That failed fire had been the justification for this new alliance with Graylee. Ferris knew that the details of such an alliance must have been negotiated over many weeks or months; the terms of the treaty had to have been the subject of discussion long before he reported on the failed fire effort, which had merely provided a convenient excuse for the new seneschal of the prince to announce the treaty.
And so, several weeks after Ferris’s report, Graylee had rolled wagons filled with the components of large siege engines across the border between the two nations, and put them in motion towards the forest boundary, teamed with the infantry formation that Ferris marched in. He wasn’t aware of any good way to use a trebuchet against a forest, but given his poor reputation, he had to bite his tongue and march along towards the forest, as he pondered the many ways that the whole campaign could end in disaster.
The column of men and materiel had come to a halt less than an hour short of the forest boundary, set up camp, and started the assembly of the siege engines. Squads of men had been sent out to over a dozen locations along a wide front with the forest, armed with shovels and picks, under orders to build defensive mounds to protect the crews of the trebuchets at the locations where the massive constructions were going to be stationed. Ferris’s men had been assigned the northernmost of the sites, and had spent two days building their improvised fortifications.
The constructed machines had been rolled to the redoubts, within clear view of the forest, and Ferris expected to receive an order to proceed with an attack of some sort. Instead, his squad, and every other group of infantrymen, had sat for a day without action. Ferris had fumed, knowing that they were giving the elves time to bring archers and forces to the edge of the forest, losing the advantage of surprise, and guaranteeing his men would be subject to a withering fire of arrows from the elves when the time came to storm the forest.
Then supplies had started to arrive for the trebuchet the second day of the entrenchment. A large metal pot, twice as large as the one Ferris’s men had carried into the forest, showed up, along with casks of solid pitch, and several large stones. Orders were given to start the fires to melt the pitch before dawn on the third day of the entrenchment.
When dawn’s rosy light began to shine, the large wooden buckets at the end of the trebuchets’ arms were filled with stones, and an hour after that, the steaming pitch was ladled over the stones, set aflame, and fired into the forest.
Ferris watched in amazement as the stones carried the burning pitch high into the sky in the blink of an eye, and he estimated they flew a half mile deep into the forest. He had never dreamed that the bulky machines could hurl their loads so far among the trees; he thought of how fearfully his squad had raced along the forest floor to get the same penetration into the woods, scared of being shot with accurate elven arrows at any second. Smoky trails above the forest showed the flight of the stones.
His men hastily rewound the trebuchet, reloaded the bucket, and fired another load of the incendiary material into the forest. He began to re-evaluate their situation, and suspect that success would be theirs today, provided another freak storm didn’t extinguish this fire as one had squelched his squad’s effort. With multiple fires being set, the vast amount of acreage that the Graylee incursion could gain for Hydrotaz suddenly grew into a considerable new holding, perhaps even a new duchy along the border, he estimated.
Then the elves came out of the woods. The elves who had expected to remain hidden among the trees to defend their home had come out of the trees to come within range of the trebuchet crews, and started firing their arrows at the men, who took refuge behind the fresh defensive mounds, and who fired arrows back. There were hundreds of elves coming forward, a mass of warriors whose arrows would have wiped out any effort to invade the forest in a traditional manner. The presence of the siege machines, and the effectiveness with which they were flinging fire into the forest, was forcing the elves into a battle they didn’t want, out in the open where they were suffering from arrows being fired back from the human lines.
Smoke was starting to rise to visible heights from deep in the forest, and Ferris realized that the elven forces were now trapped between the fire behind them in the forest and the human forces in front of them, men who were safely protected behind earthen berms.
“All forces take up bows and start firing at the elves,” he directed his men. “The fire is started,” he pointed at the smoky columns that were rising and darkening in the eastern sky. “The elves are our targets,” he commanded, as his men obediently left the pitch fire untended and gleefully took up their bows. Their stronger arms and sturdier bows were launching arrows further than the elves could fire their bolts, and even though the human shots were less accurate, they were falling with fatal effectiveness among the elves out in the open.
The elves were also coming to a realization of their dire situation, and reacted by sending one determined sortie forward on a virtual suicide mission to try to disable the trebuchets and their crews, while the rest of the elves retreated to the safety of the not-yet-burning trees on the forest fringe. Ferris and his men let the elves come towards them; he knew that in close combat the strength and skills of the men would be a huge factor in their favor.
Over the course of the day, the elves were slaughtered and routed, as the men in front and the smoke and fire behind eventually converged and overwhelmed them. Up and down the line knots of elves were trapped, converged upon by early afternoon. Most elves were killed, but a few were taken captive, facing the prospect of eventually being sold as slaves in faraway lands.
Ferris thought the prospect of subjecting anyone to slavery was the least promising aspect of the entire day’s battle, but he was so satisfied with the outcome, and the correction of the previous failed attempt to set a fire, that he still ranked the day as one of the best he’d ever known, and he sang victory songs with his men as they drank around the fires in the camp that night.
