Fallen Queen (Mariposa Book 1)

by Y. R. Shin

  Sir Evinbur Haldroff, the eldest knight in camp, who had come along on their patrol, answered in a languid voice. “The south has supplies they gathered as tribute. They’re better off in terms of food too. Maybe that’s why they’re taking their time with it. Who knows if this war will end before this old man dies?”

  “We’ll end it as soon as possible, Sir Haldroff,” Paseid replied with a faint smile.

  Jacalrin wrinkled one eyebrow, then asked, “Oh! Did you see the report I sent? I brought every single gram of military-grade gunpowder I could find!”

  “I read it from the last report.”

  “That should be enough, right?”

  “More than enough for those morons.”

  Jacalrin giggled at Evinbur’s joke. He didn’t look nervous or tense at all. Jacalrin Endo Chesa was probably the only man who could pull that off at this time.

  The whole time they walked on the dry land, all sorts of noises resounded: the clanking sound of hammers beating cleats and posts; the rustling sound the soldiers’ armor made as they ran around; people shouting instead of talking. Paseid, who was carefully watching them without saying anything, suddenly came to a halt.

  “Hey…I mean, sir?” Quickly correcting himself, because he was still not used to having to address Paseid as his superior, Jacalrin turned his head and looked up at Paseid.

  Paseid was squinting one eye. Turning his gaze to follow Paseid’s, Jacalrin let out a short exclamation. They were looking at a horse jumping around, tied to the fence, and a group of soldiers struggling to put a suit of armor on him.

  “That horse is…?” asked Paseid.

  The sturdy horse was clearly well maintained and of a good breed, but too rough to have been trained for the army. No, he was more like a completely untrained, saddled wild horse.

  Jacalrin scratched the back of his head. “He’s still going at it, huh? What a strong, strong horse.”

  He’d actually totally forgotten about it until now.

  The horse had given Jacalrin’s knights trouble the whole march to the ridge. He’d seemed so tame when he was with what’s-her-face, but the second he was separated from her, he’d started jumping and thrashing madly.

  Jacalrin thought it was a waste to kill or leave such a high-quality horse, so he’d forced the horse to come all the way here. But at this rate, it would take a long time to tame him.

  Paseid deemed the horse quite fine too. He turned his horse and walked toward the fence. “Loosen the reins and let go of it.”

  The soldiers, struggling to not get kicked or bitten, startled at the voice that came out of nowhere.

  “Sir! Good, good morning, sir! But this one’s so violent he’ll kick away the fence and run away if I let go…”

  “Fix the post well to the ground and get away from the horse.”

  A handful of soldiers huddled to fix the post. As soon as they let go of the reins, as Paseid had ordered, the horse started a racket like a mad cow.

  Instead of stepping back, Paseid faced the horse head-on. The sight of the animal kicking his hind legs at the posts and aggressively snorting looked so threatening that it even made Jacalrin nervous.

  Evinbur expressed concern. “Please do step away from that horse, Sir Calandok. I’ll call a trainer.”

  “Oh, that won’t work. Nope, not at all. You can’t tame that in a few days.” Jacalrin waved his hands like there was nothing else to be said about that, for he had already tried on the way here. The cries and whinnying of the horse pounding the ground with his front legs were so frightening that even those setting up tents nearby flinched.

  Nevertheless, Paseid’s well-trained black horse held his place and stood there staring at the brown one. The struggling horse seemed to be slowly calming down.

  After a while, the brown horse stopped its thrashing. The horse stubbornly glared at Paseid, looking down from a higher and therefore more powerful position for a while, but he dropped his gaze at last and looked straight back at the black horse’s eyes instead.

  Jacalrin looked back and forth at the two horses glaring at each other. He was witnessing something nonsensical. Mere four-legged beasts were having a silent war. Whether because he realized that the opponent of his own kind was of an innately superior blood, or because he simply gave up, the horse that was causing a racket lowered his head at last.

