They would not, of course, do any such thing. They rolled and marched, hauled and flew ever onward. They ate each passing mile and bayed to do battle the whole time. Mena refused to meet them again on the field. The Acacians backed across the glacier-scoured contours of the landscape, defensive, cautious, devious. All of it clearly drove the Auldek crazy.
For a time they flew into the Acacian camp on freketes, ignoring the rain of arrows that always greeted them. Speaking accented Acacian, they hurled insults. They implored the Acacians to fight like true soldiers, threatened that they were only making their nation’s fate worse by their cowardice. The freketes leaped about, crushing people with their feet and snatching others up in their fists. They bit chunks of flesh out of them and spat the meat on the ground. One Auldek leaped from his mount’s back and went running through the camp, hacking down anyone he could. If others had followed his example, the slaughter would have been horrible. Fortunately, the rampaging Auldek caught a crossbow bolt in the face. He went down clawing at it. He rose a moment later. His face blood-splattered, he tugged at the arrow as his body jerked and convulsed, unable to pull the bolt free. He managed to climb atop his frekete and took to the air again. After that, such attacks grew less frequent. Heartening, perhaps, except that not even a bolt right through the skull managed to kill these fiends.
That was why Mena pressed her bizarre form of warfare in every way and shape she could imagine, adjusting it daily as the circumstances changed. She once flew a mad gauntlet over the Auldek camp, dodging and dipping, cutting at sharp angles to avoid the freketes pursuing her. Behind her she trailed a falling snow of sorts, hundreds of short letters on small bits of paper, blowing out of the pack bags she had flipped open. Each note contained a personal entreaty to the quota slaves to desert the Auldek and come over to their own people. Each of them signed with the writer’s name, written in their native tongue, with the invitation to bring the note across to the Acacians and be personally welcomed home.
As far as she could tell, the freketes did not often fly at night. She knew they could because one had done so on the night of the Scav’s first fiery attack, but they had never again dropped out of the dark, something Mena had feared. Instead, she owned the dark skies herself. On a night of low cloud she flew in through the mist over their encampment. She circled several times, testing, on edge for the beat of any wing other than Elya’s. Nothing.
An hour later she returned with Perrin dangling from Elya’s claws. They both dropped to the ground well inside the Auldek encampment. By the time Elya swooped back in to retrieve them, they had slit the throats of five sleeping watchmen and had tossed a sack full of poisoned meat out to steam on the frozen ground. Food for lions, she hoped.
Nor was there anyone in the air to answer her an hour later when she dropped a flaming kettle filled with pitch into one of the pens that held the antoks. She watched the large backs of the creatures from above, the tiny glimmer of the wick falling with the pot. When it hit the ground, the pitch must have splashed out underneath their legs. It ignited in one large sheet beneath them. She stayed above long enough to verify the deadly furnace of kicking, bellowing creatures that she had created. One of them crashed through the pen wall, and in the next instant the creatures were rampaging through the camp, all sizzling hair and flesh.
Confusion. Damage. It must be taking a toll on them. Mena despised it. There was no honor in an assassin’s tactics, in making war on animals and supplies. A strange thing to a call a war, really, this running skirmish through the arctic. It was nothing Mena had trained for or read about or studied. Not a style of fighting she had ever imagined. Fighting was not even the right word for it, but she did not know what else to call something so deadly. So desperately important. When she doubted her tactics, she had only to think of the lives of her soldiers to remember why she did these things. She had as many reasons for each treachery as she had souls in her army. For them, she would do anything.
Ten days since that first battle. Hundreds of lives lost. The ranks of the injured and incapacitated growing. Mena could not claim that they were winning, but they were not losing either. Since not losing was about as positive a situation as she could envision, she kept her people focused on the small victories they were accumulating. Each slave warrior they killed, any animal they lamed, every carriage or station they crippled, all the delays and inconveniences they created: small victories. On the rare occasions when they killed an Auldek: jubilation. Howlk had died; the frekete Nawth had been taken out of the war. Things that had seemed impossible could be accomplished. If they could keep doing what they were doing… If Aliver and his army ever arrived…
F or the second time, Mena found herself standing inside a ring of her officers, interrogating a bedraggled, stammering, nearly frozen Rialus Neptos. This time, however, he brought a companion. The woman stood beside Rialus, unflinching under the men’s scrutiny. She wore a full body suit of some sort, so thick it would have hidden her completely, except that in the relative warmth of the tent she had pulled off her hood and stripped back the top of it. She stood with her shoulders and arms exposed, her chest covered by a thin tunic that showed both the sweat around her neck and the outline of her breasts. Meinish, if ever a woman was: gray eyed, delicately featured, with hair so blond it seemed to light the room with its own luminescence. She searched the collected faces with her eyes, touching on Mena briefly before moving on. Her gaze caught on Haleeven.
“Who are you?” Mena asked.
Rialus had been trying to say something, but he jerked to a halt. “Her?” he asked.
“Yes, but I asked her, not you.”
“Sh-she doesn’t speak much Acacian. Maybe none. I don’t know. I never-”
“Meinish, then? Haleeven, speak to her.”
He did, and she answered readily enough, her voice calm and deliberate. After a few exchanges, Haleeven said, “She wishes to join us. She was a slave to the Auldek, she says, but only a slave. Never willingly your enemy. She was like Rialus, trapped by the Auldek.”
Rialus ceased trembling. His head turned slowly to the woman, and he stared at her. He could not have looked more perplexed.
“She said that?” Edell asked.
“She did.”
“What’s her name?”
Haleeven asked her. “Fingel. She has served Rialus Neptos since he arrived in Avina, all the way to here.”
“We’ll have to ask her a thing or two about him, then,” Edell said, fixing Rialus with a dry, hostile gaze.
The two Meins talked a little longer. Haleeven screwed up his mouth at something she said. It looked like a grimace, but as he held the expression it showed itself as a smile. “She claims that Rialus is a good man.”
“She has reason to think we’d doubt it?”
“He told her as much himself. Rambled on often, even talked in his sleep sometimes.”
Rialus actually could look more perplexed, after all. His face reddened, and it was not from the warmth in the tent.
“I really look forward to talking with her at length,” Edell said.
Mena could see that there was something more behind her facade. “What else? She has more to say, I think.”
Fingel fixed her eyes on Mena for the first extended time. She listened to Haleeven’s translation and deliberated her answer by pressing it between her thin lips for a moment. When she answered, Rialus, obviously understanding her Meinish, sat down on a campstool. He stared at her with an expression of complete mystification.
“She represents a contingent of domestic slaves,” Haleeven said. “A few hundred of them who want to desert the Auldek. She is a scout to find out if they would be received kindly. She’s asking for refuge among us. They’ll be coming tonight. She wants to make sure that they are not attacked when they approach.”