded another before the fey even realized they were under attack. Within moments the soldiers cut all of them down.

  “Save one alive if you can!” I shouted, probably a moment too late. I wondered if they could have told me which god had attacked the palace.

  Unless we had acquired a new enemy, the same god was behind our troubles tonight. The ironwing had the same tattoo I’d seen on the ones I’d killed in the Drowned City. I thought of the golden-eyed creature I’d encountered twice already. I’d taken it for fey, but perhaps it was a servant of the gods as well?

  With the fighting over, the soldiers moved from room to room checking for survivors and any lurking fey. I topped the barricade, looking more closely at the fallen ironwing. Something had eaten away most of its face and chest. I’d never seen quite that sort of wounds before—did godlings have some sort of vulnerability I didn’t know about?

  Somehow, I wasn’t surprised to see Guthre at the head of the defenders behind the barricade. She had a fresh cut on her face but it looked shallow. Her other injuries didn’t seem to be bothering her enough to keep her from fighting anymore, although that might change when the excitement of battle faded.

  The rest of the defenders were an odd lot of convalescing soldiers, hospital orderlies, even a couple of emaciated-looking former channelers, armed with whatever came to hand. Half a dozen defenders had fallen, and many hadn’t made it behind the barricade before being caught in their rooms, but more of the patients had survived than I expected.

  “You’re getting good at this,” I said to Guthre, pointing at the fallen ironwing. “How did you do it?”

  “They use acid to clean wounds and avoid infection
,” the scout answered. “They dilute it, but they have loads of the pure stuff.”

  “And you just happened to know where to find it, and how to throw up a barricade in a hurry.”

  “I like to know all the escape routes. Talye wouldn’t approve me to go back to duty so all I could do to fight the boredom was plan for all the contingencies I could think of. And make sure all the orderlies knew the plan. When the battle started they were pretty terrified about what would happen if we got attacked. I guess they hoped some of your trap-making skill rubbed off on me.”

  “Looks like some of it did,” I said. “Why the hallway?”

  “Most of the rooms had huge windows where the fey could hit us from two directions at once. The hallway was the only place people could get to quickly where we wouldn’t have to defend two sides.”

  I could see her shift balance. Guthre’s wounds bothered her more than she wanted to admit. I sat down on a clear section of the barricade with an unobstructed view of the hall, and motioned for her to sit beside me. I passed my flask to her as she sat, and Guthre took a long pull of yellowfruit brandy. It brought back memories of another wall, watching another battle.

  Sitting, and the brandy, seemed to help Guthre regain her equilibrium. She passed the brandy back to me and I took a pull from it.

  “So this is what you do all the time?” she asked. “I’m not used to standing and fighting. I’m used to running.”

  I nodded. “Sometimes there’s nowhere to run, though.”

  I passed the yellowfruit brandy back to her.

  “That’s true enough,” she said.

  “You know, I tried to run away once, too.”

  She looked at me quizzically. “Really? That’s not your reputation.”

  “I didn’t do a very good job at it, and it ended badly.” I waved at the carnage around us. “I’m a lot better at this part.”

  Guthre nodded and took another drink. “I’d heard that.”

  By now my squad of soldiers was starting to reassemble. Any moment reinforcements would arrive from Nemias, and we would be able to get back to other parts of the battle.

  “Can I ask you a favor?” said Guthre.

  “Sure.”

  “Can you help me get out of here, and back into action? They won’t clear me to return to the scouts yet, and I guess they’re right. But I don’t want to sit out the battle.”

  I glanced at the dead ironwing. “You haven’t exactly sat out the battle.”

  She dabbed at the cut on her face. “That’s different. They came here. I want something more useful, even if I can’t do front-line fighting yet.”

  I thought for a minute. Ketya had asked for a promise that Guthre was basically asking me to break now. But I did see a potential compromise. “How about this. You can be my aide, until you’re fully healed. That should be enough danger for you, and it will free a less-wounded soldier for front-line duty.”

  She seemed to ponder the idea. “You know I’ll be awful as an aide, right? I’m a scout.”

  “Would you rather stay in the hospital?”

  “Hey, I’m a quick learner. Aide sounds good to me.”

  “Get your stuff if you have any. We’ll be leaving as soon as the new guards are ready to take over. If we wait till they’re organized, some hospital administrator will want to wait before they let you go.”

  “Give me a minute to check my room and see if anything survived. Don’t leave without me.”

  * * * *

  By daybreak, the fighting had slowed. The battle showed signs of waning. I dismissed my exhausted squad of Mountain Cougars back to their barracks, sent word to Nemias where I could be found, and went back to my own quarters to get some sleep. I put Guthre in Ketya’s chambers, next to my own, and left word with the sentry to have me woken in six hours.

