War of the Bastards

by Andrew Shvarts

  The camp loomed up ahead, fifty tents in a lakeside clearing, surrounded by a makeshift fence made of sharpened logs. Sentries kept watch from platforms built into the tallest trees. I could hear the sounds of the camp as we got closer: the chatter of voices, the neighing of horses, the thump of wooden swords against training dummies. The guard at the gate saluted Galen, fist pressed to his heart, and then he did the same to me and Zell. On the long list of things I wasn’t used to, getting saluted was near the top; I’d somehow managed to accept myself as Tilla, Citizen of Lightspire, but Tilla, Respected Rebel Warrior, still didn’t make any damn sense.

  We stabled our horses and took off on foot through the crowded tents. Chickens flapped by underfoot, and I could smell stew cooking from the canteen. There were members of the Unbroken all over the Kingdom, from lowly blacksmiths in backwater towns to spies in the castles of traitorous Lords, but we were the single largest group, a traveling band of seventy-five or so people. Most of that number were warriors, the most-seasoned rebel fighters, but we also had the leaders, the tacticians, the last few surviving mages. Also…we had the Queen.

  Galen broke off toward the round central tent that was our command center, and Zell headed toward the armory to put our swords away. I needed a hot bath, and a good meal, and a strong drink, but right now, more than anything else, I needed a friend. So I made a beeline toward a tent at the far back of the camp, the only tent with a dedicated guard out front.

  Lyriana was inside, seated cross-legged on her bed with a heavy tome in front of her. She glanced up as I entered and smiled. “Tilla! You’re back!”

  Looking at her now, it was almost impossible to recognize that naive, sheltered girl who’d sat at the Bastard Table in Castle Waverly just two years ago. Her luminous raven hair was cut short, shorn nearly to the scalp. Tattoos covered her arms, decorating the black skin: the Crest of the Titans on her left forearm, the elderbloom sigil of her family on her right, and the names of her murdered mother and father circling her biceps in the runic script of the Titans. When I’d first met Lyriana, she’d never worn anything but a dress, but now she looked natural in a loose cloth shirt and riding pants, brown leather boots halfway up her calves and an iron bracelet around her wrist. Only her eyes were the same, a glowing gold that seemed to give off a light of its own. She wasn’t a Princess anymore, not by a long shot, but she made for one hell of a rebel Queen.

  “That I am,” I replied, and took a seat next to her. Lyriana’s tent was unquestionably the nicest in the camp, with its own table, chairs, and stacks upon stacks of books. Most of us slept on mats or rugs, but Lyriana got an actual bed. A small, crappy bed with scratchy sheets and a fur blanket, but hey, a bed nonetheless.

  “How did the mission go?”

  “Successful. Only lost one man. Chalk? Chalko?”

  “Chelkon,” Lyriana sighed. “Father of two. A farmer, before the war. We’ll have to hold a funeral.” She glanced away uneasily. “Did you get Vladimyr?”

  “We got him. He pled guilty. Zell…well, you know.”

  Lyriana nodded to herself, taking it in. I knew it weighed heavily on her, having to sign off on warrants of execution, the knowledge that we were out there killing people in her name. “I met Vladimyr, you know. At the Ascendance Day Masquerade a few years ago. He’d come along as a member of Baroness Celeste’s retinue, and he was just so happy to be in the city. He gave me a little stuffed horse.” She shook her head, her voice tight. “He seemed nice.”

  “He had a wagon full of mage blood, Lyriana,” I said. “Vials and vials of it.”

  “Oh,” Lyriana replied, and her face hardened. After the Ascendance Day Massacre, the common people of Noveris had been given the choice to bend the knee to my father and accept his rule. The mages, though, hadn’t been so lucky. They’d all been rounded up, hunted, arrested, executed. Thousands died in those first few terrible months, a slaughter that put even the worst of the Volaris oppression to shame. Only a hundred or so mages survived that, but their fate wasn’t much better; they were carted off to Miles’s camps, kept alive so their blood could be harvested for his serum, tortured and experimented on whenever he needed new subjects. The era of Lightspire mages was over, the orders of Knights and Sisters and Shadows culled; now, there were only Miles’s bloodmages, and the people terrified of them.

  “The serum?” she asked.

