by Jim Butcher
“She is a traitor to the Realm,” Aquitaine said, his voice calm and hard. “Whether or not she has turned against Alera of her own will is irrelevant. She is an enemy asset that must be removed.” He slashed a hand gently at the air. “We’re wasting time, gentlemen. Sir Ehren, what else have you to report?”
Ehren focused his thoughts and kept his report concise. Other than Parcia’s loss, little had changed. “The other cities are holding. None report a sighting of a vord queen.”
“Are there any signs that the croach has invaded the Feverthorn Jungle?” the First Lord asked.
“None as yet, sire.”
Aquitaine sighed and shook his head. “I suppose whatever the Children of the Sun left behind has kept us out for five hundred years. Why should the vord be any different?” He glanced over at Raucus. “If we had more time, we could use that against them, somehow. I’m sure of it.”
“If wishes were horses,” Raucus rumbled back.
“Being a trite cliché makes it no less true,” Aquitaine said. “Please continue, Sir Ehren.”
Ehren took a deep breath. This was the moment he’d dreaded all morning. “Sire,” he said, “I think I know how to slow their advance toward Riva.”
Raucus let out a startled huff of a laugh. “Really, boy? And you just now thought of mentioning it?”
Aquitaine frowned and folded his arms. “Speak your mind, Cursor.”
Ehren nodded. “I’ve been running calculations of the rate of the vord advance in various stages of their campaign, and I’ve isolated where they moved slowest and most rapidly.” He cleared his throat. “I can show you the figures if—”
“If I didn’t trust your competence, you wouldn’t be here,” Aquitaine responded. “Continue.”
Ehren nodded. “The vord moved most quickly during their advance through the Amaranth Vale, sire. And their slowest advance came when they crossed the Waste of Kalare—and again when they advanced through the region around Alera Imperia.” He took a deep breath. “Sire, as you know, the vord use the croach as a sort of food. It’s mostly a gelatinous liquid, underneath a very tough, leathery shell.”
Aquitaine nodded. “And they can somehow control the flow of nutrients through it. It’s something like an aqueduct; only instead of water, it conveys their food supply.”
“Yes, sire. It is my belief that, in order to grow, the croach needs to consume other forms of life—animals, insects, grass, trees, other plants, and so on. Think of them as the casing around a seed. Without that initial source of nutrients, the seed can’t grow, can’t extend roots, and can’t begin its life.”
“I follow you,” Aquitaine said quietly.
“The Waste of Kalare was virtually lifeless. When the croach reached it, its rate of advance dropped precipitously. It did so again when it was crossing the region that had been blasted by the forces Gaius Sextus unleashed—another area that had been virtually emptied of life.”
“Whereas in the Vale, the richness of the soil and land fed the croach very well, enabling it to spread more quickly,” Aquitaine murmured. “Interesting.”
“Frankly, sire,” Ehren said, “the croach is an enemy just as dangerous as any of the creatures the vord queen creates. It chokes off life, feeds the enemy, serves as a sentinel to them—and who knows, it may do even more that we aren’t yet aware of—and we know that the main body of their troops does not advance without the croach to supply them. The only time they’ve done so—”
“Was in the presence of the vord queen,” Aquitaine said, his eyes glinting.
Ehren nodded and exhaled slowly. The First Lord understood.
“How much time might this give us?”
“Assuming my calculations are correct and that the rate of progress is slowed to a comparable degree, four to five weeks.”
“Giving us time enough to equip at least four more Legions, and a high probability of forcing the vord Queen to appear to lead the horde over the open ground.” Aquitaine nodded, his expression pleased. “Excellent.”
Raucus looked between the pair of them, frowning. “So . . . if we can keep the croach from coming up, the vord Queen has to attend to fighting us in person?”
“Essentially, yes,” Aquitaine said. “The extra time to prepare will hardly hurt, either.” He glanced over at Ehren and nodded. “You have the full authority of the Crown to recruit the necessary firecrafters, evacuate anyone left in that corridor of approach, and deny its resources to the enemy. See to it.”
