It was the last night of the Gathering. The bonfires that had sprung up at sunset to usher out the old year and welcome in the new blazed high. As it grew later and later, more of the clan families departed for their own tents, but Vartan kept his wife by his side until they and the other clan leaders were alone.
“It is time to speak,” Vartan said.
“Why is your wife here in a war council?” Torin of the Gitta demanded.
“Because without her we would have no hope,” Vartan said. “She will be the savior of the Outlands, and her voice is my voice. You will obey it always, Torin. Now hear me. Today Lara and I met with Kaliq of the Shadow Princes. We have learned that the incursion into the Piaras and Tormod territories is an expedition to test our strength and determination. The Midland Merchants, led by the master of their guild, are behind it along with the Mercenary Guild. Those who invaded you are not Crusader Knights but mercenaries. This scheme was concocted by Gaius Prospero, the Master of the Merchants. The ores and gems stolen from the Piaras and the Tormod have been added to his own treasury. His wealth makes him a powerful man and he heads the Hetarian High Council. The Merchants and the Forest Lords voted to test our determination, while the Shadow Princes and the Coastal Kings voted to maintain our ancient treaty. The tie was broken by Gaius Prospero himself, as he, of course, meant it to be. If only Imre and Petruso had reached us sooner-but they did not. Now we must drive the mercenaries from their lands.”
“With the winter coming,” Floren of the Blathma reminded them dourly.
“We have allies among Hetar,” Vartan said. “The Shadow Princes will hold back the winter from the mountain territories. This will allow us to invade without fear of cold and snow. The Coastal Kings will not allow any from the other provinces into their bailiwick until this matter has been settled. Rendor has made good friends, which will work to our advantage now. We will not have to worry about being attacked from another direction. But most important we shall have the element of surprise, for over half a year has passed since Hetar pushed into Tormod and Piaras. At this point I am sure Hetar believes we will do nothing. But if we do not take back these territories then Gaius Prospero is planning to annex them. Who will they come after next?” He looked about. “The Devyn are the easiest target, and then Blathma will fall, and so on.”
“How can we be certain that the Shadow Princes and the Coastal Kings will aid us?” Roan of the Aghy wanted to know. “Can we trust this Kaliq? Why does he offer to help us, Vartan? What does he want?”
“Nothing for now, but he has said that one day they will come to us for a favor, and it is then we must repay them for their aid,” Vartan said.
“He has also said we must raise a mighty army in order to impress Hetar,” Lara told the chieftains.
“What does it matter the size of the army if we can beat them?” Roan wanted to know. He ran an impatient hand through his bright red hair.
“You must understand that Hetarians are impressed by wealth, strength, status and its like,” Lara explained. “If you beat them with a small army they will say it was a fluke, and they will attempt to come at you again. Piaras and Tormod will forever be open to invasions. More people will be killed. If you beat them with a great army then they will feel they have been fairly bested, and in all likelihood the ancient treaty will be once again honored.” She shrugged. “I can explain it no better. In order to win against Hetar you must impress them first. And to do that you will have to kill many of the mercenaries, and send their bodies back to the City as a warning.”
For a long moment there was a deep silence among the chieftains. Then Rendor of the Felan spoke.
“I understand what you say, but it amazes me that so delicate a female can speak so dispassionately about taking life, for females are life-givers.” He looked at Vartan. “Your wife is the most beautiful woman I have ever seen, and yet she has, it seems, the heart of a warrior.”
“It is not my heart that should concern you, Rendor of the Felan, but rather your own. How many men will you pledge to this battle?” Lara asked him bluntly.
He laughed. “Every whole man among my clan from fourteen to sixty will fight for the Outlands,” he promised. “We are shepherds at heart, but we know well how to defend our flocks be they sheep or people, Lara of the Fiacre, wife to Vartan, daughter of Swiftsword,” Rendor answered her.
“We would expect no less,” Vartan said. “What of the rest of you?”