  “We burned it.” There were some in the Unbroken who believed we should use the serum, make bloodmages of our own. But Lyriana had drawn a hard line at that. If we went down that road, we were no better than my father.

  “Good,” she said, then cocked her head to the side, scrutinizing me. “Tilla…are you all right?”

  “Me? Yeah. I’m fine. Why?”

  Lyriana shrugged. “You seem off. Not quite yourself. The whole terse words, haunted eyes, cold demeanor. You sound like Zell.”

  I blinked. It was true, I guess, that I felt like I got Zell much more now, that a year of bloodshed and turmoil had brought us closer together than ever. But it was still weird to think that I was becoming more like him. “I’m just a little messed up from the battle. My knees are still shaking, and I keep thinking about…I don’t know.” I sighed. “I thought it would get easier. But it hasn’t. It’s still just as awful as the first time.”

  Lyriana wrapped an arm around me and pulled me into a hug. “I should be out there with you, fighting by your side. It’s not right that you’re risking your life, putting yourself through hell, and I get to sit here, safe and warm in my tent. I’m the Queen, for the Titans’ sake….”

  “Which is exactly why you can’t fight with us and you know it,” I replied. There weren’t a whole lot of Volaris left in the world, after all. Lyriana’s little sister, Aurelia, had made it out of Lightspire with us, but a rebel army was no place for a little girl. We’d sent her, disguised as a servant, to some loyalists in the Eastern Barony of Saile, where she’d be safe from my father’s reach. That meant the entire legitimacy of the Unbroken hinged on the fact that we had Lyriana with us; with her, we were the champions of the true Queen, but without her, we were just a band of outlaws. The last thing I wanted to do was rehash this argument yet again, but I didn’t have to because right then the earth started shaking.

  Lyriana let out a little gasp and I clenched my teeth, resting my hand uselessly against her bed frame. This was just a thing that happened now: every few weeks or so, the earth would shake and tremble underfoot, rattling walls and knocking over shelves. It had started about eight months ago, and the tremors had been getting more and more frequent. Most weren’t bad, just a little rattling that went for about a minute. The worst one had been four months ago, when we’d been back in Trellbein, a solid five minutes of quaking that had toppled buildings and torn deep rifts in the dirt. In that chaos, I’d genuinely wondered if the world was ending. Some days, I still wasn’t sure.

  This wasn’t a bad one. The tent rumbled for a minute, candles swaying, and then went still. Outside, I heard a few men shout, and the horses neigh.

  “Titans grant mercy,” Lyriana said softly, instinctively. There were a whole lot of folks who believed the quakes were a sign of the Titans’ displeasure, the Ascended gods angry at what my father had done. Much as I wanted to believe that, I couldn’t, not after what I’d seen down in the catacombs below Lightspire; I still didn’t know what the rotting ghoulish husks we’d encountered were, but they sure as hell weren’t gods.

  But I wasn’t about to get into that, so I nudged the book lying on the bed, a heavy leather-bound tome with a picture of a severe-looking woman on the cover. “What’re you reading?”

  “A History of Queen Corellia II,” Lyriana replied, because of course it was boring ancient history. I missed Markiska and her filthy romance novels. Really, I just missed Markiska. “Corellia came to power during one of the greatest periods of unrest in the history of Noveris and managed to restore peace and order, putting down the Bandits’ Revolt and ushering in the Golden Age.”r />
  “I see the book’s appeal.”

  Lyriana gave a sad little smile. “As a little girl, she was always one of my favorites. I thought it was just so amazing what she did, how much she accomplished. And now? All I can think about it is how easy she had it. I mean, she had Lightspire. She had hundreds of mages. She had her family advising her and her brother leading her armies and so much else. If she had all that and still struggled, how am I not completely doomed?”

  Honestly, it was a pretty good question, but I wasn’t about to tell her that. “She might’ve had a lot…but did she have a kickass best friend? One who always had her back and taught her all the best drinking songs?”

  Lyriana grinned. “Now you sound like yourself.”

  “Yeah, well, you bring it out in me,” I said, and it was mostly true. “I don’t know how and I don’t know when. But we’ll win this thing, Lyriana. We’ll get you back your Kingdom, and make my father and Miles pay for everything they’ve done. I know it.”

