The Invasion of the Tearling

On the west side of the camp, wave after wave of Mort soldiers sprinted mindlessly toward the trees at the foot of the hillside. But fifty Tear archers were scattered among the treetops, and now the Mort went down in droves, their bodies riddled with arrows, sinking into the mud of the flats. New screams came from the lake; the men who’d sought shelter there had discovered their error and now they thrashed back toward the shore, bellowing in pain. Hall smiled with a touch of nostalgia. Going into the lake was a rite of passage among the children of Idyllwild, and Hall still had the scars on his legs to prove it.

By now the bulk of the Mort army had deserted the camp. Hall cast a regretful eye toward the ten cannons, which sat entirely unattended. But there was no way to get to them now; everywhere he looked, rattlesnakes slithered among the tents, seeking a good place to nest. He wondered where General Genot was, whether he had fled along with his men, whether he could be one of the hundreds of corpses lying piled at the bottom of the slope. Hall had developed a healthy respect for Genot, but he knew the man’s limitations, many of the same limitations that Bermond suffered himself. Genot wanted his warfare quiet and rational. He didn’t make allowances for extraordinary bravado or crushing incompetence. Yet Hall knew that any army was riddled with such anomalies.

“Jasper!” he called. “Your birds have done good work. Bring them back.”

Jasper gave a loud, piercing whistle and waited, tightening the straps that bound the leather glove to his forearm. Within seconds, the hawks began to soar back in, circling over the hilltop. Jasper whistled intermittently, a different note each time, and one by one each bird dropped to settle on his forearm, where it was rewarded with several pieces of rabbit before being hooded and placed back on the perch.

“Pull the archers,” Hall told Blaser. “And find Emmett. Have him send messengers to the General and the Queen.”

“What message, sir?”

“Tell them I’ve bought us time. At least two weeks until the Mort can regroup.”

Blaser departed, and Hall turned back to stare across the surface of Lake Karczmar, a blinding sheet of red fire in the rising sun. This sight, which used to fill him with longing as a child, now seemed like a terrible warning. The Mort were scattered, true, but not for long, and if Hall’s men lost the hillside, there was nothing to prevent the Mort from shredding Bermond’s carefully assembled defensive lines. Just over the hill sprawled the Almont Plain: thousands of square miles of flat land with little room for maneuver, its farms and villages isolated and defenseless. The Mort had four times the numbers, twice the quality of arms, and if they made it down into the Almont, there was only one endgame: slaughter.

EWEN HAD BEEN the Keep’s Jailor for several years, ever since his Da retired out of the job, and in all that time, he had never had a prisoner that he considered truly dangerous. Most of them had been men who disagreed with the Regent, and these men generally entered the dungeons too starved and beaten to do more than totter into their cells and collapse. Several of them had died in Ewen’s care, although Da had told him that he was not to blame. Ewen had disliked coming in and finding their bodies cold on their cots, but the Regent hadn’t seemed to care either way. One night the Regent had even marched down the dungeon steps dragging one of his own women, a red-haired lady so beautiful that she seemed like something out of one of Da’s fairy stories. But she had a rope tied around her neck. The Regent led her into a cage himself, calling her bad names the entire way, and snarled at Ewen, “No food or water! She doesn’t come out until I say!”

Ewen didn’t like having a woman prisoner. She did not talk or even weep, only gazed stonily at the wall of her cell. Ignoring the Regent’s orders, Ewen had given her food and water, keeping a careful eye on the clock. He could tell that the rope around her neck was hurting her, and finally, unable to bear it any longer, he went in and loosened the noose. He wished he was a healer, able to fix the circle of raw red flesh on her throat, but Da had taught him only the most basic first aid, for cuts and such. Da had always been patient with Ewen’s slowness, even when it caused trouble. But it didn’t take a smart brain to keep a woman alive for the night, and Da would have been disappointed in Ewen had he failed. When the Regent came to collect the woman the next day, Ewen had felt great relief. The Regent had said he was sorry, but the woman had swept out of the dungeon without giving him so much as a glance.