A Conspiracy of Princes
“What if we hit our own forces?” one of the archers cried up to him.
“Doesn’t matter,” he snarled back. “Keep firing!”
The archer and his fellows did not delay in sending more of their deadly rain down upon the heaving mass below. Let the aggressors be in no doubt: they broached the fort at their own peril.
But now Axel watched with fresh terror as tall, thin ladders were moved into position. Where the hell had they come from? The ants below hoisted the ladders up to the higher levels of the fort. Within moments, the insects began climbing.
“Increase your fire!” he screamed at the archers below.
But all was not yet lost: he watched as the first of the ladders began to tremble, as if caught in a sudden breeze. His own forces were pushing the ladder away with long poles. It peeled away from the wall and those at the top had the choice to either cling on or jump. He had a fleeting sense of satisfaction at their screams. But, within moments, a second ladder was hoisted and, seemingly undeterred by their comrades’ fate, yet more dark shapes began scurrying up the sides of the fort. Spurred on by its success, two more ladders then began to rise. There was no way they could push back such a sustained, coordinated attack.
Now Axel heard a low thud. Throwing himself to the other side of his lookout, he saw that another group of soldiers was running at the main doors of the fort with a battering ram. Wham. He heard the sound echo up from below. The fort doors were fashioned from the thickest slabs of oak Archenfield could muster; the selfsame oak that had been crafted into the Prince’s Table. Only in this case, it was reinforced with iron. The doors had been designed to hold off invaders like these. Boom. The battering ram made fresh contact. This time, Axel felt—or maybe only imagined—the reverberations through his body. The doors would hold—for all their sakes, the doors had to hold. Wham. The battering ram came again. Axel was powerless to do anything to prevent it. Crack. He felt sick to the pit of his stomach. How much longer could the fort hold out?
The Forest, North of Tonsberg
With one hand holding tight to his horse’s reins, Morgan steadied his other hand on the shoulder of the dying soldier. He had buried his sword deep in the man’s gut and the victim’s body issued a distinctive squelch as he pulled it back out again. He saw the familiar expression in his victim’s eyes: as the man slipped from his saddle, he was already well on his journey from this world to the next. Without lowering his eyes, Morgan wiped away a thick splash of blood from his face. On the other side of the now riderless horse, he could already see his next combatant.
It would be easy to lose count of the number of enemy riders he had dispatched to their deaths from the dissembling green of the forest, but it was important for Morgan to keep count. Twenty-three so far. Their battle might be located in the pine-perfumed forest just north of Tonsberg, but it was nonetheless brutal for its picturesque surroundings. Morgan and his comrades were holding their own: he had a sudden sight of Jonas up ahead, wielding his sword. Then the riderless horse moved off, trampling its fallen rider underfoot, and Morgan bought his full attention to the next soldier lying in wait.
Like all the others, the rider was clad in the purple silk and dull black armor of Paddenburg. They looked, he thought, like giant flies. This one, a woman, was far more skilled at swordplay than the last. She met each of his attacks with a countermove of her own and, as their sweating horses turned about one another, she gained the upper hand.
Morgan felt an undeniable excitement as he parried her attack. A good duel like this was rare and, he knew, would only strengthen his own fighting skills still further. He was almost sad when she unwittingly allowed him an opening to insert his sword deep into her flank. She opened her mouth to scream but no sound came out—only blood.
Past the dying woman’s head, Morgan saw a fresh volley of enemy arrows flying through the air. One bounced off a breastplate; another hit the flanks of a horse; others fell impotently to the forest floor. Morgan watched as the last of the arrows found the exposed flesh between a rider’s helmet and his back armor, the arrow burying itself deep into the rider’s neck.
The rider turned. It was only then that Morgan realized, with a feeling of deep dread, that the victim was Jonas.
