The longhouse was silent now and Lanta knew the men listened as well as the women. The dogs had slunk beneath the tables, unwilling to attract her ire, and the slaves had melted from her view. Smoke from the central fire wended its way towards them and tickled the back of her throat. Lanta ignored it.
‘If you are unsure of the subjugation of any slave, bring them to me before we leave and I will sacrifice them to aid our war. Do not spare the lash or the club once we are gone, and do not let them rise.’
They all knew the stories of villages going on raids and returning to find their women and children dead and their slaves vanished into the mountains. It hadn’t happened in decades, but the threat remained.
Lanta gave them another smile and the women smiled back, reassured. ‘The gods are with us in war, and they are with you, who secure our future through your children. We go to claim what is ours that they may live in the warm lands. We go to claim what is the gods’ and ensure Their return. We will live reflected in Their glory and we will die sure in the knowledge that the Afterworld awaits us. What have we to fear? The Dark Path is our journey, the Red Joy is our ending.’ She raised her arms once more. ‘And the return of the gods is our holy purpose.’
The cheers came from behind as well as in front and Lanta turned and extended her arms to include the warriors in her blessing. Throughout the longhouse, men and women fell to their knees like wheat before the scythe.
The gods demanded victory. Lanta would give it to Them.
DOM
Second moon, eighteenth year of the reign of King Rastoth
Watcher village, northern Wolf Lands, Gilgoras foothills, Rilporian border
It was good to be back under trees, despite the circumstances. The nagging ache behind Dom’s right eye was becoming an old friend, never really gone, and he’d swear sometimes it saw things the left didn’t. But that was impossible, wasn’t it? It was just flickers of light through the tree branches swaying above, the sudden dart of birds.
Dom sat on a horsehide on a rock outside a ramshackle dwelling. They normally spent the winters south of the River Gil and summers north of it. They weren’t supposed to be here yet and no one had come to repair the houses before they arrived. Still, it wouldn’t much matter once the war started.
He stared around the village, crammed with almost every Wolf they had who wasn’t on patrol or sentry duty. All were busy with weapons or supplies, an air of quiet industry and grim-faced necessity surrounding them. A breeze tore the flames of his fire into rags of yellow, flinging them at the sky.
‘Rillirin’s the herald, bringing the war to us,’ he muttered, tapping his fingers against the ragged knees of his trousers. ‘But more than that. Death to love and love to death. Don’t know. There’s poison in Rilporin, maybe the poison of words in the wrong ear. Lies and deceit. Or maybe the poison is in the blood – is Rivil killing his father and seizing the throne?’ He pursed his lips. ‘But then why ally with the Mireces? Why fight a battle you can win with assassination? Killing Janis brought the throne one step closer. Killing Rastoth hands it to him.’
‘But it doesn’t bring us back, does it, my love?’
Dom started to his feet and dragged a knife out of his belt. ‘Who spoke?’ he demanded, lurching in a circle and startling a blackbird out of the leaf litter. A few faces turned to him but none looked alarmed. He was alone.
‘Oh, you’re never alone, my love. Not truly.’
He recognised it this time, both the voice and where it came from, and sheathed his dagger. ‘Great. Now I’m hearing things,’ he said, trying to make light of it.
The Dark Lady laughed, low and inviting. ‘You’ve heard things all your life, little Calestar, heard and seen. Now you’re just hearing them more clearly, waking and sleeping. Besides, you enjoy my visits, don’t you?’
There was a patch of darkness stealing through the trees to the north. Just cloud shadow, that’s all. He refused to look into the sky to see if he was right. Just a cloud. Dom sat back down and stretched his hands to the fire, ignoring Her last comment, Her presence in his skull and against his skin.
‘Right. Rillirin brings us the war and Rivil allies with the Mireces to spill enough blood to tear the veil and bring back the brother-fucking Dark Lady and Her pet idiot.’ He paused. ‘What, no laughter this time? I thought it was funny. But blood alone isn’t enough to tear the veil, it can’t be. Blood’s been spilt for centuries and the veil has remained intact. So why this war? Why now?’
