by Kate Elliott
A group of captives cowered on the road, roped together, unable to move. The soldiers bolted back the way they had come, heading for the safety of a copse several hundred paces away. Nallo released her basket, but she had cursed totally misjudged their speed and her angle and distance and the entire gods-rotted pummel of stones rained uselessly on dirt.
They tucked their heads and kept sprinting. None saw Pil and Sweet stooping from above, or Peddonon and Kanness coming in at an angle.
Sweet struck with such breathtaking precision that Nallo shouted. The talons gripped, plunging right into a man’s torso as he screamed. Then the raptor, beating its wings, rose; none of the soldiers even attempted an attack. They were too stunned. Pil, turning in his harness, released first one arrow, then another, and a third and fourth in quick succession as Sweet rose. Two arrows hit their mark. Sweet released her prey.
Kanness’s Lovely struck, talons raised and wings battering, as if she was taking a deer. The men scattered, one uselessly flinging a spear in the direction of the eagle’s tail feathers. Peddonon slammed a javelin into the back of the bold spearman as Jabi grazed another man, missing the strike and pulling up hard as Peddonon released his grip on his javelin. One soldier had the presence of mind to nock an arrow to his bow.
Nallo had overshot again. She passed over the ford. The captives struggled at their bonds, and the dray master out in the current had grabbed a dead man’s sword and cut free one beast. He was now diving in and out of the tangle to try to save the other while the prisoners shouted at him to come cut them loose instead while they still had a chance to run.
Warri and Orya remained aloft, and that cursed idiot Warri hadn’t even released his stones, which when you thought about it described him very well.
The hells!
Two soldiers ran up a path on the far side of the ford. Seeing her, they scrambled for the nearest bushes, any scant cover that might protect them.
She felt Tumna’s attention like a burst of fire in her own body, a powerful spear of hunting hunger. Eihi! She hadn’t cut the basket free; the cursed thing was in her way, but Tumna was already diving. She grabbed one of the four thin javelins stowed in a quiver to her right; no time to fumble for a knife and cut the basket loose.
How did she ever get to be such a gods-rotted slack-minded lackwit?
One man dove sideways into a crackling mass of thorn-berry.
Tumna struck the other.
Her wings flared; she thumped down so hard that Nallo pitched sideways and slammed into the raptor’s body, then stubbed her foot on the hard dirt, but Tumna’s powerful talons pinned them—and the soldier—to the earth. He twitched. He didn’t yet know he was dead. He croaked, struggling to get free, and Nallo plunged her javelin into his back, right where she thought the heart must be. He sagged and went slack.
A howl. A roar. Behind her, the other soldier attacked.
In the instant, she thought: He’ll kill me from behind. How do I fight?
All her lessons and training scattered like dross.
Tumna was faster than either of them.
She struck in one movement, piercing the man through the chest as Nallo drew up her legs and dangled in the harness watching a man die an arm’s length from her face. He looked like a rabbit caught out in the field, too stunned to understand what was happening. His mouth opened and shut as if he had forgotten what he meant to say. Bubbles of blood beaded at his nostrils, sucked in and out. She grabbed her knife, unhooked the harness, and dropped into a crouch beside him. His gaze did not follow her movement, but Tumna squawked irritably.
“Hush!” Nallo snapped. “Do what you want with him.”
She ducked out from under the raptor’s wings and circled around to the other man, who amazingly was not yet dead. Somehow, he was trying to pull himself up the path. She got a foot under his body and shoved him over. She bent, grasped his chin, and held it back to get a full curve. Then she cut deep to sever the windpipe, the foodpipe, and the blood vessels in one strong stroke, as she’d learned to do growing up among goat herders in the Soha Hills.
Battle wasn’t much different from slaughtering goats, when you thought of it that way. You killed when you had to, not for any joy you took in it.
Tumna shook the other man loose. She bent her head and nudged him.
“Heya!” shouted Nallo.
