“What will you do now?” Aliver asked.
“Is that for me to say?”
Instead of answering, Aliver found a new question. “Barad, do you remember that I spoke to you when you were still in the mines of Kidnaban?”
The man’s stone eyes managed to convey surprise. “Of course. Hearing your voice changed my life, Aliver. You gave me purpose. Before I had the words to speak against tyranny, I borrowed yours and learned to speak by juggling them on my tongue. The queen almost took that away from me. Under her spell, I came to doubt that I had ever heard your voice. I came to doubt many things.”
“And I had forgotten it myself,” Aliver said, “but I have it all back now. I reached out to you because I knew you were the people’s conscience. I needed you then. It was good to know that you were there in the mines, among the people, saying all the brilliant, rebellious things you’ve always said. I still need you, but after what’s been done to you I have no right to ask anything of you. Go, if you have a mind to. Do and say what you will all across the world.”
A group of soldiers strode by. They bowed their heads to Aliver as they passed. Barad watched them until they began to climb the gangplank to the transport. “I don’t know where I would go or what I would say. I have my tongue back, but I am tired, Aliver. I don’t have it in me to harangue the masses anymore, not after the speeches I made for your sister. If I were younger, I would go with you. I’d listen to you speak.”
“I have a different idea,” Aliver said, nervous now as he approached the second question he wanted to ask Barad. “If you want to serve the nation without having to shout above masses or wield a sword… how about having a smaller group of pupils? You could stay here with Aaden and Shen.”
Barad pulled his head back, studying Aliver as if he needed to adjust his angle to see him clearly. “Aliver…”
“Educate them. Speak your mind and tell them every wise thing you know. Explain to them the world as you understand it, so that they can be rulers with their eyes open-and with their hearts and their consciences at the centers of their beings always. Or help them learn to be something other than rulers, if it comes to that.”
“Do you mean this?” Barad said after a moment.
“Teach them to think differently. Help them make a better future for themselves and Acacia.”
“Shouldn’t you do this yourself?”
With all my heart I want that, but I am dead and cannot do it. “If I had the time, I would love to, but I may not have that time. If I don’t, will you do it? I have already written a testament giving you complete power over their education.”
“And what of the mothers of these children? What would they think of their children being educated by a commoner, a mine worker, a rabble-rousing rebel, a man of-”
“They both approved. Corinn did before she left. Benabe you can ask yourself. Mena, I will tell with my own lips. And Dariel, he may not be of this world anymore. He would approve of this, though. You see? Nobody will stop what you begin.”
The man’s gaze drifted from Aliver. It seemed to lose itself somewhere in the middle distance of the green depths at their feet. “Corinn approved?” he asked, but Aliver knew it was not so much a question as a statement, one he needed to test out loud to believe. His eyes ground back to the prince’s. “I would not lie to them. Not about anything. If I teach, I will teach them that there is a better way than that of monarch and subject. I never believed in that system, Aliver. I still don’t.”
“I know,” Aliver said. “I know what you think about such things. Much of it we are of one mind about.”
Barad shook his head. He spoke with an almost angry edge to his voice, almost as if he had not heard Aliver. “You cannot ask this of me and then tie my tongue. I would swallow it first. If I am their tutor, I will dive with them into the royal records. I will show them what your line has done and how. There will be no secrets. If we find horrors, I will hold their hands and face those horrors with them, but I will not lie to them.”
“I know.”
“Do not tell me that they are only children. War happens to children. Slavery happens to children. The ravages of corruption happen to-”
“I know better than most that children deserve the truth of the world, explained as they can handle it, and reexamined as they grow. I would do the same with them myself. I swear I would. But our history is not all horrors. It’s still being written. If you show them what we have done, make sure to show them the things that will make them proud. Let them have that as well. And be kind to them. I know you will, but there is nothing harder for a monarch than to be asked to give back what he thought was his. This new world that you and I want so much, if it comes, it will not be easy for them. I had thought once that I would oversee changes myself. Now I see my work was not about me. It was about helping set the stage for them. I haven’t done it all that well, but I’m still trying. Here, please take this for me. Keep it safe.” He pulled a chain from around his neck and held it for Barad to take. A key dangled from it. “Keep it for the children, for Mena. When the time comes to offer it to them, you’ll know it.”
Barad closed his large hand over the chain. His expression deepened. It grew lined and grave even though his stone eyes remained still at the center of it. “You… you are not coming back. Aliver, there is a pall around you. Since the coronation, it’s been on you and the queen both. I thought it was just sadness, but it’s…”
“It’s the pall of war,” Aliver said. He forced his smile to look genuine. “I may as well be cautious. That’s all. I may as well leave the children in the hands of a tutor like you. That way, I know they will not face the future blind. You will do it?”
The instant he had the man’s affirmation, Aliver bid him farewell. He could look not a moment longer into Barad’s stone eyes. Aliver turned away as if his mind had moved on. It hadn’t, though. Moments later, though he was aboard the transport, talking with Kelis, shaking hands and patting backs and speaking to the crowd, he fought to contain the emotion of the arrangement he had just made.
