The Sacred Band

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

On the morning she was to depart for the coronation, Mena left Elya in the care of gentle handlers and went to say good-bye to her troops. She paused in the hallway just outside an open doorway in the Calathrock. The chamber was still musty, damp, stained with the mold and decay. It would take more than a few weeks to undo the years of neglect. But it had been a corpse before. Now, soldiers’ feet pounded its floor. The air clanged with the clash of weapons and shouts of orders, and it smelled of men and women training. Volleys of arrows flew like single-minded birds. Once a dead ruin of a defeated people, now the building lived and breathed.

She had worked as hard as anyone to bring about the transformation. She had lifted new timbers with her own hands, pulled on the rusty-toothed saw to cut them, and leaned her weight to push them up into place, shoulder to shoulder with her soldiers. She had filled buckets with snow and brought them inside to melt, and then scrubbed the floor clean like a servant. She had held the safety ropes as climbers scrabbled into the chamber’s higher reaches, shoring up the ancient beams and repairing broken panes of glass. And she was among the first on the scene when a blockage in the vents caused an explosion that killed three and steamed the skin half off several more.

It was hasty work, done mostly so the chamber could function once more for its most basic purpose: to train an army sheltered from the winter that raged above it. This, too, she did in among her troops. She walked the Calathrock as Perrin shouted the soldiers through drills. None of them had fought more recently against the Numrek than she. So she taught what she knew. She lectured as she sparred with the strongest, tallest, and most skilled of her warriors, hoping that things learned from fighting Numrek would apply to the Auldek as well.

She was there to correct missteps, adjust weapons. Her eyes on the young men and women pushed them harder than they would have worked otherwise. She knew she had this effect on them. She used it not for herself but so they would become stronger, faster, more skillful than they thought themselves capable of. Perhaps one or two of them would learn just the extra bit he or she would need to survive the Auldek.

“Much has changed, hasn’t it?” Perrin’s shoulder brushed hers as he came to stand beside her. “Just a few weeks, but you’d barely recognize the place. It’s you who did that.”

“They did it,” Mena corrected. “One person can do little. Only together-”

“I know. Only together is great work accomplished. But I don’t know where we’d be without you. You, Mena, kept us marching and working and training. I’ve never known anyone more suited to lead others. You’re…”

She glanced at him.

The easy confidence on his face fell away. He went suddenly shy, as if the touch of her eyes was a rebuke. “I was going to say that you’re an inspiration, but that doesn’t sound like something a soldier should say to the princess he serves.”

“No, it doesn’t.”

“I should probably quit while I’m ahead.”

“I think so, Captain.” Looking back into the Calathrock, Mena smiled. Despite the interest she had always seen in Perrin’s eyes, she thought Melio would like him. I’d love to see them spar together. Melio would win, but this young man would give him a good contest. She stepped through the portal and into the massive chamber.

A visiting dignitary or senator from Alecia would not have recognized her, dressed as she was in simple garments meant for function, mobility, and warmth. Her soldiers recognized her; they were what mattered. Their survival in the face of the coming onslaught mattered. That was the main thing she hated about command-that the one thing she wanted to spare them from was the exact thing she was sending them toward. Aliver had warned her that leadership was like this.

She rejoiced when new arrivals swelled their numbers, knowing at the same time that many of them would likely die. A unit of new troops arrived from Candovia, as well as a team of laborers and young recruits from the Eilavan Woodlands. The former had acted on Corinn’s orders; the latter on their own initiative. Barely enough to make up for those taken by the hazards of trekking and working in a Meinish winter. As yet they did not fill even half the chamber, but it heartened them all to know that some were willing to join their cause. The trickle of arriving Meins had especially lifted Mena’s spirits and had done wonders for Haleeven’s.

She could see as much when she passed where Haleeven was talking with several of his clansmen. The Meinish men wore rags. Their hair hung in matted, golden knots that were, somehow, attractive on them, despite the bits and pieces of debris that clung to them. They were fresh faced and sharp featured, and each of them was sprinkled with peeling curls of pink skin on his or her nose and cheeks. It still amazed Mena that they had answered Haleeven’s call. They had appeared out of the frigid nothingness surrounding Mein Tahalian as if they had been camped just over the horizon. She stopped among them long enough to learn their names and to welcome them.

Just the previous morning they had rolled out wagons meant to imitate the wheeled structures the Numrek had arrived with. “Too bad I won’t be here to see you get squashed by these things,” she said, patting a young woman on the back. She wanted to work through the problems posed by antoks and to see the other beasts the Auldek might arrive with and form strategies against them. “I’m sorry to miss you all fighting that as well.” She pointed to where someone had mounted the head of a woolly rhinoceros on a wheelbarrow. The efficacy of training against such a comical imitation was questionable at best. She welcomed the laughter it was already invoking, though. “I’ll miss the lot of you.”

Gandrel’s booming voice called for quiet in the chamber.

