Black Ospreys

by West, Michelle

  She shrugged. “Given his reputation, it’s probably just as well.”

  It surprised him. “Why are you here, sentrus?”

  “To pass along a bit of friendly advice.” Her expression was at odds with the word friendly. Her voice was thin edge.

  He nodded slowly.

  “Keep an eye on Kreegar.”

  He nodded again.

  She set aside five of the writs. “These,” she told him quietly.

  “You know them?”

  “One of them. But I’d take a risk on the rest.”

  “The others?”

  “Fiara will kill at least two of them.”

  “If she does, she’s dead.”

  Alexis smiled grimly. It was the only way she smiled, but it changed the landscape of her face. “I know.” She turned from the tent, stopped bent slightly, in its flaps. “But Fiara, you can trust.”

  He almost laughed. “Not a single one of you could follow the orders you were given, not even when it meant your death otherwise.”

  “Maybe we didn’t like the orders.” She shrugged. “Take ’em if you want. Fiara can look out for herself.”

  He stared at the papers for a long time, musing. In the end, he kept five.

  * * *

  Where food was scant, alcohol was less so. It was a mystery to Duarte, who seldom drank; a mystery and a great annoyance. The first time, he chose to overlook it. Two men were sent to the infirmary with wounds that would render them useless for at least two weeks. The second time?

  He shed his forced nonchalance. Drinking after battle was a time-honored tradition. Drinking right before it, time-honored as well. But this? He found the men—and woman—who were drinking and he set the alcohol alight. There were cries of surprise and pain as bottles dropped and cracked, some shattering where they hit the sparse rock along the plateau. Alcohol made men brave.

  And stupid. Terribly stupid.

  One, scarred, ugly in ways that had nothing at all to do with appearance, took exception to his loss. He recognized the man: Kreegar. Alexis’ gift. His dagger glinted in the dying blue fire as he rose swiftly, his Weston a smattering of words that would make street thieves proud.

  Duarte, dressed in the finery of a Primus of the Kalakar House guards, lifted a brow. “Put it down,” he said quietly. It was not a request.

  Kreegar swore. He wasn’t drunk enough to stumble; he certainly wasn’t drunk enough to slur his words. Just enough to be foolish.

  He lunged at Duarte, who didn’t bother to move.

  In all, the Kalakar Primus was underimpressed. They had trained with him. They should be aware of what he could do, by now. Of course, they hadn’t seen it all. He was their Captain, Primus Duarte of the Kalakar House Guards. He was also their last jailer.

  He used fire that would have been almost pathetic among the Warrior mages of the Order of Knowledge, seconded to the Kings. And while the fire burned, and Kreegar screamed, he stepped in with his sword. It was not his favored weapon. Favored or no, it did its work. It passed through Kreegar’s chest with unerring accuracy.

  And Kreegar? Passed on to the Halls of Mandaros, where judgment awaited him.

  All sound died; the wind seemed to hold its breath as he watch the twenty Ospreys who now lingered around him in a circle. If they chose to attack him, it was over.

  He could see indecision at play across many faces, some more familiar than others. If the gallows hadn’t held them back, death wouldn’t. The silence strengthened, thinned, grew oppressive.

  It was broken by Alexis, who turned to her companion. “Pay up,” she said, holding out a flat palm.

  Her companion was Auralis. “Pay up?”

  “You said six days. I said three.”

  “It was four. The way I see it, there are no winners.”

  “Then open your damn eyes. I was closer. You owe me.”

  Fiara laughed. “Don’t mess with him, ’Lexis.”

  “The hells. Pay up,” she added, sliding her dagger out of the sheath.

  “Sentrus,” Duarte said coldly.

  Everyone started at him He stared at Alexis. Her expression shifted instantly into a clean anger, but she jammed her dagger back into its sheath. She was fond of it; she didn’t want to lose it.

  Or have it embedded in her chest.

  “The rest of you, back to your tents.”