By now the cursed basket was half crushed. She cut the gods-rotted thing free, wiped her knife’s blade such as she could in two swipes on the weaving, then shoved the blade back in its sheath. Pulling her reeve’s baton, she approached Tumna brandishing it as the training regimen had taught her, as if anyone believed eagles actually feared the little stick of a baton that the reeves used to “train” and “control” the huge raptors. Tumna, anyway, was perfectly able and willing to rip off the head of her reeve, if her reeve annoyed her. But Nallo had been told time and again that it were better for a reeve to sacrifice herself than to allow her eagle to feast on human flesh.
Yet Tumna was only playing; she wasn’t hungry, or inclined to eat; she rolled the body around and gave up, impatient with the corpse’s lack of activity. It was only fun when they tried to escape.
“Aui!” muttered Nallo, hot and cold at once.
She heard folk calling, “Cut us loose, you gods-rotted—”
A dray beast bellowed. A man cursed.
She would have run down to slap some order into them, but Peddonnon had been clear in his instructions: Do not stay on the ground.
Flight gave the reeves their advantage; on the ground, they were easy to kill.
She whistled, and Tumna stretched her wings, looking around as if hoping for more entertaining hunting. Nallo ducked under the shadow of her wingspan and hooked in.
“Up!”
Up.
The eagle’s majestic strength carried her. The unbelievable sight of the skirmish unfolded beneath her: the dray master had finally gotten both animals out of the water and was helping the captives free themselves. Some had plunged into the water to recover weapons or gear; trails of red spun out in the water, marking dead soldiers in the current. Three women were coming up the path in Nallo’s direction, and Nallo gestured to them, waving an arm to indicate where they should look for the fallen.
Shouts and cheers and the stamping of feet on earth sent her on her way, just as an audience showed its approval at the Festival contests. She was grinning as Tumna slipped into a weak thermal and got some lift. She couldn’t really shout across the gap between eagles, but she found her place in the formation easily enough.
Peddonon flagged a “follow me,” and they continued south toward the delta, an intense green shivering mass of vegetation ahead. Kanness was laughing as he banked into place; not that she could quite make out the lineaments of his face, but he was a hearty laugher; she knew him well enough by now to recognize how his torso and head looked when he was full-on guffawing.
She didn’t feel like laughing, precisely, but it was so cursed good to know they’d finally inflicted some damage. After all the months of feeling like useless observers.
Why in the hells hadn’t the reeves done this earlier?
We’re not helpless any longer.
That cursed Commander Joss and his gods-rotted outlander ally had been right. Imagine that.
A month ago, the enemy had been dispersed across the plain of Istria and the lower reaches of Haldia, stretching to the Haya Gap, pillaging, burning, and generally causing havoc. Now it seemed everyone was marching toward Nessumara. Barges moved downriver, laden with slaves or building materials. Gangs worked in the western forests, felling logs, which were lashed into huge rafts and floated toward Skerru.
As they flew downriver after the skirmish, she observed with new eyes. That gang of men being marched under guard down-road was not vulnerable because they were guarded by too many soldiers for one wing to attack. Yet there, several mey from the river in heavily wooded hills, a half cadre of men hauling wagons was too far away from foot-base
d relief to call for help; a single wing could scatter them, and two wings working in concert—if such a thing could be managed—could obliterate them before their company came to their rescue.
Her hands itched, eager to pull Tumna’s jesses, to go on the hunt. To strike a blow.
When the wing passed over the town of Skerru, she saw people like ants boiling, all hard at work building what looked like rafts. Something big was up, for sure.
She, Pil, Kanness, and Peddonon set down on Copper Hall’s islet while Orya and Warri remained aloft. Three fawkners hustled over to greet them, a cursed sight friendlier than they had been the first time Nallo had landed here.
“What news?” the first cried as they clustered around Peddonon. “We’re in the hells of trouble here.”
“You must have seen!” blurted the second. “That gods-rotted army is building walkways to cross the marsh and swamp.”
“The hells!” cried the third, looking at Nallo. “You’ve got blood all over your leathers.”
Drying streaks splattered her vest and trousers. Flakes shed from her hands. A spot on her chin itched, and when she raised a hand to rub at it, the fawkners flinched as if they thought she was about to hit them.
