“She wants us not to attack a few hundred figures walking into our camp in the middle of the night?” Mena asked. “That could be a very foolish thing for us to do.”
Haleeven translated. Fingel dug around inside her body suit for a moment, and brought her hand out with a note pinched in her fingers. She offered it to Haleeven and then spoke at length. Haleeven listened a long time before offering his translation. “She says she found this, one of the notes you dropped among them. She’s not the only one who hid them and began hoping they were true. She says they will fight any way they can. Those who can will put poison in their masters’ kettles. They’ll take a few souls out of them. You asked for them to trust you in these notes; she asks that you trust her now as she returns it to you.”
The Meinish chieftain handed Mena the note. She rolled it over in her fingers. She let it look like she had to weigh the hazards carefully, but really she was hiding a swell of euphoria. This was what she wanted. This was the beginning of it. If some came now, more would follow soon. “Haleeven, tell her she is very welcome among us. They all are. We’ll accept every one of them home. When we have a moment of peace to do so, we’ll drop to our knees and ask forgiveness of them. I mean that literally.”
“Won’t she and Rialus be missed today?” Perrin asked.
“The other slaves will cover for them today. Say Rialus is sick, keep the door to his room closed. They won’t be found out today, and tonight they flee.”
“Only a couple of hundred?” Edell asked.
Haleeven had the explanation for this already, too. “They kept the conspiracy very tight. They could have gotten more, but it was too risky.”
“Any warriors with them?”
Fingel must have understood the question. She guffawed and answered straightaway. “No,” Haleeven translated, “those ones will not come over. They are too far up the Auldek’s asses. But, she says, they will all suffer from the lack of well-cooked food, laundered clothes.” He smiled. “I think she’s right.”
“A couple of hundred may not be much,” Perrin said, “but it’s a start. It will put the idea in others’ heads.”
“Let’s hope it’s the trickle that starts the flood,” Mena said.
For a time the conversation turned to the practical matters of aiding the deserters. Gandrel suggested setting up a distraction like the explosions the Scav created on the first night that Neptos came across. A good idea, Mena thought, but not easy to arrange. The Auldek were more vigilant about patrolling their camp at night-or their lions were. The pitch was guarded particularly well. The small amount the Scav had stolen was all but used up. Mena had a single flame bomb left, and had not decided how best to use it.
Fingel, once she knew what they were discussing, explained that they had arranged for such a distraction themselves. One of the men who tended the woolly rhinoceroses was going to let them loose after feeding them a concoction that would put fire in their bowels. The creatures would purge themselves in great gouts of excrement. It would be messy, and they would be angry, hard to gain control of. While they rampaged, the others would make their escape.
The officers sat in silence for a moment, all of them, likely, imagining that scene. “There was never a war like this one,” Gandrel said. “Or if there was, they didn’t write it all down in the official records.”
“Maybe we shouldn’t either,” Edell said.
Looking at Rialus, Mena edged her tone and asked, “This is what you thought would buy your pardon? A few hundred cook slaves and bed servants. I thought you understood that I expected more from you, Rialus.”
The man blinked rapidly. He really did look confused.
“Rialus?”
It took him a while, but eventually he managed to say, “I-I brought other information.”
“Tell it, then,” Mena said, crossing her arms to wait through the long delay of his stammer. End of Book Three
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
The hunting lodge of Calfa Ven had once perched on a stone buttress high above the thick woodland of the King’s Preserve. The “nest of the mountain condor,” as the translation of its Senivalian name went, had catered to Acacian nobility for more than two hundred years. Standing on its balconies with wild valleys stretching out beneath her had been the closest Corinn had come to experiencing flight before her dragons brought it to her for real. It was a place of memories, of long horseback rides, of pastoral opulence, rich meals served by rustic staff, of cordials sipped beside crackling fires, of walks with her father and even images of her mother in health. A place of sunrises and sunsets and the ever-changing play of the light on the crowns of trees and over the granite outcroppings that jutted up like islands amid waves of foliage. It had been here that Corinn had bested Hanish at archery, thinking she hated him at the same time she was falling in love with him.
Now, having just climbed off Po’s back along with the ghost of Hanish beside her, she could not even recognize the field in which they had loosed their arrows. The lodge itself had been obliterated. Smashed and scoured clean from its granite foundation, nothing remained of it save the bases of the timbers that had secured the building to the stone. The outbuildings, stables and storehouse: all jumbled piles of lumber, broken and strewn about. The woodland in the valley had been scorched, trees snapped, others uprooted, splintered. Some of the largest trees twisted at bizarre angles, as if they had rendered temporarily molten. Great gashes festered in the earth, smoking, reeking of death. It was like this as far as the eye could see, an enormous scar with the former site of the lodge at its center.
Po cried out in frustration as he flew over the valley. In all that expanse no other living thing moved, nothing for him to hunt. He fled from place to place, chased by evil vapors in the air, uneasy. He wanted to leave, but Corinn did not respond to the wish.
In all of it she recognized the same accursed song that had set worms eating through her flesh. In all of it, Santoth rage. Had she any tears left within her, she would have cried. She took the scene in dry-eyed. She had called this devastation upon the place. What right did she have to cry over it now?
“It is changed, but we knew it would be.”
I should not have sent them here.
“You had to send them somewhere,” Hanish said. “This place… was full of memories for you. For us. It came into your head when you needed to name a destination. You could have chosen much worse places to send them, Corinn.” As he talked he walked around her, trying to sift through the ashes with his feet. He did not seem to notice that the toe of his boot did not really push objects about. He left no footprints, touched nothing in the world except for her.
You don’t know all of it, Corinn thought to him.
“No, I don’t. But still, let’s not talk about this.” He straightened and took in the desolation of the valley again. “What we should be asking is, where are the Santoth now?”
That’s clear enough. They don’t exactly walk lightly on the ground. They’re out there. They won’t stop searching. Corinn gestured with her chin, indicating the wide world around them. They’ve gone in different directions. No doubt some are heading back toward Acacia. We soared so high on the way here. Perhaps we flew over some of them. This is like the rage they experienced when Tinhadin exiled them. They may yet kill many people.
“That’s why we’re going to stop them. Call Po back. We should-”
A woman’s voice reached them. “Queen Corinn? Is-is that you?”
They both spun around, searching for the speaker. She was so still that Corinn’s eyes passed over her, only to snap back a moment later. A woman stood with something gripped to her chest, half hidden behind the rubble of a collapsed wall. She stepped out from behind it. “It is you, isn’t it?”