“See to what?” Raucus said.
“In order to slow the croach and compel the Queen to reveal herself,” Ehren said quietly, “we’ll need to starve it. Burn out anything that grows. Salt the fields. Poison the wells. Make sure that it has nothing to help it set down roots between the current line of advance and Riva.”
Raucus’s eyes widened. “But that means . . . bloody crows. That’s nearly three hundred miles of settled, arable land. Some of the last such in Alera that’s still free. You’re talking about burning down the best of the croplands we have left. Destroying thousands of our own people’s steadholts, cities, homes. Creating tens of thousands of additional refugees.”
“Yes,” Aquitaine said simply. “And it will be a great deal of work. Best get started at once, Sir Ehren.”
Ehren’s stomach twisted in revulsion. After all that he had been through since the vord had come, he had seen more than enough of destruction and loss inflicted by the enemy. How much worse would it be to see more of Alera destroyed—this time at the hands of her own defenders?
Especially when, deep down in his guts, he knew that it wouldn’t make any difference. Whatever they did, this war could end in only one way.
But they had to try. And it wasn’t as though the vord would destroy those lands any less thoroughly, when they came.
Ehren put his fist to his heart in a salute and bowed to the First Lord. Then he turned and left the tent, to arrange the greatest act of premeditated destruction ever perpetrated by Aleran forces. He only hoped that he wasn’t doing it for nothing—that in the end, the desolation he was about to create would serve some sort of purpose.
As such things went, Ehren thought, it was a rather small and anemic hope, but the slender little Cursor decided to nurture it anyway.
After all.
It was the only one he had left.
Gaius Isana, the theoretical First Lady of Alera, wrapped her thick traveling cloak about her a little more securely and stared out the window of the enclosed wind coach. They must be very close to her home now—the Calderon Valley, once considered the farthest, most primitive frontier in all of Alera. She looked down at the landscape rolling slowly by, far beneath them, and felt somewhat frustrated. She had only infrequently seen Calderon from the air, and the countryside beneath her stretched out for miles and miles and miles all around. It all looked the same—either wild forest, with rolling mountains that looked like wrinkles in a tablecloth, or settled land, marked by broad, flat swaths of winter fields being prepared for spring, its roads running like ruler lines between steadholts and towns.
For all that she knew, she could be looking at her home at that precise moment. She had no reference point with which to recognize it from this high.
“. . . which has had the effect of reducing the spread of sickness through the refugee camp,” said a calm young woman’s voice.
Isana blinked and looked at her companion, a slender, serious-looking young woman with wispy, white-blond hair that fell in a silken sheet to her elbows. Isana could feel the girl’s patience and gentle amusement, tainted with an equally gentle sadness, radiating out from her like heat from a kitchen oven. Isana knew that Veradis had doubtlessly sensed her own bemusement as Isana’s thoughts wandered.
Veradis looked up from a sheaf of notes and arched a faint, pale eyebrow. The barest hint of a smile haunted her mouth, but she maintained the fiction. “My lady?”
“I’m sorry,” Isana said, shaking her head. “I was thinking of home. It ca
n be distracting.”
“True enough,” Veradis said, inclining her head. “Which is why I try not to think of mine.”
A spear of bitter grief flashed from the young woman, its base fashioned from guilt, its tip from rage. As quickly as it appeared, the feeling vanished. Veradis applied her furycraft to conceal her emotions from Isana’s acute watercrafting senses. Isana was grateful for the gesture. Without a talent for metalcrafting to balance the empathic sensitivity native to any watercrafter of Isana’s skill, strong emotions could be as startling and painful as a sudden blow to the face.
Not that Isana could blame the young woman for feeling it. Veradis’s father was the High Lord of Ceres. She had seen what happened to her home when the vord came for it.
Nothing human dwelt there now.
“I’m sorry,” Isana said quietly. “I wasn’t thinking.”