As the Woodsman slumped in his saddle, Morgan jumped down from the back of his own horse—he had to reach his friend and do what he could for him. He raced over the fallen bodies slumped on the carpet of pine needles that was thickly spattered with the blood of Jonas Drummond and so many others. Was it already too late?
“Jonas!” He could not prevent the sob in his voice as he saw the undisguised agony in the Woodsman’s eyes. Jonas’s boots had become tangled in his horse’s stirrups as he had fallen. Morgan sliced through the thin strips of leather in order to free him.
Alert to the ever-present danger from enemy swords and arrows, Morgan employed one hand to drag Jonas into a nearby copse; his other hand gripped tightly to his outstretched sword, ready to see off any soldier in purple and black who stood in their way.
He succeeded in ferrying Jonas out of the fray and into the clearing. The battle continued to be fought only yards away from them—on the other side of the majestic pines.
“This must be one of the most beautiful spots in all of Archenfield,” Jonas rasped, as he glanced past Morgan to the perfect patch of winter-blue sky above them. “Not such a bad place to die.”
The sides of the Woodsman’s bloodied lips rose into a half smile. Morgan reached, instinctively, for the fatal arrow, but his hands froze. He knew the worst thing he could do was to remove it. He felt utterly impotent.
“Take it out,” Jonas instructed him.
“It will hurt like hell,” Morgan told him, tears filling his eyes. “And it won’t do any good. We both know that.”
“Please take it out,” Jonas begged. “Don’t let me die with an enemy arrow embedded in my flesh.”
Morgan reached for the arrow and drew it firmly toward him. Tears coursed down his face as he witnessed Jonas’s intense pain. Blood sprayed out from the Woodsman’s neck, covering Morgan’s own face, neck and clothes. Then, free from the arrow, the Woodsman’s body began to convulse.
Morgan gripped his friend’s hand. He could feel the life swiftly ebbing away. Morgan had been around dying bodies since he was a boy, but he had never once felt so sad.
With his free hand, he pressed down against the open wound but the blood soon escaped between his fingers and dripped onto the forest floor. His other hand clasped Jonas’s all the more tightly. He knew if he loosened his hold, Jonas’s hand would simply slip away from him.
Already Jonas’s face was white, almost transparent. It made Morgan think of the fjord in winter, when it was thick with ice.
“Where are we?” Jonas asked, his voice fainter than before.
“We are in the heart of the forest,” Morgan told his dying friend. “In the beautiful forest of Archenfield—the place you know better than any man. The place you love above all others.”
He glanced from Jonas’s face up to the patch of sky. It was, he thought, the purest blue he had ever seen. It was only the briefest glance but, when he returned his eyes to Jonas’s face, he knew that the Woodsman had gone.
North of Pencador
“You said to come north, Elliot!” Emelie Sharp harangued the newest member of the Twelve as she stood beside Nash and Lucas Curzon on the craggy hillside just north of the settlement of Pencador.
“Be fair, Emelie,” Lucas intervened. He had become well practiced in the role of peacekeeper between his two hot-headed companions. “We had little option but to flee in this direction.”
“Thank you, Lucas!” Elliot swept his arm around him. “We got our troops safely out of the line of fire, did we not? You might give me some credit for that.”
Emelie drew down her field glasses and thrust them toward Elliot. “You might not be quite so cocksure if you care to take a look down there!”
Frowning, Elliot took the glasses.
As he lifted them to his eyes, Emelie continued at full pelt. “It appears that we’re riding into a fresh battle currently under way in the foothills between Dalhoen and Kirana.”
Elliot’s expression was resolute as he removed the field glasses from his eyes and passed them to Lucas. Lifting them to his own eyes, Lucas heard Emelie’s voice ringing in his ears.
“Well? We appear to be caught between the proverbial rock and hard place. You’re the new Captain of the Guard. You got us into this situation. What do you advise now?”
As she spoke, Lucas felt a chill running through his insides. It was true: they were very far from a place of safety. Through the glasses, he could see the scope of the battle under way in the foothills—it looked like a rout.
