The Invasion of the Tearling

“Stop fucking with that thing, Ryan, and have a look.”


With a sigh, Hall dropped his helmet and pulled out his spyglass. He hadn’t slept in three days. The last two weeks had been a blur of pitched battles and retreat as the Mort army pushed them inexorably southwest, across the Crithe and back toward the lower Almont. Sometimes Hall couldn’t tell whether he was asleep or awake anymore, whether the war he fought was real or merely taking place inside his own head. The Mort had taken both banks of the Caddell several days ago, and now the river was crossed with several portable footbridges, ingenious mechanisms that Hall could not help admiring, even while he schemed ways to bring them down. The footbridges allowed the Mort to hold not only both sides of the river but the water itself, to move straight up the riverbed without effectively dividing their forces. The bridges appeared to be made of solid oak, reinforced with steel in the center to keep them from snapping under the army’s weight, but they disassembled quickly for transport. Someone in Mortmesne was a hell of an engineer, and Hall wished he could speak to him for just a few minutes, even now while the world came down around their ears.

Hall’s spyglass caught and held on a flag on the south side of the Caddell. Most of the Mort camp was either black or a deep storm-cloud grey, but this flag was bright scarlet. Hall stood up from his crouch, disregarding the threat of Mort archers, and focused the lens. The red flag was planted on top of a deep crimson tent.

“Sir. Ten o’clock on the south side of the river.”

“What? Oh hell, look at that.” Bermond set down his spyglass and rubbed his temples. He hadn’t slept in days either. Even the blue plume on his helmet, a sign of rank to which Bermond was ridiculously attached, hung limply in the hazy sunlight. “All we need now.”

“Maybe it’s not really her, only a ruse by the Mort.”

“You think it’s a ruse?”

“No,” Hall replied after a moment’s thought. “She’s here, come to finish what she started.”

“Morale’s hanging by a threat already. This might snap it.”

Hall turned his spyglass west, toward New London. The Queen’s refugee camp sprawled in front of the city, a vast acreage of tents and tarps, and now it was a frenzy of activity as Census people evacuated the last occupants into New London. Stone walls ringed the city, a perimeter set just off the edge of the Caddell, some ten feet high. But these walls had been hastily constructed on soft riverbank ground; they would not stand up to assault. Everything was a holding action. One more day to finish the evacuation, and then Bermond would pull the army back to New London, and they would all settle in for siege. A thick cloud of smoke hung over the city; they were slaughtering and roasting all of the animals, curing the meat for the long haul. The army had also been hoarding water, knowing that once the Mort reached the walls, the Caddell would be cut off. Good preparations, but still, a holding action. There was only one way for a siege to end.

“Still, Mort morale might be weak as well,” Bermond mused hopefully. “The Mort like their plunder, lad, and we’ve given them none. I hate to admit it, but the Queen had a good idea with her evacuation. There must be some grumbling going on in their camp by now.”

“Not enough,” Hall replied, and gestured toward the crimson tent. “If they were grumbling, she’d put a stop to it.”

He didn’t want to mention the Red Queen by name. An old superstition from his childhood on the border, where every child knew that if you spoke of the Red Queen, she might appear. Names made a thing real, far more real than that distant spot of scarlet … and yet once his men spotted the tent, Hall knew that the fear would sweep through the remainder of the Tear army like an evil wind.

Bermond sighed. “How do we keep them off for one more day?”

“Pull back. Mass at the entrance to the bridge and build a barricade.”

“They have siege towers.”

“Let them try. We have oil and torches.”

“You’re in fine form today. What did you do, sneak off to Whore’s Alley last night?”

“No.”

“Then what?”

“I had a dream.”

“A dream,” Bermond repeated, chuckling. “About what?”

“About the Queen,” Hall replied simply. “I dreamed that she lit a great fire that wiped the land clean. The Mort, the Red Queen, the wicked … all of the Tear’s enemies were swept away.”

“Never knew you to be a man for portents, Ryan.”

“I’m not. But all the same, it put me in a good mood.”

“You place far too much faith in a naive child.”

Hall did not reply. Bermond would never see the Queen as anything but an upstart, but Hall saw something else, something he could not quantify.