And then, back on the pier, he took to the saddle on Kohl’s back and looked across at Ilabo on Tij, and at Dram on Thais a little farther away. Outfitted for war, they looked like characters of living myth. The dragons wore plates of armor kept in place by a snug lacework of cords. They went laden with packs and supplies, with swords and crossbows strapped into place. The riders wore chain mail tunics like Aliver. As a final touch they pulled snug helmets fashioned to replicate the heads of the mounts they rode. Aliver tugged on a black helm that flared behind his ears in imitation of Kohl’s crest feathers.
They all rose into the air at the same moment, propelled upward on the cheers of the onlookers. Kohl roared and Tij answered. Thais corkscrewed just above the heads of the crowd, a move that spurred them to even greater applause. For a few moments Aliver forgot the weight of responsibility and loss on him. The scene was too glorious not to fill him with pride. Surging into the air above a beauty of an island, climbing up the terraced levels of the city. Everywhere people waving and shouting for them. Over the palace itself, he saw Shen and Aaden at the balcony of the upper terraces, Rhrenna just behind them. He swooped past them with Kohl tilted to one side so that Aliver hung toward them in the saddle, one arm outstretched as if he were touching them over the distance.
For the first time in his second life, Prince Aliver Akaran went to war.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
Breaking camp after the first battle had been a terrible task for Mena’s army. They worked through the night, taking no rest, laboring in clothes and armor still smeared with gore. They tended the injured as they went, piling them-the living, the dying, and the dead-on sledges that they dragged toward the broken mangle of shore ice. The Scav had scouted and improved a half-submerged route that proved much more efficient than climbing up and down over the slabs and crevices. Trusting them with a completeness that would have been unimaginable a fortnight earlier, the Acacians followed
their lead. They did not stop until they were all out on the frozen ground once more.
Even then the Scav did not rest. They went back into the labyrinth of ice to destroy the route and to set their traps. It was fortunate that they did. Watching from a distance as that Auldek station plunged into the water filled Mena with exhilaration. If only they could have dropped all of them into the depths, let the water and ice cover them, and forget about them. If only they would vanish like the phantoms of a nightmare.
They would not, of course, do any such thing. They rolled and marched, hauled and flew ever onward. They ate each passing mile and bayed to do battle the whole time. Mena refused to meet them again on the field. The Acacians backed across the glacier-scoured contours of the landscape, defensive, cautious, devious. All of it clearly drove the Auldek crazy.
For a time they flew into the Acacian camp on freketes, ignoring the rain of arrows that always greeted them. Speaking accented Acacian, they hurled insults. They implored the Acacians to fight like true soldiers, threatened that they were only making their nation’s fate worse by their cowardice. The freketes leaped about, crushing people with their feet and snatching others up in their fists. They bit chunks of flesh out of them and spat the meat on the ground. One Auldek leaped from his mount’s back and went running through the camp, hacking down anyone he could. If others had followed his example, the slaughter would have been horrible. Fortunately, the rampaging Auldek caught a crossbow bolt in the face. He went down clawing at it. He rose a moment later. His face blood-splattered, he tugged at the arrow as his body jerked and convulsed, unable to pull the bolt free. He managed to climb atop his frekete and took to the air again. After that, such attacks grew less frequent. Heartening, perhaps, except that not even a bolt right through the skull managed to kill these fiends.
That was why Mena pressed her bizarre form of warfare in every way and shape she could imagine, adjusting it daily as the circumstances changed. She once flew a mad gauntlet over the Auldek camp, dodging and dipping, cutting at sharp angles to avoid the freketes pursuing her. Behind her she trailed a falling snow of sorts, hundreds of short letters on small bits of paper, blowing out of the pack bags she had flipped open. Each note contained a personal entreaty to the quota slaves to desert the Auldek and come over to their own people. Each of them signed with the writer’s name, written in their native tongue, with the invitation to bring the note across to the Acacians and be personally welcomed home.
As far as she could tell, the freketes did not often fly at night. She knew they could because one had done so on the night of the Scav’s first fiery attack, but they had never again dropped out of the dark, something Mena had feared. Instead, she owned the dark skies herself. On a night of low cloud she flew in through the mist over their encampment. She circled several times, testing, on edge for the beat of any wing other than Elya’s. Nothing.
An hour later she returned with Perrin dangling from Elya’s claws. They both dropped to the ground well inside the Auldek encampment. By the time Elya swooped back in to retrieve them, they had slit the throats of five sleeping watchmen and had tossed a sack full of poisoned meat out to steam on the frozen ground. Food for lions, she hoped.
Nor was there anyone in the air to answer her an hour later when she dropped a flaming kettle filled with pitch into one of the pens that held the antoks. She watched the large backs of the creatures from above, the tiny glimmer of the wick falling with the pot. When it hit the ground, the pitch must have splashed out underneath their legs. It ignited in one large sheet beneath them. She stayed above long enough to verify the deadly furnace of kicking, bellowing creatures that she had created. One of them crashed through the pen wall, and in the next instant the creatures were rampaging through the camp, all sizzling hair and flesh.