“We’ve been in a skirmish.” Peddonon gestured to get their attention. “I need to see the marshal at once.”
“You’re in luck,” said the first fawkner. “They’re in council now, with the commander and that outlander captain.”
“Joss? Is here in Nessumara?”
“Just came in last night—”
“The hells! Kanness, you stay with the fawkners. Nallo, Pil, come with me.”
The fawkners blurted out a protest but a glance from Peddonon, and the menace of his big frame, silenced them. Nallo and Pil trotted obediently after him as he made his way through the compound to the marshal’s cote, a pretty cottage surrounded by a garden on the landward side and with a wooden pier jutting out onto a wide channel. Two low-slung boats had been tied to the pier. A girl, ten or twelve years of age and quite thin, was set to watch them. Two elderly reeves sat on the porch, mending harness. When they saw Peddonon they clambered to their feet. One tapped the sliding door and went inside the cote while the other blocked the stairs.
“I’m here to see Commander Joss,” said Peddonon.
“You’re Peddo, right? Where’s your eagle perched?”
“I’m Peddonon, sergeant in charge of the contingent stationed at Law Rock. If the commander’s here, he’ll want to speak to me. If Captain Anji is here, he’ll want to hear about the skirmish we just fought.”
“Skirmish?”
The old man’s gaze fixed on Nallo, taking in the blood. “Aui! What happened?”
“I’ll give my report to—”
The door slid open, and the other old reeve indicated that Peddonon should go in.
He paused on the porch to take off his boots, nodding at Nallo. “Go wash yourself off.”
“Where?” she demanded.
He waved a hand, but she wasn’t sure if he meant the garden, or the pier, or the barracks. The door slapped shut behind him, and the old reeves stared so rudely! She grabbed Pil and walked to the pier. The heat was beginning to rise, already muggy and steamy here in the delta; in another few weeks it would become unbearable. She swatted at gnats attracted to her sweat, but they only returned, like that cursed army: swarms that would eat them alive if they could manage it.
“Abandoned again with the usual disregard important louts show for their underlings,” she muttered. “Not one word of praise for our victory.”
“Any decent fighting unit would have made quick work of our clumsy attack,” said Pil. “The eagles are huge targets. We need better tactics, and much more training.”
“Thank you,” she said as she stamped out onto the pier, Pil following with more caution. The girl turned to stare at them. “Now I’ll just shove you into the water, if you don’t mind, so you can feel what it’s like to have water dumped over your excitement at finally having done something right!”
Pil didn’t like water; it had been hard enough to get him to bathe in the way Hundred folk did.
“I didn’t mean it,” she added, hating that stiff-faced expression he got.
“You were brave,” he said. “You didn’t hesitate.”
She laughed. “That’s praise coming from you, I suppose, with your fancy Qin ways.”
The brown water flowed so sluggishly you couldn’t quite see the current’s ripple. A pair of boats eased downstream, one tied on behind the other, an older woman steering the forward craft. The woman glanced their way casually and then, startled, looked more closely at Pil.
“Heya! Auntie! Look where you’re going!” A pair of young men called out jocularly to the older woman. She favored them with a long look, and whistled provocatively, and they laughed in reply. The men, rowing cargo upstream, were stripped down to loincloths, their muscular backs rippling as they stroked.
Nallo nudged Pil, but he was already looking in that pretending-not-to-look way he still had, as if admiring were shameful.
The girl ran her toes along one of the long lines, staring sidelong at Pil much as he was watching the passing rowers. “Why’s he wear his hair all funny like that? Why isn’t it short like a proper reeve? He’s an outlander. So why’s he wear reeve leathers?”
“I’m sure you’re a smart girl,” said Nallo. “If he come in here jessed to an eagle and wears reeve leathers, what do you suppose he is? Anyway, let me ask you a question. Why does this water stink so much?”
“It doesn’t! You’ve got blood on you. All dried and flaking off. Yuck.”
“It does! It smells like rotting fish and rubbish. Yuck.”
