28. Blood Curses
Blood Curses
The next fortnight hit like a volley of arrows. Dain and Leah made up. Leah broke Dain’s nose. Dain announced to the entire garrison that he was in love with Leah and kissed her on a table. Leah was assaulted and Dain didn’t murder anyone. The Queen made Dain Regent and left for Lyraniorn.
And then, like the arrow that strikes you in the throat, Lyraniorn fell.
We received the news by flicker-bird while eating dinner in the garrison pub with Alluin and a number of the other officers we frequently spent time with.
The bird appeared midair and landed directly on Alluin’s plate, stomping on his salad as it turned its back to him.
His brows snapped together, all levity vanishing from his face as he removed the hastily-scrawled letter from the pouch on the bird’s back.
The note was written in Army courier-code, intended for sending critical messages as swiftly as possible. Alluin read it, his expression going grave, then looked up at all of us.
“‘Lyraniorn dead. Buildings standing; people, animals, garrison dead,’” he said, his voice clear, translating the note. People stopped talking as he spoke, stillness falling in a circle around him.
Alluin inhaled through his nose, his jaws clenching. “‘Blood magic army constructs. All dead walking, heading northeast, forty-four degrees.’”
I heard gasps; sharp inhales—the sounds of people doing the math. Of how many of the walking dead a city’s worth of slaughter would make.
Alluin met my eyes, his own gaze going steely.
“‘Help,’” he said.
My skin went cold.
“Oh, fuck,” one of the First Army commanders whispered.
Alluin folded the note with a sharp motion and put it back into the pouch.
He picked up the bird and fed her a piece of his nutbread.
“Good bird. Go to General Dykaestra,” he said softly, then jerked his wrist up to toss the flicker-bird into the air.
Before it even disappeared, he was on his feet, his set expression one I recognized from the Annihilation War.
“Captain Gravaia. Get a courier to the Antlered Palace with the information as swiftly as possible. Regent Sundamar must be notified and a war room must be convened. I will attend as swiftly as I may.” He inhaled, his shoulders setting like the horns of a bull. “Commanders, it’s time. Let’s go.”
Alluin had already spent the last week preparing the entire First Army for deployment, and the generals of the Second and Third Armies had followed his lead.
If Alluin thought that the Armies would be needed at a moment’s notice, no one was going to argue with him.
Alluin’s gut feelings when it came to war were generally understood to be seer-like prognostications.
Within a quarter-hour, the garrison was a hive of activity. I didn’t have so much as a chance to wish Alluin luck. I had my own duties to attend to, and a battalion to deploy.
The First Army marched within the hour. The Second and Third were close behind, every garrison across Stag Court swarming into action like a kicked nest of hornets.
We couldn’t all reach the front lines, of course; Stag Court was large and rugged, and there were many places that were too far to provide the Antlered Palace aid.
The fighting was only one part of war, though, and we would need every other part of it to survive this: supply, healers, peacekeeping, cleanup.
We commandeered every rideable or driveable animal in the Antlered Palace and the surrounding area that we could get our hands on with such short notice.
I knew most of them wouldn’t make it, and put that quiet mourning away.
The survival of the Court and everyone in it depended on the Armies meeting the army of the dead as swiftly as possible, to give Dain every second we could to destroy the constructs and find the blood mage.
We needed the heavy infantry at the front, and we didn’t have the time to walk us there.
The Second Army’s Third Battalion traveled with the First Army’s First Battalion.
I’d (politely) protested this arrangement when General Dykaestra had proposed it, worried that the pairing would smack of favoritism, given that General Xilsatra also rode with the First Battalion.
General Dykaestra had told me, in the no-frills way she always did, that General Xilsatra was key to the survival of both armies, and she wanted to ensure that whoever was paired with him would both defend him and obey him with the loyalty of a hound.
Once, it might have stung to be viewed as Alluin’s dog. I knew General Dykaestra respected me, though, and my battalion loved me. The comparison wouldn’t lessen their opinion of me.