  “I wish I had your optimism,” Lyriana said, and I kept up my smile. The thing is, it wasn’t optimism. It wasn’t certainty. It was desperation. I believed it because I had to believe it, because if I doubted it, if I questioned it, then I would just lie on the floor every morning and never get up. It was a load-bearing conviction, and the house of Tilla the Rebel depended on it.

  “Enough talk,” I said. “Want to grab a drink at the canteen?”

  “I should stay here and finish this,” Lyriana said, as if we were still at the University and she still had homework. “But you ought to stop by the canteen anyway. Ellarion’s been there since morning and…he could probably use a friendly word. I’d go, but you know how he gets with me. Like I’m still some little girl he has to protect.”

  “Oh.” My smile faded. I felt bad because Ellarion was my friend and deserved my support, but at the same time, I was looking to get comforted, not console the inconsolable. Not that I had any right to complain, of course. As bad as I had it, he had it so much worse. “Okay. Yeah. I’ll stop by.” I hugged her again, then glanced down at the portrait on the cover of the book. “By the way, you’re, like, a hundred times prettier than her.”

  “She was in her fifties, you jerk.” Lyriana laughed and shoved me off the bed. “Thanks for coming by, Tilla. Really.”

  Well, I felt better, if only a little bit. I would’ve given anything for a long soak in a hot bath, but had to settle for a dip in the lake instead, in a private spot a small walk away from camp. I stripped down and washed off the sweat and the mud, and as I ran my hands through my hair they came back bloody, which was just great. I’d loved reading about war as a kid, but none of the books had driven home how messy it is, how loud, how gross and squalid and wet. You never realize how fragile humans are, how brittle and breakable, until you’ve killed twenty-nine of them.

  With a shudder, I washed my hands in the river a dozen times, then got dressed and headed back to camp. Ellarion or not, I needed that drink.

  We called the common area “the canteen,” but that was being generous; it was just a few long tables at the edge of the camp, next to a tent that served food and drinks. As soon as I got close, the smell hit me, savory roasting meat and freshly baked bread, almost as good out here as it had been in Lightspire. I grinned and waved, and from the canteen tent, a pair of friendly faces smiled back: Marlo and Garrus, ex–Ragged Disciples, devoted rebels, and the cutest couple I’d ever seen. Marlo ran provisions for us, hustling every caravan and small-town merchant, and Garrus had turned down the opportunity to fight to be a full-time cook, bringing all his baking skills to our meager little camp. Things could be tough out here in the woods, sleeping on mats, pissing in bushes, and constantly swatting away flies, but no one would ever say we didn’t eat well.

  “Tilla!” Marlo beamed, his smile big and infectious. “Tell me you’re hungry. Garrus has whipped up, and I’m not exaggerating here, the best mudrabbit stew you’ve ever had….”

  “That’s a low bar,” Garrus grumbled, stirring a pot with a wooden ladle. “But I’ll admit, this is pretty damn good.”

  “Give me a bowl,” I said. “And a glass of ale. The good stuff.”

  “Coming right up.” Marlo grinned and turned to his apprentice, a scrawny young recruit we’d just picked up a few weeks ago. “Ein! You heard what the lady said!”

  “On it, sir!” Ein replied, in that overeager way you had in your first month on a job. He scrambled forward to pour the stew, and only dropped the ladle once.

  “Never too early for a drink,” a voice called from one of the tables. Ellarion. He sat hunched over, bleary-eyed, with what I’m sure wasn’t his first glass of ale in front of him.

  “Can I join you?” I asked.

  He glanced up at me, eyebrow arched. If Lyriana didn’t look like the Princess she’d once been, then Ellarion was damn near unrecognizable. Back in Lightspire, he’d taken meticulous care in his appearance, always the sharpest-looking guy in the room, but now his aesthetic could best be described as “frightening hermit.” His black hair was messy and wild, hanging in wide curls down his back. A thick beard covered the lower half of his face, stretching down to his collarbone, and his red eyes looked dulled, bloodshot, framed by heavy bags.

  And then there were his hands. I tried not to look, to be polite, but my eyes instinctively glanced there anyway, to the clicking mechanical prosthetics at the ends of his wrists. Ellarion had lost both of his hands protecting us from the explosion at the Ascendance Day Masquerade. We’d scored him the prosthetics during a visit to the black market of Trellbein, and they were the nicest money could buy, elaborate Artificed bronze hands with inlaid gemstones and flexible gold bands for the knuckles. Inside were thousands of tiny clockwork gears that gave life to fully functioning joints and bending fingers, linked magically to his mind. They could grasp things and make gestures and do pretty much everything non-prosthetic hands could do.