“I never asked you!”
“Yes, but you had plenty to say about my friend here, and you never asked him, just talked to me like he wasn’t even there.”
“Outlanders can’t talk proper speech, everyone knows that. If he could, why doesn’t he say anything?”
“I have nothing to say,” said Pil softly. The girl, hearing him speak, shrieked and danced away to the end of the pier. He grinned, more sweetly than Nallo ever did.
The male rowers had vanished past a point of land piled high with piers and warehouses and the auntie floated out of sight under a narrow arched bridge that stretched between Copper Hall’s islet and a spur of land that held what looked like a council square behind a screen of mulberry trees. The channel lay empty but for a leafless branch swirling aimlessly like a dead snake in the brown water.
The girl sidled a few steps closer. “Folk say we’re all likely to die,” she ventured, still staring at Pil. “Not so much by starving, ’cause we got fields all over the islands, but ’cause that army, they coming back.”
“This city is well defended by the river,” said Pil. “Only on two roads can an army march in across the wetlands. Likely the army will build paths and rafts. But your soldiers have weapons, boats, archers. You know the land. All this you can fight with.”
“We dun’t really have soldiers,” said the girl. “My brother got hisself killt. He was on Veyslip Island with the militia that held off the main attack on the east causeway. So he’s a hero, but he’s still dead. I dun’t see how we can fight them again. My clan tried to get us out in a boat but it cost too much. At least we live here in the hall, and get nai every day for our labor. Why do you fight them?” she said to Pil. “You being an outlander, I mean.”
He fingered his neat topknot. The clubbed hair bound around with thin leather strips had not a strand out of place. “I am a reeve.”
“Heya!” Peddonon appeared on the porch. “You two!”
Nallo rolled her eyes. “He’s changed now that he’s been put in charge on Law Rock. Whew! High and mighty!”
Pil looked away.
“You got something going on there, eh?”
The girl snickered.
Pil’s stance took on the rigidity that told her she’d gone too far.
�
��You can’t hear me?” Peddonon bellowed.
“Eiya! I’m sorry. And an idiot.” She slapped Pil hard on the shoulder, and he relaxed. “Let’s go.”
She trotted toward the cote, Pil’s steps sounding behind her. Commander Joss and Captain Anji emerged onto the porch, chattering away like her brothers when they would go on about the most precise details of the cursed goats.
The outlander had an engaging voice, his accent more pleasing than difficult. “That huge old forest—the Wild, you call it—would be a perfect refuge for skirmishers. We could drop them in behind enemy lines to maintain a running disruption, and they could retreat into the forest when they got into trouble.”
“No human can enter the Wild, and live. It’s forbidden to go in there.”
“What if we could speak to these wildings and ask them to allow our soldiers refuge? Just for the duration of the war? If they can think and communicate, then it is possible to negotiate with them.”
“Had much luck trading for horses with the lendings?” asked Joss with a laugh.
The captain winced, then grinned. “It was my own fault. I did not listen to good advice. But if the wildings are people, like to us, then it is merely a matter of coming to understand what they need and how we can offer that to them in return for what we need. Then both they and we benefit, to our mutual advantage.”
The tip-tap of a cane preceded the appearance of the marshal. He was old, weary, and stoop-shouldered, shaking his head as he appeared in the open doors as if disagreeing with Anji’s statement. His evident weakness made the contrast between the three men even greater: Commander Joss’s excessive handsomeness could not disguise his barely leashed energy, striking in a man who had counted a full forty years; the outlander captain had a quieter but more forceful charisma, a deadly wolf lying patiently in wait for the right moment to kill.
The captain addressed the marshal as if resuming a conversation broken off inside. “Marshal Masar, I know there is not time to properly train strike forces as efficient, disciplined units, but there is enough time to use them wisely. Reeves can carry soldiers and put them down behind enemy lines. We can sow confusion, pick off stragglers at little risk to ourselves. Create trouble. Draw off their attention while meanwhile I march the army up from Olo’osson. The key is to keep their gaze fixed elsewhere so they don’t see us coming.”