As expected, they found Drogan seated alone at a small table near the back of the Bloody Bucket. He was just finishing breakfast.
“The survivor has awakened. He witnessed the golden elves take the gold for themselves. The full shipment, as we suspected. They returned only half of it to buy some goodwill and kept the rest. We need to act now,” Verdant said. He sat down opposite the mine owner, with the saloon’s entrance behind him.
“You…,” Baylest said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “Sorry, we still have the same problem, my friend. Even if the other miners believe your story that the Golden are thieves, what alternative do you propose?”
“When King Balen hears they killed his uncle he will take action. What if he decides to charge a fee of his own on each shipment to recoup his losses? Or worse, what if he decides to send another army to hit the Golden? Will he stop there or bring his men into Galena?”
“If Balen moves so will Ghent. They hold each other in check, but if you can stir up enough doubt with the other miners, you might move them to act. Though what would you suggest we do? We don’t know enough about the golden elves to wage an effective war with an improvised army.”
“Perhaps the wood elves would help us. They have reason to hate the Golden.”
“How would we contact them? Most here have never seen any. And they haven’t been able to fight off the Golden, either. We would be taking up with the losing side,” Drogan said.
He opened his mouth to say more, but something stopped him. The miner paused and stared at the doorway behind Verdant.
Curious, the priest turned. A pair of lithe female elves stood in the Bucket’s entrance. Unlike the golden elf ambassadors and then the assassins he had seen, these had long, brown hair and they wore clothes of forest green. Each carried a set of curved twin swords at their waists.
“Priest?” the left one asked with some slight hesitation. She pointed at him.
“Umm, yes. I am a priest,” Verdant responded.
The second elf spoke.
“I am Myria, and this is my sister, Breen. We have been sent by King Teldrain of the wood elves to ask for aid. A human, Dain, is with our King. He said you would present our case before the other humans.”
Verdant was vaguely aware of his mouth hanging open. He shut it with a snap.
“Please, sit,” he said. He rose and pulled a chair back from the table. “The table is a bit crowded, but we will make do. I am Verdant, the dwarf’s name is Razel, and this is Drogan Baylest, owner of the Lucky Seven mine. He’s one of the people you need to meet with and convince.”
Verdant couldn’t believe their good fortune. Surely the Light itself worked on their behalf.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Dain led the first skirmish against the invading army’s sleepy rear guard just before daybreak. He rushed into them, headlong and sword flashing, a pack of shapeshifted wood elves surrounding him. Taking forms of boar, wolves, or bears, the shapechangers made an unstoppable battering ram, crashing into the golden elf positions. Dozens of Golden soldiers died in the initial rush of tusk and fang and claw.
To their credit, Elam’s soldiers tried forming up into a solid rank to repel the wood elves, but the mages behind Dain cast curtains of lightning to rake their formations, chaining from warrior to warrior, killing clusters of men with each spell. To stand together against the fearsome strikes was to die. The rearguard had no defense against the lightning, Dain suspected. Their own casters were up front, near their king.
Larcet led four hundred armored soldiers, along with a scattering of mages, following up behind the shapeshifters. Their armor slowed them more than Dain would have preferred, but they would be needed to hold off the inevitable counterattack. They finished off any survivors they passed with their merciless swords.
As planned, Dain slowed the mob of shapeshifters, calling a halt just a hundred yards into the enemy position. He did not want to outrun his support.
Two brave, howling golden elves ran toward him as he waited on Larcet’s troops. He parried the first elf’s spear and surprised the second with a sweeping slash at his chest. The blow glanced of the elf’s plate armor but its strength still drove him to the ground. Dain spun his tomahawk and slammed down, powering the steel spike through the chest plate and killing the downed elf.
Too close for the spear to be effective, the remaining attacker dropped the long weapon and reached for his sword, but Dain’s own struck and severed the elf’s arm with a single cut. Then he stabbed the blade’s tip into the elf’s armor, puncturing his lung. The golden elf clutched at the wound, but was helpless to stop the flow of blood that poured out between his fingers. He fell dead at Dain’s feet.
Dain looked up in time to see another golden elf fast approaching. A mage, by the looks of him. Are they arriving from the front already, he wondered, or had a few been dispersed throughout the army?
The mage faced him from across a small clearing, and Dain saw the eagerness in his eyes. A glowing blue sphere formed between the caster’s spread palms. There could be no doubt of his target.
The hair on the back of Dain’s sweaty neck stiffened as static charged the air. He focused the Light into his spellshield, hoping it would redirect the blast around him.
The mage smiled triumphantly and had just completed the cast when an arrow exploded through his shoulder. A jagged lightning bolt flew wide from his hands. It leapt into the mage’s own companions who had emerged from the trees to aid him, killing several.
Dain ran forward, closing the distance to finish off the spellcaster, but three more arrows hit the mage’s chest before he could reach him.
Keeping the golden elf casters out of action fell to the wood elf archers. In the night’s silent darkness they had climbed into the treetops, and now the concealed marksmen picked off any enemy mages from their perches. Dain was glad of them. Stretching his aching arms, he looked out over the battlefield.