Confusion. Damage. It must be taking a toll on them. Mena despised it. There was no honor in an assassin’s tactics, in making war on animals and supplies. A strange thing to a call a war, really, this running skirmish through the arctic. It was nothing Mena had trained for or read about or studied. Not a style of fighting she had ever imagined. Fighting was not even the right word for it, but she did not know what else to call something so deadly. So desperately important. When she doubted her tactics, she had only to think of the lives of her soldiers to remember why she did these things. She had as many reasons for each treachery as she had souls in her army. For them, she would do anything.
Ten days since that first battle. Hundreds of lives lost. The ranks of the injured and incapacitated growing. Mena could not claim that they were winning, but they were not losing either. Since not losing was about as positive a situation as she could envision, she kept her people focused on the small victories they were accumulating. Each slave warrior they killed, any animal they lamed, every carriage or station they crippled, all the delays and inconveniences they created: small victories. On the rare occasions when they killed an Auldek: jubilation. Howlk had died; the frekete Nawth had been taken out of the war. Things that had seemed impossible could be accomplished. If they could keep doing what they were doing… If Aliver and his army ever arrived…
F or the second time, Mena found herself standing inside a ring of her officers, interrogating a bedraggled, stammering, nearly frozen Rialus Neptos. This time, however, he brought a companion. The woman stood beside Rialus, unflinching under the men’s scrutiny. She wore a full body suit of some sort, so thick it would have hidden her completely, except that in the relative warmth of the tent she had pulled off her hood and stripped back the top of it. She stood with her shoulders and arms exposed, her chest covered by a thin tunic that showed both the sweat around her neck and the outline of her breasts. Meinish, if ever a woman was: gray eyed, delicately featured, with hair so blond it seemed to light the room with its own luminescence. She searched the collected faces with her eyes, touching on Mena briefly before moving on. Her gaze caught on Haleeven.
“Who are you?” Mena asked.
Rialus had been trying to say something, but he jerked to a halt. “Her?” he asked.
“Yes, but I asked her, not you.”
“Sh-she doesn’t speak much Acacian. Maybe none. I don’t know. I never-”
“Meinish, then? Haleeven, speak to her.”
He did, and she answered readily enough, her voice calm and deliberate. After a few exchanges, Haleeven said, “She wishes to join us. She was a slave to the Auldek, she says, but only a slave. Never willingly your enemy. She was like Rialus, trapped by the Auldek.”
Rialus ceased trembling. His head turned slowly to the woman, and he stared at her. He could not have looked more perplexed.
“She said that?” Edell asked.
“She did.”
“What’s her name?”
Haleeven asked her. “Fingel. She has served Rialus Neptos since he arrived in Avina, all the way to here.”
“We’ll have to ask her a thing or two about him, then,” Edell said, fixing Rialus with a dry, hostile gaze.
The two Meins talked a little longer. Haleeven screwed up his mouth at something she said. It looked like a grimace, but as he held the expression it showed itself as a smile. “She claims that Rialus is a good man.”
“She has reason to think we’d doubt it?”
“He told her as much himself. Rambled on often, even talked in his sleep sometimes.”
Rialus actually could look more perplexed, after all. His face reddened, and it was not from the warmth in the tent.
“I really look forward to talking with her at length,” Edell said.
Mena could see that there was something more behind her facade. “What else? She has more to say, I think.”
Fingel fixed her eyes on Mena for the first extended time. She listened to Haleeven’s translation and deliberated her answer by pressing it between her thin lips for a moment. When she answered, Rialus, obviously understanding her Meinish, sat down on a campstool. He stared at her with an expression of complete mystification.
&n
bsp; “She represents a contingent of domestic slaves,” Haleeven said. “A few hundred of them who want to desert the Auldek. She is a scout to find out if they would be received kindly. She’s asking for refuge among us. They’ll be coming tonight. She wants to make sure that they are not attacked when they approach.”
“She wants us not to attack a few hundred figures walking into our camp in the middle of the night?” Mena asked. “That could be a very foolish thing for us to do.”
Haleeven translated. Fingel dug around inside her body suit for a moment, and brought her hand out with a note pinched in her fingers. She offered it to Haleeven and then spoke at length. Haleeven listened a long time before offering his translation. “She says she found this, one of the notes you dropped among them. She’s not the only one who hid them and began hoping they were true. She says they will fight any way they can. Those who can will put poison in their masters’ kettles. They’ll take a few souls out of them. You asked for them to trust you in these notes; she asks that you trust her now as she returns it to you.”
The Meinish chieftain handed Mena the note. She rolled it over in her fingers. She let it look like she had to weigh the hazards carefully, but really she was hiding a swell of euphoria. This was what she wanted. This was the beginning of it. If some came now, more would follow soon. “Haleeven, tell her she is very welcome among us. They all are. We’ll accept every one of them home. When we have a moment of peace to do so, we’ll drop to our knees and ask forgiveness of them. I mean that literally.”
“Won’t she and Rialus be missed today?” Perrin asked.
“The other slaves will cover for them today. Say Rialus is sick, keep the door to his room closed. They won’t be found out today, and tonight they flee.”
“Only a couple of hundred?” Edell asked.
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