Brazen crows circled the clearing beyond the far bank.
“Duly noted.” Jon ducked behind the wall once more and shivered. The wind presaged the quickly approaching winter cold with increasing boldness.
All along the wall, paladins said their prayers and made their offerings, a few priests giving blessings among them.
“The last of the Faralles volunteering for a suicide mission.” Pons grumbled a few curses under his breath and rolled his eyes.
The last… Among the catastrophes bursting at all corners of the kingdom, the Grands—Derric especially—had been most relentless with this one cause.
Jon reached for his belt pouch, the familiar crumple of parchment setting his mind at ease. It was still there, the last note he had received from Brennan. The ship was bound for Harifa. Setting sail today. “I won’t be the last.”
Pons eyed him narrowly, and he didn’t need to say anything. A few choice words from Derric came to mind: something about twenty-six-year-old unmarried and childless kings being liabilities for a kingdom.
But the kingdom had other—greater—liabilities, the resolution of which afforded the tangential benefit of sparing a man from wasting away in uselessness and frustration.
“You’re not the only one to call it a ‘suicide mission,’ ” he whispered to Pons. One hundred and forty-eight had died before he’d sent forces to handle the mangeurs. And both squads of paladins and three squads of Emaurrian soldiers had died on the field—eighty men and women—along with sixty-four more civilians and Bisclavret’s seventy-one men. All told, the death toll had risen to three hundred and sixty-three people.
And he couldn’t justify sending even one more person into battle unless he himself assumed the risk as well. “But for our strategy to work, our forces must have faith in it and see that their king does, too. And the best way to show my faith is by fighting alongside them.”
“Wise, Your Majesty,” Perrault said. He’d sat still and contemplative on the other side of Pons and the Divinity geomancer Olivia had contracted. Forty-eight-year-old Paladin Captain Sir Albain Perrault had been known for his settled stomach before battle; Jon hadn’t seen his composure abandon him yet.
Perrault continued. “But defending the innocent is a paladin’s duty whether a king commands it or not. Our place is here. Yet you are of the Order no longer. A king’s duty lies with the entire realm.”
A man who hadn’t served under Perrault for several campaigns might have misunderstood his statement for a barb, but it was an extenuation. The captain gave him the opportunity to quit the field with the semblance of honor.
“I am a paladin no longer, captain. You have the right of it.” He met Perrault’s gaze squarely. “Yet discharge from the Order doesn’t discharge a lifetime of its training. The Emaurrian throne will never crumble for want of a king, yet for want of a single sword, this village might.”
Here, just beyond Espoire, he, a company of paladins, two mages, and a squad of Emaurrian soldiers with four ballistae were all that stood between the mangeurs and their prey.
Perrault inclined his head, a gleam—of pride?—in his brown eyes, and said no more.
Sitting between him and Pons, the young geomancer the Tower had sent quivered with pre-battle jitters. She was a master at no more than twenty years of age, her brassy waves of hair pulled back into a tight knot, a brush stroke of freckles across her nose. Her partner, a healer, had remained behind at the castle infirmary when they’d left. She, along with Pons, comprised the entirety of their mage component here. The measure of her confidence would determine the shape of day’s end.
Under his evaluation, she brought her trembling hands together. Familiar. His own skin had hardly contained him before his first major battle.
He nodded at her joined hands with a reassuring palm. “Have faith.”
She glanced up at him and mustered a watery smile. “Thank you, Your Majesty. It’s mostly the cold.”
He tried to offer her what he hoped was an encouraging smile. “What is your name?”
“Ella Vannier.” An ephemeral grin flashed on her face. “ ‘Ella Basket-Weaver.’ Not fit for a mage, is it?”
He’d carried the name Jonathan Ver, fit for a common-born bastard, for his entire life until a couple months ago. And yet, with those he’d helped, it had carried disparate weight. “It is not your name that makes you. It is you who make your name. This land will know you for your deeds.”
A spark lit her eyes. “I’ll give them something to talk about.”
The ground shook, debris crumbling into the river channel below. The line of soldiers stiffened. Murmurs wound from end to end.