Dom wasn’t sure if he was asking Her or thinking aloud, but he got more than he was expecting with Her response. Pain seared up his right arm and into his shoulder, neck and chest. He bent double, gasping, clenching his arm between his thighs. Pale flames licked along his wrist, almost invisible in the sunlight, touching nothing but his arm, burning and burrowing into the bone. He could smell cooking meat.
‘Because of you,’ hissed a voice right into his ear. ‘Because a calestar swore a blood oath of vengeance and thinned the veil for us, his treachery to his gods the ultimate heresy. You did this, my love. It’s all you. When you break, the veil breaks, and then you’ll have no one to blame but yourself.’
‘No,’ Dom gasped. ‘No, that’s not right. That’s not why—’
The voice, presence and flames flickered and vanished, leaving Dom huddled into himself, stunned and racked with pain. ‘Not true. It’s not true,’ he whispered. There was laughter on the wind.
‘I’m back. Look what – Are you all right?’
Dom forced himself to sit up and smile. ‘Fine, just a bit of cramp. It’s the cold. So come on, what have you got?’
Rillirin held up a brace of fat ducks. ‘Dinner,’ she announced and patted the sling at her belt. ‘Who needs bows and arrows?’ she added smugly. ‘Oh, I saw Lim. Ash is back from the West Forts and the general and Lim agree it’ll probably be soon. While that soldier, Crys, didn’t hear the exact date Corvus and Rivil agreed, he said there was a sense of urgency about everything they did after Janis.’
‘I’m glad Mace agrees,’ Dom said absently. ‘That ties in with my own … understanding. And at least we don’t have to try and convince the West Rank to move on the word of a calestar.’
‘Maybe if they knew it was you, they’d be more likely to believe the knowings,’ Rillirin ventured, propping her spear against the rock.
Dom snorted. ‘No thanks. The fewer people who know I’m the freak with the visions, the better. What else did Lim say?’ he asked before she could protest.
‘That we’ll be in the party setting out in the morning to take watch at Blood Pass Valley.’
‘Good. Finally get to do something useful.’
She dropped the ducks in the snow and bent to graze a kiss on his cheek; Dom turned at the last second and their mouths met. Rillirin jerked back in surprise, but then giggled. ‘Every time,’ she muttered, shaking her head.
‘You should stop letting me then if you don’t want me to,’ Dom said, waggling his eyebrows.
Rillirin waved a hand in dismissal. ‘Oh, I didn’t say that,’ she said, cheeks red, then surprised him with another kiss, a little longer this time and tasting like snow. Butterflies made their way through his belly.
Death to love? he thought as Rillirin settled beside him and passed him a duck. They plucked in silence. Please don’t let it be this she kills. He pressed his thigh to hers, relishing her warmth as the pain in his arm subsided into a ferocious itching that made his fingers twitch.
He was losing himself in the pleasure of her company when fingers stroked down his back and a laugh sounded low in his ear. ‘She’ll never compete with me, my love,’ a voice whispered. ‘And you know it.’
Dom blinked and closed his right eye, fingers spasming in the feathers. Rillirin didn’t notice. He counted to ten and forced the eyelid open, breathing deep through the pain, pushing back the dread, trying his hardest to forget what he knew, what he’d seen. What he had to do.
Don’t break, Dom. Don’t ever
break.
TARA
Third moon, eighteenth year of the reign of King Rastoth
Final Falls, the Gil-beside Road, Gilgoras foothills, Rilporian border
Tara felt sorry for Major Costas as the sentries stationed at the Final Falls and Costas’s Hundred mingled. The sentries were from Fort Four and Costas operated out of Two, so the gossip mills were running overtime.
‘Costas? What kind of a name is that? Sounds Mireces to me,’ one sentry whispered, casting covert glances at him. Costas sat his horse in silence, letting it drink from the frothing, icy Gil spurting the taste of winter out of the mountains into the early spring air.
‘He says his mother was Listran.’
‘And mine’s the Dancer!’
‘Enough,’ Tara snapped and the men shut up. She’d be the next topic of conversation, no doubt. Mace Koridam’s pet project, his secret lover who pretended to be an officer to stay at his side. She knew them all.
