The Emerald Crown (The Red Sword Trilogy Book 3)

by Michael Wallace

  “How long will your sorcery hold?” Marissa asked.

  “At least an hour. Maybe longer.”

  “I want a better look,” Marissa said. “And maybe Geord gets his shot.”

  Sir Geord, the third member of their scouting company, had brought a crossbow in case an opportunity should present itself. He hoped to fell the one-handed brute named Hamid who’d taken over as captain of the gray marauders after Bronwyn’s final death. The Veyrian pasha would make another excellent target, should they spot him.

  “What about the wards or runes, or whatever you call them?” Marissa asked. “The dark acolytes will be busy protecting the camp, right?”

  “Not in this rain, no, and not with this little time. They can only have just arrived.”

  Nathaliey glanced at the trench, where the Veyrians stood knee deep in muddy water, doing as much bailing as digging. It was chilling work, and the enemy would be lucky if half their army didn’t come down with consumption.

  This wasn’t the briny rain of the Veyrian coast, the cloudbursts of the central plains that gave way to brilliant sun, or even one of the not-infrequent rains that kept Aristonia green and her forests lush. It was a steady, relentless drumbeat of fat drops that turned roads to mud, swelled rivers until they overflowed their banks, and drove crofters and herders indoors. Day after rainy day. They’d spotted a few miserable sheep clumped on grassy hills in the barony of Deepenhelm, but otherwise the countryside seemed deserted.

  It had already been raining for days when Captain Wolfram’s Blackshields fought a brief skirmish against a small Veyrian army along the banks of the Thorft south of Deepenhelm Town, which the enemy had sacked after a brief siege. Wolfram had been on the road twenty miles to the west, waiting for a band of twenty paladins carrying much needed supplies, when Nathaliey’s seeker found the enemy lingering in the ruins, weighed down with plunder. Wolfram rushed to engage before the enemy could escape.

  The two sides fought a short, sharp engagement, and Nathaliey won her greatest victory. The enemy had been retreating north, and word had it that Toth was sending reinforcements from his base in Estmor, where his new highway entered Eriscoba. Desperate to stop the two enemy forces from joining, Wolfram sent Nathaliey, Marissa, and Geord north, and she had succeeded in bending the appearance of the road. The enemy had wandered up a sheep path and were bottled onto a bluff overlooking the river. It was a defensible position, but one from which they could not easily escape.

  The only question was whether the marauders had slipped the trap or if they, too, were with the foot soldiers. The presence of so many horses seemed to indicate that Hamid’s forces had remained behind as well. That was both a threat and an opportunity.

  Nathaliey allowed herself a moment of pride as the three of them picked their way up the hillside. Even with the passage of so many hundreds of feet, this sheep trail could hardly be mistaken for the Deepenhelm road, which was flat and had been cleared of ruts to handle the traffic of merchants to the Arvada wool fair. The Veyrians had been marching north, trying to stay out of the pincer movement of Wolfram’s paladins, when the road seemed to veer suddenly up this hillside, through muddy streams and around boulders, yet it hadn’t occurred to the enemy that they’d gone astray until it was too late.

  That was the power of her magic. Between this example—more trickery than brute force magic, admittedly—and her shared victory with Markal against Bronwyn’s marauders, she felt more confident of her ability to defeat King Toth’s dark acolytes, even though Markal had returned to the gardens and left her alone on the barbarian side of the Dragon’s Spine.

  Still, she was cautious as she led Marissa and Geord forward. The enemy might not have laid wards in the mud and rain, but they could have made simpler traps like mud-concealed holes with sharpened staves at the bottom, and it fell on her to sniff them out.

  The trench was only partially dug, and so she was surprised there weren’t more soldiers guarding the footpath that had led the enemy to this dead end, but she supposed they were busy trying to make camp to get protection from the rain. She counted five soldiers: two standing in the rain and three squatting beneath a piece of canvas stretched over poles to form an open tent.