He shook his head. Their troops had barely had the chance to draw breath after their last battle. Soon, though, they would be in the heart of the melee once more.
“We cannot go back,” Elliot declared decisively. “We must continue north, on toward the palace.”
Emelie frowned. “In other words, you intend to lead us into the heart of this conflict below. Are you a complete fool, or simply dead set upon leading us into enemy territory?”
Ignoring Emelie, Elliot turned toward Lucas. “Our chances are significantly higher in taking on the smaller enemy force down there in the foothills than the considerably larger one pushing north behind us.” He glanced back at Emelie. “Success in circumstances like this is determined by taking calculated risks.”
“Pah!” Emelie spat. “Which military manual did you grab that maxim from?”
“No manual,” Elliot rejoined with a thin smile. “I learned everything I know from Axel Blaxland—of course, I should now say Prince Axel.”
Field Hospital, Kirana
Elias turned from the flayed leg to the nurse at his side. “I’ll have to amputate just below the knee,” he confirmed. “Fetch me the”—he paused to lower his voice—“equipment, and do what you can to prepare the poor soul.”
Moments later, he had the saw in his hand, feeling the regrettably familiar sensation of its sharpened teeth slicing easily through flesh and tissue, but then making its first contact with the bone beneath. He was dimly aware of the soldier’s screams, but only dimly. There was nothing wrong with Elias’s hearing—he had simply acquired the necessary skill of tuning out any distracting noise in order to remain focused on the job at hand.
There had been a two-year hiatus between his last amputation and the first of this new conflict, but his touch was as precise and certain as if he had performed such an operation only yesterday. In truth, it seemed barely yesterday that he had been stationed, for months on end, in a field hospital identical to this—filled with the stench of death and the moans of the dying. He had convinced himself in the interim two years that life in court was the norm and his wartime experience the anomaly. Now he realized he had been mistaken: these torturous sounds and horrific smells were the norm of life in Archenfield—a Princedom more practiced in war than peace. Though this latest conflict might prove more definitive than those that had come before, he reflected briefly. The home army was now so weakened, the advancing enemy as vast—as it was predictably ruthless—that the struggle might simply be the very last of Archenfield’s wars. Soon, very soon, Archenfield might cease to exist in its own right, swallowed whole by the insatiable hunger of its warmongering neighbor.
The Princedom Elias had loved and served so long had as much chance of returning to its former glory as this poor soldier had of growing a new lower leg.
Elias felt the curious weight of the limb as it became detached from the body. Remembering Axel in his surgery, discussing the value of the different parts of a body, Elias placed the damaged leg carefully on the ground. He could no longer remember the standard remuneration for a leg: it was if his mind could no longer maintain any pretense toward order.
His assistant—who seemed, thank heaven, able to focus squarely on the task at hand—passed him the earthenware pot containing the ointment to dress the wound. Its scent was pungent and familiar, going deep into Elias’s nostrils. It momentarily overpowered the stench of decay—though, in truth, the two smells had come to indicate the selfsame thing to him.
As he applied the dressing to the exposed tissue, he became more alert to the patient’s cries. He was unsure if they were cries of fresh pain or grief for the loss of the limb.
“Give him more brandy!” Elias instructed his assistant.
The Physician took a spool of bandage and began to cover the inflamed flesh. How many more operations such as this would he be tasked to perform? However many broken soldiers and brave-hearted civilians he managed to fix, there would be far more who met their ends either in the battle itself—where death at least might be mercifully swift—or here, at a slower, crueler pace. What, in truth, was the point in saving one more of them? Maybe he should make this patient his last. He was not quite a single man poised against the war machine, but the odds were not far removed from that.
War would win in the end. It always did. Why pretend otherwise?
Elias finished the bandaging. “There,” he said with a sigh. “All done.”
