A Flight of Marewings

by Kristen S. Walker

  The other warlord nodded slowly. “I think that this may be the best course of action for my company.” He extended his hand across the desk. “Warlord Mrokin, I believe that we have just reached a peaceful accord.”

  Galenos accepted his hand and shook it with a smile. “Thank you. The soldiers who won’t die today are grateful for your discretion.”

  They both rose to their feet. At the tent’s entrance, Vedonos looked up at him—he was a full head shorter than Galenos. “A small pity. I had wanted to see you in action on the battlefield just once, to see if the stories were true. Your rise to fame at such a young age was hard to swallow ten years ago.”

  Galenos laughed and clapped him on the back. “You may still have the opportunity some day, but for my sake, I hope not. I’ve heard some frightening stories about you.”

  Vedonos chuckled. “I’ve had a longer career to earn them. I remember meeting your father back in his prime. I was always surprised when he chose to retire—he struck me as more of a career soldier than a humble farmer.”

  Galenos shook his head. “I may be more like my father than you realize.” Before Vedonos could ask him what he meant, he thanked the warlord for his hospitality, and the Blue Suns let him out of their camp without challenge.

  When they flew back to the fort, the soldiers were standing down from the fight on Galenos’s orders, but he saw that most of them still lined the walls, eager to see what would happen. Galenos raised both of his fists up in the air in triumph, and at his signal, the soldiers broke out in enthusiastic cheer. Now they knew the battle was over.

  He had Nightshade land directly in the courtyard. A crowd came out to hear the news, but kept a respectful distance from the marewing

  “The Blue Suns are in full retreat,” he announced with a grin. He nodded at the commander of the fort. “I’ll let you handle the details from here.”

  Nightshade stood patiently in the yard as he dismounted. He patted her neck. “I’ll come back to care for you in a bit, dear,” he reassured her. “I just have one last thing to take care of first.”

  He turned and searched the crowd of faces in the fort, but he couldn’t find the one that he was looking for. In a panic-stricken moment, he wondered if he would find the girl in the infirmary—or worse. He had stopped the fighting early, but there were always some casualties, and it would take some time for the officers to make a full tally of the dead.

  Sergeant Navera wasn’t there for him to question. But a young Khazeem man in the plain uniform of a marewing candidate caught his searching gaze and nodded at him.

  “She’s up on the southwest wall,” he said, pointing to a section of the fortifications.

  Galenos took the narrow steps up two at a time. When he reached the top, he found a unit of archers packing up their gear.

  They dropped what they were doing and snapped to attention, saluting the warlord. “Congratulations on our victory, sir!” the leader said.

  He returned the salute and nodded. “Good work, soldiers. As you were.” He searched through the ranks and finally saw the girl he was looking for near the back.

  He signaled for Korinna to join him to the side, and noticed with relief that she appeared to be unharmed in the battle. “Are you alright?” he asked, just to be sure.

  She blinked up at him in confusion. “Yes, sir, I’m fine. Did you need me for something?”

  “No, I—I just needed to check on you.” He reached out to take her hand, and she let him. “Your father would be unhappy if I let you get hurt.”

  She smiled up at him, eyes sparkling. Had he noticed before that her eyes were brown with an inner ring of green? “I never got near the fighting. You needn’t have worried.”

  He moved closer, bending down so that his face was nearer to hers. “I did worry, though. I thought about you the whole time I was flying here.”

  He hadn’t known what he was about to say before the words came tumbling out him, but when he stopped, he realized they were true. He’d trusted his officers to defend the fort without him, but the fear that Korinna could be caught in the crossfire had spurred him on to fly past Trovaelos and check on Aelyzoai.

  She looked just as surprised at his confession, but she slid her arms around his waist with a smile. His arms seemed to wrap around her of their own volition. “I was worried about you, too. Everyone said that we were being attacked because you had disappeared.”

  He cursed himself for rushing off to Petropouli so recklessly. “I’m sorry.”

  He opened his mouth to explain, but instead he bent down and covered her mouth with his own.

  She returned his kiss fiercely, standing up on her tiptoes and arching her back to reach him. All thoughts of her being soft or fragile fled from his mind: her whole body tensed like a bowstring pulled taught, ready to fire an arrow straight into his heart.

  He would lose himself if he stayed. Galenos broke away from the kiss, pushing her back. “I—I have to go.” Nightshade was waiting for him with her tack still on, and the other archers were staring.

  Korinna pulled back just as fast and turned her face from him. “Yes, I have—duties.” She cleared her throat and made an awkward salute without meeting his eyes.

  The warlord turned and made a hasty retreat.

  29

  Korinna IX

  Korinna wiped the bark and dust off of her hands on the front of her pants. Her shift building funeral pyres was finally over. Gods bless the exhaustion that had numbed her heightened emotions after the battle—there was so much work to be done, from gathering the dead on the battlefield to rebuilding defenses that had been damaged during the fighting.