So far they had fared better than expected. Suffering only minimal losses, his men had killed at least two hundred invaders. As one of the few with any experience fighting in or against a structured army, King Teldrain had asked him to lead the attack, and three archers and two mages had the sole responsibility of keeping him alive if he got into trouble. Already, those archers had saved him from a vicious slash to the ribs and the mage that now lay dead a few yards from his feet.
The field cleared as the Golden held themselves back. The raiding aspect of the attack was now ended. The more difficult—and far more dangerous—part remained.
Larcet and the armored troops joined Dain and the shapeshifters. Dain would have given much for another month of training with them on how to fight in formation. Might as well wish for another five thousand troops on magical flying horses, he scolded himself.
“Hold ranks!” he bellowed at both the frenzied shapeshifters and Larcet’s eager troops. He leaned down and wiped his sword edge clean with a fallen golden elf’s tunic. “Hold ranks, damn you!”
Maintaining order with this group would be nearly impossible, he knew. At best he could only hope to channel their chaos into the enemy. Channel it, and try to keep as many as possible from getting themselves killed.
The archers, though effective in their lofty positions, limited his ability to push further into the enemy camp. Another hundred yards ahead and his ground troops would no longer have their protection. And he intended to cling to every advantage he could. Now they would have to wait for the Golden to approach.
Wiping his brow with the back of his hand, Dain silently reviewed the plan.
His assault had taken place at the rear of the golden elf position for a specific reason. Elam’s strongest defenses and best troops were focused up front, facing off against the bulk of the wood elf army. His goal was to sow as much confusion as possible, distracting the invaders from Teldrain’s men. Drawing Elam’s army off-balance would greatly increase the king’s own chances for success.
He and Larcet had decided to
drive their men into the Golden lines to bait and goad them into forming up battle lines for a counterattack. Here, among the ancient, towering trees, the Golden wouldn’t be able to form up into true ranks of overlapping armor. That would give the less experienced wood elves a slight measure of balance against them. And, if resistance proved tougher than expected, they would fight a slow retreat to give the hidden archers easy targets.
The plan risked everything on a short week’s worth of training with the armored wood elf troops at his flanks. An organized pullback could easily turn into a rout, and he feared they wouldn’t be able to pull it off. If fear and panic took his men, disaster would follow.
“Signal the mages,” he told Larcet, now standing at his side. The armored general removed a curled ram’s horn from his belt and sounded a powerful, deep note, beginning their plan’s next movements.
Dain’s mages, who had just proven so effective at busting up concentrations of Golden with their lightning, now began hurling sizzling fireballs into the enemy camp’s interior. They streaked across the sky, screaming though the air and billowing a cloud of black smoke in their wakes.
Teldrain had warned him that the wood elf spellcasters weren’t as powerful as the Golden, and the signal also told those on the ground to line up into five evenly-spaced columns four soldiers abreast. At the head of each stood two mages whose only assignment was shielding the troops behind.
When the inevitable counterfire began, the mage’s shields deflected the fireblasts away from the wood elf troops and between the columns.
From behind a protective mage, Dain looked out into a fiery hell. Great, rolling spheres of red and orange flame skipped between his column and the next, dropping tendrils of fire with every bounce. He recalled shooting marbles with his younger siblings when they were children. These marbles would melt your very bones.
For over an hour the spellbattle continued until, both Golden and wood elf mages finally tired and the smoking fireballs became fewer and fewer and then stopped completely. The once-lush forest between the five columns was gone, scorched away and replaced with a black, sooty furnace. Dain’s mages drew down cool air from high above the forest to keep the wood elves from being roasted alive as the undergrowth and shrubs smoldered around them. Ash fell in clumps all across the battlefield. Tendrils of wispy, gray smoke rose from slow-burning brush piles.
The tallest trees, where his archers remained concealed, had escaped the pyre below. The broad, green giants were next to impossible to burn. Dain strode over to the base of one, cupped his hands, and whistled up to see if the archers had survived the rising heat. A cluster of arrows struck the trunk, well above his head, in response.
“Damn archers have a sick sense of humor,” he said, shaking his head and smiling.
“They probably think the same of you, champion, keeping them up in those pines like fat ducks roasting over a hot campfire,” Larcet replied with a half-smile of his own.
“It’s about to get a lot worse down here. Start the fog,” Dain ordered. Larcet blew a quick blast of two notes, and the mages used the last of their strength to create a dense wall of fog fifty yards forward of their position.
“Now hold, men,” Dain said in a firm voice, trying to meet each pair of eyes that surrounded him. “Hold this ground for your kingdom, your homes, and your families.”
At his signal, the wood elves formed into two long, loose lines. His two guardian mages who had done no casting thus far and thus whose powers were at their height stood just behind the lines, ready to deflect any spell attack hurled at them.
Dain wished he had a few of Teldrain’s summoning mages with this force. A pair of massive rock beasts would have given him an advantage in shattering enemy formations. Summoners were rare to the wood elves though, and for them the king had plans of his own.
He waited, feeling the steady thud of thunderous heartbeats ringing in his ears. Faintly, he heard metallic clanking beyond the gray, featureless fog. He smelled only smoke and ash.