The tremors intensified. Their enemy neared.
He gave a grim nod to Perrault, who signaled to his officers. Ripples rumbled through the hardness of the winter ground, and a chill crept from across the Brise-Lames. Puffs of white fog misted the air before him. His breath. He squeezed Faithkeeper’s hilt.
Primal voices thundered nearby, the sound rattling his bones, reverberating in his chest. He eyed the line along the wall, lingering on an Emaurrian soldier raising a hand mirror. He didn’t have an angle on the intended target, but the mirror reflected a corner of her stark-white horror.
Cold slithered in, colder than the winter air had any right to be, misting the crisp air with a macabre opacity.
He squeezed his eyes shut. Holy Mother, guide my hand… for the faithful, the faith, and the land. He glanced past Pons to Ella, who prayed to her own god and then fixed her eyes upon him.
A quake ripped up from the river, water thrashing with it. The mangeurs.
She stiffened, spine rigid, hands out.
“Not yet,” he whispered to her.
Another, the aftershock shaking the wall and everyone behind it. Murmurs rose from the line. Beside him, Ella shuddered and bit her lip.
Heavy thuds came from the Brise-Lames riverbed. And the scraping and scrambling of rocks from the river channel cliff wall. The east bank. Their side.
He closed the visor on his helm and gripped Faithkeeper, every muscle aligned to readiness.
Flinty eyes bored into his, awaiting sanction.
The bank crumbled, near enough to smell the fresh earth.
“Now!” he called to his forces.
Ella sprang into action, covered by paladin heavy crossbowmen.
He stole a look over the wall.
Shaggy white hair—almost a glacial blue—topped snow-white faces, eerily human but for crazed crystalline eyes. An air of cold radiated from their frosty skin, the only covering of the twenty-foot mangeurs.
Two dozen occupied the field of battle—half in the river channel, heads and shoulders peaking over as they attempted to climb, and half still on the farther west bank.
Her hands aglow in ghostly green despite her lined face, Ella gestured along the west bank and pulled in.
The cliff wall crumbled at her motion. Rock and soil tumbled into the river channel, engulfing the mangeurs, burying them deeper and deeper.
Pons pressed his glowing hands together, packed the loose earth tight with force magic. Walkable, but it eliminated their buffer zone.
Yet it left the buried mangeurs’ heads and necks vulnerable to attack.
How long would it—
Emaurrian soldiers fired ballistae high at the upright mangeurs approaching from the other side of Brise-Lames. Three hits, one down. A shoulder.
The mangeurs closed in.
“Attack!” He jumped the wall, leading the paladins, drawing Faithkeeper with an eager flourish as they charged the trapped mangeurs in the channel. They swarmed the Immortals, plunging long swords into eyes, ears, and skulls.
He ran a giant eye through, translucent fluid bursting forth to coat him. Ichor. It chilled like the coldest night of the year, an inescapable grasp. Lend me your fire, Rielle.
Shuddering, he yanked Faithkeeper free, hard, and rolled away as a ballista bolt flew up and over him and his brothers-in-arms to hit a
mangeur square in the chest.
Another frost giant swept its arms across the ground, knocking away men like playthings. She seized a paladin and curled a fist. A scream. A crunch. Crimson spray.
She held the crushed body above her mouth and lapped at the oozing blood.
Pons still held the river channel. Jon scanned its length—the heads still moved. The mangeurs in it weren’t dead. Ella spelled stone and earth into their eager, chomping mouths.
Paladins with great-axes moved in, hacking at giant necks.
Perrault called the advance, barking orders. Picking his route with care, Jon moved, cutting the air with Faithkeeper, shaking off the ichor.
Booming voices, arcanir squelching into flesh, and agonized screams fed the chaos of battle. Massive hands grabbed for paladins.
He buried his blade in a gigantic heel cord and then jerked it free. Icy blood spurted.
A swipe from the target—the female mangeur—
All instinct, he dodged. A bearded frost giant grabbed for him, and he juked. He found his footing amid his fallen brothers. A squad assaulted the bearded mangeur in a storm of flashing blades and armor, commands and shrieks competing for air.
