Faerie's Champion

by M. H. Johnson

  Dead silence. Jess just gazed at her friend for endless moments, Twilight methodically swishing his tail, flicking Jess's hair. "Explain," Jess said at last.

  A solemn nod. "As you no doubt know, this war began some twenty years ago when one Lord Tulia, an Erovering diplomat sent to the borderlands to settle a seemingly straightforward dispute, was instead cruelly butchered along with all his men, a declaration of war shoved in his mouth, with further declarations of war sent direct to the capital. At the same time, several outlying Erovering villages with minimal defenses were burned to the ground." Rulia sighed sadly. "Or so the tale is taught to every child with their first history lesson, no doubt. And the whole thing? A lie."

  She peered intently into Jess’s eyes. “Being from a holding farther north than your own, my family has learned that there is far more to the story than that. While it is true that the luckless Lord Tulia and his entire retinue had been butchered to the last man, that multiple outlying villages were burned to the ground, and that the royal seal of Velheim was on each and every one of those declarations of war, there are also truths, tragic truths, that are all too often overlooked.”

  “Such as?” Jess asked softly.

  Rulia's gaze held the weight and sorrow of decades of horror and bloodshed. Perhaps it was a trick of the light, or even a flicker of the dream in which they strode, but in that moment Rulia's countenance held the tears and sorrow of a thousand wives widowed, a thousand mothers weeping for lost sons brought home on their shields by their brothers in war. "Such as the fact that the royal seal of Velheim used was, if anyone had cared to judge the seals properly, more than half a century old. A seal that had been lost many years ago."

  Rulia sighed, gazing thoughtfully at something only she could see, even as Jess's heart began to hammer. “Velheim’s seal had been reforged four decades back, over two decades prior to the border wars, to show a reversed horse and crescent, quite different from the wax markings on those declarations of war.”

  Rulia suddenly shifted her gaze, catching Jess's eyes, refusing to let her go. "But the darkest secret? The men who did the killing, who raided those poor outlying communities, razing them to the ground, the men who butchered Lord Tulia in cold blood, were none other than King Joshua's own elite soldiers."

  Jess frowned. "By the gods, that's quite an accusation, Rulia! Forgive the words that have to be asked, but do you have any proof of this?"

  Rulia sighed. “If one were to do a comparison of the seals, that truth would become readily evident. As far as the other elements are concerned, well, of those Velheim bodies so conveniently found at the diplomat’s residence, there were none save lightly armed and armored scouts. If anyone has any education into Velheim’s military protocol, scouts never engage in combat directly. They are almost never grouped more than three or four together, serving primarily to ascertain the enemy’s position and intentions, and may provide some covering bow fire as needed. To expect them to have the training, physical build, and armaments needed for a highly disciplined assault sufficient to take down a borderland diplomat’s full contingent of guardsmen is absolutely absurd. And the idea that it was a combined force, well, in that case, the scouts would have been providing auxiliary support while elite troops struck hard at their opponents. The only bodies on the field would have been heavily armed and armored soldiers, not the scouts at all.”

  Rulia shook her head firmly. “No. These poor fools were either captured or seduced and drugged as part of a well-executed bit of intrigue that worked perfectly.” She sighed then. “Think on it, Jessica. Constant bloody border conflict simmering just under the surface of what are now perpetually strained relations. Who profits? And now, cries to wipe Velheim completely off the map, now that your nation’s superior steel reserves and larger population and food supply has allowed for a massive growth in Erovering's infantry and cavalry forces alike. After all, if Velheim no longer stood between Erovering and the rest of the continent, the wealth of any number of powerful nobles would grow exponentially through unrestricted trade, to say nothing of the possibility for conquest and extensive empire building.”

  Rulia held Jess with the weight of her gaze. "Tell me honestly, Jessica, all those years you attended Highrock, the most prestigious war college in Erovering, weren't you trained for just such a campaign? Weren't all your friends? And as for all the girls and boys who came to learn the arts of magic, didn't they end up, for the most part, learning the arts of elemental battlemagics?"

