Blade of Empire

by Mercedes Lackey

  Leutric frowned thunderously “Your people have called us Beastlings. Abomination. You’ve killed us. Burned our homes. Worn our skins as clothing. We have been delicacies for your table. You cannot even look at us without flinching, because the shapes we wear are different from yours. Why would you help us?”

  “Because—” Runacar swayed and nearly fell. Now Leutric could see he had not sought this audience lightly. Weariness and strain etched the lines of his body. “Sit,” Leutric said, motioning him toward the ground. “Whatever great state your people keep, ours do not.”

  “So I discover,” Runacar muttered. He went ungracefully to his knees then sat heavily, hunched forward, his elbows on his knees.

  Leutric waited in silence, and at last Runacar spoke.

  “I don’t know,” he said at last. “You’re monsters. So I was told. Why shouldn’t I believe it? I believed my father when he said Caerthalien deserved the Unicorn Throne. I believed my brother when he said he was content to be Lightborn. I believed my mother when she said Farcarinon was tainted and corrupt—” He broke off with a weary laugh. “I didn’t believe Vieliessar when she said she would be High King. And she is. And … I think she has destroyed us. I just want to save something. Even if it’s you.”

  Leutric did not believe him. He did not disbelieve him, either, for the Children of Stars lied so readily they did not know how to recognize truth even from their own lips. Instead, he kept Runacar by his side as he moved through the West. Sennight after sennight, Runacar attended every court, heard ever report, every petition, and always Leutric tested him, asking his advice, asking what he would do.

  He did not follow Runacar’s advice at first, but as the days passed, he came to realize that Runacar was more often right than wrong. When a plan of Leutric’s failed, it failed in much the way Runacar predicted.

  And so one day Leutric said: “Give me the Shore.”

  Runacar answered: “I will. But first I will give you the West.”

  * * *

  It was, of course, not that simple. If Runacar meant to destroy the remaining strongholds of the Elves and harry their occupants from the Western Reach, he must have the fighters to do it. But while Leutric might be Emperor of the Otherfolk, he had less authority over them than Caerthalien’s chief castellan would have had over the kitchens of Aramenthiali. Though Leutric sent out a call for volunteers to join an impromptu war band, Runacar realized that without his sennights of acting as Leutric’s military advisor in the sight of all who came to the King-Emperor’s court, no one would have been willing to answer that call—except, perhaps, Keloit.

  Even before his first volunteers arrived, Runacar was planning out what he would do. The Otherfolk would have begun with the obvious targets, the Sanctuary of the Star, the Western Shore. If they had thrown the whole force of their people into such a battle, they might even have prevailed, but brute force against craft and skill would buy any victories at far too high a cost. Runacar meant to begin with the smallest and easiest targets he could find, but before that, he and his war band would have to find out what they were. Leutric had gotten reports, but they were all-but-useless to Runacar.

  And even that must wait upon discovering who would follow him.

  By now Runacar knew that the Otherfolk divided themselves into two groups. One—called the Nine Races, though there seemed to be far more than nine of them—was what Runacar knew as the Beastlings; the Otherfolk upon whom the Hundred Houses had eternally waged war. The other group were called the Brightfolk. They lived only in the Flower Forests and were—at least to him—silent, invisible, and intangible. Even the few he could see or hear—like the fairies—he could not understand. In the end, it didn’t much matter who or what they were: the Brightfolk would not fight.

  In fact, most of the Otherfolk would not fight. It had taken moonturns, but Runacar had come to realize that everything he thought he knew about the “Beastlings” was completely wrong. Not only were the Otherfolk not the monsters Runacar had been told they were, they weren’t even a really credible threat to an Elven army. If the Hundred Houses had ever been able to agree on anything, they could have slaughtered all of the Otherfolk centuries ago, because the Otherfolk would have—could have—offered no organized resistance. War was Runacar’s trade and profession, and when he had been Prince Runacarendalur of Caerthalien, Runacar had been a master of war.

  The Otherfolk simply weren’t any good at war.

