by Jenna Glass
“It is a foul tactic we use,” Tynthanal agreed. “But it is our only chance for survival.” The muscles of his cheek worked as he ground his teeth. “A fair and courteous warrior is a dead warrior.”
Alys swallowed her worries and tried not to imagine the hell that would reign on this battlefield tomorrow as Tynthanal and his men slaughtered men who had once been their friends. Men who were doing their duty by following the commands of their king. Even a victory would take a heavy toll, and the consequences of a loss were unthinkable.
“I’m not arguing that it’s not necessary,” Jailom hurried to assure him. “But I am not required to feel good about it.”
Tynthanal sighed heavily. “No.” He shook his head, then turned to Alys. “Make sure you keep all the civilians indoors and away from windows. Some will be tempted to watch, but a stray arrow or bolt—especially a spelled one—can travel a long, long way and can easily break through a window.”
She suspected that particular warning was aimed straight at her. She raised an eyebrow. “I thought they wouldn’t have time to activate their spells.”
He shrugged. “The stray arrows don’t have to come from the enemy to be deadly.”
“Besides,” Jailom added, “we are sure to meet some resistance once the shock wears off. They are more likely to retreat than attack, but they would certainly want to cover that retreat with a hail of arrows.”
As they rode back toward the town, Alys pulled up beside Jailom’s horse, hoping the sound of the hooves would keep Tynthanal from hearing her.
“Whatever happens,” she said, giving him a steady stare, “you make sure my brother is safe tomorrow. I cannot lose him.”
Jailom returned the stare. “You will not lose him, Your Highness.”
And he said it with such conviction that she couldn’t help believing him. There was now nothing she could do but wait. She glanced over her shoulder in the general direction from which the attack would come.
Even if the battle was not the success Tynthanal and Jailom assured her it would be—even if they all fell to Delnamal’s men—she would have her revenge. Just before riding out here to inspect the workings of the Trapper spells, she and Chanlix and Tynthanal had presided over the sending of a Kai flier to Delnamal. There was some comfort in knowing that whether the battle was won or lost, Delnamal himself would lose something he held dear.
* * *
—
With the town of Women’s Well itself in its infancy, there were very few children packed into the town hall with all the women and other noncombatants, but it seemed to Alys that every single one of them was crying. If Delnamal’s forces somehow made it past the town’s defenders, they would have little trouble finding the hidden heart of Women’s Well, despite the Trapper spells that concealed the building from view.
Not that Alys could blame those children. Even those too young to know what was happening could sense the tension and fear in the room as the first shouts of battle sounded from the distance. Alys clasped hands with Chanlix, and the two women shared an anxious look as they imagined Tynthanal out there in the middle of the fray. As sovereign princess, Alys was naturally concerned for all the men who were out there risking their lives, but it was fear for her brother that had her squeezing Chanlix’s hand painfully tight. On the table before them was the mate to Tynthanal’s talking flier, and they both stared at it as they waited breathlessly for it to chirp.
At least Corlin wasn’t out there, despite his impassioned arguments that he should be. He was only a few weeks short of his fourteenth birthday, at which time he would be considered from a soldier’s perspective man enough to fight, and he’d been adamant that they had too few warriors to spare him. Alys thanked the Mother that Tynthanal had sided with her and turned a deaf ear to Corlin’s pleas.
Corlin sat with Shelvon in resentful silence, his arms crossed over his chest as his jaw worked in frustration. He was still capable of a world-class sulk. Alys couldn’t understand what made men so eager for battle, for pain and terror and death. Corlin acted as if it were all some great game that his mother was stubbornly refusing to let him join, but she would happily face his disdain to have him safe and whole here with her.
The town hall was far enough from the ambush site that only faint cries reached Alys’s ears, but the sounds made her wince nonetheless. Men were dying on her doorstep because of the choices she’d made, and guilt gnawed at her insides.
“You did not start this fight,” Chanlix said, shaking Alys out of her downward spiral—and proving herself a very perceptive woman.
“If I had not declared myself sovereign princess—”
“You didn’t. We did. And it was necessary. You know it was.”
She let out a shuddering breath. Yes, she did know. “That doesn’t make this any easier to bear.”
To that, Chanlix had no reply.
Less than a quarter of an hour after they’d heard the first shout, the communicating flier—or talker, as the folk of Women’s Well were now calling them—chirped. She and Chanlix shared a look of shock, for though the faint sounds of battle had faded already, they could hardly credit that it was all over in such a short time. Alys activated the talker, and both she and Chanlix let out loud sighs of relief when Tynthanal’s image appeared before them. He was sweaty and dirty, and there were spots of blood on his mail coat, but he was whole.
“All went as expected,” he reported, and there was a haunted look in his eyes that told her just how much he had hated their ungallant plan of attack. “The enemy has fled. Those who survived, that is.”
“How many dead?” Alys tried to keep her voice steady and dispassionate, but she doubted she’d fooled anyone.
“I don’t have a count yet. We’ve lost perhaps five men, with about twenty more wounded. The enemy’s casualties were…a lot more significant. Keep everyone in the town hall until I contact you again. The women and children do not need to see this.”