“Honestly, my lady,” Veradis said, her voice calm and slightly detached, a telltale sign of the use of metalcrafting to stabilize and conceal emotion. “You’ve got to get over that. If you try to avoid every subject that might remind me of Cer . . . of my former home, you’ll never speak another word to me. It’s natural for me to be feeling pain right now. You did nothing to cause it.”
Isana reached out to touch Veradis’s hand lightly for a moment, and nodded. “But all the same, child.”
Veradis gave her another small smile. She glanced down at her papers, then back to Isana. The First Lady straightened her spine and shoulders and nodded. “Excuse me. You were saying? Something about rats?”
“We had no idea that they might be carrying the disease,” the young woman said. “But once the security measures were put in place to guard three camps against the vord takers, the rat populations in them were severely reduced. A month later, those same camps had become almost completely free of the sickness.”
Isana nodded. “Then we’ll use the remaining security budget from the Dianic League to begin implementing the same measures in the other camps. Priority will be given to those who are hardest hit by the disease.”
Veradis nodded and withdrew a second paper from her sheaf. She passed it to Isana, along with a quill.
Isana scanned the document and smiled. “If you already knew how I was going to respond in any case, why not proceed without me?”
“Because I am not the First Lady,” Veradis said. “I have no authority to dispense the League’s funds.”
Something in the young woman’s tone of voice or perhaps in her posture raised an alarm in Isana’s mind. She’d felt a similar instinctive suspicion when Tavi had been withholding the truth from her, as a child. A very small child. As Tavi grew, he’d become increasingly capable of avoiding such discoveries. Veradis’s skills of evasion simply did not compare.
Isana cleared her throat and gave the young woman an arch look.
Veradis’s eyes sparkled, and though her cheeks didn’t become pink, Isana suspected it was only because the younger woman was using her furycraft to prevent it. “Though, my lady, since lives were at stake, I did issue letters of credit to the appropriate contractors, so that they could go ahead and begin their work, beginning at the worst camps.”
Isana signed the bottom of the document and smiled. “Isn’t that the same thing as doing it without me?”
Veradis took the document back, blew gently on the ink to dry it, and said, in a satisfied tone, “Not anymore.”
Isana’s ears suddenly pained her, and she frowned, looking back out the window. They were descending. Within a minute, there was a polite tap at Isana’s window, and a young man in gleaming, newly made steel armor waved a hand at her from outside. She rolled down the window, letting in a howl of cold air and the roar of the columns of wind that kept the coach aloft.
“Your Highness,” the young officer called, touching his fist to his heart politely. “We’ll be there in a moment.”
“Thank you, Terius,” Isana called back. “Would you see to it that a messenger is sent for my brother as soon as we land, please?”
Terius saluted again. “Of course, my lady. Be sure to fasten your safety straps.”
Isana smiled at him and closed the coach’s window, and the young officer banked up and away, to move back to his place at the head of the formation. The sudden lack of roaring sound made the inside of the coach seem too still.
After a silent moment spent rearranging her wind-tossed hair, Veradis said, “It is possible that he knows, you know.”
Isana arched an eyebrow at her. “Hmmm?”
“Aquitaine,” Veradis said. “He might know about the fortifications your brother has been building. He might know why you came here today.”
“What makes you say that?”
“I saw one of Terius’s men entering Senator Valerius’s tent this morning.”
Valerius, Isana thought. A repulsive man. I’m really rather glad Bernard found it necessary to break his nose and two of his teeth.
“Really?” Isana asked aloud. She mused for a moment, then shrugged. “It doesn’t matter if he knows, really. He can say what he wishes and wear anything on his head that he likes—but he isn’t the First Lord, and he never will be.”
Veradis shook her head. “I . . . my lady . . .” She spread her hands. “Someone must lead.”
“And someone will,” Isana said. “The rightful First Lord, Gaius Octavian.”
Veradis looked down. “If,” she said, very quietly, “he is alive.”