  Jacalrin rubbed his chin and made a sound through his nose, like he hadn’t thought of that. “Hmmmm. I’ve been thinking this for a while, but I guess Rotsa really is an exceptional horse. People kept telling me that Baldoan horses are the finest. Makes me want to stop by at Baldo on the way back to the capital.”

  “Did he have a rider?” Paseid asked. The discolored, worn-out saddle commoners used seemed to suggest that he was not wild.

  Jacalrin suddenly recalled the woman from yesterday and scratched his forehead. Is she still where we left her?

  He had enough conscience to be concerned.

  Though he had completely relied on his intuition, even if he considered all the suspicious aspects of that woman, she probably was a commoner of Rarke who was not going to cause any big trouble. But it was her fault for venturing near the border during wartime, so it ended at that.

  “I bought it on the way here, at the field across the ridge,” he said.

  “Caravans are still travelling in these times?”

  “Kind of. You know what, I’ll give that to you as a gift, sir. I’m not interested nor good enough to train him. Moreover, my horse isn’t as domineering as Rotsa.”

  Evinbur frowned. That kind of untrained horse was of no use in war. It was better to just let it go. As he expected, as soon as Paseid turned his horse away, the dispirited horse started snorting and stomping the ground with his hooves again. But Paseid seemed to have taken a liking to the ferocious horse.

  “Sure,” he said.

  Jacalrin still didn’t think that the horse would really become a problem.

  Until the next morning when he found some deranged woman lying unconscious in front of the camp.

  Chapter Six

  The Hansen Deuk Chesa of Reuyen’s memory had a cunning side to him.

  By cunning, she didn’t mean that he was prone to flattering someone like a conniving snake; she meant that he was by far the best at pranking people behind their backs. He also could not stand defeat. His betrayal at the end of the queen’s time had probably been rooted in his personal feelings toward her and her forthcoming end, rather than his loyalty to Belbarote.

  She remembered the preposterous sight of him sitting in front of her cell, the night before the execution, facing her, with a chessboard laid before him.

  The betrayer with roughly tied sandy hair and eyes twinkling like the fresh meadows asked her to play, as if nothing had happened. Even though he knew she could not move an inch with the chains.

  “We should finish what we started before your departure,” he said. “Which side would you like, Your Majesty?”

  “Black.”

  “Still?”

  Him sitting on his bum on the dirty ground and setting up the chessboard was not very different from the past. He set up the pieces exactly as he remembered from the game they’d stopped somewhere on the battlefield. It was remarkably exact, but Swan was not surprised.

  “You’re the one who’s still addressing me as ‘Your Majesty.’ You must not fear those who might listen.”

  “A majesty once, a majesty forever. But of course, I can’t take your side now.”

  “I’d rather take my own life than take your pity.”

  “Your Majesty, you’re too intimidating. You have to stop being perfect at some point.”

  “You’re now insulting me to my face, are you?”

  Hollow laughter echoed in the empty cell.

  “Now I can tell you that seeing you galloping across the battlefield with a woman’s body was quite astonishing, but it wasn’t exemplary. In that sense, you’re a failure who could not become a role model to the nob
les.”

  “How sage of you. You’re daring to blabber your mouth now only because I’ve come to this, Hansen.”

  “What can you ever do to me now, Your Majesty?”

  Glancing at the chessboard on the other side of the bars, she suddenly pulled the end of her rough lips into a smile.

  “Move the bishop next to the rook on two from the left and three from the bottom two blocks northwest.”

  “Then I’ll move my knight here.”

  “The queen on the second row to the diagonal of your pawn.”

  “This? Then I’ll…”

  Hansen picked up a white bishop with a raised brow, then stopped midway through placing it down. He frowned, gave a little tsk, tsk, then started laughing. He proceeded to put the bishop down and pushed his pure white king, who now had nowhere to go, with his fingertip.

  Thump.

