Shadow and Flame

by Gail Z. Martin

  Assuming he’s right, that’s hedge-witch-level magic, nothing like Quintrel’s people, or battle mages like Rikard, Blaine thought. Maybe their powerful mages were killed in the Great Fire.

  “Lord McFadden!” Dillon emerged from the mechanical house sweat-soaked but grinning in triumph. “The boom worked! We’re all sure to be sore and bruised, but from what we can tell, the mechanism worked!”

  “Hey, Mick!” Piran called. He had walked toward the edge of the path, looking down over the harbor. “I think he’s right. Take a look.”

  Kestel and the guard remained with the bound soldier and his injured companion as Blaine walked over to join Piran. In the time that had passed since they had looked out on the bay the last time, the tide of battle appeared to have turned in Folville’s favor.

  “Ships are stopped,” Piran noted. “You can bet they’d have driven right up the middle if they could.”

  The ship that had been on fire was burned to the waterline, just a smoldering wreck. A second ship was burning, its sails alight, forecastle aflame. Blaine could see soldiers jumping from the doomed ship, flailing in the dark water. The catapults from the embankment still thudded as they sent rocks and debris raining down on the ships that were now stranded in the harbor they had intended to attack. Caught between the boom in front and the wreckage of the two burning ships behind, the other three ships lacked the wind and the maneuvering room to get clear.

  Dark shapes moved across the clouds, diving at the remaining ships. Men screamed and ran for cover as talishte attackers snatched sailors from the decks and dropped them into the deep water of the bay. Two talishte swooped down on one of the ships, pushing the portable catapult through the railing and into the sea. The other catapult was smashed to bits on the wrecked deck of the burning ship.

  Without their war machines, the ships were sitting targets as the catapults up above lobbed volley after volley. Some of the large stones hit the water, sending up violent splashes that rocked the ships, scattering or crushing the men who were swimming desperately for shore. Other stones crashed onto the decks of the ships, shattering masts, shredding sails, and smashing through the hulls.

  A flotilla of small fishing boats sat in a solid line on the harbor side of the chain barricade. Archers took shots at the landing boats filled with soldiers.

  As Blaine watched, something burst up from beneath one of the landing boats, lifting it out of the water and capsizing it, sending its occupants into the water. More talishte, Blaine bet, though from the terrified screams that rose from the bay, he was certain the enemy soldiers imagined even more frightening foes.

  All along the waterfront, angry citizens stood shoulder to shoulder. Blaine spotted Traher Voss’s battle flag, meaning reinforcements had arrived. “Voss is there,” he said, pointing to the flags. “Folville will be all right. Voss’s men will make short work of the survivors.”

  As he spoke, a volley of flaming arrows sailed toward the stranded ships, lodging in their sails and rigging. Wave after wave of burning arrows rained down on the luckless invaders, until the bay blazed with firelight.

  “Poor dumb bastards,” Piran said, shaking his head. “Then again, all the better for us. Voss and Folville are making short work of them.”

  “Which means they aren’t going to need us to hurry down there,” Blaine said, knowing Piran could hear the note of relief in his voice. “Frankly, I’d rather see what the talishte read from our ambassadors, and what they can find out from these two,” he said with a backward glance.

  “Biters?” The prisoner’s eyes widened with fear. “Oh, gods. Don’t feed me to the biters! I’ve helped you. Told you everything. Sweet Torven and Esthrane! Don’t let them feed on me!”

  “Can’t help you with that,” Piran said as Dillon and the other guards emerged from the mechanical building. “See, we need to know everything, and there’s one way to find it out. But since you’ve been helpful, as you say, we can put in a word for them to make it quick.”

  The soldier collapsed, sobbing into his hands. “Get him on his feet,” Blaine said to the guards. “Someone’s going to have to carry the other one. Let’s get them back to the castle, see what they can tell us. We’re done here.” He turned to Dillon and the guards. “What you did in there changed the course of the battle. Thank you.”