  A physician was binding one man’s foot wound—an apparent casualty of the morning’s fight, when the Veyrians, finally recognizing the dead end, had tried to break free of the hill where she’d sent them. In fact, all of the men in the tent seemed injured. That left two legitimate guards.

  Nathaliey turned to her companions, who were shadowy forms behind her, like streaks of rain on a windowpane. She picked out Marissa with difficulty, and leaned into the other woman’s space, where the lean barbarian face with her blue eyes and aquiline nose finally came into focus.

  “Where are the rest of the Veyrians?” Nathaliey asked. “Up the bluff? The entrance is practically unguarded.”

  Marissa spoke into her ear. “Whatever the reason, we can’t let the chance pass us by. I’m going back to tell the captain.”

  Indeed, if the whole mass of Blackshields came charging up the hill, they’d overrun the trench and be into the heart of the enemy camp in an instant. Even a raid would be devastating. They could wipe out the wounded and the trench diggers and make off with all of the marauders’ horses without losing a single paladin. It wouldn’t be easy charging the hill in this rain, which was presumably why the enemy had risked leaving the entry to their camp undefended while they . . . what, exactly?

  “Go tell Wolfram,” she told Marissa, again leaning in to speak directly into the woman’s ear. “My magic will shield you until you’re down.”

  “And you?”

  “I want a closer look at the camp.”

  “Be careful.”

  “They won’t catch me,” Nathaliey said.

  “I’m more worried that you’ll be up here when we return.”

  “A quick look around, and then I’ll be back down the hill.”

  “Good. There’s going to be bloodshed, and you don’t want to be in the middle of it.”

  The two paladins fell back, and soon vanished from sight. Still moving warily, Nathaliey continued past the tent, taking note of another makeshift pen holding horses, and stacks of supplies in stolen wagons, some covered with oiled cloths, others exposed to the elements. If it weren’t for the rain, she might have been tempted to hurl a fireball and flee. Let the Veyrian army hold out in a siege without their food and gear. But most likely, a fireball would fizzle, as damp as the wagons were.

  Nathaliey had reached the top before she found the rest of the enemy force on the edge of the bluff. The Thorft curved around the hill below, overflowing its banks and flooding the surrounding farmland on the far shore, but the Veyrians were safe enough roughly eighty feet above the water, so she couldn’t figure out what they were doing clustered near the edge.

  The Veyrians had pressed through the mountains with barely three hundred footmen and a couple of dozen gray marauders. Another company of marauders had waited for them in Eriscoba, and for a time, the man who’d taken command made a series of brutal raids through the free kingdoms that forced Wolfram to respond. Few villagers survived these raids, but they all spoke of the cruelty of the one-handed man who called himself Hamid of Veyre.

  If the Eriscoban kingdoms had immediately gathered an army to oppose the foot soldiers while Wolfram’s Blackshields hunted down the marauders, they might have put an end to the threat from the south, but the response was weak; those earls, barons, and kings who had the will to fight had already sent their best forces north to Estmor. Three weeks passed between the battle when Bronwyn fell and when Wolfram at last gathered a force strong enough to press matters.

  Still wary of traps, and watching now for the dark acolytes who’d remained a shadowy presence among the enemy force, Nathaliey continued toward the edge of the bluff to have a closer look. Hamid stood with a small knot of marauders directing regular soldiers, who pulled at ropes dangling over the edge. When the soldiers
flagged, the big gray-faced captain shouted at them to work harder. Muscles strained, men grunted. Nathaliey leaned over and saw men clinging to the ropes.

  Her first thought was that Hamid was attempting to escape by lowering his army from the bluff to the river. Did he mean to swim across, abandoning horses, wagons, food, and supplies? And what of the soldiers who couldn’t swim? Veyre may be a coastal port, but a good half of the army hailed from khalifates of the dusty plains, and surely those men wouldn’t be able to cross the swirling, flood-swollen river.

  But when she edged closer, she saw that they weren’t lowering troops, they were hauling them up. Flat, barge-like boats poled downstream, laden with men wearing the robes and tunics of Veyrian soldiers. When they reached the base of the hill, men on board grabbed ropes dangled from above, while others held the barges against the current as those above hauled them up.