  Fiara whistled; she made a fist and pumped it once. “Sentrus,” she said, managing both syllables without a sneer.

  Alexis still faced Duarte. After a moment, she said, “Do I get a raise?”

  “My tent,” he said, still cold, ”Now.”

  * * *

  All studied casualness was gone the minute the witnesses were. Alexis faced him across his pathetic excuse for a desk. Field desks were terrible, unless you were a commander. It was a rank he would never attain. And he thanked the gods daily for that fact.

  “You’ve been here three weeks,” he told her quietly. He did not refer to her promotion. “I’ve had Dunbar confined three times; I’ve broken up eight fights. I’ve killed three men, including Kreegar.”

  She lifted a hand. ”Permission to speak freely?” she said, with a trace of humor.

  His raised brow told her how much he appreciated the attempt. “Granted.”

  “Nine fights.” He thought, for a moment, that had he actually been a commander, the army would be a lot smaller. “Nine, then. Your point?”

  “Give us something else to fight. Soon.”

  “Sentrus—”

  “Alexis will do.”

  “I decide that.”

  She shrugged. “Whatever. You can add a stripe or a quarter circle to the arm. Or the armpit. It won’t make a damn bit of difference. No one trusts you. No one trusts each other. You have no idea if we ever will.”

  He nodded quietly.

  “But with people like us, there’s only one way to test it. We’re not theoreticians. We’re not even army. We’re just…your cadets.” She said the word with a grimace. Lifted her hands, signaling, of all things, retreat. “We only learn one way, Primus. We don’t know what you want. We can guess. Some of us are pissed off about it; some don’t give a damn.”

  “What do you ‘guess’ we want?”

  “You want us to fight like the Annies fight. We’re ready to do that.” She paused, and then added, “But we’re not ready to sit, to wait, to be picked off because we’re stupid. Give us a fight.”

  He nodded quietly. “Sixty-seven men and women. You’re one decarus. Who will the others be?”

  Her brows rose and then lowered, as if they were wings.

  “Not Fiara,” she said at last. “And if you repeat that, I’ll kill you.”

  “You’ll try.”

  “Even odds. I’ve seen you fight. But unlike Kreegar and half of the rest, I paid attention.”

  He nodded grimly. “Continue.”

  “Auralis, maybe. You’ll have to bust him down, but he’ll do.”

  “That’s two. I need at least five.”

  “Margie. She’s grim, but she’s got enough discipline to keep things in line unless all hell breaks loose. Stepson.”

  “Stepson? He’s a—”

  “Psychotic, yes. But fear works. He knows you’ll kill him if he blinks the wrong way; you’ve been itching to do it. That’s what four of us? Put Cook up as well.”

  “Cook is—”

  “Bloody big.”

  Duarte hesitated for just a moment, and then he nodded again. “Don’t let the tent hit you on the way out.”

  She muttered something rude under her breath. It was a start.

  * * *

  Ellora AKalakar liked maps.

  Which was good; she had to look at a lot of them, and some were of questionable accuracy. She made marks on them, pinned flags to them, removed flags from them, watched as whole river boundaries were redrawn. Birds were the scouts of choice for the Northern army, but a bird’s-eye view was not always accurate, and very, very few people could get i
nformation from conversation with birds. She found some amusement in watching them try.

  Then again, she found mages more or less amusing in general. They were obdurate, arrogant, overweening in their vanity; they fretted about things that she hadn’t worried about since the vagaries of youth had been shaken off with a vengeance. With the exception of the warrior magi, they were all considered elderly, although she privately thought much of that age was like carefully applied make-up; age and wisdom, or age and power, were often conflated among mages.

  That, and she liked their beards.

  Had she hated the magi, she would have found them amusing anyway, because Devran ABerrilya could not abide their presence for more than an hour at a time. He was not a man given to outburst; instead, he used silence like a blunt instrument. He was positively glacial on this particular day.