“But you have wounded who need tending,” Chanlix said.
“Send some of your abigails,” Tynthanal conceded. “But only those with the strongest stomachs.” His head turned in a slow circle as he looked around him. “This is not a pretty sight.”
Chanlix snorted. “As if any battlefield is.”
Tynthanal deactivated his flier, and Chanlix chose a handful of her former abigails to go with her to the battlefield to heal the wounded. Although Alys had no desire to see the devastation, she felt it her duty as the sovereign princess to tour the battlefield, and so she went with Chanlix despite the other woman’s attempts to dissuade her. And when Corlin begged to come along—to prove what a man he was, she supposed—Alys allowed it, though it felt like cruelty. The boy had lived a more sheltered life than he realized, and it was time he come to grips with the reality that war was not a game to be eagerly plunged into.
When Alys caught her first glimpse of the battlefield, her whole body went cold, and it was all she could do to keep her feet moving forward. Chanlix and her abigails rushed forward, preparing healing spells as they ran with blind eyes, leaving Alys and Corlin to cover the remaining distance alone.
Alys knew in her head that it had been a very small battle, nothing like the battles that occurred in most wars, and yet the enormity of it made her eyes sting with tears. So many dead, so much blood, so much gore. And the stench was enough to make her stomach turn. Worse were the bodies that moved still, the men who cried and groaned and whimpered in pain and misery.
To her surprise, Corlin slipped his hand into hers, his earlier anger forgotten. His face was pale and his eyes too wide.
“You’ve seen enough, Mama,” he said. “Go back to the town hall. I will find Uncle Tynthanal and see how I can help. The danger is past now, so you needn’t worry about me.”
Her heart swelled with love for her son, and she very much wanted to gather him into a hug. Of
course, he would have been mortified by such a gesture, so she refrained.
“I’m all right, Corlin,” she assured him, though it was beyond her to make the lie convincing. “I’m not the sort to order men to their deaths and refuse to acknowledge the consequences.”
Still holding her son’s hand, she started forward once more, fighting the nausea that swam in her stomach. Tynthanal’s men were sorting through the fallen, separating the dead from the wounded—and relieving both of their weapons and armor, for Women’s Well did not have the necessary masculine elements to produce spelled weapons or armor.
She spotted Tynthanal—carefully laying out the body of one of his men—at the same time he spotted her. Corlin let go of her hand and veered off, and she let him go as Tynthanal shook his head and grimaced. The look he gave her combined exasperation and sadness as he picked his way across to her. One of the wounded—a boy who looked no more than sixteen and had a gaping wound in his belly and one on his thigh—grabbed weakly at Tynthanal’s leg.
Tynthanal glanced down, and Alys saw him quickly assess the boy’s wounds. Then he squatted by the boy’s head, saying something she couldn’t quite make out in a soothing tone. He laid a gentle hand on the boy’s forehead, and Alys saw the boy’s eyes slide closed as if in relief.
With a suddenness that made Alys gasp, Tynthanal whipped a knife out of his boot and jammed it upward through the boy’s throat. The boy’s body jerked once, then was still. Tynthanal wiped the blood from his knife and stuck it back in his boot.
Alys covered her mouth and feared she might collapse in horror.
“He would not have survived that injury,” Tynthanal said as he approached. “Better to end it swiftly.”
“But we have healers…” Her voice died, for that wasn’t strictly true. They had abigails with healing potions, but they did not have Academy-trained battlefield healers, who were capable of healing more grievous wounds. To tend the damage men did to one another in battle required men’s magic.
“Even the best healers would not have saved that boy,” Tynthanal said. “There are limits to what magic can do.”
Alys surveyed the battlefield once more and saw that the abigails were delivering potions to Tynthanal’s wounded men, while the wounded attackers were left to lie in the dirt. A small band of Tynthanal’s men were making their way through those wounded, occasionally striking killing blows, but leaving many others alive and suffering. In all their previous planning for this battle, Alys had never stopped to think about what to do with wounded enemies.
“In an ordinary battle,” Tynthanal said, “we would take the enemy soldiers prisoner and perhaps ransom them. But we don’t have the men or the facilities to keep prisoners.”
“What do you recommend we do with them, then?”
“From a military standpoint, the most practical thing to do is kill them. Such a solution is hardly unheard of, though it is considered barbarous. Then again, our ambush has already shredded any pretensions of honor we might have.”
Alys shook her head. “It’s not their fault they were fighting for the other side. They were just following their orders.”
“The same can be said of almost all enemy combatants. It does not change the stark reality that we cannot hold them.”
Alys chewed on her lip as she thought. The “barbarous” ambush had been an unavoidable evil in the face of overwhelming numbers, but surely there was an alternative to killing the wounded.
“We can heal them and then let them go,” she said. “Without their armor and weapons, of course. We can never hope to compete with Delnamal in sheer numbers, and returning a couple dozen fighters to him will do us no harm.”
Tynthanal frowned as he thought about it. “I’m not sure that would be doing them any favors. Delnamal doesn’t understand the depth of the magic we have here. He will think of those healing potions as expensive resources, and he will question the loyalty of any man on whom we would ‘waste’ a potion.”
