by Chris Bunch
"The Roche main trading routes are from the south, up the Ichili River, and, in the north, down the Pettau.
"Roche is fairly independent, but Sagene raiders have seized baled cotton, and rice. From the north come furs, dried fish, and, most important, dragons from Black Island.
"The southern blockade is the easiest to deal with, geographically. The problem is the Pettau. I've had small craft scouting its mouth, or mouths, which come off this huge delta. The river's mouth is constantly changing, and most sea traffic is shallow-draft barges or hulks.
"They travel through the Wolda hugging the coast, sheltering behind barrier islands, enter the delta from the east, in any of several passages, move to the head of the delta, then upriver to the city of Lanzi, where cargoes are either broken up or continue on upriver to smaller cities.
"At first, I thought I might be able to blockade the north with the vessels I'm building for deployment close onshore, sailing, when they see a target, within the barrier islands.
"Roche ships will be seized when it's possible, burnt when it's unhandy to try to capture them intact.
"Then I had a better idea, thinking of you."
Hal waited.
"As I recall, your flight did an outstanding job of interdicting traffic on the Ichili, during the siege of Aude, correct? I even remember your dragons were known as 'whispering death.'"
"So I heard, sir."
"I propose your entire squadron, once it's built back up to full strength, as a reconnaissance unit for my small ships, and as a raiding, a casting, unit by itself.
"The rest of the northern blockade will be handled by the fleet, big ships out at sea, smaller ones hugging the coastline.
"If we can't fight the damned Roche into submission, then we'll starve them!"
Asir tossed back his brandy, set the glass down, and looked ferociously at Hal.
"Well? What do you think of the idea?"
Hal had been dreading the moment.
"Sir," he said, "does my answer have to be final right now?"
"No," Asir said, a bit grumpily. "You can have a few days."
"Thank you," Hal said. "I can give you my first reaction, which is that I like the idea. I don't mean I like the idea of starving women and children, but anything that ends the war soon can only be good.
"I don't see any holes, any problems, but I'd like to withhold my final answer until I've gone over the maps, particularly the one of the River Pettau."
Asir's mood had changed again. "I'm sorry I growled," he said. "I should have known you'd at least tell me your first thoughts. Not like some of my damned courtiers, who wouldn't say shit if they had a mouthful.
"Go on. Your squadron won't get here for another week, and I give you leave to join your wife.
"Oh. One other thing that might help. If you think the blockade is feasible, you'll be rebased here, in Deraine, somewhere on the east coast, although I think you and your dragons will be spending time at sea, which you've done before.
"Now, get gone, and I'll talk to you in a week."
* * * *
Khiri met Hal at the castle, and their lovemaking was a roil of ecstasy.
They talked about what they should do for the promised week, decided they'd stay at Sir Thom's city mansion, where Khiri had been living when she first met Hal.
She was clearly most curious about what had brought him back to Deraine. Hal refused to tell her, not having been given permission by the king, for two days.
Then he noted the taletellers were filling the broadsheets with stories of the brave Sagene navy, and the even braver Derainian mariners, and of the recently discovered evils of the Roche traders in the primitive lands to the east.
Hal figured the hells with it. If the king's campaign to ready the civilians for the war to be continued on a pair of new fronts was already under way, what was the problem with telling his wife, who'd certainly proven herself not to be a babbling gossip?
She listened carefully, sat silently for a time, then asked, in a small voice, "That'll mean civilians—women and children—will starve as well as the lords and soldiers."
"It does, I'm afraid," Hal said uncomfortably.
"That doesn't seem right, since they didn't start the war," Khiri said.
"No," Hal agreed. "But I can't think of a way the king could do this without hurting some innocents. What of the Derainian women and children who've lost brothers, fathers, sons?"
Hal thought of Khiri's father, dead at the war's beginning, her brother, and someone who might have become her lover, killed in battle.
Khiri shook her head. "That doesn't make what King Asir is going to do right, does it?" Before Hal could reply, she went on: "And I know very well that the queen and the Roche barons and soldiers will be fed first. Won't they?"
"I suppose so," Hal said.
"Oh," Khiri said, and rather ostentatiously changed the subject.
The next day, she said she had some business to attend to, regarding one of her estates, and didn't invite Hal, which was most unusual.
He started to get angry, since he wasn't exactly the originator of the blockade, decided that wasn't right, and called for a horse to be brought around.
Something had been pulling at him for a time, and so he sought out Garadice, head of what was, archaically, still called the King's Remounts. Garadice's son had trained with Hal earlier in the war, and was killed during the siege of Aude, and Garadice, still mourning his only child, busied himself with replacement dragons and the dragon training schools for both beasts and men.
Garadice was headquartered at what had been the King's Own Menagerie, but now was turned over to the reeking dragons. Dinapur, father of his dead love, Saslic, had been head of the menagerie, but, to Hal's relief, wasn't in sight.
Garadice took him into his common room, and ordered tea brewed.
Hal hadn't seen Garadice since the dragon-stealing raid on Black Island. His beard and hair had whitened, and there were new lines of determination and fatigue on his face. He'd aged but Hal supposed he had as well.