  Except magic. For some complicated reason I couldn’t begin to understand, mages needed their hands to channel magic, to funnel the energy running through their blood out into the universe. And whatever that conduit of energy was, it didn’t work with Ellarion’s mechanical hands, no matter how hard he tried. Ellarion Volaris, the former Archmagus, once the most powerful mage in the Kingdom, had lost his magic.

  Which brought us to where he was now. Slumped on a canteen table in a rebel camp.

  “Did my cousin send you?” he asked. “Because I don’t need a pity check-in.”

  “Relax, tough guy. I’m just here to get a drink.” I took a seat at the opposite side of the table, and even from there, I could smell the booze on his breath. “Started early, huh?”

  “That, or I’m just still going really late. Hard to tell sometimes.” He shrugged. “How’d the raid go?”

  “Good. We got Vladimyr.” I cleared my throat. “Your tactics worked out perfectly. The archers on one hill, the rest of us on the other…”

  “I’m not so drunk I don’t remember my own plan,” Ellarion said, though I would argue he very much looked that drunk. “You don’t have to praise me. Seriously. It was a basic high-ground rout, nothing to write ballads about.”

  “It just worked, is all,” I said softly. Figuring out Ellarion’s role in the Unbroken had been one of the more painful challenges of the past year. He’d spent fruitless awful months trying to regain his magic, sweating and grimacing in our training grounds, his metal hands trembling uselessly in front of him, the anguish in his eyes too terrible to look at. After that, he’d wanted to be trained in the khel zhan, to fight alongside us, but Galen had forbidden it; even without his magic, he was still one of the few remaining Volaris, and we couldn’t risk losing him on the front line. Galen had wanted to send him east with Aurelia, but Ellarion had put his foot down, insisting he stay with the Unbroken.

  So he became our tactician. And honestly, it was a good fit. Ellarion was smart as hell, and he’d read pretty much every book there was on military strategy
. He worked alongside Galen in the command tent, poring over maps and scrolls, fielding letters from spies, plotting the course of our tough little rebellion. He was good at it, damn good.

  And I knew he hated every second.

  “Your soup and ale, miss,” Ein said, placing a ceramic goblet and a wooden bowl in front of me. The goblet was full of cheap stolen beer, but my eyes were on the bowl right now, and the steaming, savory stew inside: diced rabbit, potatoes and carrots, a little dash of some peppery spice.

  “I’ll have another beer, too,” Ellarion said, knocking over his empty goblet with a stray gesture. Ein shot me a glance, the kind that said For the love of the Titans, deal with this guy, and hurried off.

  I ate a spoonful of stew and slumped back in my chair, savoring it. I knew objectively it probably wasn’t that good and my standards had just plunged since we’d become a rebel band, but I also knew that it tasted amazing. Ellarion watched my face, and his cracked lips twisted into a little smile. “Know what I miss most about Lightspire?”

  I arched an eyebrow. “Everything.”

  “Yeah. But especially the fruit. What I’d give right now for a thick juicy pear or handful of sweet cocoaberries…” He shook his head, his shaggy beard swaying with it. “Every morning of my life, I woke up to a bowl of amazing, ripe, perfect fruit, cut and peeled and ready for me. And I never appreciated that until now. Do you know what I mean?”

  “No. I don’t. I’m a bastard from the West, remember? I appreciated the hell out of every single bite of Lightspire fruit I had.”

  “Fair point. Fair point.” Ellarion rubbed at his eyes with the back of a metal hand, which always made me wince a little. “Ein’s not bringing me that beer, is he?”

  “Nope. And with good reason. You are pretty damn drunk.” I worried he might argue, but he just nodded and slumped forward, resting his head in his hands. “Can I ask what happened?”

  “I just hate days like today,” he grumbled. “Sitting back here all cooped up, no idea what’s happening with you all out there, no way to know if my plan worked, just wondering if today’ll be the day, the day it all comes down…” He let out a sigh and sat up. “Shit. I’m sorry. You…you shouldn’t see me like this.”