  When I awoke, I could see the pinks of sunset through my window. Nemias had countermanded my orders to the sentry and ordered that Guthre and I be allowed to sleep. Which meant, I knew, that what remained of the battle was mostly mopping up. Nemias had left word for me to find him after dinner, which gave me a little while to discuss the dilemma of the chancellor with my new aide. I faced, I suspected, some tough choices. Or at least choices I preferred not to make.

  “The problem,” I told Guthre, “is that we need magic to survive. No matter what it costs to get it. We can win battles like this one, but we can’t win wars this way.”

  “Seems like you’re doing pretty well at it. You took on giants, and those flying things.”

  “But that’s only part of a war. We can improvise traps only for so long—the fey are smart and will adapt. Already by the second day of this battle, the flying lizards were adapting and avoiding traps. But even if we could win this war, we lose without magic. The Central Alliance is attacking at the same time as the fey, and even if we beat both of them, most of Ananya will starve without magic to keep the farms and greenhouses going, and to ship the food to where it’s needed. Even if the magic came back tomorrow, we’d have famines next winter, I think.”

  “So how do we get it back?” I doubted any of this was new to Guthre, but she played the role of sounding board willingly.

  “That’s the problem,” I said. “As far as I can tell, the only one who knows exactly what happened is the chancellor, and he isn’t telling.”

  “So we need to make him tell.”

  “We don’t just need the story, we need the truth. He could spin us off in a wrong direction without us even knowing. And even once we do get the truth out of him, we still need to figure out how to undo it.”

  “Ketya would know how to fix it, I bet,” Guthre said. Then her face fell. “But she wouldn’t know if her father was lying to her. She believes everything he says.”

  “That’s the problem,” I said. “I think we can get him to tell the truth, but not if we leave him here. I think the only way to get the truth out of him may be to give him what he wants, at least in part. And I think he knows it.”

  “You mean, let him go? How would that help?”

  “I mean, bring him with us to wherever the problem can be fixed. Then if we have to, let him go after the magic is back.”

  “Would he agree to that? Even if he did, wouldn’t he just scheme to get us killed so he could escape without having to give us anything?”

  “I’m sure he’d try,” I said. “Whatever he planned on, I don’t think he can do it without help, though.” I explained to her about the Alliance soldiers with the packs and frames in the palace, and the Alliance ships that he apparently had planned to escape on during the night the godlings attacked.

  “So if I understand correctly,” she said, after I had answered her other questions about the massacre in the Drowned City and the journey to where she had met us near the lake, “you are proposing that we free the most wanted prisoner in Ananya from his cell and escort him out of his prison, in return for which we get what, exactly?”

  I’d never had an aide who wasn’t the least bit afraid of me before.

  “It may come to that,” I reluctantly concluded. “Prison and the threat of trial are a club—but we may need to offer him a way out, too. We’re not letting him loose unless he tells us everything first. And he needs to convince us that he can undo the damage before he goes anywhere.”

  “And if he doesn’t? Or if he says no?”

  “Then Burren gets to have the trial he wants, and then he gets to toss the chancellor off the walls. But only the chancellor can give us the information we need. Along with Ketya’s knowledge of the Talisman of Truce.”

  “The problem is getting that information out of him. You have to admit Burren’s solution makes a certain amount of sense,” Guthre said.

  I nodded. “Burren’s solution does have a certain elegance, yes. Believe me, I would love nothing more than to kill that man.”

  “Maybe.” Guthre looked skeptical. “Actually, he’s the only person I’ve ever felt like you were reluctant to kill. You would have been happy
to wring my neck yourself if you thought it would have bagged you one more giant, and you like me. But the chancellor’s always been off limits for you.”

  I started to disagree, then realized she was right. “I suppose he has been off limits. I’ve known him for a long time. We have a...complicated relationship.”

  Guthre snorted. “See, that’s the problem. This isn’t complicated. ‘Talk or die.’ You need to uncomplicate your relationship with him if you want this to work.”

  “You know, I think you’re right.”

  “Of course I’m right. That’s why you picked me for your aide. I’m a terrible liar and I hate politics. But I’m a good listener, and a good scout.”

  “Yes, you are,” I said. “And I think I know what we need to do now. Get ready to leave.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Dinner first. Then a visit with Captain-general Nemias. After that, I think we will pay a visit to the chancellor and his daughter.”

  “Sounds good,” she said, turning to the table where her knives sat.

  “One more thing,” I said as I turned to go back to my own room.

  “Yes?”

  “Bring everything. We may not be coming back.”

  * * * *

  The talk with Nemias went significantly more smoothly than I had anticipated. It was good to have a friend in command, and someone who had known me for years and utterly trusted my judgment.

  I had expected to have to lay out the case for what I planned, as I had with Guthre, but that never happened. First Nemias gave me some not-unexpected news when Guthre and I entered his chamber. Geriald and Guthre were there with Nemias, but no one we couldn’t speak freely in front of.

  “Sefa didn’t make it, Sperrin. I’m sorry.”

  “What a waste.” What else was there to say. “I wish the last time we spoke had gone better.” I shook my head. “The times before that, too.”