by Dana Marton
Before I knew it, we had a full army.
Lord Karnagh, Tomron, and I were standing on the parapets, looking at the warriors training on the new grass. We were, at last, at winter’s end.
Orz was playing with Marga on the side of the training field. They made an odd couple, communicating with grunts and growls. I wondered if he might not have some Selorm blood in him. After seeing that he caused no harm, most people accepted him, especially when they saw Marga accept him. Both the Seb and the Selorm put great faith in the judgment of tigers.
Marga bounded away, twisting her head to check on me before she moved toward the forest. The sparring warriors switched positions, and one challenged Orz.
Without the slightest hesitation, Orz stepped into the fight. He held his own, despite his disfigured fingers that badly gripped his sword.
Lord Karnagh remarked, “The hollow is no stranger to war. If he had his voice, you could make him a captain.”
“He might have been a captain once,” I allowed, and told him about the disappeared captain of Ishaf’s city guard.
We watched him as he fought, beating back his opponent little by little. Due to his uneasy grip, his blows were not as accurate as the other man’s, but he had more strength behind them.
“Tomorrow, I set out for Muzarat,” I said.
“And we set out to free Regnor,” Lord Karnagh responded. “We have the men to do it. As soon as my city is free, I shall be coming to your assistance, my lady.”
We had agreed the day before to split our new army. Lord Karnagh gave Tomron, who had once been sworn to the Selorm lord as his captain, into my service. I named Tomron my general, an honor the battle-hardened warrior had accepted with tears in his eyes.
And now we were ready to leave.
Up this far north, the river was riddled with rapids, unsuitable for barges, but below Muzarat, the waters calmed. I would march to Muzarat with my half of the army, and from there, the Silver River would take us to the sea; then we could sail to the islands of Landria and negotiate transport back to Dahru.
Batumar’s cloak with the star map stitched into the lining was gone—my heart twisted with a sharp pain, even as I thought that—but since I stitched the map, I remembered it fair well. I was certain I could recreate it again.
“The most difficult part will be to convince the Landrian king to put his navy in our service. But in a world such as we live in now, even he must be looking for alliances,” I told Lord Karnagh.
He grew thoughtful. “I might be able to help with that.”
He pointed to the hills, covered in trees all greening for spring. “Landria is a nation of small islands and island fortresses. Their navy is crucial to their defense. But their arid southern islands lack the right kind of wood for shipbuilding.”
I listened with budding hope as he continued.
“Seb loggers cut the cedar and fir for the ships, the oak for the oars, then the logs are floated down the Silver River to Uramit. The rapids do not damage the logs much. Wood for ships is our main trade with Landria.” He smiled. “I shall write a missive you can carry to their king, to remind the old man just how much he needs our trade and let him know how fully we support your quest.”
I embraced him as I would have a brother, and he embraced me back, awkwardly, one-armed, but with warmth.
So close was I to the end of an impossible journey, tears suddenly burned my eyes.
We would march from Brooker’s Castle to Muzarat, where I hoped to find Graho and purchase the children from him to free them, then float down the river to Uramit, the nearest seaport to the Landrian islands.
And from there, home to Dahru to save my people. I smiled, but that smile soon wilted as I saw Lord Brooker approach with a grim look on his face.
“Bad tidings, my lady. I have word from the latest refugees. The main force of the Emperor’s army was seen heading toward Uramit. They have the dark sorcerer with them.”
My heart stopped. “Uramit has a Gate.”
Lord Karnagh grunted with frustration next to me. “Can a dark sorcerer open the Gate of the World on Dahru from the Gate of Uramit?”
“I do not know.” Desperation filled me. Who knew from whence the Emperor’s sorcerer drew his power?
I thought of Kratos, the taloned god, and shuddered.
* * *
Our march south through enemy-controlled territory was most difficult. We fought skirmish after skirmish, battle after battle. What castles we passed, we freed.
It was after one such battle that I was nearly captured by retreating enemy.
We thought the Kerghi who had survived the last clash had run off. After I treated our injured, as I was covered in blood and gore, I wished to bathe. Our soldiers crowded around the castle well, trying to do the same.
I left the well to them, needing peace after the bloody battle, some silence for my ears that had heard too many death cries that day. I knew the forest outside the walls had a creek. With Orz and Marga, I walked out to seek its clean water.
I had bathed in many forest creeks with Orz and Marga standing guard. Marga liked splashing in the water with me. Orz would stand on the bank, sword drawn, with his back to me. I felt safe with him. He was protective of me. I did not think he thought of me as a woman.
About that, I was wrong.
I washed the blood of the injured off me, out of my hair, scraped it from under my fingernails. We were far enough south so that, although the water was bracing enough to make me not want to linger, I was not cold once I walked out of the creek and dried myself.
Darkness was falling on the forest. Marga padded off to hunt. She would have filled her belly on the battlefield, but I would not let her feast on the dead, not even our enemies, and never had.
“Let us go and find two unburned beds,” I said to Orz, now alone with him in the clearing.