“You began this campaign with me a few months ago,” Mena began. “Most of you did not know me. I did not know you. We know one another now. We were called upon by the nation as the first line of defense against invaders none of us have even seen. My sister, Queen Corinn, asked for bravery. You arrived wearing it on your chests. Didn’t you?”

Apparently so, judging by the shouts of affirmation.

“I thank the Giver for it every day. I cannot tell you how proud I am of the army we’ve become. I know none of you would have expected to be training here, in Mein Tahalian, but I thank you for accepting the task of rebuilding this ancient chamber with me. Our time grows near. I won’t keep you from your training but a minute. I know you want to get to it.”

She grinned at the groans they responded with. Her eyes touched on Perrin, who was watching her with undisguised admiration. All right, so she did have a way with her troops. She wondered if he understood how much they all gave her, how much she needed them to need her. Her soldiers. A different sort of family from the one she was about to fly to, but one she loved just as much.

“I leave you only briefly. I’ll fly on my dragon. You’ve heard of her, right? The great dragon Elya? I fly on her to be at the coronation of Aliver reborn. You see? My sister raises the dead. She slays Numrek with the words out of her mouth. You think I’m scary with a blade-you should hear her sing!”

A great noise greeted this, mock horror and praise mixed together.

“When I return, we’ll march north and defend our nation. When I return, I will hold out my hand for you all to touch. I will bring a blessing from Aliver reborn to you.”

Walking through the crowd as she exited, nodding and shaking hands and continuing her flow of humorous remarks, Mena wondered why she was so capable of appearing certain about things that she was not at all certain about.

She had just stepped into the hallway when the man threw open the reinforced doors at the end of it. “Princess Mena, come… please. A Scav come from Tavirith… Something has happened.”

The jog back to Tahalian was short and brisk, but it exposed her enough that winter’s fury ripped and snarled at her for a few ferocious moments. It always did that, but this time it felt much more sentient, intentional, personal. It poured out of the gap in the mountains that led toward Tavirith with a physical violence made no less by the fact that it was only air and tiny ice crystals. She had no idea what message awaited her, but it already felt like a punishment for the certainty she had feigned before her soldiers.

In an anteroom just inside the inner doors of the fortress, Mena found Edell, her military secretary, standing beside a seated man. She recognized the Scav as soon as his blue eyes lifted and met hers. Kant, the same man who had shown them the route the Numrek had taken. Since Gandrel had to be fetched to translate, she stood looking at the man, unable to communicate with him for several minutes more.

“Get it from him,” Mena said as soon as Gandrel and Perrin stepped inside, flushed from the rabid cold.

For a few moments the two men talked the guttural confusion that was the Scav tongue, and then Gandrel stopped the man midsentence. He touched the scar on his nose as if it were a talisman against what he was about to say.” A massacre… in Tavirith.”

The rest came out in the maddening stutter stop of translation. Kant’s words were unhurried. He stared at one object after another, as if talking to the chair and the wall and the door, not the people in the room. He had returned to Tavirith to winter, he said. He did not usually do so, but with the bounty Mena had paid him for his earlier information, he had much to trade and gamble. He arrived to find the place sacked. Houses had been smashed and gutted. Ash blackened the snow. Frozen bodies littered the ground. Hacked, defiled bodies. Limbs chopped off. A few had lost their heads. Some had been half eaten.

“He says it was not animals that did it. Not all of it, at least. Flesh was cut away by knives.”

“Do the Scav make war this way?” Mena asked.

Gandrel passed her question on. The look Kant turned toward her was so full of derision she felt suddenly ashamed. “No Scav would do this. It was the Auldek.”

“That’s madness!” Perrin said. “How could they? It’s too soon! They couldn’t have marched this far already. By his own testimony they couldn’t.”

Edell asked, “Is he after more booty? We gave him too much before. Now he thinks we’ll pay for any fool story.”

This got no translation, but the Scav must have read his tone.

“He says if you don’t wish to believe him, you don’t have to,” Gandrel translated. “He saw what he saw, and he heard what the dead had to say. With his own eyes, he saw there were no tracks of marchers. A small party, perhaps a dozen of the invaders, touched down a little distance from the village and walked toward it. No tracks brought them to that point. They just dropped from the sky. They flew.”

“Flew?”

“Atop beasts with large footprints. Like a man’s print, but massive.”

“This is foolishness,” Edell said. “How much does he want to go away? I’ll pay him myself.”

The Marah captain Bledas and the Senivalian Perceven had just arrived, but they paused inside the door. Haleeven shouldered between them. He spoke to the Scav.

“Haleeven is greeting him with respect,” Gandrel narrated. “They seem to know each other. Kant’s… telling him what he has told us… Now Kant says that he did not come for himself. He did not come for the Acacians. He came for the dead. They want vengeance. They howl for it.” Gandrel paused a moment, before finishing. “There is another thing we should know, he says. The invaders have made the turn inland. The bulk of the main force, that is.”