Two ballista bolts flew past the female mangeur. But she dropped, lop-sided, quickly descending into a pit swallowing one large leg.
Ella’s geomancy.
As the female attempted to pull free, great-axes hacked at her arm. He closed the distance, drawing his dagger, and then vaulted over two fallen brothers and onto the mangeur. He buried a dagger for a hold in her hip, then Faithkeeper, and tore her gut open. Liquid frost covered his armor and shot through his helm’s visor to spatter and freeze upon his face.
He yanked Faithkeeper and his dagger free and cleared the mangeur as a large steel net descended over her and closed, constricted by Pons’s magic.
She grasped at her gut, held in what spilled out as the shrinking net pressed her to pieces. Eerie eyes pierced him.
His gaze caught on the crystal iris of the massive eye beneath the net, shimmering like ice in the dying light. It faded to darkness, and the night-black pupil tethered him, dragging him into its inky depths, a nightmare world of shrieking wind and spikes of thorny grass, phantoms in uncanny shapes haunting a witching circle. A shadow realm. He stepped into a pool of darkness and quickly receded, an unstoppable ripple the ephemeral harbinger before his own image, a shrouded reflection with skin that turned to grotesque scales, grinning with too many teeth, too pointed, and it opened its maw to a forked tongue. The depths of its stygian eyes lengthened to an eternal void, summoned him in a chilling voice that echoed. His own.
Moans and cries broke through the shouts and clash of fighting, and he blinked, gasping, struggling for air, and looked about the field—no monster, no pool of darkness, no shadow realm. His gaze snapped back to the mangeur’s eye. Dead. Clouded. The netted mangeur lay dead.
A fragile quiet settled, joined by the stench of blood, viscera, and frost. With a shudder, he removed his helm, blinking through the cold burn of ichor. Perhaps only a few seconds had passed. He shook off the malaise and studied the field.
The mangeurs lay broken, disemboweled, dead. But of the company of paladins, less than half remained standing. Maybe a hundred. Most had fallen. A few clung to life and would, Terra willing, survive.
Priests rushed the field with Pons and Ella on their heels to tend the wounded. An arcanir-clad arm reached out from under a dead mangeur’s shaggy head. Trapped. Jon sprang forward and braced the massive skull. The trapped man didn’t have long.
“Sodalis!” Jon bellowed to a passing paladin, who stopped and rushed to help. Soon, a squad had gathered to extricate their brother, and slowly, painstakingly, they freed him.
Perrault approached with a grim stride. “Your Majesty, would you come with me?”
The gravity etched into Perrault’s face gave Jon pause. He nodded, and with a reassuring clap on the shoulder of his nearest brother, he left to accompany Perrault toward the wall.
The chaos of the battlefield gave way to purposeful calls and sparse bursts of activity. Great-axemen cut great throats, a macabre thing. His people ministered to their dead with tender ritual. Too many had fallen. Too many had died to his ignorance.
They had known little about their enemies. Had planned too little. But faced with the decimation of all the villages east of the Brise-Lames—the loss of civilians, territory, supplies for the coming winter, and esteem, both at home and abroad—the decision had already been made. And endorsed with his knowing seal. The limb cut to save the life.
Soldiers and paladins arranged a makeshift infirmary, and Perrault led him through the hive of activity directly to a soldier held down by two paladins with a priest nearby. Her frantic eyes darted toward her arm, a belt gnashed between her teeth. A steel short sword glowed a molten red in the nearby fire.
One of the paladins held a bonesaw to her arm, flesh that darkened from gray to black and spread like a pestilence from her elbow both up and down her arm. She fixed her fevered gaze on him, horror humming in dilated pupils.
“Terra have mercy,” he breathed, taking a knee and offering his hand to her. “Goddess save you.”
She gripped it tight, shrieking through the leather as metal sundered flesh.
“Ichor.” Perrault knelt next to him, lines chiseling his face as the teeth of the saw gritted against bone. “Magic was of no use to her.”