  The Gryphons, far from being the terrifying aerial killers immortalized in many of the Windsward ballads, were shy and rather skittish, interested in creating and reciting long poems and songs. The fact that an adult Gryphon could carry off a horse in its talons did not translate to battlefield aggression. The horse was food—and despite the centuries of warfare between them and the Elves, the Gryphons still hesitated to kill sentient beings: Gryphons were pacifists.

  Bearwards looked terrifying. They would attack Elves if they were threatened. Their Spellmothers were fearsome sorceresses and fearsome foes. But the Bearwards lived in the forests which they tended, did not gather in large groups, and when offered the choice between attack and retreat, Bearwards nearly always chose retreat.

  Hippogriffs were scatterbrained and easily bored, more interested in playing tricks upon an enemy, or showing off, than they were in fighting. They were savage fighters when attacked, but as soon as the immediate threat was gone, they lost interest.

  The Minotaur clans were widely scattered, reluctant to leave their families, reluctant to organize.

  Nobody but a lunatic would put a Faun in charge of anything.

  And so it went, race after race. Individually they were dangerous. Certainly they had strong ties to family, clan, and—at least in the case of the Centaurs—villages. Certainly there had been no season since the Hundred Houses came to be that did not bring news of some Elven death at the hands of the Otherfolk. But to drive Elvenkind out of the West, the Otherfolk needed to be an army, not a disorganized collection of individuals. Until Leutric became King-Emperor, they hadn’t even had a leader.

  Many of the first volunteers were Centaurs, for the West had once been their territory. Some Bearwards came out of curiosity and for the fun of it. Leutric had enough sway over the members of his own clan to convince some of the Minotaurs to join—including Audalo, who was, Runacar discovered, Leutric’s heir. Radafa came, though he said firmly he came only to watch and to learn more of the alfaljodthi. But the most surprising recruits to Runacar’s nascent war band were … Elves.

  They named themselves Woodwose, and swore that Elves were another race entirely. Woodwose had lived beside Otherfolk—and among them, in Centaur villages and Bearward hidels—not just for centuries, but for millennia. Most of them neither knew nor cared how they’d come to live among the Otherfolk, but Radafa’s people, the Gryphons, were great storytellers, and he told Runacar enough for him to make a Loremaster’s story of it. Runacar wondered how often one of the Woodwose was the last sight a huntsman or a forester saw, for there had never even been rumors of their existence—at least, rumors that rose as high as a War Prince’s court.

  Woodwose averaged a little taller than Landbonds, but with that same willowy strength. They wore tunics and leggings, the items painted rather than dyed, and braided ornaments into their hair, which they often dyed in garish colors. It was ironic that the element of his army most like him in form and heritage was the element Runacar could least depend upon. The Woodwose were kin, but kin who loathed the “Houseborn” who had discarded them, or their ancestors, like worthless refuse. In battle, he would not be able to trust them to hold a position: they would see the enemy and go running toward it. Or disappear into the forest to ambush knights who would never arrive.

  But at least they would fight.

  * * *

  To scour the West as he had once scoured Farcarinon would not be the work of a moonturn, or even a Wheelturn, but it could be done—if there was no leader who could unify and rally the leaderless L
andbonds, Farmfolk, and Crofters.

  Runacar took his two tailles of volunteers east. His array carried what it needed on its backs—even the Woodwose did not ride horses—with a few light pushcarts for the heaviest items. Once he had some idea of the scope of the task before him, he began training his most unmartial of levies by sending them against the easiest targets he could find, for his new partisans lacked even the basic theory of war. “It is not enough to destroy an enemy if you cannot hold what you have taken from him,” Arilcarion War-Maker had written in The Way of the Sword, and so Runacar believed. Under his command, farmsteads were overrun, border steadings erased, abandoned Keeps were opened to the wind and the sky and cleansed with flame.

  At first, Runacar was certain time was the one thing he did not have. A few moonturns after the Battle of the Shieldwall Plain, Vieliessar had sent a grand-taille of Lightborn westward. Leutric—at Runacar’s suggestion—had let them pass unmolested. They had vanished across the Angarussa, and no more followed. He’d been certain that the High King’s army would come again by Fire Moon, but she did not—nor had she come by Harvest, by Frost, or by Rain. Nor could Runacar send scouts across the Mystrals to survey and report: the Gryphons or the Hippogriffs could reach the Shieldwall Plain and return in less than a handful of days, but they simply would not go, saying the Red Harvest had begun. Runacar had no idea what the Red Harvest might be, and all Radafa, or Keloit, or even Audalo would say was that it had been “prophesied.”