  Jess thought back, recalling the many hundreds of hours diligently training, studying tactics and the art of leading troops through all sorts of terrain and campaigns; mastering the arts of the blitzkrieg strike, destroying enemy supply dumps, and striking key targets of interest behind enemy lines. For all her flaws as a student, Jess had been quite skilled at mastering her classes under General Eloquin. Battlefield tactics came as naturally as breathing to her, with her knack for sensing the flow of battle, understanding instantly where and how to best apply reserves to counter any newly developing threat as it manifested.

  And those, in the end, had been the only classes that had ever mattered. Everything else but a smokescreen to hide the activities of Squires of War and Knight Aspirants alike, being trained with a focused intensity unlike anything Jess had ever read about prior. To say nothing of how fanatically each and every Squire had been trained to devastate enemy forces, even noncombatants, with utter savagery. Perfect mock exercises for forces expected to one day lead the most ruthless and devastating of assaults, and all of them had known without a word being said that Velheim was their eventual target.

  She recalled all too well the time she and her shieldbrother Malek had been inspired to take the hypothetical to the extreme, as was their wont, drawing up carefully thought out battle plans over their final third year break, plans that had turned out to mirror the king's own to such a degree that had they not been favored proteges whose loyalty to Crown and Eloquin both was beyond question, they would already be dead.

  As it stood, their instructor had only sworn them to utter silence, General Eloquin doing them the rare honor of taking notes from their own battle plans, finding their insights of worth, before consigning the entirety of their project to the fires of his study, scattering even the ashes.

  Jess was all too aware of how focused her own training had been. Her own apparent invulnerability to pike, spear, lance, and arrow; all things made of wood, in fact, making her all the more valuable an asset for leading the vanguard in a terrible series of planned assaults. If anything, her present inhuman strength and Delver's resiliency now made her all the more useful and deadly a tool for just such a campaign.

  The ugly truth of the matter was that were it not for her military gifts, Jess feared her family would have already been put to the stake, after she had dared to rediscover the ancient art of Claimance, the heretofore lost gift of bonding a chosen supplicant to the land. For she alone had the power to raise a king or queen who would then hold Domain over the entirety of their realm, however large or small it was. It was a double-edged gift that could easily upset the present balance of power, the one unforgivable sin, were she not judged a piece worth the risk of keeping, dreams of conquest enough of an enticement to keep her in play.

  Jess smiled sadly, well aware of why all her teachers, so disciplined and hard on most of the students, had been so comfortable looking the other way when Jess would snore through their lectures or cheat on their tests. For Jess was being groomed as an elite tactician, a future master strategist, and was far more valuable in the royal scheme of things than any number of students whose roles were that of future historian or scholar, young lords and ladies whose only real purpose at Highrock was to provide cover for the Knight Aspirants and Squires of War, scores of future tacticians and squad commanders all training with a diligence and use of resources only to be found in one nation preparing to go to war with another. What was so odd in her case, making the favoritism so overt, was that very few stud
ents were such savants at mastering the arts of death, yet so abysmal at every other aspect of scholarly learning.

  Twilight yawned. "It was always quite obvious, the carefully honed blade your school was forging you into, my queen. The students who didn't master those basic precepts of strategy, after all, you never heard from again after your first year. Like shattered blades in truth, cast off to be reforged into simpler tools, somewhere else. But so long as Highrock's training was diligent and on point, I saw no reason to protest. For in teaching you to master the arts of melee and battle, they were providing you with the tools you most needed to make your mark in this world on your own terms. It did not matter what their ultimate designs were in teaching you the deeper arts of swordcraft and battlelore. All that mattered was your diligence in making that knowledge your own."

