But there was no chance that their champion was actually going to kill the Fillorian champion, Eliot’s champion. Because Eliot’s champion was Eliot.
There had been some debate, when the idea was first mooted, about whether it made sense to send the High King of Fillory into single combat with the hand-picked designated hitter of the Lorian military. But it rapidly became clear that Eliot was serious about it, and when the High King was serious about something, people had learned to shut up about it pretty quick. Partly because the High King didn’t tend to change his mind, so you might as well skip the whole futile-protest stage, but mostly because people had figured out by now that the High King knew what he was doing.
High King Eliot stepped forward from the front rank of his army, that, predictably but gratifyingly, also went nuts. He smiled—the smile was twisted, but the happiness was the real stuff. The sound of the king’s regiment of the Fillorian army going nuts was unlike anything else in the known universe. You had men and women shouting and banging their weapons together, good enough, but then you had a whole orchestra of nonhuman sounds going on around it.
At the top end you had some fairies squeeing at supersonic pitches; fairies thought all this military stuff was pretty silly, but they went along with it for the same reason that fairies ever did anything, namely, for the lulz.
Then you had bats squeaking, birds squawking, bears roaring, wolves howling, and anything with a horse-head whinnying: pegasi, unicorns, regular talking horses. Griffins and hippogriffs squawked too, but lower—baritone squawking, a horrible noise. Minotaurs bellowed. Stuff with humans’ heads yelled. Of all the mythical creatures of Fillory, they were the only ones who still creeped Eliot out. The satyrs and dryads and such were cool, but there were a couple of manticores and sphinxes that were just uncanny as hell.
And so on down the line till you got to the bass notes and the subsonics, which were provided by the giants grunting and stomping their feet. It was silly really: it only just occurred to Eliot that he could have just picked a giant as his champion, and then this thing would have been over in about ten seconds flat, pun intended. But that wouldn’t have sent the same message.
At first, when Eliot had gotten the news that the Lorians were invading, it had seemed grimly exciting. Rally the banners, Fillory’s at war! Antique formulas and protocols were invoked. A lot of serious-looking non-ceremonial armor and weapons and flags and tack had come up out of storage and been polished and sharpened and oiled. They brought up with them a lot of dust and a thrilling smell of great deeds and legendary times. An epic smell.
The invasion wasn’t a complete surprise. The Lorians were always up to some kind of bad behavior in the books. Kidnapping princes, forcing talking horses to plough fields, trying to get everybody to believe in their slate of quasi-Norse gods. But it had been centuries since they actually invaded. They were usually too busy fighting among themselves to get organized enough to come down across the Northern Barrier range in any significant numbers.
Moreover, the peaks of the Northern Barrier range were supposed to be enchanted to keep the Lorians out. Eliot wasn’t sure what had happened to that; when this was all over he’d have to remember to figure out exactly why those spells had gone pear-shaped. For now here they were, in force, and it was a tricky business, because while Eliot was determined to repel the invaders, he also found that he was very reluctant to kill any of them.
Eliot was familiar with the literature on the subject, or at any rate with the movies of the literature on the subject, or at any rate with relatively short sections of one of the movies. As far as he had gleaned, in Tolkien the hordes of orcs and goblins and trolls and giant spiders and whatever else were all so evil that you were free to commit genocide on them without any complicated moral ramifications. They didn’t have wives and kids and backstories. But the Lorians weren’t like that. They looked human enough that killing them would be basically murder, and that wasn’t going to happen. Some of them were even kind of hot. And anyway those Tolkien books were fiction, and Eliot, as High King of Fillory, didn’t deal in fiction. He was in the messy business of writing facts.
So he was going to roll them back, but with minimum casualties. It was tricky. There was nothing—in Eliot’s admittedly limited experience—more tedious than virtue.