Part of the castle had caught on fire while we had fought, but the flames had since been extinguished, only the south tower badly damaged.
Orz turned toward me.
Tension sat in his movements, in his wide shoulders. I could feel him watching me from under his hood. Instead of heading down the path, he took a step toward me, then stopped, as if fighting with himself over something.
I tilted my head. “Orz?”
But I did not have time to puzzle out what bothered him. A moment later, voices reached us on the wind, guttural, Kerghi sounds. Some of the enemy were still in the forest. Judging by all the different voices, at least a dozen.
“Run,” I whispered, not wanting Orz to try to take on that many. And since I darted down the path toward the castle, he had no choice but to follow me.
But the enemy heard our racket and gave chase.
While standing his ground in a fight, Orz’s movements were fast enough. But he was not a fast runner, not with his broken gait.
The enemy gained on us. Orz knew it too, and when he saw a hollow tree a few steps off the path, he darted for the waist-high hole.
He slammed into the cavity backward, laying his sword on the ground in the same moment so I would not be skewered when I slammed in after him.
We filled the hole with no room to spare, and I scrambled to pull my robe in and around me. I hoped, if anyone looked in the falling darkness, my brown robe would be just a brown shadow on the brown bark, not easily noticed.
My heart raced as the enemy rushed by us. But then, since our footfalls had stopped, they stopped too. They doubled back.
I held my breath.
Orz sat with his knees pulled up, me on his lap, with a knee on either side of him, straddling him. My hands were braced on either side of his head. His hands were on my waist, under my cloak.
As the enemy searched around outside and I squirmed in fear, Orz’s mangled hands came to grip my hips.
And then my heart raced even faster.
Plunged suddenly into darkness, our bodies were invisible, defined only by touch, reducing us to just a man and a woman.
&nb
sp; His face was a hairsbreadth from mine. His hood had slid up, but in the pitch dark, I could not see his face.
My heart hammered away.
Does he hear it? Heat crept up my cheeks.
I tried to shift up a little, but my behind on his thigh slipped right back down, the joining of my thighs coming into hard contact with his loins.
The harsh catch of his breath sounded loud in my ears. A small moan escaped my throat. I hoped he recognized it as a moan of embarrassment. What would he think of me otherwise? For all I knew, he was the captain of the Ishafi city guard and had a wife at home and ten children.
But if he did, he was not thinking of them at the moment, because his hands tightened on my hips.
My hands dropped to his shoulders that were hard with muscles. For the first time in a long time, a faint yearning unfurled inside me, but, as soon as I recognized it, an ice-cold wave of guilt washed it away.
The moment I stiffened, Orz withdrew from me in the tight space, allowing a little more room between us, and I was suddenly cold enough to shiver.
His hands loosened on my hips. Before he could pull them away, I slid my own hands over them. And then I did something I had ached to do for a long time. I healed his fingers.
He growled low in his throat once he realized what I was doing, but I would not release him, and he could not escape. He had guarded me and had given me his friendship, his companionship through a difficult journey. I was determined to do this one thing for him.
I would have healed his entire body, but I feared that might truly arouse his anger. So I softened the ruined bones of his hands, then I knitted them together the right way again, using my own good bones as the pattern.
I grew tired by the end. The knitting of bones, even small ones, was never easy work, and I had already been exhausted by caring for the injured of the battle.
When I finished, I leaned against him, my head resting on his shoulder. And he folded his arms around me and stroked my hair with the hands I had just made whole again.
His heart beat steadily against my chest. I sighed. I had missed the feel of strong arms. Suddenly, I was blinking away tears.
Orz’s arms tightened. In a dark hole, hidden away from the world, I let his comfort wash over me without questioning it for a moment, then another. Emotions I could not name swirled through me.
Then the enemy stalked off, swearing at having lost their prey, and we eased out of our hiding place and hurried back to the castle.
* * *
Day and night, men and women kept coming to us. The women and their babes, the injured and the old we left behind at the freed castles, with their men to protect them. But some warriors asked to join us, and these we took along. Our numbers swelled once again.
After a while, we did not have to fight as often as when we had begun our journey. Smaller bands of enemy soldiers would not engage us but often fled before us instead. The areas we marched through had already been conquered; the Emperor’s main army had moved on, only enough soldiers left behind to hold key positions.
The worse their area had been ravaged, the more fighting men joined us. With their homes burned and their families killed, they had nowhere else to go. By the time we reached Muzarat, our numbers had doubled once again.
We camped on the low hill that overlooked the end point of the caravan trail. The Silver River flowed south just outside the city. Here, caravan goods were loaded onto barges and simply floated down to the port city of Uramit.
Tomron, Orz, Marga, and I stood in front of my tent.
Orz watched the river. Did it remind him of something? Was he from around here? Would he ever remember who he was and where he was from and leave me?
How much that thought bothered me took me by surprise. I had grown most used to his company. A hundred times a day, I was searched out by his gaze, or he was searched out by mine.
But he did not seek being as close to me again as we had been in the hollow tree. Part of me was disappointed; part of me was glad.