“Every horseman in my clan will fight,” Roan of the Aghy said.
“We are few in number,” Accius of the Devyn said, “but we will contribute in our own way. Some of our bards will go into the villages of the Piaras and the Tormod, ostensibly to entertain the invaders, but they will pass the word to the people that their leaders have reached their brethren and that a mighty army comes. We will ready them to rise up against their captors. And we will fight. Those who cannot fight will sing you into battle, and if necessary into the realm of the Celestial Actuary.”
“Thank you, my old friend,” Vartan said. “The nobility of the Devyn is well known among the Outlands.”
“Our fields are put to bed for the winter now,” Torin of the Gitta spoke up. “If the Shadow Princes say our villages will be safe, then only women, children and the elderly will be left behind to care for our lands. All who can fight among us will come.” He turned to look to his fellow agrarian, Floren of the Blathma.
The plump farmer sighed. “I can do no less than Torin,” he said reluctantly. “You are certain our villages will be safe from harm?” he asked of Lara.
“Kaliq of the Shadow Princes has said it, and I have never known him to lie,” Lara replied. “They are honorable men, and the oldest among the inhabitants of this world we all share,” she explained.
“Then it is settled,” Vartan said. “Take your people home, my brothers, and then return here to the Gathering place in ten days’ time. By that time we will have a plan readied to punish these Hetarians who have invaded our lands.”
“I know I speak for Petruso as well as myself when I thank you,” Imre of the Tormod said. “For the sake of our peoples I only wish we had gotten to you sooner.”
“Do not thank us until you are back safe in your own house with your wife by your side, Imre. Many will die in this undertaking, but there will be more grief in Hetar than in the Outlands when this is finished,” Vartan said fiercely.
Early the next morning, before the sun was even up, the clan families dispersed from the Gathering place. Imre, Petruso and their men went with Vartan’s clan for they dared not return to their own homes yet. On the day following their arrival in Camdene, Vartan dispatched riders to each of his villages issuing a call to arms. Every Fiacre clansman between the ages of fourteen and sixty was expected to answer that call if he was physically able. The villages and the herds would be looked after by the elderly, the women and the children. Any woman able to fight was invited to come as well, although it was not mandated that women answer the chieftain’s call. Still, several came from each village, and were put into Sholeh’s care. Lara, it was agreed, would fight by her husband’s side.
“I will come, too,” Noss said bravely.
“You do not like discord,” Lara reminded her friend and companion. “This will be terrible, dearest. Remain behind with Bera, Elin and Liam’s mother.”
“No,” Noss replied. “While you will fight with Andraste, I am a better archer than you. Why did I carry the long bow the prince gave me on my back from the Desert kingdom if I was not to use it? And what better use than in the defense of our homeland? And Sakari tells me she, like Dasras, was trained for battle. She is eager, and I feel safe with her. I but ask one thing of you, Lara. Let me wed with Liam now.”
Lara sighed. In her eyes Noss was yet a child, but in truth she was not. Lara still saw Noss as the frightened girl who the Foresters had refused to accept as a breeding slave because she was too young, but two years had passed, and Noss was no longer that youngster. She had small, fi
rm breasts, and a way of tossing her head that bespoke someone on the verge of womanhood. Liam loved her. What if he was among those killed in the coming Winter War? Could she forgive herself if she forbade Noss even a brief happiness? “I will have Vartan speak to Liam,” she said, and her heart swelled at the look of happiness that engulfed Noss’s pretty face.
Tears spilled down that face. “Thank you!” Noss said softly, and she hugged Lara hard. “I was so afraid you would make us wait, and what if he doesn’t come back?” She sniffled. “Or I don’t?”
“Have you spoken to him about coming with us yet?” Lara asked.
“Yes, and while he is not pleased, he has consented, for he knows that I must go with you. How could I not?”
“You must not think you owe me because the Forest Lords did not want you and took me instead. That was part of my destiny, Noss, as unpleasant as it was,” Lara said. “If you would prefer to remain behind I will not think you craven.”