As the unfortunate soldier was stretchered away, Elias gazed at the familiar staining on the palms of his hands. He allowed his eyes to close briefly. It was one of the only ways he knew to cut himself off from the horrors around him.
As he did so, his mind became unusually empty and clear. A face appeared. It was Asta. He realized its import. The Princedom could descend into hell—it was well on its way in that direction already. All he truly cared about was the safety of his niece.
Mellerad
Asta gratefully took the fresh pile of sheets from the woman whose house had been transformed into a makeshift surgery, at the heart of the settlement.
“You’re sure about this, Zayna?” Asta inquired.
The woman nodded, even managing a faint smile. “I couldn’t sleep on these sheets again if I thought we hadn’t done everything to do our bit to help.”
Zayna sat down beside Asta and they began tearing through the sheets as neatly as possible to create strips that might be used as bandages. As she busied herself with her work, Asta thought of Elias and the caskets of medical supplies she had seen him organizing for each of the settlements. The supplies had proved woefully inadequate here in Mellerad, where they were dealing with the war-wounded not only from the home settlement, but those who had fled from Galvaire, Lindas and Vollerim.
Across the room, another young woman was busy stitching a head wound with a needle usually employed for needlepoint. It appeared to be working just fine. Asta felt a sense of pride that they had accomplished so much in such a short space of time there.
“You’re quite something, you know.”
At first, Asta didn’t realize that the words were directed at her, but then she felt Zayna’s hand on her shoulder. “We couldn’t have organized ourselves as well as this without your help.”
Asta blushed, uneasy with the praise. “I only did what anyone would have done.”
“No,” the woman said more forcefully. “You did more than that. You came to warn us of the flight of refugees from the west. You somehow managed to rally the settlement dwellers while maintaining calm throughout, and set up this surgery for those of us cut off from medical help.”
Asta heard the words and they touched her, but it was as if Zayna were talking about someone else other than her. She had acted on pure instinct; indeed, she could barely remember any of her actions. She had simply kept focusing on what had needed to be done next.
“What now?” her companion asked.
As she tore through the last of the sheets, adding the strip to the basket in front of her, Asta glanced up at the kindly woman.
“You look exhausted,” Asta told her. “You should go and rest for a while.”
“I can’t—” Zayna began.
“You must,” Asta insisted. “There are others here who can continue yo
ur work. You need to go upstairs, if only for a short while.”
“And what about you?” Zayna asked. “You’re a force of nature, Asta Peck, but even forces of nature cannot keep going without any rest.”
Open Ground between Mellerad and Dalhoen
Lydia and Henning rode at the front of their forces. They were not side by side, but close enough. So far, everything was going to plan—in certain ways, better than expected. Each of Archenfield’s western settlements had fallen and by surrounding the fort at Mellerad, they were close to claiming their most significant prize so far.
Glancing back over her shoulder, Lydia saw a river—no, it was more of an ocean—of purple and black following in their leaders’ wake. They were an unstoppable force and she had no doubt that she had played a significant part in making them so.
When she had first encountered the Princes of Paddenburg, she had found two young men full of ambition but lacking in any clear strategy. She had made them wake up to what was ripe for the picking beyond their borders. She had focused their energies and organized them into a force to be reckoned with. Her own success had already been proven by the swift taking of Tanaka: Archenfield was putting up more of a fight. All the same, it was almost certain now that the colors of Paddenburg would be flying from the palace flagpole by nightfall. Where next? They had made plans, of course. But success brought the opportunity to create newer, bigger plans.
Turning back again, she saw that Henning had brought his horse to a standstill. The order to pause was passed through the ranks. What was wrong? She pointed her own horse toward his. The ranks soon opened up to allow her through.
“Why did you order the stop?” she asked, lifting the visor of her helmet.
Henning did the same. “Look ahead, Lydia,” he told her.
She did as he asked. She could see the forces ranked on the open ground before them.