The Invasion of the Tearling

My gift to you, Queen Kelsea, he thought, and dropped his hand toward the ground.

Axes hissed through the air, and then the stillness of the morning wrenched wide open, the hillside echoing with an enormous creaking and cracking as the arms of the catapults realized they were free. One by one they levered upward, gaining speed as they lunged into the sky, and Hall felt his heart lift in a pure joy that never evaporated, a joy he’d felt even as a small child testing his first rabbit trap.

My design! It works!

The arms of the catapults reached their limits and halted, with a boom that echoed across the hillside. That would wake the Mort, but it was already too late.

Hall socketed his spyglass and followed the progress of the light-blue bundles as they hurtled toward the Mort camp. They reached their zenith and began to drop, seventy-five of them in all, the sky-blue parachutes unraveling as they caught the wind, their canvas burdens swinging innocuously in the breeze.

The Mort were moving about now. Hall spied knots of activity: soldiers emerging from tents with weapons, sentries withdrawing into the camp in preparation for an attack.

“Jasper!” he called. “Two minutes!”

Jasper nodded and began to pull the hoods from his hawks, feeding each bird a small piece of meat. Major Caffrey, with his uncanny gift for recognizing a dependable mercenary, had found Jasper in a Mort border village three weeks ago. Hall didn’t like Mort hawks any more now than he had as a child, when the birds used to swoop across the hillside looking for easy prey, but he still had to admire Jasper’s skill with his charges. The hawks watched their handler attentively, heads cocked, like dogs waiting for their master to throw a stick.

A warning shout went up from the Mort camp. They had spotted the parachutes, which dropped faster now as wind resistance decreased. Hall watched through his spyglass, counting under his breath, as the first bundle disappeared behind one of the tents. Twelve seconds had elapsed when the first scream echoed across the flats.

More of the parachutes descended on the camp. One landed on an ordnance wagon, and Hall watched, fascinated despite himself, as the ropes relaxed. The bundle shivered for a moment, then sprang open as five furious rattlesnakes realized they were free. Their mottled skins curled and streaked over the pikes and arrows, dropping from the wagon and disappearing from sight.

Screams echoed against the hillside, and in less than a minute, the camp devolved into utter chaos. Soldiers ran into each other; half-dressed men stabbed wildly at their own feet with swords. Some tried to climb to higher ground, the tops of wagons and tents, even each other’s backs. But most of them fled for the boundaries of the camp, desperate to get clear. Officers shouted orders, to no avail; panic had taken hold, and now the Mort army began to pour from the camp on all sides, fleeing west toward the Border Hills or away to the east and south, across the flats. Some even sprinted mindlessly north and splashed into the shallows of Lake Karczmar. They had no armor or weapons; many were stark naked. Several had cheeks still covered with shaving cream.

“Jasper!” Hall called. “Time!”

One by one, Jasper coaxed his hawks onto the thick leather glove that covered his arm from thumb to shoulder and sent them into the air. Hall’s men watched the birds uneasily as they gained altitude, but the hawks were well trained; they ignored the Tear soldiers entirely, soaring down the hillside toward the Mort camp. They dove directly into the exodus of men who streamed from the southern and eastern ends of the campsite, talons opening as they dropped, and Hall watched the first of them seize the neck of a fleeing man who wore only a half-buttoned pair of trousers. The hawk ripped out his jugular, spraying the morning sunlight with a fine mist of blood.