  The boats were strung up the river as far as she could see, each laden with men. If they all came up, it would more than double Hamid’s forces. Give him six hundred or a thousand men to accompany his marauders and it would take a full-size army to root them out.

  Nathaliey searched for the dark acolytes, knowing they were behind this somehow. She couldn’t feel Vashti or his companion, but they had to be near. There was no other way but via magical means that Hamid’s force had made contact with Toth’s army in Estmor to arrange for reinforcements.

  As soon as that thought occurred to her, a darker, more niggling doubt entered her mind.

  Are you sure you sent them here? What if they intended to come to this bluff all along, and from here get their reinforcements?

  No, surely there were better spots to meet the barges. And better means than ropes. It was a tedious, exhausting process doing it by hand, and it would take hours to complete the task. Enemy commanders must have sent these reinforcements days ago, and only when Nathaliey tricked Hamid into bottling his forces atop the bluff had they improvised this method.

  By now, Wolfram would be getting Marissa’s news about the poorly defended enemy camp. Give him another half hour to arrange his forces, and a half hour to come storming up the hillside from the Deepenhelm road. How many men could Hamid raise from the river by then?

  Already, the first men to arrive were swapping out at the ropes and leaving their exhausted comrades to fall back toward the ditch and palisade. Give it an hour . . . she estimated fifty or a hundred soldiers might be manning the barricades. Plus four or five hundred up here by the time the Blackshields broke through, not the much smaller force Wolfram would be expecting. The attack would fail. Frustrated, Nathaliey prepared to return and warn him to call off the attack.

  Hamid shouted, his voice rising above the rain and the grunt and heave of men pulling ropes. One of the rope lines was struggling, and suddenly the waterlogged lip of the hill gave way, and mud slid toward the river, carrying men with it. Mud, rocks, and men thundered down on the barge, whose occupants could only cower under the barrage. Several men went overboard and disappeared into the churning river, and the boat itself lost contact with the ropes above and drifted downstream.

  Hamid’s warning had come just in time for those holding the rope, and most of the soldiers kept their grip, even as three men dangled over the edge, screaming for help. Ignoring the lost boat, the Veyrian sergeants and the marauder captain got them hauled up top before any more could be lost, and the operation continued apace, dashing Nathaliey’s hopes that the loss of a boat and several men would force Hamid to call a halt to the operation.

  But fresh hope rose in her chest as she took in the whole scene. Hundreds of men above crowded the edge of the cliff. The barge-like troop transports gathered below waiting their turn at the ropes. And it had rained so heavily and for so many days that a man getting too close to the edge risked setting off a small mudslide that would hurl him eighty feet into the river, where he would most likely drown.

  Meanwhile, Nathaliey knew of a spell that could make the earth shake. It wasn’t an earthquake, nothing to swallow a castle wall like the master commanded, but enough to throw men from their feet.

  What would happen if she gave the hillside a little jostle? She didn’t need an earthquake today, not when the heavens had already liquefied the ground. All she needed was to force what had already begun. And then, when the hillside began to crumble, the weight of several hundred men standing so close to the edge would pull them down, throw them into the river, and obliterate half a dozen boats and their passengers at the same time. Even better, the marauders were in the thick of the action, working at heaving up a massive ballista from the river, and in the part of the hill most likely to collapse.

  Her heart beating with excitement, Nathaliey checked her concealing spell and edged closer to the men working the ropes. She needed to get close enough to channel her power into the ground, instead of spilling it all crossing the distance, but not so close as to send herself plummeting to the river along with the enemy.

  By the time she stopped, she was close enough to hear the muttering Veyrian soldiers with rope-burned hands cursing the marauder captain in low voices whenever he stalked away from them to rage at someone else deemed not working hard enough. Her spell held, and nobody had noticed her; if they looked her way, they would only see streaks of falling rain.

  Nathaliey exposed her hands and placed them palms down. She closed her eyes and thought through the incantation to make sure she could get the words. Power rose from deep within her body, and blood came to her pores. She spoke the words.