  Kestel gave her prisoner over to the guards and came to join him. They were all splattered with blood, though fortunately little of it was their own. Kestel peered down into the firelit harbor and watched for a moment in silence. “In an awful way, it’s actually rather pretty from up here, with the fire reflecting on the water,” she mused. “I don’t imagine it’s pretty at all down there.”

  “No,” Blaine agreed. “And it’s going to leave a mess in the harbor, after we’d only gotten part of it dredged.” He sighed. “But it’s better to stop them there than burn the city to drive them out.”

  Kestel nodded. “Think they’ll try again?”

  Blaine shrugged. “If the Cross-Sea king is as crazy as Heldin said, maybe. Then again, it should send a stern message when none of his ships return and his troops are never heard from again. It could take months for them to notice. He might even have more ships headed this way, for all we know.”

  “They won’t be landing at Castle Reach,” Kestel said.

  “No,” Blaine agreed. “But you know as well as I do that the coast is full of inlets. After the ‘pirates’ attacked, Folville and Voss set up patrols along the coastline, but it’s an impossible task.”

  “Still, the farther away they have to land their men, the harder it is to mount a surprise attack,” Piran ventured. “That weighs in our favor.”

  “Two men, stay with the capstan,” Blaine ordered as they readied for the trip back up the cliff. “I’ll have fresh soldiers sent to relieve you as soon as we reach the castle. In the meantime, stay sharp. If one boat of enemy fighters could make it to shore, there could be another. Until those boats are sunk and the men aboard them drowned, they’re still a threat.”

  “Aye, m’lord,” the ranking guard replied. “We’ll watch carefully. No one will get by.”

  “The boom and net will stay up until we lower them,” Dillon said. “Indefinitely, if we want. I’m still quite pleased that they worked after all this time!”

  “I’m glad I didn’t realize that you thought there was a good chance they wouldn’t, when we were making our way down that goat path,” Piran replied with a glare.

  Dillon shrugged. “Nothing ventured, nothing gained, as they say. I figured it was worth the risk, if it worked.”

  “If there were still such things as medals, I’d give you one,” Blaine said. “Look down there,” he added, pointing to the harbor. “Your boom and net saved a lot of lives. We’d have never known about it without you.”

  Dillon looked utterly embarrassed. “Just doing my duty, m’lord. The gods smiled on us tonight.”

  The soldiers went up the narrow path first, followed by Dillon, Blaine, Kestel, and Piran. To Blaine’s relief, their horses were where they had left them, fidgeting with the smoke and noise that rose from the bay. The two prisoners were slung over the rumps of the soldiers’ horses like sacks of grain for the ride back to the castle.

  Clouds of smoke gusted across the road, dimming the stars. After surviving two attacks in one day, Blaine was hoping he could look forward to a hot bath and a glass of whiskey, but experience cautioned him not to count on such rare luxuries until they were achieved.

  The soldiers at the castle gate stopped them only briefly, opening the way for them to ride on to the castle. Dillon swung down from his horse, barking orders to the castle staff as soon as his feet touched the ground. Six more guards were sent down to the mechanical building, and they were heading toward the gate before Blaine had even handed off his horse to a groomsman.

  “Take the prisoners to Rikard,” Blaine ordered the soldiers who came to meet them. “Have him question them like the others.”

  “Very w
ell, sir,” the ranking soldier replied. “And afterward?”

  Blaine sighed. “Hang them with the two ambassadors,” he said wearily. “Make sure the talishte read them before that. We need every bit of knowledge we can pry out of them.”

  “Yes, m’lord.” With that, the castle guard took the two prisoners and headed toward Quillarth Castle.

  Blaine turned to one of the other nearby soldiers. “Go find Captain Larson or Captain Hemmington,” he ordered. “Get me a status update on what’s going on in Castle Reach with Folville and Voss. If they need more soldiers to hold the waterfront, we need to know.”

  “Yes sir,” the soldier said, taking off for the stables to get a horse for the ride into town.

  Blaine, Kestel, and Piran made their way up to the parlor. In the time they had been gone, all signs of the fight with the false ambassadors had been removed, and a reasonable attempt had been made to remove the bloodstain from the carpet. Piran poured a glass of whiskey for each of them, and collapsed into a chair by the fireplace with a dramatic groan.