  The enemy’s king rolled across the hard chessboard and fell on the dirty jail floor. His laughter became louder and louder. She was quite satisfied with its strange echoing.

  “It was a done deal from the start. It’s your mistake for being too blinded by not losing to spot a small victory, Hansen.”

  “Till the end, really?”

  “Ruminate on today’s defeat until you die an old man, for there will be no more opportunities.”

  With a curse-like blessing, the queen was no more the next morning.

  By the time she reached the bottom of the ridge, Reuyen’s cheap leather soles had become completely tattered. Without proper shoes, her feet were suffering their share. But Reuyen kept forcing her blistered and bloodied feet to march on without resting.

  She couldn’t remember experiencing this kind of hellish pain in all her lives. In her last life, she had occasionally gotten into accidents, such as being slain with a sword, hit by an arrow, or falling off a horse, but those were all passing moments of deliberate hostility, not this kind of pain that tested her endurance.

  But this was a fight against herself. Whenever she could not take another step and wanted to rest, she looked up at the sky and muttered, “Look what that babe from your house dared to do to me, Hansen,” in a hoarse voice. That made the journey to the camp easier.

  Once she found the strength to continue, all the hesitance, fear, and confusion that was holding her back scattered away like a rainbow under the sun. To be honest, she was half-unconscious from the middle.

  The only times she was fully awake again were when she was famished or when she spotted traces of wild wolves. Thanks to the young Chesa’s despicable kindness of leaving behind the saddlebag, she could drink from the water bottle and eat the snacks that were packed in it.

  On the second day, she could feel her consciousness fading away as she went around the ridge. She threw the bag away and kept moving forward with only the small bag of food tied at her waist.

  By the end, it almost became a habit.

  “Hansen, I do not hate the Chesas, but it is truly hard to let that feeble babe of your house off with mercy.”

  Her present self was quite pathetic compared to her past self, who would’ve been full of energy after days of marching, but it was what it was.

  When she was starting to sense the imminent danger of extreme thirst, her body threatening to collapse at any moment regardless of her will, a faint smell of metal tickled her nose as she only just pressed her legs, shaking like a crab’s, down with her hand. She forced her dropping head up to see a vast field of dry clay behind the ridge. She could barely make out the Rarkian camp with the white wolf banner.

  Her heart started to beat fast.

  At last.

  The smell of torches and dark smoke billowing from the fires reached her nostrils. The familiarity fooled her into thinking for a moment that she had gone back in time.

  After only a couple more steps, her body collapsed. Her swollen, wounded feet that had been numb for a while now refused to move at all. Barely awake, she clenched her teeth, but it was no use. She was so close.

  “What is that?” said a voice.

  “Is that a person?” said another. “Report to the captain. I’ll go check it out.”

  Then, a guard patrolling the area noticed her and cautiously approached. “Identify yourself!”

  She was at her limit, just trying not to pass out, and now she saw the shadow of a soldier with his sword against the back of her neck. This was insanity. With all her might, Reuyen stopped herself from groaning and spoke. “…Came…Den…”

  “What? Why are you all the way here at…”

  “Came to find Den…Hansen’s…”

  “Hansen?”

  She couldn’t feel her legs, and now her consciousness was flickering too. Her state was serious enough to make her dry tongue limp and memories muddled. That single word, “Chesa,” had gone beyond her reach in her heap of memories, so she could only think of the name she had repeated over and over the whole way here.

  “Hansen. That—damn—ho-horse thief…!” She thought she yelled with all the energy she had left in her, because her rational awareness had also escaped her.

  Before going completely under, she looked up at the blue sky through her nearly closed eyes and thought, See, Hansen. After two hundred years…I still can beat you.

  She smiled with victory.

  When she opened her eyes again, she found herself inside an old tent in the camp she had so desperately wished for.

  When the preparation of the newly dispatched troops was almost done, the leaders gathered at the headquarters one by one. This meeting was not as energetic as yesterday morning’s.