“Nay, it is not that. I feel I must do this, just as you feel your destiny so strongly,” Noss responded. “I sense no impending doom about me. I shall come home to Camdene again with my Liam when this is all over, Lara.”
“Very well then. I shall be glad for your company, as always,” Lara told her.
No time was wasted in the matter of Liam of the Fiacre and Noss of Hetar-the marriage was performed that same night in Vartan’s hall. Liam’s mother, Asta, was pleased with her new daughter-in-law’s sweet nature, and equally pleased that Noss would go with her husband to fight by his side.
“Mayhap,” she said, “the ordinary Hetarian is not as bad as we have always supposed they were. Noss might have been born here in the Outlands did I not know otherwise. But when this Winter War is over and done with I shall have grandchildren at last!” She laughed heartily. “I am pleased with this marriage.”
Vartan gave the bride and groom two days to hide away by themselves. “Be back in my hall on the third morning,” he said.
After the brief respite the wedding offered them, Lara and Vartan became engrossed in planning how they would attack and triumph over Hetar’s invasion of the Tormod and Piaras lands. All the Outlanders were trained in the arts of war, though they had not been forced to use that tuition in centuries. Their greatest advantage was that neither had the Hetarians, for there had been peace between the two cultures for years. The great Crusader Knights were an army never used. It was the mercenaries who fought in the small squabbles between the law-abiding citizens, and the bandits who roamed all the provinces. But no one in the Outlands could remember a great battle being fought.
They learned from Imre that the householders in each village had been forced to take in their oppressors. Those forced to toil in the mines now were kept in barracks they had been forced to build themselves, and the barracks were enclosed by high wooden fences. The old women were sent into these enclosures to cook for the miners and wash their clothing. The women left behind in the cottages caring for their young children were more often than not forced to offer pleasures to the men now living in their homes. The young girls, as Imre had told them, were confined in his house and forced to act as Pleasure Women for those men in charge and for important visitors from the City. Old men who could work at tilling the fields that fed these clan families were left in peace. Any who were unfit and showed no signs of recovering were slain without mercy.
“They are clever,” Vartan said to the circle of men around him in his hall. “They inhabit every house, which makes it difficult to mount an attack.”
“Why must a battle be noisy and heroic?” Lara said. “Is not the victory the same even if the battle is a quiet one?”
“What do you mean?” Vartan asked her.
“Death is inevitable in war, but if we can keep all knowledge of our coming from the Hetarians, if we can get word to all in each village before we attack, do you not think they will rise up to aid us? We will move stealthily from village to village until the Tormod and Piaras regions are free of the invaders. In each village we will spare one among the enemy, and they will drive the wagons of Hetarian dead back to the City, to the very door of Gaius Prospero’s beautiful house in the Golden District.”
The men gathered around her nodded, and smiles wreathed their faces.
“Some Outlanders, for whatever reasons, will have cooperated with the enemy,” Vartan said wisely. “They must be rooted out and slain as a warning to any who would betray their own kind. This will be difficult, but we must be hard.”
Again there was agreement.
“I would send a traitor from each village with the wagons. They will hardly be welcome, and they will not be able to come back. Execution is a quick death. Exile is a long one. There is no place in the City for strangers,” she told them. “They will suffer bitterly before they finally die.”
“Is it your destiny to destroy the world that spawned you, my Lady Lara?” Imre asked her politely. “Is Hetar doomed?”
“My destiny for now is to be Vartan’s wife, and to ride with you in what is a just and righteous cause. What is to come I do not know, my lord Imre. I am but half faerie.” She smiled at him, her green eyes twinkling.
“Will your faerie kin come to our aid if you ask?” he wondered.
“We do not need them in this endeavor, my lord Imre. The clan families of the Outlands are strong because they are pure of heart,” Lara told them.
Vartan put an arm about Lara. “You have all heard my wife,” he said. “Now we must decide how to execute our plans that all be in place when we meet with the others at the Gathering place in a few days. Speak now, and let me hear your voices.”