  A surge of magical power flowed from her hands and pressed into the ground. It burrowed into soft mud and continued down for several feet, where the soil was still waterlogged, but compacted. And there it gave a shake. If not for all of the water in the soil, it would have dissipated within a few feet, but the force of it going off down there was like a rock heaved into a pond, and a giant ripple radiated outward.

  Men screamed, and Nathaliey opened her eyes to see the hillside sloughing away. Soldiers holding ropes and others recently hauled up from below flailed in the air as formerly solid-seeming ground disappeared beneath their feet. Others tried to scramble back, but the hillside was collapsing all around them, even as the first mud and rocks and men crashed down on the enemies below.

  And then, just as Nathaliey prepared to run for her life, the mudslide stopped. Emerging from the mud was a ledge of stone, bedrock which supported the entire hill. Some more mud and debris slid around the side of it and rained over the edge, but most of the bluff remained intact. Some ten or twelve men had gone over, and though she was no longer in a vantage from which to see the river, she imagined at least one of the boats must have been hit and hit hard. But almost the entirety of Hamid’s army was intact. Meanwhile, the air vibrated with the powerful effects of her magic.

  Mixed blood and rainwater dripped from her hands, and she took a few steps backward, thankful that the marauders—including their captain—were so intent on getting the men to safer, more stable ground that nobody seemed to have noticed that she was the cause of it all, not the rain. She hadn’t achieved the victory she’d hoped for, but she’d given them a setback.

  If she hurried, there was plenty of time to slip from the enemy camp and warn Wolfram before he mounted a disastrous attack. Hopefully she wouldn’t need any more magic; she’d exhausted her strength.

  Nathaliey turned around and came face-to-face with a dark acolyte. His face was gaunt, eyes sunken in their sockets. His mouth turned up at the corners in a cruel smile.

  The dark acolyte held up his hands, and a fountain of sorcery flowed from his palms. Nathaliey barely had time to brace herself before it struck.

  Chapter Four

  When Markal first parted ways with Nathaliey, he’d hoped that in three weeks he’d be in his cottage on the woodland path. Sleeping in his own bed, his belly filled with bread and stew, and warmed with wine from the vineyards. All the problems of the war, the king’s highway, and the missing red sword would still be out the
re to confront him, but he’d be in the company of Memnet the Great, Narud, Chantmer, and the rest, with the stout magical fortress of the gardens to protect him.

  That first day after Nathaliey left him had been challenging, traveling as he was on an empty stomach, but then he met some of Wolfram’s reserve force in the mountains, who gave him travel cakes and hard cheese. Strengthened by the food, he’d hoped to get through the Spine in two days, descend from the foothills to the plains in four or five more days, and then take another week to get home if he could secure a horse, and in two weeks if not. Either way, he’d be in the gardens before the rising of the twin dragon constellations marked the solstice.

  Instead, it was the afternoon of the twentieth day of his return journey, and he was still in the mountains, picking his way slowly, laboriously north. He’d tried to descend three different times, only to be spotted and hunted by griffin riders. The only good thing about the griffins was that their relentless patrols seemed to have confined the Veyrians to the lowlands; whenever he got a view of the eastern plains, he could see villages burning and armies on the march, kicking up clouds of dust from the drought-choked khalifates.

  Markal was attempting another descent when griffin riders spotted him from above and chased him into the deepest part of the mountain forest. Soon, a dozen or more griffins were screaming above the trees, waiting for him to poke his head out so they could tear it off.

  The Harvester take them. He had to figure out a way down. But how?

  Thanks to their relentless pursuit, he’d spent far too long either taking or sticking to cover. Casting concealing magic helped, but it drained his strength and slowed his pace. Meanwhile, he was at least a hundred miles from home, his feet never stopped aching, and his clothes hung so loose that he figured he must have lost a full stone since leaving the gardens in late spring. He had a scratch from a near miss with griffins that was turning into a knotted scar on his back, and a bundled forearm from when he’d slipped while crossing a ravine and torn up his skin trying to stop from plunging over a waterfall to his death.