  Rulia nodded solemnly. “It's true, Jess. All of it. Students like you were being trained as battle commanders for the campaign to come. And your friends with an arcane bent? Forged to master the elements of storm, sound, and fire, to better send arrows off course, and strike down Velheim’s warriors.” Rulia sighed. “Your whole damn school. Training Erovering's brightest and best in the most efficient ways to cripple Velheim, to burn down its towns and fortifications, to butcher its people, leaving it broken and defenseless; a ripe virgin ready to be raped under Erovering’s harsh rule, even as all her nobles are led to the chopping block and her peoples enslaved and purchased by Erovering's most corrupt nobles; the prettiest to be used as jaded lord's playthings, the rest to be sentenced to life in the mines, no doubt, short as that would be.”

  Rulia’s voice held a grim tone of dread certainty and Jess shivered, feeling, much as she had after losing herself in the headmistress's office, like she was some sort of monster.

  “You make my whole school sound so horrible,” Jess said softly, shaking her head. “Yet, your words. I sense no malice from you. None at all. If you were knowingly lying to me, I would see it in your gaze. You believe every word you are telling me. By the angels above, you believe every word you say.”

  Jess stopped then, squeezing her eyes shut as they approached the small spiraling staircase, having passed the quietly reading students and proctors unawares, quickly making their way to the second story above. Soon they could detect a soft, silvery glow seeming to emanate from the very walls of the reading room in which the book they were after was secured.

  Opening her eyes, taking off her helmet and rubbing her temples, Jess grimaced, feeling a troubling headache come on.

  “Paradigm shifts have never been easy for you, my Jess,” Twilight said sympathetically. “Then again, most people can never accept that the world isn’t quite how they had thought it to be.”

  “But why the hell do I feel a headache in my dream?” Jess mused with a sad little smile. “By Justice, I fear she is right, Twilight. The question is, was it a ruse perpetrated by a few corrupt border nobles or, worse, is it all some jaded scheme initiated by old King Joshua himself?”

  Rulia shrugged. “Even I’m not certain about the answer to that. But every attempt Velheim made to explain things to former King Joshua had been rebuffed with contempt, so I tend to think he suspected, at the very least.”

  Jess grimaced. “Bloody hells.”

  Twilight leaped off Jess’s shoulder, loping stealthily to the oddly glowing door before them. He looked back at his master. “You feel pain in the dream because you are not really dreaming. Power gained and artifacts you find here you do have the ability to pull back into mundus. So too, should death find you here, it will have claimed you in that world as well.” He gave Jess a sharp look. “And as well trained as I have made sure you are, I’d be most cross if you were to die of anything trivial, my queen.”

  Jess grinned sheepishly. “I’ll try not to disappoint.” She gazed meaningfully at Rulia. “I’m sorry everything is so bloody awful and corrupt, politically. But that doesn’t have to change anything about how we feel about each other.”

  Rulia grinned back, her features easing into a smile. “You’re right, my beau. It's not like pawns such as you and I have any control over the madness and corruption we are forced to live within. The important thing is that we are honest with how we feel about each other. That we treasure each other's hearts, and don't take the tenderness we share lightly. That is the one thing we can control.”

  Jess nodded her head approvingly, raising her lips for a quick, consoling kiss before strapping her mithril helmet upon her head once more. "Then there is just one thing left for me to say on the matter." Her voice turned solemn as they gazed at each other on opposite sides of the luminous doorway beckoning them forward. "I know your heart is true, and your affection for me genuine. I feel that whenever I gaze into your beautiful blue eyes, whenever I feel you wrap about me so sweetly, holding me so closely through the night." She took a steadying breath, taking her friend's measure as she said what needed to be said. "I don't care what your allegiances are, Rulia, so long as your friendship with me is genuine, and I can count on you to have my back."

  Rulia stepped back, trembling, her face suddenly deathly pale. “You know, then.” It was not a question, her words held a sense of defeat, and relief. As if she wearied of holding aloft an impossible weight that had been crushing her all this time.

  “Oh come now, Rulia. It was painfully obvious, even before your diatribe against the evils of Erovering, legitimate as they are.” Twilight sighed. “My dear, I’m afraid you don’t make a very good spy. Frankly, I’m surprised you weren’t discretely done away with by the masters of intrigue this school raises like fresh crops of dung mold every year.”

  “Twilight!” Jess hissed reprovingly.