  “What a day!” He tossed back his whiskey.

  Blaine sipped his whiskey, but he could not manage to match Piran’s exuberance. He drifted to the window, looking out through the cracked glass toward the glowing wreckage in the Castle Reach harbor. After a few moments, Kestel joined him.

  Kestel touched Blaine’s arm. “You don’t have a choice about it, hanging the Cross-Sea spies or those soldiers,” she said quietly, guessing that his mood went deeper than mere exhaustion. “We don’t have the extra food to keep them prisoner, and they can’t go free.” She paused. “Heldin might be useful. I don’t think his heart was really ever fully in the attack. I think he can be brought along.” Kestel shrugged. “And if not, you can always kill him later.”

  Blaine nodded. “I know. But knowing doesn’t make it easier. I tell myself that as long as this sort of thing keeps me up at night, I must not be a monster. If it ever stops bothering me… I’ll have one more thing to worry about.”

  A knock came at the door before Kestel could answer. “M’lord,” Dillon’s assistant, Coban, said from the doorway. “I apologize for the interruption. I know it’s been a long day. But there’s a messenger from General Theilsson, and he says his message is most urgent.”

  Blaine and Kestel shared a ‘what now?’ glance. Blaine nodded. “Very well. Send him in.”

  Disheveled and dirty, looking as if he had come straight from the battlefield, Geir walked into the room. “Niklas and Penhallow send their greetings,” he said with a tired smile.

  “I will be back with a flagon of deer blood,” Coban promised without being asked, and headed for the kitchen.

  Geir looked utterly spent. Kestel embraced him in greeting. “Sit down. Rest,” Blaine said. “You look like you’ve had a rougher day than we have, and ours is one for the legends.”

  Geir nodded and sank into one of the seats. “I came in from the north, but I could see a battle in the harbor. What’s going on?”

  Blaine and Kestel took turns filling Geir in, first about the false ambassadors and their treachery and then about the invasion force and the fight at the mechanical house. “You’re right,” Geir said. “You’ve had quite a day.”

  Coban entered with the deer blood and a goblet. Geir poured himself a glass, drank it slowly, and leaned back. “That’s better,” he said tiredly. “Thank you.”

  “Things must be pretty bad for Niklas to send you in such a rush,” Blaine said. “What’s happening? Is he still fighting the marauders in the north?”

  Geir nodded. “And it’s not getting any better. The marauders aren’t robber gangs like we originally thought. Those were the strike teams, sent to spy and loot. What’s coming across the border now qualifies as an army. It’s organized and I’d bet that a lot of the fighters are former Meroven soldiers.”

  “Damn,” Blaine said. “I bet Niklas feels right at home, fighting them all over again.”

  Geir raised an eyebrow. “Actually, he described it in much more colorful language, but that was the gist of what he said.”

  “What does he need? Rinka Solveig and her army are on their way to join up with him, and we’ll be going back there, too, once this is resolved,” Blaine said. “When I get a report back from the harbor, I’ll know whether Folville and Voss have the situation down there in hand. So I can shift some of the men we assigned to the west and bring them to help Niklas, but it will take time to move them.”

  Geir nodded. “The reinforcements would be appreciated,” he replied. “Niklas and his army are holding their own, but they won’t be able to hold off Nagok forever without additional help—and Voss’s men are busy.”

  “This means we’re going to be riding north, doesn’t it?” Piran said from where he slouched in his chair. “I knew it was too much to expect that we could have a day or two without killing someone or nearly being assassinated.”

  “Technically, only Blaine can be assassinated,” Kestel corrected with a wicked gleam in her eye. “The likes of you just gets regular-old murdered.”

  Geir glanced at Blaine, who despite everything, had a shadow of a smile at the banter. “Are they always like this?”

  Blaine shrugged. “Usually, they’re worse.” He sighed. “Yes, it means we’re going to have to go north. We can’t afford to be overrun from any direction.” He looked back to Geir. “What of Penhallow and Connor? We haven’t had word in quite a while. Do you know if the voyage to Edgeland was successful?” His bond through the kruvgaldur was still new enough that Blaine had little practice interpreting the impressions he received.