  In the tent that smelled of dirt, even Paseid, wearing his proper black uniform that came up to his neck, couldn’t hide the deep fatigue on his face.

  Everyone in the room had a similar worn-out expression after spending a day organizing the new troops. Without any greetings, the discussion resumed.

  “You understand?” said Sir Tarayet Vinsen.

  Slouching in his seat and looking down at the map laid out on the round table, Jacalrin nodded at the explanation of the knight sitting across from him. Sir Vinsen rubbed the end of his pointy nose and raised his thick eyebrows in disbelief.

  “So,” Jacalrin said, “the point is that the Rarkian occupation force at the Gerad border of Galabua is a little over forty thousand, including my men who just joined. The Morganaans have a little less than thirty thousand, because their reinforcements haven’t arrived yet, so the easiest strategy is to wipe them out before that happens.”

  There probably—no, certainly—was a more specific explanation, and yet Jacalrin summarized the whole thing in spite of Sir Vinsen’s effort. Tarayet agreed by silently rubbing the end of his pointy nose again.

  “But what’s the problem?” Jacalrin asked. “Weren’t we letting them do whatever they wanted until now because we couldn’t attack them first?”

  After quietly listening to their conversation, Paseid pointed somewhere on the map. “They chose the Anf region south of here for strategic reasons.”

  Jacalrin looked at the way the black and white chess pieces were positioned there, remembered the rocky geography near the border, and slapped his knee with an, “Aha. But isn’t our Jolanta Field right in front of the twin cliffs of Anf and Morgana’s Plain Ishas beyond them? Seems large enough for a battle to me.”

  “In a battle at the beginning of this war, the enemy came gushing through the road between the cliffs into Jolanta and caused mayhem, resulting in thousands of casualties on both sides,” said Paseid. “Two weeks later, Rarke won by a very close number of men and the enemy retreated.”

  “I’m familiar with the victory at the Battle of Jolanta.”

  “Deducing from the number of weapons we retrieved, about three thousand and eight hundred of the enemy died.”

  Jacalrin looked surprised. Though not from any official report, from what he had heard, the enemy had suffered a much bigger loss than that at the Battle of Jolanta. He was sure he wasn’t mistaken, because
he had been there when the nobles in the capital were toasting the great victory that must have crushed Morgana’s spirit.

  “I heard it was nearly six thousand. Was there an error in the report to the capital?”

  Tarayet scoffed at that.

  Paseid looked at him for a brief moment and continued explaining. “The number of casualties during the retreat ranged over a thousand.”

  “What a psychopath. That Rovantis, did he run away as fast as he could to save his own life or something?”

  Evinbur stopped listening, his eyes shutting with fatigue. “Perhaps because he got scared he would lose his head after that kind of a result from the first battle, he hid in the Anf twin cliffs and started driving us crazy with his ever-defending tactics. After the first battle, Sir Deusak tried to create additional loss by attacking first, but the geography was too advantageous for those in defense, so he retreated.”

  “Gosh, that must have been laborious, Sir Deusak.” Jacalrin turned around to face Sir Denjak Deusak.

  Though there was no hostile intent, Denjak blushed with humiliation. His slightly hooded eyes narrowed and his thin lips scrunched up. He then turned back to Paseid.

  Paseid finished his explanation regardless of the other men. “But we can’t hide behind the unideal nature of this situation anymore. Now is the only chance to utilize our greater numbers.”

  “Umm, what’s your plan?”

  “We will ambush them and lay siege, as is protocol.”

  “Do you have any specific plans?”

  Ambush and siege were the basics of strategy. But there was a valid reason they’d dealt with small losses from sporadic battles until now instead of carrying that into action.

  Considering the geography of the Gerad border adjacent to Morgana, the only way to properly lay siege to the enemy while avoiding the twin cliffs of Anf was to go around the lowlands of Itaka in eastern Gerad, surrounding the sides and the rear of the Rovantis occupation force.