  "Relax, my mistress. Frankly, I'm impressed that she has managed to keep a certain measure of discretion with the rest of the school. Perhaps we will chalk up her lapses to tongues that always wag more freely in the land of dreams. Or, as your people might put it, dear Rulia, ‘the dead have no secrets'."

  Twilight flashed a mischievous grin as Rulia stepped back. “Yes, I know all about the customs of your people, Rulia. And incidentally, Jess, I am quite glad this school has been strangely remiss in judging your paramour with any measure of skepticism, for I can all too well imagine the avenging antics of wanton destruction you would have embraced, had you awoken to find your lover screaming her last, after being impaled on a pike.” Twilight sighed. “Truly, I am not looking forward to a second coming of the Red Queen any time soon, for all that I now see the corrupt games presently being played between bickering nations as a vile boil in desperate need of lancing. You are always so despondent after the fact, unwilling to leave your garden for ages, and that's far too long a time to deny your kitty the exquisite delight that is a perfectly poached salmon.”

  Jess clenched her eyes shut and turned away, feeling suddenly sick and dizzy, shaking visibly.

  “Jessica?” Rulia softly asked.

  "It's nothing," Jess assured, even as she clenched her abdomen, grimacing as if in pain. "I had a really vivid dream the other night. One filled with terror and madness. One that sickened me."

  "She deserves more sympathy from you than that, dear Jess," Twilight said softly. "She had lost everything, you know. Her mother, her father, her beloved husband and baby girl, all in one horrific act of barbaric cruelty." Twilight sighed. "It broke her. Tore away the beautiful dream her life story had been until that moment. Something snapped inside her soul then; all remembrances of her primal father, all his loving resonance had faded. In its place was something dark, terrible, abyssal in its inhuman fury and desire for vengeance."

  Flicking his tale, Twilight quietly gazed at the two girls staring so raptly at him. “For near two score years she had reigned, and a mighty reign it was. One of blood and terror. Fierce and utter savagery was shown to her enemies, the ruthless subjugation of even the original ruling lords who called this nation their own. Weak and ineffectual as they had been at stopping the endless northern incursions, she deemed
them no longer fit to for anything save serving her as living furniture, their lives an endless torment.

  "Yet she had managed to forge a chaotic collection of warring fiefdoms into a nation both strong and powerful. And for all that she was utterly ruthless and savage to our northern neighbors across the sea, having captured and enslaved thousands of their peoples, burning all their cities and shipyards to the ground while doing so, she also broke the back of our nation's once greatest enemy. To this day, save for lone pirates quickly put down, our trade partners across the sea have yet to break the truce assuring their raiders would never again have royal sanction to trouble our shores."

  Twilight gave an oddly approving nod, lost in his own thoughts, it seemed. “And for the average citizen of Erovering, life had actually improved. No longer did he have to worry about being drafted and forced to die for the sake of his master’s petty neighboring feuds. No longer did he have to worry about lords arbitrarily claiming the bulk of his crops, leaving him and his family to starve. For the first time in centuries, laws favoring the common man and his family were passed. For all that the Red Queen eventually took over the entirety of this continent, all other nations but vassals paying tribute to Erovering, she had once been naught but the daughter of a well-to-do farmer herself.”

  Twilight paused then, gazing at Jess carefully. “So please have a care before you judge her too harshly, my mistress. There, but for the grace of fate and fortune, you might have found yourself walking in her exact footsteps, should such horrors have befallen your family as had her own.”

  Jess sighed, humbled by her familiar's words. "You are right, my beloved Twilight. She had endured such horrors as the very thought of which would jolt me awake screaming from darkest nightmare. Not for anything that would occur to myself, but rather, being helpless when those I loved perished before my eyes. And yes, for all that her reputation is a grim one, the Red Queen did much for the sake of our great nation." Jess shook her head wryly then. "And who am I to judge the fierceness of her battle savagery? I who have done such horrible things myself, in the name of protecting my family. When I know already that I have come close to losing it. To snapping all restraint and becoming something… other than myself."