  Runacar was sick of prophecies. He didn’t ask further.

  He spent the moonturns of the first deep winter that followed—the few moonturns when snow and cold made skirmishing impossible—among Keloit’s family in a forest through which he had hunted as a boy, for it was on Caerthalien lands. Caerthalien Keep was utterly deserted. Whoever its caretakers had been, they had fled long before Runacar arrived.

  Spring came, and the war band—now doubled in size by an influx of new recruits—returned to its task, and worked from Storm to Hearth. Runacar spent that winter at one of the new Centaur villages somewhere in what had been Domain Brabamant. Pelere’s family lived there—she and Keloit were his most promising students.

  Spring came again. His forces regathered. And over moonturns and Wheelturns—slowly, painfully—he turned his tiny War Band into an army. Not the sort of army he had once proudly commanded in his father’s name, but one well suited to its current task: to take the Western Lands as its own. He had promised Leutric the West and the Shore, and he meant to keep that promise.

  And still the High King did not come. She was not dead—there was no place far enough away that Runacar, her unwilling Bondmate, would not mirror her death with his own—but she did not come west, and he did not know why. Even though they had been destined enemies from the moment of her birth, they had had the same teachers. Even though she had far outstripped those teachers, she had certainly not rejected their basic principles. Move quickly. Secure resources and defensible structures. Do not give your enemy time to entrench and prepare.

  Yet she did not come.

  As the Wheelturns passed, Centaurs built villages and farms in the shadows of disparaged Great Keeps. Woodwose and Bearwards planted saplings at the edges of Flower Forests, Fauns frolicked through the forests where Bearward families made their homes, Dryads filled the orchards, and the Minotaur clans carved great mazes into wide, serene meadows. The land grew peaceful, fruitful, and populated.

  Runacar’s army grew from one taille to two, to four, until he led eight tailles of folk used to rough and tumble banditry. It was no form of warfare that Mosirinde or Arilcarion would have recognized, let alone Caerthalien’s own Warlord and Swordmaster, but it was effective and deadly. He also had a handful of true apprentices in the art of war. Any Warlord might have a thousand students, but true apprentices were rare, yet Keloit and Pelere, Audalo, the Woodwose Tanet, and even Radafa, scholar and pacifist that he was, had become Runacar’s most able students.

  The most important thing he tried to teach them was that the purpose of war was to gain peace.

  * * *

  “What is that?” Pelere whispered. Pelere was fair, with wheat-colored hair and a flaxen tail to match. Her slenderness made her lower body appear more horselike than that of many Centaurs, and her roan hide was polished to gleaming. She wore a hooded jerkin of exquisitely soft undyed leather, completely embroidered in a design of twining vines covered with berries and flowers.

  Beside her, Keloit—clad only in a necklace and a wide belt—shifted uneasily. In the Wheelturns since Runacar had first met him, Keloit had grown up, gaining most of his adult height and mass; where once Runacar could look him in the eye, now Keloit towered over him when he stood. The last time Runacar had been to Keloit’s home, Frause had introduced him to Keloit’s future bride. (Helda was a Healer, not a Spellmother, to Runacar’s obscure relief.) It was a sobering reminder that many of the Nine Races did not share alfaljodthi longevity: aside from Radafa, his first friends among the Otherfolk would be dead of old age in a scant handful of decades. If any of us live that long, he thought mordantly.

  The third of his students, the Woodwose Tanet, stood unmoving, nearly invisible in his painted leathers, ornamented with beads, shells, and feathers. His hair, dyed to the color of ash, formed a spiky corona about his head.