  Around her, the more seasoned soldiers went about the work with a cheerful air, congratulating one another on how short the battle had been and how few casualties they’d sustained. They sang songs of previous victories and praised Warlord Galenos for coming to their aid so swiftly. No one was quite sure how he had turned the Blue Sun Company away from their border, but they all agreed that it was the easiest battle the Storm Petrels had ever fought in the company’s history.

  Galenos. Just thinking his name made her face grow hot again, remembering his sudden appearance and passionate kiss up on the walls. What did he want from her? They’d never stopped to talk about what the kiss meant for them. He’d admitted to being worried about her in the fighting, but was she more than just a valuable asset that he couldn’t afford to lose? Did he imagine that when they were married, she would be more than just the key to her father’s title?

  Korinna herself had never been in any danger. She had been stationed in the main fort with the other archers, and although they waited at the ready, the enemy forces had never even come within range of their bows. She had barely slept the night before the battle, worrying that she would freeze up and be unable to fire, but it had been over nothing.

  Only forty-two soldiers had been killed on their side. Most came from a single infantry charge when they had pushed back one particularly bold unit of mercenaries who came close to an outpost. A few of the newest soldiers, fighting for the first time, had been killed in an accident involving one of the deadfalls used to block the mountain pass. Long after peace had been called, the remainder of the group returned, carrying their fallen comrades. Three men from the infantry and one woman from the candidates.

  Herokha. Her face looked so different in death, pale and bruised, her expression calm instead of locked in her customary sneer. But her uniform, and those who brought back the body, confirmed her identity.

  Seeing the other girl’s body lying on the funeral pyre brought home the futility of the battle. If circumstances had been different, that could have been Korinna on the pyre. Herokha was honored as a hero with the rest of the dead, but no one mourned any of them in truth. They were too busy feeling proud and relieved that the battle was over.

  Varranor and the main force from Fort Ropytos had arrived the same day they burned the dead. Korinna watched the commander for signs of sorrow, rem
embering the rumors that Herokha had been his secret mistress, but saw none. He seemed more preoccupied with his disappointment in missing the battle.

  She had become a warrior for the promise of power, but her first fight had left a bitter taste in her mouth. She avoided Galenos and his brother, the celebrated heroes, as well as the comfort of her friends, and went through the motions of her assigned labor. Every time she closed her eyes, she saw Herokha’s face float before her.

  “I have to leave,” she told herself, but when she went to tell Sergeant Navera that she was going to quit, the older woman just shook her head.

  “Plenty of soldiers feel scared after their first battle.” The sergeant’s cold stare gave her no sympathy. “You need to toughen up and get used to it. If you run away now, you’ll be running your whole life.”

  Korinna shrank away from her gaze. She had expected another woman to be more sympathetic. “Yes, sir.”

  Navera frowned. “You need to keep busy, I think. I was going to give all of the candidates a few days’ break from training, but I can assign you extra exercises to keep you occupied.”

  That would be a relief. She nodded. “Thank you, sir.”

  Korinna kept herself busy with training, just as Sergeant Navera had ordered, and within a few days she found herself slipping back into the routine easily. The extra exercises kept her mind occupied during the day and each night she fell into a dreamless sleep.

  She couldn’t avoid Galenos forever. Late one evening, he summoned her to his private chambers. This time, she would be on her guard to avoid merely falling into his arms again. So she went into the small room and, without looking at him, gave the salute to the Warlord of the company and stood at attention.

  Galenos looked up from his seat on the couch in surprise. “At ease, private.” He gestured to the empty spot on the couch to his right and reached for a bottle of wine on a nearby table. “I would like to speak with you in a more informal manner. May I offer you some refreshment?”

  “No thank you, sir.” She sat down on the edge of the couch, far away from him, and looked at the floor.

  He tried to smile at her, but then he looked away. “Look, I wanted to talk to you because I’ve received an unsettling report from your sergeant. She says that the recent action against the Blue Suns has changed you. You’ve been throwing yourself into your work to take your mind off of it, but would it be better if we talked?”

  She shook her head. “Has there been a problem with my performance, sir?”

  “No, but we’re concerned about you.” He hooked one arm over the back of the couch and turned to face her, although he maintained their distance. “I understand that you lost a friend in the fight?”

  Korinna twisted her hands in her lap. “She wasn’t a friend, sir, just someone I trained with.”

  “Then why are you thinking about quitting?”

  She looked up at him and thought she saw genuine concern in his eyes. She bit her lip. “I—I think that you may have been right, that I’m not cut out to be a soldier.”

  He shook his head, keeping his gaze on her. “And I’ve been thinking that I was wrong, seeing how far you’ve come already.”

  “That was before—” Before you tried to seduce me, she didn’t say aloud. She took a deep breath. “Before I saw my first battle.”

  He frowned. “I thought that you didn’t go near the fighting.”

  “I know.” Her hands clenched into fists on her knees. “That’s what everyone keeps telling me. I wasn’t anywhere near the fighting, so I was never in any danger. We were lucky that so few of our soldiers were hurt. The whole thing was barely even worth calling a battle—” She paused and took another lungful of air. After all of this, she was not going to cry.