  “They’ve reached Edgeland,” Geir reported. “From what Penhallow has been able to read from the kruvgaldur, Connor and the others obtained the artifact—with some danger involved—and are on their way back.”

  “We’re never going to hear the end of this from Verran.” Piran sighed. “Might as well expect a whole new set of songs about snow.” He looked over to Blaine. “Maybe he’ll bring back some fresh herring for you.”

  “Forget the herring. I want news!” Kestel said, excitement glinting in her eyes. “He’d better come back with gossip about everyone we knew. Engraham and Ifrem and all the others—I want to know what they’ve been doing, how they are, what happened when the magic came back. Dammit! It’s been too long.”

  “Dear Kestel, much as I miss our friends, it could never be too long to be gone from that accursed place,” Piran replied. Kestel made a face at him when Piran was not looking.

  “They were actually worse, cooped up together all winter during the Long Dark in Edgeland,” Blaine said to Geir. “It’s how they handle stress.”

  Piran raised his nearly empty glass of whiskey. “This is how I handle stress,” he said, rising to pour himself a refill. “Annoying Kestel is what I do for fun.”

  “I consider annoying Piran to be an art,” Kestel said with a straight face. “And that makes me a virtuoso.”

  Blaine chuckled, knowing that their friendly sniping was their way of dealing with the idea of heading into yet another series of battles. “Do you see any end in sight to all of this?” he asked Geir, taking a swallow of his own whiskey. He recounted what they had learned from Heldin about the Cross-Sea Kingdoms’ involvement in the Meroven War and their talishte uprising.

  Geir drained his goblet and poured more from the flagon. “Unfortunately, I don’t think we’ll see an end soon. Thrane is a danger to be reckoned with, especially with the rogue Elders on his side, and we’re certain he’s had a hand in Nagok’s rise to power. And perhaps, given what you’ve shared, meddled beyond our shores. That’s a very disturbing thought.”

  “But Penhallow has some of the Elders siding with him as well,” Kestel said, growing serious once more. “Doesn’t that balance things?”

  Geir gave an eloquent shrug. “Balance, yes. But neither side can settle for balance. The only thing either side can accept is the utter destruction of the enemy. And right now, anything could tip the sc
ales one way or the other.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  DO YOU THINK THEY WERE REALLY AMBASSADORS?” Betta asked.

  Folville gave her a look. “What do you think?”

  Betta chuckled. “Does it give you a hint that I already activated the Wharf Rats?”

  The ‘Wharf Rats’ was the name Folville had bestowed on the orphans and urchins who made their homes wherever they could take shelter near the harbor. Years ago, Folville and Betta had been among them, on their own from a young age, eking out a living and stealing what they needed. Folville knew that any attempt to rescue or organize them would be like herding feral cats, so he mobilized them, gave them a name and a mission, and paid them in food, clothing, and shelter. In response, they gave him their unwavering loyalty. Those who showed promise became full-fledged Curs when they were older.

  “Good. Learn anything from them?”

  Betta leaned back against one of the building’s wood-paneled walls and crossed her arms over her chest. “Plenty. Tresta shadowed them all the way up to the castle gates. Heard one of the men giving the others orders about what and what not to say, warning them what would happen to them if they failed,” she said. “The Rat who reported it said they sounded more like highwayman than highborns.”

  Folville nodded. “Then the lighthouse seers were right. They’re scouts for an attack.” The rebuilt lighthouse at the entrance to the harbor no longer held a massive mirrored fire to attract ships and lead them in. Castle Reach wanted no outsiders, at least, not until the city was restored and its defenses were at full measure.

  Betta nodded. “Afraid so. The seers believe that the one ship we see is just a decoy. They foresee other ships, war ships with soldiers.”

  “We need to get Voss involved. We can’t hold the town on our own, not even with Larson and Hemmington’s help,” Folville said.

  “Sent a runner a candlemark ago,” Betta said with a smirk.

  Folville took her in his arms and kissed her. “You’re so smart, you should have been a man,” he said jokingly.