“He saw this?”

“No, but his ancestors did,” Gandrel said. “He speaks to their ghosts, remember?” He smirked, but the expression quickly faded. “The Auldek are making good time. He says they move despite the weather, day and night, slowly and steadily. That means fast in the north.”

“And that was over irregular terrain,” Perrin said. “They may be able to move faster when they reach the Ice Fields.”

Gandrel said something to Kant, heard his answer, and nodded. “He thinks the invaders will be out of the Ice Fields before the spring.”

Edell began, “But do we believe him? What proof-”

“He needs none,” Haleeven said. “I know this man. I know his people. They saw the Numrek come through. Back when you knew nothing of them, we did. The Scav did. He had relatives in the town of Vedus, the first to be slaughtered and left flaming with that vile pitch the Numrek brought with them. If he says this about Tavirith, it’s true. About the war column-it’s true.”

“How do we know that?” Edell asked. “It was you who invited the Numrek down in the first place. You lit the torch on the pitch that burned Vedus.”

Haleeven looked at the young soldier secretary with a measure of the disdain Kant had shown earlier. “We never meant for that to happen. I have reckoned with Kant on the past already. That’s between us. Do you doubt my word?”

“When your word is based on stories of ghosts, yes, I’d say so.”

“The dead don’t lie. And they don’t speak without having something to say. That’s a trait of the living.”

Edell’s mouth twisted into a snarl, but his voice kept an official precision. “The Acacian military cannot move on the word of a Scav who claims he’s been talking to the dead. You may have sucked from the same mother’s teat as this Scav, but I didn’t. I think we need confirmation before we do anything.”

Mena cut in before Haleeven could respond. “Peace, Haleeven. Peace, Edell. I want no arguing between you.”

“Especially not now,” Perrin said. “Mena leaves this afternoon. Let’s give her no cause to doubt our leadership when she’s gone.”

“Will you still go?” Bledas asked. “This changes everything.”

“It doesn’t change anything,” Perrin said. “We’ll be here doing the things Mena would want us to. We’ll start for the Ice Fields earlier. If the enemy can travel in winter, we’ll find a way to travel in winter, too. No matter what, we’ll still meet them on the fields and defeat them.”

Edell touched his temple, wincing. He was prone to headaches. “We should send a party to Tavirith to check the Scav’s story.”

“In these conditions?” Haleeven asked, swinging an arm as if asking them to take in the view. “The howling wind from Tavirith is well known to my people. It may not stop for weeks. Marching into it would eat men alive.”

“You both speak wisdom,” Mena said. “We should step away from this, regroup in a moment. Let’s go to the conference room. It’s warmer there, and there are the old Meinish maps to consult. We’ll plan while we can.”

Bledas pushed his unanswered question. “Your highness, the royal coronation-will you leave to attend it?”

The room hushed as Mena considered her answer. “Yes, I’ll go. I meant what I said-I have faith in you all. We’ll plan what we can before I fly, but I will fly.”

She looked at Kant, who sat motionless, a bland look on his face as if he had already forgotten the confusion he had just brought with him. “Haleeven, stay with us a moment. Translate for me. I would speak with Kant about some things, just the three of us.”

W ith the Scav’s promises still in her ears a few hours later, Mena climbed atop Elya. Her head cleared as they rose into the frigid, angry skies. Mena leaned into Elya, her cheek on the scented feathers, breathing them in. She smelled and felt so good that Mena almost could not ask of her the thing she had decided to ask. What part did Elya own in all this anyway? None of it, perhaps. In a perfect world she would be home with her babies, raising them, but this was not a perfect world. Mena was not perfection herself, so she had to rely on someone. Fair or not, it was to be her winged companion.

They slid down along the eastern edge of the Black Mountains. The raging torrent of air funneled through the pass from Tavirith shoved them forward. They could not have fought it if they tried. Mena let Elya ride it instead, over Scatevith and the woodlands rimming the Sinks. They scattered herds of woolly oxen beneath them. From there they traced the meandering line that was the frozen River Ask. Ironic, Mena knew, that she was flying the same route Hanish Mein had attacked by, first on sleds and then on boats. She wondered what the landscape had looked like to him. To her, despite the cold, despite the coming war and the many things that roiled in her stomach… To her the frozen land beneath her was beautiful. All Acacia, all the Known World was filled with wonders worth fighting for. She had long ago decided she would die for it. Before this was all over, she would die. It seemed the only possibility, the only way through it for the people and the nation and the land she loved. The certainty of this belief made what she did next easier.

Back when Bledas asked if she would go, her answer had not been as certain as it sounded. Now, on the wing and with the world cold beneath her, she decided upon another course. She turned Elya toward Candovia. From there she would keep flying, all the way to Tavirith and then beyond. She and Elya would see these Auldek with their own eyes.