But Jorey had been right. The world wasn’t what it was a year ago. The Severed Throne as she’d known it was gone. The buildings might be the same, the city, even the people, but the nature of the empire—its soul—had changed. It might be possible to betray this new empire and not what it had been. A loyal traitor, then? It seemed absurd and enticing both. She wondered whether one could be faithful to the past and yet not be bound by its rules. Perhaps it was only the beer, but the question seemed heavy with importance.
“Do you know—” she began, but Vincen shook his head and gestured toward the stage.
“Show,” he said.
A dark-haired woman had taken the stage, her smile haughty and wild.
“Come!” she cried, her voice filling the darkness. “Gather near, my friends, or if you are faint of heart, move on. For our tale is one of grand adventure. Love, war, betrayal, and vengeance shall spill out now upon these boards, and I warn you not all that are good end well. Not all that are evil are punished.” Clara felt her throat growing thick, her heart beating faster. The words seemed like a threat. Or worse, a promise. “Come close, my friends, and know that in our tale as in the world, anything may happen.”
Geder
The first battle of the war came at a garrison ten miles from the low hills that marked the border. Ice still clung to the edges of the creek, and snow lurked at the roots of the trees and the northern sides of the walls where the sun could not reach them. Lord Ternigan led the vanguard himself, waiting until midday when the sun offered the enemy no advantage. If the soldiers of the keep had taken the field, it would have been the work of an hour, but instead the iron and oak doors closed, and Ternigan’s men withdrew to prepare their brief and bloody siege.
“Why didn’t they just go around it?” Aster asked.
Geder tapped his lips with the reports, thinking. In truth, he’d been in the field considerably less than Ternigan had, and though he had read deeply on the theory, practice, and history of war, the analysis of men who’d spent more years conducting it was still sometimes obscure to him. He felt Aster deserved an answer, though, and he did his best.
“If you just go on, then you leave them at your back,” he said, fairly certain that was right. “An enemy you haven’t destroyed utterly could always regain strength and come at you.”
Aster’s brow ceased as the boy considered this, then he nodded.
“Go on,” the boy said. “Keep reading.”
The forces of Antea outnumbered the garrison keep by easily five men for every Timzinae or Jasuru, but the keep walls were well made and maintained. Ternigan began by sending a squad of archers and hawkers to the east to bring down any rider or bird sent to alert the enemy or call for aid. The siege engines were constructed in the dim evening just beyond arrowshot of the keep’s walls. In the night, Ternigan patrolled to slaughter the fleeing enemy, and caught and killed nearly a dozen. The priests that had come with the army spoke their sermon by firelight, and their words—that the destiny of Antea to bring peace to the world began here, that the spirits of the dead would ride with them in the morning and make their assault unstoppable, that the rising tide of war would lift them all to glory—so filled the men with lust for battle that Lord Ternigan had to argue against making a night attack.
In the morning, with spring frost still glazing the tents—
“Oh that’s nice,” Aster said.
“Ternigan’s reports do have a certain poetry,” Geder agreed. Basrahip, sitting a little apart, coughed out a short laugh.
In the morning, with spring frost still glazing the tents, Ternigan called the attack. The desperation and fear of the defenders came clear at the start. The rain of arrows and stones held no reserve, and a cunning man hidden in the keep’s walls threw great gouts of living flame from the keep’s single tower. The crew of a battering ram was lost to the flames before a bolt brought the cunning man down. When a second crew began to falter under the defenders’ arrows, Ternigan had called the charge, bringing the body of the army up behind them. With their own men blocking the path of retreat, the men’s resolve stiffened, and at the last, Ternigan dismounted, putting his own hand to the ram for the final dozen critical blows.
When the keep’s doors fell at last, Ternigan led the charge. There were few Timzinae and Jasuru in the keep, but they were wild with despair. Rooting them out took the better part of the day and took its toll in men, including Ternigan’s own squire. But the sun set on the banners of Antea flying above the conquered keep, and the first true victory of the war could now be unequivocally announced.