"I assume you have business," Garadice said. None of us seem to have any interest except the war these days… although, if you've come just to socialize, that'd be a blessing, uncommon as it is."
"No, I have business. Of a sort," Hal said. He told Garadice about what Danikel had said, during the Fovant conferences, that once the war was over the dragons would be discarded or even killed, and no one would give a damn, any more than they would for ex-soldiers.
"I've read of that young man," Garadice said. "Quite the hero… and now I see someone who's got more than a bit of brain."
He sat down heavily, staring down at his teacup.
"I'm afraid he's dead right. There's no provision for a crippled dragon, any more than there is for a broken-legged horse. Dragons either heal—and the gods be blessed dragons are tough, almost as tough as a man—or they're gotten rid of.
"If they're so seriously injured they can't recover… well, the unit vets are issued poison."
"I know that, sir," Hal said. "But what about the others that're not that seriously injured. Say they can't fly. I know they're taken off the station… I've seen enough of that. But I've never wondered what happens to them."
"They're put out to pasture behind the lines," Garadice said. "At one time, they were just killed, but I put a stop to that. Now, we have rations continuing for them, and they're cared for by wounded soldiery who volunteer. I'm glad to say I had a hand in setting that up.
"But once the war is over, all military funding will be sliced to the bone and further…"
He broke off, and shook his head sadly.
"Man is a long ways from being an ideal master. If he can't eat it, or make use of it, there's no use for it and it, whatever it is, beast or whatever, is put away."
The two sat looking at each other; then Hal thanked Garadice for his time, got up and left.
He went to the king's castle, sought out an equerry he knew, and asked who would
be a reliable sort to draw up a will, or such. He got a name, an address, and rode into the heart of the city, thinking how truly inept he was at handling personal business that the army didn't take care of, let alone the rather more complicated affairs of a lord owning villages and great expanses of land.
The legal counselor was awed at meeting the Dragonmaster, and offered any help he could provide.
Business complete, and feeling a great deal of satisfaction, he rode back to Sir Thom's estate, and sought out Khiri.
He explained that he was having papers drawn up to take care of crippled and maimed dragons, to be paid for with a small deduction from his estate's profits. Since Khiri was his heir, he hoped she didn't mind, and, if he, well, failed to make it through the war, he wanted her to know what was in his mind.
"I certainly don't care for myself," she said. Then she looked at him a bit oddly. "But wouldn't your money be better spent, say, founding an orphanage? Or even a poor-house for widows?"
"Why?" Hal asked, honestly bewildered.
"Because," Khiri said, in the voice of an adult speaking to a small child, "they're people. Dragons aren't."
"But nobody's taking care of the dragons," Hal said. "And there're lots of orphanages and poorhouses."
Khiri looked at him for a time.
"It's your money," she said. "You can do with it what you like.
Hal was not that unhappy to be told three days later that his squadron had arrived in Deraine, and he was to return to duty.
34
"Now this, young Lieutenant, is an example of what is called irony," Sir Loren Damian said to Farren Mariah. "Since you have ambitions beyond getting yourself eviscerated in this war, ambitions that I've heard include public leadership, learn to use irony whenever possible.
"It'll make the masses think you to be educated, and hence fall into line and obediently do your every wish."
"Aarh," Farren Mariah said, then considered what lay before them again. "But 'tis a bit of all around turn around. To think this is where we all began, and where we end up now."
Where, was the old monastery named Seabreak, where Hal and the other founding members of the 11th Dragon Flight had begun their training.
Gray stone against a gray sea and foggy skies, it looked no more inviting than it had almost ten years before.
Perhaps someone in the army had sensed the gloom, because Seabreak was no longer used as a dragon fliers school either.
Hal thought that was not frigging likely. Armies aren't known for being mood-sensitive.
But this would be the new base for the First Dragon Squadron in the blockade.
It might have sounded odd for Hal's unit to be based in Deraine, rather than in Paestum or the conquered fringe of Roche. But Roche, east of the Zante River, curved out, and the farthest reaches of the country that would be Hal's operational area were a closer flight from Deraine.
Not that anyone would have objected if it had been longer—what little comforts war can provide are easier to get hold of closer to the mother country.
"At least one thing," Mynta Gart said. "We know where the back door to the mess is."
She looked down, toward the heaving sea. Three frigates were moored there, plus two light corvettes, and the familiar Galgorm Adventurer dragon transport and a newer sister ship, the Bohol Adventurer. Her expression was unreadable.
"Are you sorry you didn't stay in the navy? Hal asked quietly.
She hesitated.
"No, sir. I don't think so, anyway." She forced her mood to change. "I wouldn't have met fine, upstanding gentle souls like Farren."
Mariah looked offended.
"O Captain Fearless Leader Lord Kailas, sir, I gotta lodge a complaint on being picked on by my superiors."
"Not nearly enough," Hal said. "But since you've problems with the present company, I'll put you in charge of divvying out the buildings."
"The student huts are for fliers, right?"
They were the best thing about Seabreak—four-person cottages scattered around the estate.