  It was the first time she had pinned a black flag to the map. She thought he might reach out to sweep it away, and apparently, so did Bruce Allen; the Eagle hovered between them, his shadow like outstretched pinions, while the mages talked among themselves.

  At length, however, they finished, and they turned their attention to the maps that held them all. The Terrean of Averda and the Terrean of Mancorvo were the most detailed portions of the map; there were only two passages into the Dominion, one through each. But Mancorvo’s pass went through the mountains; Averda’s did not.

  It was therefore in Averda that most of the battle was likely to be fought.

  “What will your Ospreys do?” Commander Allen asked quietly.

  “What they have to.”

  “And that?”

  She shrugged. “Change the face of the Northern army.”

  Devran’s face grew slightly pinched. “The face of the Kings’ army does not require changing.”

  “We’ve had this argument,” Commander Allen said. He Looked at Ellora, his gaze keen. “You’re sending them into the heart of the Annagarian front.”

  She nodded. “They’re few enough.”

  “They won’t make it,” Devran replied.

  Her turn to shrug. She did; it was artless. “They were carrion anyway. What do you care?”

  “They broke the Kings’ laws.”

  “The Annies don’t care about the Kings’ laws, and we’re not in the Empire.”

  “I said we’ve had this argument.”

  Devran rose. “Will you let her play these games?”

  “They’re not games,” she replied evenly.

  He ignored her. He often did. “Her men are barely part of the army; they serve her. I do not want our command structure to devolve into a personality contest.”

  “You command your army,” she told him. “I’ll command mine.”

  “You will answer to the Kings.”

  No, she thought, but she didn’t bother to say it. She looked at the markers and pins. I’ll answer to their wives, their children, their parents. If they have any who give a damn.

  * * *

  Sixty-six men and women were not a small force, unless held against the balance of the Imperial army. Primus Duarte AKalakar watched them warily. Truth? He didn’t like them. They didn’t like him. He was counting on the fact that they hated the Annies more. He had tested this hatred a handful of times, culling their numbers; choosing, with deliberate care, the men who could best serve as examples by dying. He was not a torturer; he generally killed quickly. He did not kill officially.

  That would require paperwork and time, neither of which he had in abundance.

  No, he thought, as Alexis lifted two fingers in the silence of the occasional snapped branch. It would require distance. It would make him just another servant, albeit one with rank. This way, he was master, or no one was.

  It was close.

  With the Black Ospreys, it would always be close.

  By killing swiftly, and without any compunction, without any sign of hesitation or remorse, he made the game deadly. More, he made it clear that they were his.

  He waited a moment. Alexis lifted her left hand, and flattened her palm. He lifted his own, then, as if he was a conductor, and brought them together. She nodded, left her men, her fingers dancing wordless in the air.

  She had learned quickly. And she moved.

  He was almost captivated by the speed and silence of that graceful motion. His eyes were still on her when she reached his side, and she noticed; she noticed everything. Her brows rose in amusement, but her eyes were steady and unblinking when they came to rest upon the village. The valley contained it. Here, between the perch of too many trees, they could see the planted fields, and beyond them, the huts that were home to the Dominion’s slaves. Beyond those huts, a stone manor, the only such dwelling, and behind it, the tall structures that were, in theory their target. Granaries. They were guarded; he could see horses moving in the distance. They were more easily counted then men. In fact, in Averda, they were counted and prized more highly then men.

  He did not look at his hands.

  Alexis did. And she smiled. They had traversed the forests with care, avoiding the mounted patrols and guardposts that the Annies relied on. The Imperial army was a theory, now; the Ospreys were surrounded, in all directions, by the forces of the Tyr’agnate of Averda. Callesta.

  Learn to speak a different language, he thought.

  He glanced back once. Just once.

  The night would be filled with sounds of terror: laughter, screaming, the cries of the dying. Some of them would be his; most would not. Twisted fate, then, that the ones that would linger longest, in memory and nightmare, would be those that were not.