Her grip tightened along with her squeezed-shut eyes—then as one of the paladins brought the molten-red blade to where her arm had been, she faded. A lanky paladin archer rushed in to take the bonesaw and hurried away.
This soldier would not be the only one losing a limb today.
He tensed his fingers around the soldier’s and, receiving no response, leaned in close to her nose, stone-still until her warm breath confirmed her life on his ear. A priest knelt nearby to inspect the work.
“She will live, Your Majesty,” the priest offered, with an inclination of his head.
“Gods above.” He stared at her face, coated in damp torment. It was his knowing seal that had brought her here. That had cost her an arm. And so many others.
And how cavalierly he’d disregarded the Earthbinding and a political marriage, which might have spared some of the lives lost today. His armies would not be enough. Paladins would not be enough. Immortal hunting squads would not be enough.
“Your Majesty,” Perrault began softly, “the ichor…”
The ichor. The ichor that grayed flesh. The ichor that had spattered him.
He raised wary fingers to his face. Nothing. If it spared him… “It hasn’t affected the paladins.”
Perrault sighed and looked out at the field.
So many lay dead—most of them paladins—but the wounded facing amputation were soldiers.
“The sigils,” Jon whispered under his breath. Their sigils against magic—against elemental magic—had protected them.
Perrault nodded.
Paladins would be needed now more than ever; there wasn’t nearly enough recondite to sigil the entire army. But against an invasion of monsters, demons, creatures of myth and legend, paladins alone, in their current number, could not hold the line.
Emaurria—and its people—needed every possible advantage.
Composure. He rose, mind whirling. But now was not the time for theory and conjecture. He needed to get the men and women who had fought so bravely here to safety and medical care, to the castle at Bisclavret. He needed to reassure them, the people of this march, and everyone else, that this victory was the first of many to beat back the Immortals threat.
And then he would think on how to stop the unstoppable.
Across the field, brassy silken waves fought free of a tight knot. Ella Vannier rose from her ministrations to a soldier, her worried gaze catching his. Jon grasped at the Laurentine signet ring hanging from a cord around his neck.
A shadow darkened the battlefield.
Overhead in the dist
ant sky, a massive winged creature soared toward the Marcellan Peaks with a deafening roar. A dragon. From maw to tail, it was the size of a village. A town. Against the evening sky, it was a massive shadow, dark as death and unfathomable. Not a single person moved until it had disappeared far from sight.
Perrault scrutinized him. “Your Majesty?”
Jon collected himself quickly. “A squad to carefully collect samples for the Archmage, draw sketches, write accounts, take trophies for our return, then burn the rest of the remains. To the castle, Captain. And then home to plan our next steps.”
Composure. Perhaps if he repeated it to himself enough, it would appear.
No. It wouldn’t. Not until the kingdom had a fighting chance. He’d fought battles for the past decade, seen enemies capable of destroying a land, but never anything like this. Never giants, dragons, arcane powers… If this was even a fraction of what the kingdom would face, conventional means of warfare were hopeless without… something more.
His spirits fell. But in the face of frost giants, huge losses, and dragons, conventional warfare wouldn’t hold the line. As much as he hated the thought, it was time to acknowledge the necessities. As a paladin, it would have been unthinkable, but he was a king now.
The Earthbinding.
Chapter 16
Rielle’s first week at House Hazael taught her some lessons about her new reality. She had not forgotten the Sileni woman’s attempted escape. Vittoria, Samara had called her. After a night in the barracks, Vittoria had died, before a single lash could even mar her skin. Rielle swallowed. Divine keep you, sister.
Since her arrival, Rielle had watched, listened, and learned. All the new slaves were trained in entertainment and hospitality, observing and learning from the pleasure slaves and the support staff dealing with guests. She’d never use the skills—being a scribe—but it was the perfect time to gather information. As always, success depended on the possession of information in greater amount and usefulness than that of the enemy. Courdeval had reinforced that lesson.
By Dark Deeds (Blade and Rose Book 2) Page 16