She glanced at the major again, sitting painfully erect in his saddle. He looked up the steep, rocky riverbed and then urged his horse into the pool and across to the other bank. Tara frowned and followed his gaze, scanning the steep, twisting path next to the river.
Tara turned to glare briefly at the men making coarse jokes about Costas and his horse; then she urged her own into the river and across. ‘Something wrong, Major?’ she asked and noticed Costas’s lips tighten. He had such a painful inferiority complex that he thought having a woman assigned his second in command for this recon was an insult. More the other way around. She was twice the officer he was. What did he have to worry about? So what if his parents weren’t noble, if they’d saved up for years to buy him a commission? He should be bloody proud of that.
‘Up there. I saw a movement around those three rocks by the lip, the ones leaning together like an old man hunched over. Do you see?’
Tara squinted up the steep-sided ravine. ‘I see three boulders piled together,’ she said doubtfully. ‘But nothing else.’
‘Well, I definitely saw movement, like someone ducking out of sight. And you can get all the way up into Mireces territory along here.’
‘Yes, sir, but it’d be difficult to move a large force down along the river.’
‘I didn’t say it would be easy,’ Costas said, gazing upwards. ‘Get a couple of men to go up to the three stones and scout around, please.’
‘Yes, sir,’ Tara said and wheeled her horse, plunging back into the pool. ‘You and you’ – she picked the ones who’d been most vocal about the major – ‘take a wander up to the lip where the river becomes the falls. Suspicion of movement.’
The two men didn’t dare grumble until they were out of her earshot, but she could sense their hostility as they waded into the Gil up to their waists. Bet that’s chilly. They slogged past Costas and started gingerly over the spray-slick rocks on to the foot of the Road. Tara watched them for a second, and then slid her gaze up. Her eyes widened. Shit. Costas was right.
‘Come back,’ Tara hissed, her fists clenched on the reins. ‘Get your arses back here.’ Issue the order, damn you. It was pathetic and petty but, regardless of the circumstances, Costas would have her flogged if she gave an order in his stead.
But he’d seen it too, thank the gods. The major managed a ‘Hey!’ before his stallion coughed and stumbled. It grunted, staggered again, and went to its knees on the far side of the river. Tara caught a glimpse of blue fletching sticking from its chest.
Arrows. Mireces. Oh shit.
Above them, men in blue came leaping down the rocks, scrambling, falling, screaming in their haste.
‘Move,’ Tara yelled, a flogging be fucked, and then they were all shouting, lining the bank and screaming for their men. Costas’s face was a picture of pure, baffled astonishment as he struggled up from his horse, nearly taking a hoof to the skull as it kicked. The soldiers Tara had sent over showed no such confusion, leaping over the stones and rocks and leaving Costas gaping behind them.
One of them fell, arrows in his back like spines, and then the other at the edge of the pool, landing with a splash before bobbing jauntily back up to the surface. Costas stared at the body, his mouth open, and Tara urged her horse into the river. ‘Major? Major, move your shitting arse,’ she screamed.
He turned as though he were in a dream and she waved frantically at him. A second later reality kicked in and his face drained of blood.
‘Fuck,’ he squeaked and plunged forward into the Gil, went to his knees in the battering water, drank a mouthful as an arrow whickered overhead, lurched up, gasped and flailed on. ‘Take cover,’ he roared in a voice Tara had never heard from him before.
His Hundred and the sentries scattered behind boulders, shrubs and trees. ‘Return fire,’ he commanded as Tara urged her mount deeper into the river. She rode for him, reaching down to take his hand, and a giggle burst from her lips when she saw the wet wool of his breeches sagging from his arse. Mooning the Mireces. One way to make a name for yourself.
Costas grabbed her stirrup and she turned for the bank, head hunched between her shoulder blades and her horse providing Costas with cover. It screamed and she looked back to see an arrow embedded deep in its haunch. It was slowing, limping through the water, hooves slipping on the rocks, and Tara kicked free of the stirrups and threw herself from the saddle, grabbing Costas by a fistful of tunic and splashing through the water to the dubious safety of the rocks.