His mind wandered, thinking about the home he had planned near the mountains. How many rooms would his house need? A main hall, a kitchen, a bedroom for Jin, and one for Sera and himself. He would leave room for expansion, just in case. Half elves weren’t uncommon, at least back in his own part of the world, and he swore to himself that if they were blessed with children of their own, he and Sera would make sure they were raised without fear for their lives.
What would his father have thought? An elf for a wife, an adopted elf daughter, and the possibility of half-elf children. He shook his head. What his father might or might not think about the path he had chosen wasn’t the most productive use of his energy at that very moment. Perhaps ever.
The metallic clanking grew louder, and the first golden elf emerged from the mist. Dain’s muscles tensed. He couldn’t help but admire their precision as the invading troops marched, spear first and in perfect lockstep. His archers, shooting between the foot soldiers’ shields, decimated the first rank, and most of the second died in another dozen steps. The third though, remained virtually intact when they collided with his waiting troops.
Dain, along with Larcet and the armored wood elves, held the center, battering through wave after wave of golden elves, splitting their formations like a wedge. The shapeshifters, assigned with protecting their right and left flanks, clawed and slashed wildly against the scattered Golden that passed around the armored troops. Fang and claw tore viciously at sword and plate.
Drawing strength from the Light, Dain enhanced his chainmail armor and charged his weapons. The glowing sword and tomahawk exploded enemy armor on contact. Sera’s potion for endurance burned through his veins while he faced attacker after attacker.
In total, eight ranks breached through the fog. All broke themselves onto the wood elf lines. After the eighth died, no more came from beyond the gray barrier.
Dain’s cheek was split from a spear tip. He felt a deep bruise on his side where his armor had deflected a sword. Looking over at Larcet, he saw that the elf had lost his helmet during the fight and a wide chunk of his scalp. Blood poured from the wound over his face like a fearsome mask. The elf held a broken spear, point up, beside him. Grim determination gleamed in his eyes as he stared at the fog before them.
Although they had done much better than he expected, every wood elf seemed to have suffered at least one wound.
Dain signaled for his troops to withdraw another two hundred yards from the fog. The archers descended from their perches and fell back alongside them. Those with more serious injuries rested while the most able troops remained in loose formation. Trained in basic triage, the wood elves each tended to their own wounds and aided those who could not. No one talked of heading back to camp.
“Why did they stop attacking?” Larcet asked. “Another three ranks and we would have either retreated or been surrounded.”
“Teldrain must have them occupied. Hopefully, we drew enough of their attention off him,” Dain replied.
“How many do you think?”
“We lost a quarter of our footmen. The archers, shapeshifters, and mages all escaped with minor losses. From what I saw of their ranks, I would say we took at least six hundred of them, along with another two hundred in our first attack. No way of knowing how many the mages got with the fireblasts,” Dain answered.
Not a bad start, he thought, but there were thousands more to face, and he was afraid they fought merely to delay the inevitable. Could they somehow overcome Elam’s numbers?
“What do we do now?” Larcet asked.
“We wait, rest, and then we’ll see. We’re in no shape to try anything fancy. Half our men are down and the other half are asleep on their feet,” Dain replied. “Let’s hope this battle goes well elsewhere.”
The battle was not going well, Sera knew.
Instead of waiting for the golden elves to hammer down on them, Dain had convinced her father to strike first. The wood elves couldn’t afford to wait while Elam bulled his way
down into Teran, he’d reasoned—surprise would aid them. Jace, of all people, had agreed.
Teldrain’s soldiers hit the Golden at the appointed time, making good progress at first. And Dain’s advice was proven sound. The disorder in the enemy camp, obvious even to Sera, demonstrated that Elam and his generals had not expected to fight defensively.
Like a ravenous beast, her father’s army tore into the golden elves. Frenzied shapeshifters, armored warriors, and casting mages threw themselves into the fray. They fought toward the army’s center, where Elam’s command tent stood. Finding him would end the battle before it had really begun, Sera was sure of it.
They were halfway to the tent and cheers roared up from the reserve troops all around her. Could her father succeed? Were their fears of the Golden army unjustified?
Far too quickly, her questions were answered. Ahead of her father’s troops, a line of golden elf soldiers formed up into ranks, their shields overlapping into a steel wall. The shapeshifters collided with the line and it buckled inward, but refused to break. An enormous, shapeshifted warrior drove himself through the first rank, knocking aside a half dozen soldiers and opening up a hole in the wall of steel, but the Golden reformed before more wood elves could follow.
The shapeshifter found himself isolated. And the spears of the second rank found him.
Dain had warned of a stalemate and urged Teldrain to retreat at the first sign of trouble. They couldn’t afford to stand toe-to-toe with the more numerous invaders, he reasoned. Sera would soon know if the king would heed that counsel. For as long as she could remember, her father had kept his own plans and determined for himself the best course for their people. She hoped he considered the advice of another today.
Surveying the battle, she hid among the branches of a tall oak and used a spell to enhance her senses. Though more than a mile distant, she could hear and see and even smell the fighting as if she were a part of it. She felt a part of it.
Kingdom's Forge: Book 01 - Paladin's Redemption Page 28