Chapter 13 — Horses and Surgery
The day of Hydrotaz’s victory was also the day that Arlen took Kestrel to learn the new element of his curriculum, the surprise that Kestrel had never considered before.
“Welcome to the stables,” Arlen said as he rolled open a wide, tall door on a wooden structure Kestrel had never visited, or even seen, during his time in Firheng.
Opening the door both revealed a dark interior partitioned into many smaller cubicles, as well as allowed a redolent wave of organic odors to roll outward and envelope the two elves standing at the entry.
“What is this place?” Kestrel asked as he tried to adjust his senses to the smell. It was one he had a faint recollection of, from the evening of his first day in Firheng, when he had sat on his porch and the breeze had brought a momentary whiff of the scent of the stables to his nose.
“This,” Arlen said as he led the way into the stables, “is where we keep the horses.”
Kestrel followed his instructor into the building, his eyes adjusting to the gloom within, and he suddenly realized that three of the cubicles held massive animals within, creatures that were each as large as a moose, though shaped with a more graceful profile.
Kestrel had heard of horses. They were a creature domesticated by men, used for transporting men and goods, he generally understood. Elves did not use horses; elves disdained the animals. Their own fleet-footed nature and the lack of fodder in the heavily shaded forests, made elves see horses as unnecessary and wasteful. Alternately, according to elven lore, there were centaurs who lived far to the east, sentient creatures who looked upon mounted horses as an injustice, an abominable form of slavery and in respect for the mythical centaurs’ feeling, elves stayed away from the animals.
But now, regardless of the reason elves shunned the creatures, as he looked upon the horses he approached, Kestrel began to re-evaluate his opinion of the animals. They looked graceful, and he was sure he saw intelligence in the large eyes that calmly examined him.
“Good,” Arlen said. “I c
an tell you’re going to get along with our fillies.”
“What’s a filly?” Kestrel asked, as he stood before the gate to one horse’s paddock.
“A filly is a female horse,” Arlen answered. “Go ahead,” he urged, “you can touch her. Pet her neck.”
Cautiously, Kestrel reached his hand over the gate and tentatively touched the large animal before him, then began to gently stroke the coat along her neck.
“Let’s go for a ride,” Arlen spoke softly, standing next to Kestrel, who had focused so closely on the animal that he hadn’t noticed Arlen’s approach.
“Go get a blanket,” Arlen motioned, and Kestrel followed him over to where they each began to gather the materials they needed to take the horses for a ride. Nearly half an hour later they had two horses saddled and ready to go, as Arlen led the way out a back door in the stables, to a yard that Kestrel realized on one side was walled up against the exterior of the city.
Arlen opened a heavy gate in that wall, and they each walked their horses out into the open verge that stood between the forest and the exterior wall. “This is how you mount a horse,” Arlen demonstrated by climbing into and out of his saddle twice, then held the halter of Kestrel’s horse as he awkwardly lifted himself up into his saddle.
“Now we’re ready to go,” Arlen announced, as Kestrel sat ahigh in wonder and surveyed the landscape from his elevated perch. “You’ll have to hold the reins,” Arlen reminded Kestrel, who grabbed the leather straps, and they set in motion along a trail through the forest.
The first several minutes of the ride were exhilarating, as Kestrel swayed back and forth to the rhythm of his mount, and continually reached forward to pat the horse in a friendly manner that was meant to be reassuring for both the mount and the rider. He uncertainly handled the reins to make his horse follow the lead of Arlen’s ride, and felt increasing confidence in his abilities.
By the time they returned to the city wall, Kestrel was feeling chafed and sore in his thighs. He awkwardly dismounted, and gingerly walked his horse back into the stables. The process of removing the saddle was agonizingly prolonged, it seemed, and by the time they were finished, Kestrel could only think about the pain he felt.
“You can probably skip your afternoon lessons,” Arlen said helpfully. “Go into town and soak in the hot baths for a long time, then do some stretching.
“Everyone feels sore the first few times, but your body will adjust,” he added.
“We’ll start doing this every other day, and you’ll be added to the rotation for cleaning out the stables for the rest of your stay. The rest of us appreciate you volunteering to do that!” he grinned, as the two of them walked away from the stables.
Kestrel did as Arlen suggested, relieved to sit in the warm water of the baths for a long stretch of the afternoon. He slept poorly that night as he turned and turned again, trying to find a comfortable posture, but in the morning he managed to practice his staff and sword tolerably well, and the following day he was ready once again to go to the stables and work with the small herd of horses. He found the animals to be so enjoyable he quickly adjusted to the change in his schedule, adding horsemanship to the combat skills and human language and social lessons he was working on daily.
Two weeks after he began his work in the stables, Belinda sent a message asking him to come to her office, a message he received as he finished his work at combat and weaponry. He’d seen very little of Belinda since the start of his stay in Firheng, and he gladly took advantage of the request to skip his language lesson that day.
He’d been in Firheng for over two and a half months, he realized, as he tried to calculate how long it had been since he’d visited the office building where Belinda and Casimo worked. “Hello Kestrel,” Belinda said with one of the bright smiles that marked her in his memory. “It’s been so long since we’ve seen you here.”