“Then perhaps you can explain that to them and then give them the option to stay and join us if they prefer. We could use more fighters. These are your former friends and comrades-at-arms, and they respect you.”
Tynthanal snorted. “I very much doubt that after today. But you’re right—I’d much rather give them that option than kill them.”
Alys let out a sigh of relief. There was more than enough death on this battlefield already. She just had to hope that all those deaths might help Women’s Well entice an ally and prevent an all-out war.
* * *
—
A blast of frigid wind stole Jinnell’s breath as she and Prince Waldmir stepped out onto the observation platform. At the very top of the highest tower in the palace, the platform offered a breathtaking view of the city below and of the soaring cliffs on all sides. For the first time since Jinnell’s procession had crossed the border into Nandel, the sun was shining bright in a nearly cloudless sky, the snowcapped peaks nearly blinding in the light. She pulled the heavy fur mantle more closely around her as her breath steamed.
“If the cold is too much for you, we can go back inside,” the prince offered solicitously, but she shook her head.
“It’s worth a little cold to see this,” she told him, taking in a deep breath of bracing mountain air. There was so much about Nandel that was bleak and forbidding and inhospitable, but there was an undeniable beauty and grandeur to the land, as well.
The prince smiled, his eyes crinkling with crow’s-feet that she suspected came more from squinting in the sun and snow than from smiling. She could hardly claim to know him well after a mere two days’ acquaintance, but she had already formed the impression that he was a deeply unhappy man. While he smiled at her a great deal, she rarely saw him smile at anyone else. And she doubted that smile would make very many appearances once she was bound to him.
Prince Waldmir put a hand on her back and gently guided her toward the battlements at the edge of the platform. Although he had brought her here to show her the beauty of the view, there was no missing the true purpose of this place, where there was always a lookout on duty. Despite all the twists and turns the road took to thread its way through the mountains toward The Keep, Jinnell could see most of its curves for miles into the distance. A hostile force foolish enough to launch an attack would be remarked long before they arrived at the city’s walls.
The wind whistled through the battlements and whipped Jinnell’s skirts around her legs, the chill sinking deep into her bones till she could hardly remember what it felt like to be warm—and this was supposed to be spring. She shuddered to think what the temperature would feel like in the height of winter.
“I would not make a good wife for you,” she said baldly. She glanced up at Prince Waldmir’s face, internally wincing at her brazen, impolitic remark. She hadn’t meant to say it, but the words had tumbled out with no forethought, and they were hardly the kind she could take back.
The prince leaned his forearms on the battlements, looking relaxed and unaffected by the cold—or by her rude words.
“I don’t need a good wife,” he said, not looking at her. “I need a son.”
Jinnell swallowed hard, her stomach threatening to turn over. She had stopped taking her poison potions, but they seemed to have had a lingering effect, and she could eat very little without paying for it. She had no idea how to respond to his uncomfortably frank response to her uncomfortably frank statement.
“My first wife was a good wife,” the prince continued. There was a hint of wistfulness in both his voice and his expression. “She bore me three daughters, and she was everything I could have wished for.” His expression hardened. “None of those births was easy. But then she bore me a stillborn son, and the birth almost killed her. The midwives warned that she could not survive another pregnancy.” His lips pressed together into a thin, hard line. “I am the Sovereign Prince of Nand
el. I must have an heir.”
“So you divorced her. Sent her to the Abbey to rot.” Her voice was all sharp edges and accusation, and she quailed to think that that would be her own fate if she was forced to marry him and did not give him the heir he desired.
The prince closed his eyes in what looked like pain. “I deemed a life at the Abbey favorable to a death in childbirth.”
Jinnell wondered if his wife would agree. “And what about your second wife? Did you divorce her for her own good, as well?” Perhaps if she were sharp-tongued and disagreeable enough, he would decide to seek a better wife elsewhere.
He stood up straight and turned to face her. The expression in his flinty gray eyes was chilling and repressive, and yet he answered calmly enough.
“I understand that my marital history does not make me a young woman’s dream husband, so I will share with you details I might not share with others, with the understanding that these details are not to be repeated. Do I have your agreement?”
By now, Jinnell was far too curious to do anything but nod.
“My second wife was barren and did not quicken even once over the five years we were married. That marriage was not as successful as my first even before her barrenness came to light, but it was at least…adequate. We were not happy together, but we were content. Had I not needed a son, I never would have divorced her.”
If the Nandelites weren’t so squeamish about women’s magic, they could have known in advance that the marriage could not bear fruit, but Jinnell kept that thought to herself. She didn’t imagine that the fate of a barren woman here would be any better if she never married in the first place.
“After that, I married Shelvon’s mother,” Prince Waldmir said with a curl of his lip. “I had no illusions that she would ever be a good wife, but then how many good wives can one man hope to have? I had no sons—and far too many scheming nephews—and securing the throne was of paramount importance. I know you are aware of how that marriage ended, and I doubt even my daughter could argue the execution wasn’t warranted.”