  Runacar raised a hand, silencing the Centauress. The scouting party was almost a league south of the forest road that led through Arevethmonion to the Sanctuary. There should be nothing here but wilderness. Instead, Runacar looked out over farmland that ran to within a bowshot’s length of the Flower Forest. Fields stretched into the distance; some being plowed, some already planted, some holding flocks of sheep or herds of cattle.

  He had kept his war band away from the Sanctuary of the Star while they had cleared the lands between it and the Mystrals, and now he was glad that he had. It was second nature for him to count the people in the fields, and to estimate how many people the strange vast village outside the Sanctuary of the Star could hold.

  Hundreds.

  Thousands.

  They should not be here.

  None of this should be there. He had known that the Sanctuary had expanded, that a village had grown up near it, but he had never imagined the sheer size of it. He was glad, now, that he’d chosen to make his approach through Arevethmonion. The Dryads and the other Brightfolk would protect them and give warning of any discovery or pursuit. He could not think of the Brightfolk without thinking of the Ghostwood, and there were nights when the memory of it allowed him very little sleep. But to set against that were days like today, filled with sun and growing things and the deep, sacred hush of the Flower Forest.

  He motioned to his companions and they retraced their steps, moving silently back the way they had come. Tanet moved like a shadow among the trees and Pelere moved as gracefully and as quietly as a deer among the saplings and fallen leaves. Otherfolk knew how to hide.

  “What’s going on?” the Centauress repeated when they had returned to their campsite deep within the Forest. She stamped a hoof impatiently.

  “They’re farming,” Runacar said.

  Keloit snorted, wrinkling his snout. “We can all see that they’re farming! But what does that mean?”

  Runacar sat down on a fallen log. “I don’t know,” he said.

  “That’s helpful,” Pelere grumbled. “You’re supposed to know. If you don’t, what good are you?”

  “Are you just now beginning to wonder that?” Tanet asked silkily.

  Runacar smiled without warmth. He was never sure whether the Woodwose hated him—or to be frank, how much Tanet hated him—or if he was simply pragmatic enough to want to learn all he could, regardless of its source. “I’m the Elven general who’s going to give you everything from the Mystrals to Great Sea Ocean. And to do that, I need to see what we have to get rid of.” As he spoke, he turned to the pack resting against the trunk and pulled out a large scrollcase. He tipped its contents out and shuffled throu
gh the sheets of vellum until he found the one he was searching for.

  “Here is the Sanctuary as it stood before the High King’s War,” he said, smoothing the sheet over the trunk and bringing out a stylus. “I know it’s accurate, because I drew it myself. Sanctuary, gardens, Guesthouse, stables, and Rosemoss Farm to provide everything that didn’t come with the tithing wagons. But nobody’s tithed for five Wheelturns now, and even before that the tithes were short—”

  “Because you were at war,” Keloit said.

  “Going to war,” Runacar corrected absently. “After the False Truce in Fire Month, but Oronviel had belonged to Vieliessar since the previous Harvest—”

  “What good is telling us what we already know?” Tanet demanded.

  “It tells us what’s going to happen next,” Runacar said. “If your people had paid more attention to things like that, mine wouldn’t have been burning you out of your villages since the fall of Celephriandullias. Now,” he said, as Pelere swished her tail in impatience, “no tithes, no Candidates, no War Princes to keep order—and no High King returning to restore order. So Hamphuliadiel sets himself up not just as Astromancer, but as War Prince. He builds a higher wall around the Sanctuary garden, dismantles the stables and the Guesthouse, expands Rosemoss Farm, and builds a very large village. What does that tell us?”

  “That … he’s got a lot of free time?” Keloit suggested, his ears perking up hopefully.

  “Or that he’s as mad as all Houseborn,” Tanet suggested. “But clearly you don’t think so.”

  Runacar laughed shortly. “Hardly. The outbuildings were torn down to improve the sight lines. The new wall forms a line of defense. The village is vulnerable, but a couple of Lightborn casting Shield could protect it easily. Hamphuliadiel’s expecting a war. With who?”

  “Us?” Pelere suggested hopefully.

  “Why not the High King?” Runacar asked gently.

  Pelere frowned as she struggled to think of the answer to his question. “Well … The High King’s on the other side of the mountains,” she said. “She isn’t here.”