  But they were parchment, paper; they were the things upon which the first of the Northern messages would be left. Over the corpses of the dead—the many, and the helpless—the banner of the Ospreys would be the only moving thing by night’s end, and it would move by the grace of the Southern wind.

  Wind was the only thing the Southerners seemed to fear, and the wind carried the Black Ospreys.

  * * *

  Ellora AKalakar looked up as Verrus Korama entered her quarters. He was quiet, which was not unusual; like Devran, his silences were often more telling than his speeches. He handed her a tube; she touched it. Beneath her hands, it warmed, waiting. She spoke a phrase, placed her thumb against the edge of the tube that would either open or explode, and waited.

  This was Duarte’s work.

  Korama waited while the tubing fell away; waited while she uncurled the missive it contained. He even waited while she read it, his posture pitch-perfect, as if it were the only grace-note in a particularly grim second act.

  “Kallos has fallen,” she whispered. The paper fluttered to her desk. She did not touch it again.

  “There was resistance,” he said, when it became clear she wouldn’t.

  She understood what he offered, and refused to accept it. “There would be,” she replied, black humor edging all of the syllables. “Any bets?”

  He frowned. “Don’t,” he told her quietly.

  “Don’t?”

  “Don’t think like an Osprey. They have that luxury, AKalakar. You don’t.”

  Luxury. “Did anyone survive?”

  “In the village? Possibly. At night, it would be hard to be certain.”

  She didn’t ask about prisoners.

  She didn’t ask about anything. She had come to war, and with her, had brought the certain callousness that any officer must. She balanced on its edge.

  * * *

  “Kalakar.”

  She had not looked away from Duarte.

  “The Ospreys were born here,” she said quietly.

  “And they were laid to rest in the North,” he replied, equally quiet. “We surrendered the colors there. We thought it wouldn’t matter.” His shrug was dismissive. “We were never a peacetime unit.”

  She looked at him, gave him that much. The darkness hid many scars.

  “This was a different war.”

  “A cleaner war.”

  “Duar
te—”

  “Alexis will stay in the South.”

  And you?

  * * *

  By the time they were sent to the third village, word had spread. The Northern armies were known, in the South, by the visage of the Osprey, and its wings were black.

  The prisoners that the rest of the army gathered—and admittedly, they were few—spoke of the Ospreys in bitter, implacable Torra. They spoke of little else, and the words were both curse and promise.

  You could have painted targets on their backs, Duarte thought, gazing at his unit. But they would have been small targets, and at that, in constant motion.

  The Annies thought they numbered in the hundreds. In the thousands. They thought the wind carried them. They thought the Lord of Night blessed them. Duarte was willing to admit that if there was a Lord of Night, they worked in his shadow.

  He thought about clipping their wings.

  But it was only thought. And if he didn’t join them in savagery, if he didn’t join them in murder, he gave them the opportunity to vent their rage, to plant the seeds of a different rage in their enemies. Anger made fools of all men.

  Even Duarte AKalakar.

  * * *

  The villages around the granaries became focal points for the Tyr’s cavalry units. The valleys were not kind to horses; the Ospreys, who used them seldom, less so.

  They added horsekiller to the long list of epithets they wore as badges. They took their greatest losses in that enterprise. And they suffered the bitterest of their divisions there. Men, women, and children? They were seen as mirrors. Their deaths were markers, the oldest variant of an eye for an eye.

  But the horses were harder. Not for Duarte, and not for many of the Ospreys. Fiara, however, was livid. As if the horses were helpless, and the children were not.

  Alexis reined her in; it was close.

  Duarte felt the first hint of unease, then; he was prepared to kill Fiara—but he didn’t want to kill her. Wanted, in fact the opposite. It was unexpected. Unaffordable.

  The Ospreys had lost and gained men; the gallows were empty, their shadows paler and more peaceful than the shadows the Ospreys cast. But each new Osprey that survived Duarte, that survived the insane and suicidal missions that Duarte himself chose, became AKalakar. The name meant something to them.