Isana folded her hands in her lap and looked out the window as the valley below began to grow larger, the colors brighter. “He is alive, Veradis.”
“How can you know that?”
Isana stared out the window and frowned, faintly. “I . . . I’m not sure,” she said, finally. “But I feel certain of it. It feels to me as if . . . as if it is nearly sup pertime, and he is about to come in from tending the flock.” She shook her head. “Not literally, of course, but the sense of it, the emotion, is the same.”
Veradis watched Isana with calm, serious eyes, and said nothing.
“He’s coming home,” she said quietly. “Octavian is coming home.”
There was silence. Isana watched the walls of Garrison, the fortress-town her brother commanded, grow larger and more distinct. They changed from lines to sharp-edged ridges to constructions of seamless, furycrafted stone. The flag of the First Lord, a scarlet eagle on a blue field, fluttered in the breeze, and beside it flew her brother’s banner—a brown bear on a field of green.
The town had grown again, even though Isana had been there only two weeks before. The shantytown originally erected just outside of Garrison’s walls had been replaced with solid buildings of furycrafted stone, and a new wall had been raised to protect them. Then a second shantytown had gone up at the base of that wall, and Isana had been there the day Bernard’s engineers had brought up the third one, another layer of concentric half circles that enfolded the growing town.
The shanties were gone, replaced by more buildings of stone—rather square, blocky buildings with very little to distinguish one from the next, but Isana was sure that they were perfectly functional and practical.
And outside the third wall, still another shantytown was growing, like moss on the northern side of a stone.
Veradis’s eyes widened as she saw the place. “My. This is rather a large town for a Count to have in his keeping.”
“There are many people without homes these days,” Isana said. “My brother will probably give you some perfectly logical explanation as to why they are here, if you should ask. But the truth is that he’s never turned anyone away from his door. Anyone who made it this far . . .” She shook her head. “He’d do whatever he could for them. And he would make sure they were taken care of. Even if all he could do was give them the cloak off his own back. My brother finishes what he begins.”
Veradis nodded thoughtfully. “He raised Octavian, did he not?”
Isana nodded. “Especially the last several years. They were close.”
“Yes,” Isana said. “He’s coming home.”
Veradis was quiet for a moment more as the coach soared over the outer walls of Garrison. Then she bowed her head, and said, “As you say, my lady.”
Isana pushed away the ugly worry that had been ripping its way into her thoughts since her son had left with the Canim armada.
Tavi was coming home.
Her son was coming home.
Gaius Octavian, son of Gaius Septimus, son of Gaius Sextus, and the uncrowned First Lord of Alera, lay quietly on his back, staring up at the stars.
Given that he was lying on the floor of a cavern, it probably wasn’t a good sign.
He searched his alleged memory for an explanation as to why he might be doing such a thing, and why the stars were so brilliant and swirling around so quickly, but he seemed to have misplaced that fact. Perhaps the bump he felt swelling on his skull had dislodged his memory. He made a mental note to ask Kitai if she’d seen it lying around on the floor somewhere.
“A reasonably educational attempt, child,” murmured a woman’s voice. “Do you see now why it is important not only to maintain a windstream beneath you but a windshield in front of you?”
Ah, that was right. Lessons. He was taking lessons. Cramming for an examination, really, with a particularly astute tutor. He struggled to remember which subject they’d been working on. If he was pushing things this hard, final examinations must be soon, and the Academy had very little sympathy for its students during the grueling chaos of final exams.
“We’re doing history?” he mumbled. “Or mathematics?”
“I know that you find it counterintuitive to project wind both ahead of you and behind,” his tutor continued in a calm tone. “But your body was not designed for high-speed flight. If you do not take measures to protect yourself, especially your eyes, even relatively minor amounts of particulate matter in the air could blind you or otherwise bring your flight to a . . . terminally instructive conclusion. Adept fliers accomplish it so naturally that they have no need to consciously think about creating the shield.”
