Chapter 86
CHAPTER EIGHTY-SIX
I had never been more grateful to have a wife who rode astride a horse and trained daily as we led our forces to what was sure to be a battle. We took a small contingent to the border, maintaining a rigid soldier’s pace that she never once faltered with.
The two days of hard riding gave me time to analyze what I knew of our situation. It made little sense, tactically, for Iiro to come straight for Bear instead of one of the less fortified clans who opposed him. It would have taken time for us to reach Lynx in the dead of winter, and Bison was allied with no one.
Once again, he had let his vendetta for me and my wife cloud his judgment, which could work in our favor. It was probably too much to hope for that he had accompanied his troops to the front line, but that didn’t stop me from fantasizing about all the ways I would ensure the end he met was even more satisfying than Samu’s.
We finally reached the camp halfway through our third day of riding through the icy wind. I dismounted, then helped my wife do the same. Capable though she was, her shaggy warhorse was nearly as big as mine, built for trekking through the knee-high snow and decidedly not sized for a tiny woman wearing skirts.
Her face was red from the frigid temperatures, her lips chapped from the wind, but her eyes shone with the same unwavering determination they had held since the moment we got the letter from Crane.
I led her into the command tent, not giving a single damn what the men there thought of her presence.
There was a small fire in the center of the tent—the smoke filtering through a hole in the top—and a table directly next to it. That’s where the men were standing—two lords, a commander I trusted, and a mid-ranking soldier I could have done without. They were all solid strategists, at least.
“Report,” I ordered, before the tent flap had even closed behind us.
Lord Doyevsky lifted his head abruptly, offense written over his features before he realized his Duke had arrived. He was the one of the two lords I was more familiar with, and his expression relaxed when he caught sight of me, though his shoulders were still rigid.
“The king has nearly double the forces we were anticipating,” he said bitterly, clenching his fists. “Crane and the few from Bear that could make it in time held the line, but they lost a lot of ground and sustained significant casualties.”
Of course, Doyevsky would take that the hardest. The border was his territory. I nodded, trying to rein in my own fury at the loss of our men, at how quickly we had been forced to cede the border, so I could analyze the maps with a clear head.
He wasn’t exaggerating about the casualties. Crane should have had double their yellow pieces on this map. How had he caught them so thoroughly off their guard?
I surveyed the map closer, putting together what I knew firsthand of the terrain with the scattered forces. Iiro must have risked sneaking a contingent through their southern pass before the snow made it completely impossible, distracting them with the unlikely invasion point while he sent his larger forces through the main road.
“What of the villages on the border?” Rowan asked the mid-ranking soldier, Talvys.
I glanced up in time to see the idiot blinking at my lemmikki like his horse had just learned to speak rather than his Clan Wife asking an incredibly pertinent and reasonable question.
I may have understood the culture surrounding the men’s feelings towards women—and red hair, for that matter—but I had little patience for it today, in the middle of a war where men were dying on the front lines as he held up a conversation for little other than prejudice. I fixed him with a glare and he paled several shades, clearing his throat to answer.
“Some he left alone, but any who resisted…” He swallowed. “He made an example of.”
Though he had witnessed battles, starvation, and the plague alike, whatever Iiro had done to the villagers made him turn green, and was clearly something he didn’t feel like he could voice in front of Rowan.
She sucked in a breath at the implications of his words.
Der’mo.
Iiro had always hidden a sadistic side of himself, but anyone who paid attention saw the way he basked in the heady sense of power from crushing people under his boot. Now he had turned that cruelty on my clan, just when they would finally have known a single moment’s peace from my father’s volatile whims.
“We need to change tactics,” I said, surveying the map once more before turning to go.
Our focus on minimizing casualties was not, in fact, minimizing them, nor was it gaining us nearly enough ground, but I wanted to take a look at the battlefront myself before I decided what direction to shift things in.
“I’ll be back in a couple of hours to finalize a plan for going forward.”
The men stood at attention, nodding in deference as Rowan and I left the tent. The camp was organized chaos, wounded men arriving with corpses in tow while more soldiers rode out to replace them.
After we were situated in our tent, I made my rounds through the soldiers’ tents. The men stood straighter when I arrived, shoulders visibly sagging in relief that we had brought reinforcements.
They treated my presence like their own personal salvation, and I told myself it was enough to know the sacrifices wouldn’t be in vain as long as we had a plan. Because this war was far from over.
And these men were far from saved.
For all that we were technically winning, it sure as storms didn’t look that way from the front lines. I forced myself to look past the lifeless faces of the soldiers—my soldiers—and focus on the fighting itself. The specifics of the terrain, the forces, the style in which they were attacking.
My father’s lessons resounded in my mind, even as I wondered how my wife would feel about me employing the same tactics that had gotten her family killed.
There was no room for sentimentality in war, though, not when the people under my protection were dying faster than I could keep track of.
The sun had fallen by the time I returned to camp, bathing the icy grounds in a silvery glow. The groans of the wounded and dying carried across the still night air, punctuating the need for urgency as I made my way into the command tent.
Wordlessly, I moved the pieces around on the map, deliberately forcing away thoughts of the bolstered soldiers while I moved the small black figures into a more coordinated assault.
One that was sure to be deadly for the men those black pieces represented who were serving as a distraction, but was also the only way to save our forces down the line.
A muscle ticked in my jaw, my stomach churning with the choices I was forced to make, always, for the sake of my clan. Rowan thought she was a monster for torturing a single heinous woman, but the real ruthlessness was here, in the clinical decision to sacrifice a small number of my men to bring the majority home.
“Ready the troops accordingly,” I said flatly, gesturing to the map.
Then I spun to leave without another word, having no desire to see the looks on the men’s faces when they came to terms with the cost of holding our ground.