They crouched behind a boulder with a raw recruit, who was crying, and a sentry coolly stringing his bow. Tara’s own bow and quiver were on the saddle of her horse, and Costas only had his sword. She put a hand on the recruit’s shoulder while Costas, hopefully, assessed their position. ‘What’s your name, lad?’ she asked as though they were out at drill and the boy had missed his step in the march.
‘Poll,’ the boy squeaked, grey beneath his freckles.
‘Well, Poll, what say you string that bow and make these bastards pay, eh?’ she said and swallowed sour spit. Costas looked seconds away from puking too. ‘Come on, now, I know you’re a fine shot, and I’ve heard tell you’re a hell of a boar-hunter. Everyone reacts the same to an arrow in the guts, lad, so how about you start shooting?’
Poll nodded convulsively and grabbed an arrow to hold it shaking on the string. He whooped in a breath and his eyes narrowed, and then he drew smoothly and evenly to his lips, held, and released. Costas’s head darted around his side of the boulder and a Mireces collapsed screaming, the arrow through his right eye. He pounded Poll on the back and gave Tara a single nod of acknowledgement.
‘That’s it,’ he shouted, ‘now keep it up.’ Poll managed a grin as he drew again, sighted, and let fly. Costas grabbed Tara’s shoulder, hauled her back to give Poll and the sentry room.
‘Carter, we’re isolated and spread out. I need a defensive wedge or we’ll be picked off one at a time.’ He eyed the landscape. ‘There, that half-circle of stones. That’s where we’ll make our stand. You signal those men’ – he pointed – ‘and I’ll tell these. We’ll draw fire when we start moving, so the men already over there will need to provide covering fire. Do you understand?’
‘Yes, sir,’ Tara said and half saluted, relief swamping her guts that he was taking charge. That he was giving the right orders.
At the signal, the men furthest away moved first, sprinting and weaving from one side of the clearing to the other. The Mireces were too far away to do more than fire a few hasty arrows. This time. When the runners were settled, they nocked and waited for the next wave, started loosing as soon as four men broke from cover and began sprinting. They lost one that time, an arrow in his spine that took his legs from him. He fell face down and screaming and Costas started to move. Tara dragged him back.
‘You can’t save him. Save the others. Save the boy here’ – she indicated Poll, whose face had paled at the screams but who was still managing to loose – ‘and for fuck’s sake save me. Him you can’t.’
‘Fuck!’ Costas yelled
and then risked a look again. The enemy was crossing the water; they were out of time. ‘Right, go now,’ he shouted. Poll and the sentry had time for one more shot each and then the foursome burst from behind the boulder and began to run. Arrows bounced off the ground around them and one parted Tara’s hair, but then they were diving head first into the shelter of the stones, heedless of the bruises or the men they fell on to.
‘Archers to the fore, two ranks, one kneeling, one standing. Those without bows give them shield cover. Loose in waves on my command. Get a rhythm going and keep it going until they stop, reach us, or you run out of shafts. When they do reach us, it’ll be hand-to-hand but we fight in rank the way we’ve been trained. Every man supports his comrade. If a gap appears in the front rank, second rank moves to fill it.’
It’s what Tara would have ordered. She drew her sword and eyed the oncoming mass of men. This wasn’t a raid; this wasn’t a scouting party. Costas had a hundred men and the sentries numbered twenty. The Mireces came in their thousands.
This was the godsdamned invasion they’d expected to come down the Blood Pass. Only reason Mace had sent so few of them out here was because this was the route the Mireces weren’t supposed to be taking.
Costas took a deep breath and met the eyes of as many of the men as he could manage. ‘There’s a lot of them, lads,’ he said and got a wry chuckle. ‘But we hold them here for as long as we can. Tara, you’re taking word to the Rank. Go now, and Dancer go with you.’
What? ‘Major, I can fight.’
‘No, you’re going. We’ll give you as much time as we can, time you’re already wasting.’
‘If this is because I’m a wom—’ she started, fear making her furious.
Costas glared her into silence. ‘This is because you’re the fastest runner I have and you know the route. Now bloody well run.’ Costas pushed her out of the front rank and took her shield, holding it for young Poll. The others stared at her and then shuffled into place, cutting her out.
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