Our shadow enemy crumples into a dead fae adorned with antlers like a deer’s. He’d be beautiful if his life hadn’t spilled out, stunning if he hadn’t been a demon creature a moment ago.
I step over his corpse, binding any pity I feel down to that place where the other things are trapped in close to my spine, behind my breastbone.
And my sword works and works as I spin and weave and dance the old dance of death I’ve been trained for. I take no pleasure in violence. Those who live by the sword die by the sword. I don’t think I’ll hate the dying any worse than I hate the living.
Fergan flicks fingers at me from down the line. I look to the right and left quickly.
Our ambush has been successful. We huff together in the cold – tattered, bloody, dirty, and too thin. We stand over the dead like gaunt coyotes over dead songbirds. Not enough meal to feed us. Winning and losing all at once.
I want to sink to the ground and feel it all. But I won’t. I won’t.
Hessa slides her head against my leg, and I let myself put a trembling hand on her head. I can’t afford weakness, but maybe I can indulge in this one small display. Her muzzle is red with blood. She favors one paw. I’ll have to check it.
“We got them, Haldur!” Gragor laughs from beside me.
He either does not let himself care or does not let himself notice how many of ours are strewn among our enemies. There’s Old Brathur with a cut throat, eyes empty as his skin turns white. There’s Jehn the carver’s youngest son. His face is purple, eyes bulging. Gragor would have died just like that if I hadn’t noticed him. I swallow down bile.
“We killed them all and their hellspawn mounts!” Gragor cheers.
I clap him on the shoulder with a grunt. I don’t want to see the day his enthusiasm rots to bitterness. Although it would be nice if he lived that long.
Fergan flicks his fingers again. He’s my second. He’s been busy counting. We lost fourteen to the sixteen we pulled down. Only surprise and greater numbers bought us that much advantage. Only war would consider that a victory.
I want to curse.
I don’t. I’ve learned that words can only hurt. I try to avoid them as much as I can.
Trellan jogs up, his worn coat flapping in the wind. It was his brother’s and Henta was twice as wide in the shoulders before he was gutted by a fae monster.
“Message,” he gasps. “We’re to return to camp fast as we can.”
I nod and grunt my understanding, fingers flicking to Fergan. It’s not what we expected and in war, surprises are never good.
2
HALDUR OAKENSEN
Idon’t have time to do more than carry our dead to the pyres and clean my blade before we have more messengers breathing down our necks.
“Hurry,” they say.
“You’re needed, Sir Oakensen,” they say.
“The king has asked for you by name,” they say.
I answer them with dour looks and nods and grunts when I must. The king has only asked for the Oakensen name because of my father and brothers. He asks for it because he remembers it in an army of people he no longer knows, gutted of nobility and pride. Strangers dragged out from croft and keep, to fight in this endless, hopeless war.
And they only call me Sir because my father was a knight and the king’s hasty signature upon his death and the deaths of my brothers – all in the same battle – left him desperate to fill the role. Blood, it seems, trumps experience.
But I go with them.
What else would I do?
I pause long enough to find a little rabbit jerky for Hessa. She’s owed that. She wags her tail and twitches her soft eyebrows at me. Anyone who says dogs don’t know human emotion has never met a Hessa dog. I don’t speak to her except to touch her head, and that’s all she needs to stay with Fergan and wait for me.
“Going up to the Command tent?” he asks me quietly when I leave Hessa with him. Fergan ought to be enjoying his dotage carving wooden animals for children and offering sage advice to me about how to court a lady, or how to settle a dispute. Instead, his old bones must fight with us on this field of madness.
“Mm,” I agree.