“I’m sorry,” he apologized. “It seems like the training keeps me so busy I don’t have time to visit.” It was true; he’d gotten to know a few of the other students slightly, but socialization just didn’t seem to take place or be encouraged among the elves who were learning the crafts involved in being a spy. One or two had left the camp in the time Kestrel had spent there, and one or two had arrived, but there were no activities in which they all interacted or gathered with one another. The lifestyle of the students was a lonely one, and Kestrel wondered if it was just a result of the rigors of training, or a deliberate part of preparing them for a lonely life afterwards. He didn’t like the implications if the latter were the case, as he continued to internally struggle with the overall question of whether he would ultimately accept the assigned role of being a spy.
“You have been doing more training, faster, than any student I can ever remember,” Belinda agreed. “Do you enjoy it?”
Kestrel thought about the question. “I think I do, mostly,” he answered truthfully.
“That’s good to know, mostly,” she laughed back at him. “Well, I mustn’t keep you waiting. You have a messenger here to see you, waiting for you in the commander’s office. You can go on in.”
“A messenger? From where?” Kestrel asked in shock, not taking a step forward. He had no anticipation of a message, no reason to think anyone would need to communicate with him for any reason. No messages had come back in response to his missives to Cheryl or Lucretia, and even if any had been sent, they would arrived via a courier carrying routine mail, he was sure.
“You’ll see. Just go on in, Kestrel,” the woman at the desk gently urged.
He stepped forward and turned the door handle, then looked at Belinda momentarily before he pushed the door open and stepped into the spacious room. The curtains were closed, dimming the space as he closed the door behind him, and for a moment he could barely make out the outline of a figure standing nearby, devoid of details. Then his eyes adjusted, and he instantly recognized that the messenger waiting for him, grinning at him, was Vinetia, the guard from Center Trunk who had been his partner for one day in the great archery tournament during the festival in the city.
Kestrel held his arms open and rushed to the girl, embracing her tightly, with more emotion than he would have expected from himself. The isolation he had experienced during his time in Firheng overwhelmed him, as he stood still with Vinetia in his arms.
“It’s good to see you too!” the girl told him at length, moving him to release his grip and step back. She was smiling broadly, but there was fatigue beneath the smile, shadowing her face. It was a face that had grown thin, and her uniform hung loosely from a figure that was much more slender than Kestrel remembered, he realized as he hugged her.
“Why are you all the way up here?” Kestrel asked her, as they took the two chairs that were placed side-by-side.
“Orders, of course,” she said brashly. “Your spy folks ‘offered’ me the privilege of delivering a message to you, and I decided to take it. I didn’t know if I’d ever see you again otherwise,” she reached into a satchel and pulled out a sturdy message tube, one without the official blue tape seal across the end, which she handed to him.
He looked at her inquiringly.
“I don’t know anything about what it says,” Vinetia replied. “I was as surprised as you are that they assigned me to bring the message to you. I thought I was going to ship out with the rest of the squad to Elmheng.”
“Why would you go to Elmheng?” he asked as he began to open the tube.
“Because,” Vinetia said. She looked at him, “You know,” she added, then studied his face. “You don’t know, do you?
“We lost a huge battle with the humans on the western edge of the forest, right about where your fire was. They brought some weapon that threw the fire far into the forest, behind the guards who were there to protect the fringe,” Vinetia explained. “There was a huge fire; it wiped out miles of forest. And virtually all our guards who were there to fight got trapped by the fire, cut off from escape.
“We lost hundreds of peop
le,” she said softly. “We lost Lucretia,” she added after a pause, with tears in her eyes.
“How, how was Lucretia there?” Kestrel asked in horror, his own eyes watering.
“She volunteered to go on an exercise to Elmheng. She said it would be something different — you know how she was about wanting to try new things,” Vinetia told him. “And while she was there the humans approached the forest with their army, so all the guards in Elmheng and all the militia in the western forest were sent to face them.
“We don’t really know much else. There weren’t many survivors, so we don’t know the whole story. The humans burned a huge portion of the fire, they killed off virtually every defender we had in the west, and then they just withdrew. It doesn’t make much sense,” Vinetia told him.
“How did Lucretia die?” Kestrel asked, not really wanting to know gory details, but wanting, hoping, to learn that she died gloriously in battle, without pain.
“I don’t think they actually found her body. A lot of guards were burned to death, a lot were killed in battle, hacked to pieces, and some were taken prisoner and taken away,” the messenger answered.
Kestrel’s eyes wandered about the room, then came to rest on the paper in his hand. He looked down and started to read.
He looked up again just seconds later. “It says that I’m supposed to return to Center Trunk with you immediately and report to Colonel Silvan,” he told her, holding up the short, succinct report.
“That’s all? Report to Silvan? I came all the way up here just to bring you back?” she asked.
“My training isn’t finished,” Kestrel said.
“That must not matter,” Vinetia answered. “Maybe this war with the humans is involved. They may have some plan for you.
“Do you want to start this afternoon, or wait until tomorrow?” she asked him.
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