Then I thought of Lawana in my mother’s tale, how she could not make her decision, turning back and forth until a great hole was created.
“The hole, deep and wide, drank Bottomless Lake and swallowed Mountain of No Top. An endless swamp took their place, and to this day, it is called Lawana’s Swamp,” my mother would say.
“What happened to Lawana and her parents and the man?” I would ask my mother each time she reached this far in the story.
“The swamp swallowed them,” my mother would tell me, her voice deep and grave.
Now, having seen some of the world, I knew at last the meaning of the tale: indecision had a price. A lesson I would do well to remember.
I ran my fingers through Marga’s fur, and she rubbed against me. I drew my mind from the past and considered the more immediate difficulties we faced.
From the scarce news we had gained from new refugees, I tried to calculate whether we or the enemy army would reach Uramit first. And if they do, how large a force will we face?
I kept scratching the tiger’s neck. She knew to lean against me only partially. Her full weight would have tipped me over.
“The Emperor began this war with a formidable army,” I said. “But some of his men were lost in the fighting. Others have to be left behind to hold territory while the main force moves forward.”
Tomron nodded. “Which means his fighting force is decreasing.”
This gave me some hope as I searched Muzarat, which stretched before us with its endless markets, the largest city I had ever seen. Oddly, despite its size, Muzarat had but a minor fortification in the middle.
Of course, I could not see what I most wished: Graho the merchant and his little beggars. We were too far away for that.
Tomron pointed at a procession leaving the city, a dozen men on horseback—all white horses of the finest breeding. Orz was moving already, calling Marga to him with a soft chuff and walking back toward the middle of our camp with the tiger. Well done. I did not want anyone from the delegation to be thrown from his horse when the animal panicked.
For this reason and others, we had learned to camp outside the cities we came across instead of marching in and causing distress.
“Here come the emissaries,” Tomron said.
They stopped at a fair distance and remained on their horses, which pranced anyway, since the wind blew from the camp and they could smell Marga.
The men gave short bows and introduced themselves with names that were a combination of sounds and snorts. Luckily, the one who spoke next—the youngest of them—used the merchant tongue. “Greetings from the Merchant League of Muzarat.”
They looked between myself and Tomron, trying to judge which one of us they should address.
Tomron solved this problem by saying, “The High Sorceress, Tera, accepts your greetings, merchants. I am her general, Tomron. We are on our way to the port city of Uramit. Our army will camp here until we can find enough barges to take us down the river.”
He simply informed them of our plans, did not ask for permission or an opinion.
“Were you hired to defend Uramit?” another merchant asked, the one in the turban.
“We were not,” Tomron said.
They smiled at that and slipped from their horses to the ground at last, stepped closer and bowed again.
“The Merchant League of Muzarat would hire the sorceress’s army. Would you come into our city to discuss terms, my lady?” a man with a silver beard asked.
“The army is not for hire,” Tomron informed him.
The emissaries looked at each other with frowns. They were merchants. Perhaps they did not trust that which was not for sale.
“Do you know of a merchant by the name of Graho?” I inquired.
Since they showed no recognition of the name, I added, “He traveled to Muzarat with the caravan from Ker, transporting nine little beggars.”
The merchants murmured amongst themselves, then the young one mounted his horse and
rode back toward the city.
“We will enquire,” silver beard told me, then asked, “Why risk the spring river? Why not wait a mooncrossing here? Ice floes come from the northern mountains and sink barges this time of year. We would provide you with tents, food, and women for the men. And male pleasure slaves for you, my lady,” he added hurriedly.
I nearly choked on my own spittle at the thought. I did not return his smile. “We hurry to Uramit.”
The merchants looked at each other. Then the turbaned one said, “The Emperor Drakhar’s main force is marching on the port city.”
My very reason for wanting to reach the seaport in a hurry. “How soon will the enemy troops reach the port, do you think?”
“Five days at most,” the oldest of the merchants said in a trembling voice, so many folds of skin above his eyes, he could barely keep them open. “They will sack Uramit in no time. Then they shall march on us.”
“Can we reach Uramit in five days?” I asked.
Again they looked at each other. None would speak. A few gave noncommittal shrugs. They did not want us to leave.
“If we face and defeat the enemy at Uramit, they will never reach this far,” Tomron put in.
This brightened them up. No battle anywhere near their city meant they need not lose a single man, a single home, a single possession.
The turbaned one was just about rubbing his hands together. “How many barges would you need, my lady?”
And so it happened that the Merchant League of Muzarat put their barges at our disposal. After a night of rest, our army began floating down the Silver River. The turbaned leader of the merchant league volunteered to travel with us and help us on the way.
By the time the barges pushed away from shore, I had word about Graho. He had been in Muzarat, but he had not sold his little beggars. Only a few days earlier, he had hired a barge to take him and the children to Uramit.
Why was he going there?
I pondered that question more than a few times during the five full days we spent on the barges, moving closer and closer to the sea. Few ice floes bothered our progress, none large enough to sink us. For this, I gave thanks to the spirits.