"Right," Hal said. "But first we make sure the dragons have enough. I don't think we'll have to pitch the tents."
They didn't. The dragons fit comfortably into the large horse barns the religious order had built before the war. The explanation Hal and the other students had made up was the order, which seemed to have vanished, worshipped some sort of horse god. Or else their acolytes were most wealthy.
There was also more than enough room for the humans in the squadron.
It took about two weeks for replacement dragons and men to trickle in, and then Hal sent a courier to Supreme Army Command in Rozen to say that he was ready to go to back to battle.
* * * *
There were five men on the single-masted sloop, in peacetime a patrol boat for the Roche fisheries, now a guard ship on the inner passage that led from the Roche border west to the Pettau River.
Their duty was to keep watch for any Derainian intrusion and summon reinforcements from their nearby headquarters, garrisoned with a half company of marines and a very small hooker.
One man was at the helm, another in the prow, keeping watch, although the Roche were local sailors and utterly familiar with the passage, with its tidal vagaries and shifting sands.
The other three were forward, arguing about what the proclaimed blockade might mean to them.
They'd pretty well decided that the Derainians would try some sort of big raid, end up going ashore and finding little in the way of loot or enemies, and henceforth keep an almost-useless patrol far offshore.
None could see getting worried about anything. War may have been boring, but they were sitting quite comfortably on the trade route from the east, and anything they couldn't catch or their wives make could be traded or purloined from the small coasters headed for the delta and Lanzi.
One of them heard a sound, like the rasping of silk, looked up, and shouted an alarm.
Three black dragons dove out of the lowering cover toward them.
The sailors had just time to see the fliers wore Derainian uniforms when a crossbow bolt whipped through the helmsman's leg. He groaned, let go the wheel, and stumbled back, just as a second bolt took him in the chest.
He fell on his back, lay still, just as the lookout was hit in the body by another bolt.
One of the arguing men ran for the wheel as the sloop yawed out of the dredged, marked channel.
He, too, went down.
The two survivors dove for shelter, one behind the upturned ship's boat, the other behind a bulwark. The bulwark wasn't heavy enough to stop the next round of bolts, and two took him. He stood, screaming, stumbled forward and went over the side.
The survivor stayed where he was, even as the sloop ran into the shallows, hard aground, then lurched sideways, its mast cracking overside.
The dragon riders didn't wait for the tide to take and wreck the sloop, but flew on, down the waterway, looking for another target.
* * * *
Hal looked down at the ocean, and thought of the few hours it took to fly from Deraine to beyond the Zante River, as opposed to the days he spent as an escaped prisoner in that damned boat he'd killed for, tossed by the seas and hoping he was headed somewhere friendly.
From up here, the water looked friendly, bobbing whitecaps in the still-warm sunlight.
He knew if he was down there, conditions would be a deal less inviting.
Ahead of them, the barrier islands rose out of the sea.
Hal blatted an alert to the other three dragons in his flight, not that there should be any need to bring them to the alert.
Two of the dragons carried passengers—earnest young women with drawing boards firmly lashed to their saddle rings.
Hal touched Storm's neck with a boot, and the dragon obediently turned east by northeast, flying, at about three hundred feet, above the sandy islands that were covered with brush and scattered trees bent by the near-constant offshore wind.
The dragons flew as slo
wly as they could, and the artists busied themselves drawing.
Hal considered how much of war never appeared in the romances, tasks such as this, making maps for the ships that would keep the inshore blockade.
At least there weren't—yet—any Roche catapults or dragons to worry about, and he relaxed in the sun.
As much as he could ever allow himself, which was not much.
Too many dragon fliers had eased off, when they absolutely knew it was safe… and gone down to a very surprised death.
Hal thought about after the war, then grinned, remembering a story of Farren Mariah's.
"Ah, it'll be a grand, grand homecoming when somebody flinches and we're struck with peace.
"I'll land my dragon in the street outside my house, where my mother, the always-delightful Lady Mariah and my sisters, those she hasn't succeeded in marrying off to some dunder-brain with money, are waiting, having made all my favorite dishes.
"I'll whip out my sword in one hand, dagger in the other, then run, zigging and zaggetying through the gate and the yard, ducking any archers lurking about, kick open the door, flash up against the wall inside, and then bellow, 'Ma! I'm home!'"
* * * *
It was raining, a dull soaking rain that had started before dawn, and looked to last for days.
Below Hal and his three dragons, eight coasters, under full sail, scattered among tiny islets.
The wolf was in the fold.
Four of the new shallow-draft raiding ships and three corvettes had been guided into the inland passage by Hal, and then led into the convoy.
Some of the Roche coasters gave up, and ran aground, their crews leaping into the shallows and running ashore for shelter. Others, stouter, more foolhardy, or, most likely, with captain-owners aboard, packed on sail, and tried to flee upchannel.
But there was no safety this day.
The sleek corvettes and raiding ships ran at their heels, and sorcerous firebottles were hurled from the Derainian ships.
Perhaps the Roche knew about pirates, who would dare everything before ruining their chances at loot.
The Derainians cared nothing about grain or furs, and so the ships roared up in pitch-fed flames.