  Galenos leaned closer and put his right hand on her arm. “Any loss of human life is a terrible thing, no matter how small. Every good soldier feels that way. It’s the ones who take pleasure in the killing who shouldn’t fight.”

  Korinna looked up at him, blinking back tears. “I—I thought that you enjoyed it.”

  “No,” he said gently. Were his eyes bright with tears as well, or was it just a trick of the candlelight? “I do everything I can to avoid it. I fight to protect this land and the people in it, and I’m good at what I do. I’ve followed your father’s orders and profited from his conquering—my conquering.” He stared off into the distance. “But I know the names of everyone who died because of that, on our side and theirs. I want to build a lasting peace to honor their memory.”

  “So you’re saying that I should keep fighting because I don’t like it?”

  “Keep fighting so that we can make a world where no one has to fight anymore.” He shrugged and pulled back, breaking the contact. “Or quit, if you believe there’s another way you can help. In one month you’ll have the chance to catch a marewing, but don’t try if you have doubts. Becoming a rider is a lifelong commitment.”

  She stared at him, trying to figure out how he really felt. He was opening up, but he could still be trying to manipulate her. “Does it get any easier? Fighting?”

  He shrugged again. “Yes and no. Sometimes I worry that it’s too easy for me.”

  That didn’t sound like the kind of lie a man would tell just to impress a woman. She leaned back on the couch, and her shoulder touched his hand again. “Is that why you became a mercenary?”

  “No.” His voice hardened, and his left hand clenched into a fist on the armrest. “I did this because I had no other choice. Kyratia offers few opportunities to the foreign-born, even those who grew up within her borders.”

  She remembered distantly an argument in the marketplace, when he told her that the ruler of Kyratia must serve all her people, no matter where they came from. Now she understood a little more of what he had tried to teach her. Mkumba, Tsukaro, Yulina—even Orivan and Herokha, who came from Seirenian families, had chosen the mercenary life as a last resort. She knew how they felt, to have nowhere left to turn in the world.

  “I had no choice,” Korinna said aloud.

  Galenos’s head whipped back to stare at her. “What? You had every other choice. Money, land—”

  “With no family left to protect me, I could have lost it all.” She shook her head. “The Council granted me the rights to my father’s holdings, but how long could I keep them as a young, unmarried woman? There are distant remnants of the Votsis bloodline in other cities, and it would only be a matter of time before one of them showed up to challenge my claim. The compromise would be to marry one of them.” She glanced at Galenos, then away again. “If I can’t have the husband of my choosing, I would rather have none at all.”

  He slid his arm around her shoulders. “I was not the husband of your choosing.”

  “Before I met you, certainly.” Korinna cleared her throat. She forced the words out. “It was what my father wanted. And from a distance, you looked like such a heroic figure, the youngest warlord to own such a renowned mercenary company. But when you chose to keep playing soldier, I was afraid that I had lost my last ally.”

  He sighed. “So you threw everything away without even trying.”

  Her hand went to the coin at her throat. “I’ve tried for years. Running a farm out in the country, you can only get so far. One bad harvest, one monster attack, could have wiped me out.” She fingered the coin and looked off into the distance. “I guess that I can’t quit my training now, because if I fail at being a soldier, I’ll be just as destitute.”

  Galenos shifted on the couch. “Korinna—”

  Something in his tone caught at her. She looked up at him. “Yes?”

  “You still—“ He stopped, and something passed over his face. He gave a slight shake of his head, and he leaned closer to her. His dark eyes softened. “If you really want to quit, then I will make sure that you’re taken care of. I promise.”

  She smiled and tilted her face up to meet his. “Thank you,” she whispered.

  Their lips met and his arms encircled
her, pulling her closer. This kiss was gentler, more tender than the desperate one on the wall. Her arms wound around his neck, drawing his head down closer to deepen the kiss. The height difference between them meant that he had to bend nearly in half to reach her. He growled in frustration and slid her onto his lap.

  She lost herself in his kisses. She didn’t think about where things were going until his hand slid inside her uniform.

  He broke the kiss and pulled back to stare at her. “I—I’m sorry,” he gasped when he had recovered his breath. “This is improper of me.”

  She blinked in surprise. “Why? You said that mercenaries had a different culture.” Since graduation, she’d seen many of the soldiers pairing off in the evening, and no one spread malicious rumors like the recruits.

  “But I don’t want to take advantage of—of my future wife,” he said.

  “Advantage?” She smiled at the sound of his voice when he said “wife.” “I’m a grown woman, and I’ve blessed the fields before planting every year. I know what I’m doing.” And she knew which herbs to ask for from the physician the next day to make sure there were no unintended consequences. Korinna would worry about that later.

  He traced a finger under her chin. “Then you’re sure that you want this.”

  She kissed the tip of his finger. “I’m sure.”

  He drew her back to him, and they didn’t speak again.

  30

  The Council VII

  Pelagia sat across from Eutychon and Varula Soma in her private garden patio. She ignored the hints for wine from the Councilor and served only iced water flavored with slices of lemon. She found the beverage far more refreshing on the hot, hazy day, and she wanted Eutychon to be lucid for once. His news was crucial now, and troubling.