Chapter 16
THE ARMIES of the clan families convened in late autumn. Lara was very pleased to see how large a force had been gathered, and how impressively they were caparisoned. When word got back to the City, the High Council would be very impressed. The flags flown by each clan family were different. The eagle was embroidered upon the purple and gold banner of the Fiacre. A white horse galloped across the blue and gold banner of the Aghy. The Felan flew a banner of sky blue with a black and gray wolf upon it. The Devyns’ red flag was decorated with a golden harp. The Gitta’s flag was green with sheaves of grain, the Blathma’s green with multicolored flowers. The Tormod flew a banner of silver that twinkled with gemstones. The Piaras’s flag was coal black with gold and silver lines running through it.
It had been decided that each clan family would free a single village, but for the last two. Each individual army would move off to secure its designated village, before joining together for the assault on the two villages of the Tormod and Piaras left to be freed. The Devyn would send their bards into the villages beforehand, singing in the ancient language of the Outlands before both they and the Hetarians spoke a single tongue. All Outlanders were taught the old speech in their schooling, and many of their songs were sung in it.
“We are less apt to be seen if we travel singly,” Vartan told them. “Beware of mercenary scouts. Send your own ahead of you. We will lose fewer of our own men if we maintain the element of surprise. Kill all the enemy but the one chosen to drive the cart. We will all meet in the mountains at the Crystalline Falls, and move out from there.”
Even with less than half a day’s light left, the clan families departed the Gathering Place, their trumpeters and banners hidden until the moment of triumph to come. The Desert moon was waning, but the butter-yellow moon of the Coastal Region lit the way for Vartan’s army until they finally stopped to rest themselves and the horses. None of the other clan families was visible to them.
“What if the mercenaries have posted a watchtower on the mountains?” Lara asked her husband. “That could ruin all of our carefully laid plans.”
“I will take the eagle’s form, and fly ahead in the morning,” Vartan said.
“Nay, you must lead your army, husband,” Lara told him. “Nor do you want it known that you shape-shift. It must remain your secret, and it cannot if you disappear from
the head of your troop. Yet nothing will be thought if I disappear, and then return suddenly. I am the Fiacre chieftain’s halfling wife,” Lara said with a chuckle. “I possess faerie magic.”
“But what if you are seen?” he worried.
“By whom? An eagle seen flying in the mountains will not be thought unusual, my lord,” she reassured him.
He nodded. “Then go with the dawn, my love and my life, but return to me safely.” He kissed her brow, his blue eyes filled with his love for her.
“I will, husband,” Lara told him, and when the dark began to retreat from the autumn skies over the plains the next day a small golden eagle soared above the sleeping encampment of the Fiacre. The bird’s speed was swift, and by late morning it cruised among the peaks of the Purple Mountains, eyes sharply viewing the landscape below. She was pleased to find that there were no sentries’ outposts posted on the heights. Obviously the mercenaries felt safe, which seemed rather careless to Lara. Did the men who had escaped them not concern them? Or were they so arrogant as to believe that any Outlanders who came upon them could be easily beaten? Satisfied that their plan would hold, Lara turned and flew back, spying Vartan and his troop as they traveled across the grasslands.
She circled above them calling, and her husband looked up. Lara realized that perhaps now was the time to display some of her small magic to her husband’s people. It would put them in fear or awe of her, and one day she might need that advantage. She flew down to the riders, alighting upon her own saddle as Dasras cantered along. “Lara return!” she said, and was immediately restored to her human form. She reached out for her reins, knees gripping her stallion’s heaving sides, laughing at Vartan as she did.
Around her she heard the gasps of surprise, and low murmurs.
Her husband chuckled. “That was well done, and you are now completely established as a magical creature,” Vartan told her.
“It may be of help to us one day that they are convinced of my powers, and perhaps even a little afraid, husband,” Lara told him.
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