“I fear no westerner,” Hoygraf said, and leaned heavier, both hands on his cane, but the smile was gone. “And certainly no silliness of the north from the Syloreans. Let them come, and we will break these western fools. Let Syloreas fall to whatever chews at it, and the army of Actaluere will deal with that as well.”
“I need a courier.” Milos Tiernan raised his voice now, so that the entire crowd could hear. Martaina had set foot forward before she even realized she had, stepping out of the circle of observers, crossing the ground between her and the post, where Tiernan stood facing Hoygraf and Cattrine. The voice went low again, but Martaina followed it as she approached them, the lone person who did so. “You are a fool, Tematy, and your war is direly timed. You are twice the fool if you think that whatever afflicts Syloreas will be easier to defeat without their aid as with it. You may have dominion over my sister now-to my eternal shame and dismay-but you do not rule my Kingdom. You do not declare war for me or take action that will cause me to have to fight after you provoke others into them.” Martaina arrived at his side, then, and the King of Actaluere looked to her without any sign of recognition. “Please take my sister and her … accompanying package … to the Sanctuary camp to the southeast. Ensure that she is able to return their general’s head to them, but give them no further message.” His face twitched. “Stay with her while she is there, and perhaps one of their healers will find it in them to ease her pain. Do you understand?” Martaina nodded, and Tiernan waved her off. “Be on with it, then, with all alacrity. Hurry.”
Martaina knelt next to the Baroness, whose head snapped back at her approach and again as she wrapped an arm around Cattrine and pulled her to her feet. The Baroness’s legs did not work, not at all, and she was dead weight as Martaina carried her along, half-dragging her to the edge of the crowd, which watched her. There was silence from behind her as Tiernan and Hoygraf continued to stare at each other, or possibly at her, and she could almost taste the bitter conflict between the men, burning hotter than the summer day around them, and with none of the occasional idle breeze to break it up. The quiet was oppressive in its own way, and every step she could feel the Baroness sag against her and the slippery, bloody, naked skin of Cattrine was slick within her grasp.
They made their way past the circled crowd, and J’anda and Aisling joined them as they passed. “I’ll take this,” Aisling said, and laid a hand on Cyrus’s head. “I’ll run ahead.”
“No,” Cattrine said, halting, her words choked with pain. “I need to get it to … Curatio. To the Sanctuary guild members.”
“You have,” Aisling said quietly, and Cattrine cocked her head. Her eyelids fluttered. “Let me take it, so that I can get it there in time.”
“All right,” Cattrine said, weakly, and relinquished her hold. Aisling, for her part, did not waste a moment-she ran, no stealth, no guile, and faster than Martaina would have thought the little dark elf could have moved, disappearing between the tents ahead of them in a flat-out sprint in the direction of the Sanctuary camp.
“I’m going to get you to Curatio,” Martaina said to Cattrine. She could feel J’anda hovering next to her. “We need to get something to cover you, and we’ll make certain you’re healed.”
“I’ll give her my robes when we’re out of the camp,” J’anda said. “Take care with her, those wounds are …” The enchanter cursed, a word that Martaina had heard before, something in the dark elven language that was so foul it left a bitter taste in the air. “Barbarians.”
“No doubt,” Martaina said, hurrying along as fast as she could side-carry the Baroness. The tents around them passed in slowest speed. The soles of Cattrine’s feet were red with blood and covered with dirt, which stuck to the crimson in flecks, dust holding in place from the stickiness. Every time Martaina tried to readjust her grip, Cattrine cried out; there was nowhere to hold the woman that wasn’t hurt, oozing blood with her every motion. “I’m not certain she’s going to survive the walk to camp,” she whispered to J’anda and hoped he caught it.
“I will endure,” Cattrine said. “This is not the worst of my husband’s affections I have experienced, not by a very lot. I have saved him, and with him, this land, and that is all that matters.” With that, her head drooped, and she fell into unconsciousness, yet no more of a weight on Martaina’s shoulder than she was before.
Martaina exchanged a look with J’anda, and they hurried on, the trail left by the Baroness’s feet dragging a line of red through the pale dust that followed them all the way back to the Sanctuary camp.
Chapter 46
Vara
“So they circle,” Alaric said from the head of the Council table, Vara, Vaste, Erith and Ryin there with him. “The Sovereign needs food for his legions, and he turns his eye toward the Plains of Perdamun.” The Ghost rested a hand on his helm, the peculiar, almost bucket-shaped helm. “They will not let us rest long, if their objective is to hold the plains for themselves. We would be like a knife perched at the small of their back, ever ready to strike at our leisure, destroying their caravans and tearing asunder their lines of supply.”
“Not that we would do such a thing, attacking caravans and whatnot,” Vaste said with a sense of irony.
“You’re damned right we would,” Ryin said, frowning at the troll. “This is a war, the dark elves are our enemies, and we would be fools not to toss as much chaos as possible into their camp.”
“I was making a joke,” Vaste said, straitlaced. “Bear with me, as I know it was the first I’ve ever made, so it may be hard to discern given my usual tendency toward the serious-”
“The Sovereign is right to fear us in this way,” Alaric said. “As Ryin points out, our loyalties in this war were long ago revealed by our actions, and if they were to begin running shipments of grain to the dark elven armies in the north and west, we would be ill-brained not to cost them as much as we could, especially now that he has tipped his hand to reveal that he wants us destroyed.” The Ghost shook his head. “And so we enter a period of consolidation and licking wounds on the Termina and Reikonos fronts; all that remains to supply his army for the next hundred years is to put his boot on our guildhall and apply the pressure until we are finished.”
“Or so he thinks,” Vaste said then shot a look around the table. “Right?” He looked to Erith. “Right?”
“Why are you looking at me?” Erith snapped. “Because I’m the only dark elf at the table?”
“Yes,” Vaste said, nonplussed, “the same as if we were discussing something to do with trolls, I’d probably be the reference point.”
“Well, I don’t know what the Sovereign intends,” Erith said with little restraint. “He doesn’t run his plans by me, nor I by him. I left Saekaj when they opened the gates and allowed the exodus, and I haven’t been back since. From what I know, he’s vicious enough that yes, he would stomp us down if he thought we were even a slight threat. Just look what he did in Termina, and the elves were doing nothing more than passively supplying food and weapons to the humans.”
“Not the happiest thought,” Ryin said, “but what do we do? Can we take on whatever he sends our way?”
“Yes,” Alaric said.
“No,” Vara said after the moment’s pause that followed her Guildmaster’s statement. “Alaric, the dark elven army at full force must number in the hundreds of thousands, of which there are quite a few magic users. Not as many as we possess, to be certain, but a considerable number. We have something on the order of four thousand at our disposal, and even with the somewhat gross mismatch of our spellcasters to theirs, we are desperately outnumbered.”