Besides, I was Alluin’s dog. Like a beloved hound, I would defend him with my teeth if necessary, and he was the only person in the world to whom my loyalty and obedience was absolute.
I was willing to defy General Dykaestra and my prince if it came down to it, but if Alluin commanded something of me, I would do it or die trying.
Reports poured in as we rode for Lyraniorn—intelligence from the palace, mostly, about the location, forces, and movements of the dead army, but also various reports about evacuations and counter-measures being taken.
Sometime around three in the morning, I received a flicker-bird directly from Leah, informing me that every noble house even remotely accessible to the army had been informed of their duties, and that we could regard them as waystations, hospitals, and supply depots.
My answering smile was vicious. “Atta girl,” I murmured, my eyes fixed on the dark horizon. It was nice to know that the Antlered Palace had our backs.
We encamped for five hours around dawn, enough time for people to eat and catch a single cycle of sleep.
Having learned my lesson during the last war, I forced Alluin to join me in bed, tangling my limbs with his so that he couldn’t escape and had to rest. We were going to need him once we actually made contact with the dead army. He needed to sleep in the meantime.
Honestly, the fact that I could and would ensure that the General of the First Army got fed, watered, and some amount of rest—and that he would actually listen to me, instead of the aides that he routinely ignored on the topic of sleep—was, on its own, a good reason to deploy the Third Battalion alongside him.
For better or for worse, Alluin and I were a unit, and when it came to keeping Stag Court’s brilliant general in top form, my desire to take care of him was an easy lever to pull.
We moved out before dawn, aiming in as straight a line as possible.
The dead didn’t have such troubles as physical hunger or exhaustion.
The blood mage (presumably) did, but they obviously had experience with massive magical endeavors.
If it was Dain’s mother—and gods, it was hard to believe otherwise—she surely knew how to set her spell with simple instructions.
She was a Queen, after all, used to interfacing with the overwhelming stream of information coming from the Court.
Coordinating tens of thousands of bodies might have been something she could do literally in her sleep.
Ahead of us, other branches of the Armies started engaging the dead army, helping civilians escape and doing what they could to slow and diminish the enemy forces.
I received a stream of reports through the day: towns evacuated, bridges demolished, forests set aflame.
We started smelling the smoke in the early afternoon, the wind carrying the proof of the wildfires, and by the time pemmican and stimulants were being passed out in lieu of dinner, we could see the dark, greasy plumes.
We set camp behind a rocky pass. Alluin sent out the scouts into the hills with the engineers to set black powder explosives so that we could collapse the cliffs onto the dead, and the rest of us ate and prepared for what was to come.
I knew that Dain was ahead of us, fighting with the vanguard.
Even on two feet, even without the force of the full moon behind him, Dain was a formidable foe.
He knew slaughter—had learned, in those horrifying hours in Phazikai, how to cut down people like a scythe reaping wheat.
The dead couldn’t be killed, but they could be destroyed.
More than that, Dain could nullify the blood magic animating the corpses, which made him irreplaceable in the field.
From Dain’s attempts to cut down some of the footsoldiers of the dead army, we knew that even dismembering the bodies didn’t break their animation.
The pieces would still keep coming, crawling or writhing towards the living, and if there were enough pieces in one place, they would form horrifying, seething lumps of dead flesh that slumped forward, driven by the magic that had raised them. Our best weapons were fire and Dain.
We waited for the battalions at the front to retreat to our position, gathering our strength to take over the fight.
We had food and healers ready for the vanguard, and all in our wake we’d left engineers and base camps, a supply line intended for a single retreat.
Every body we let fall was an enemy to face.
Our goal was simple: minimize fatalities as we slowed and winnowed the dead.
Fae war-maneuvers relied on a mixture of mortal footsoldiers and fae specialist fighters.
Fae were faster and more powerful in the short term, but our endurance was much lower than mortals; we needed to be rotated in and out of battle so that we could rest. Mortals, on the other hand, could go for days without dropping dead when in full fighting fit.
The First Army, composed almost entirely of fae, had the specialty skills needed to fight monsters and constructs.
The Second Army, with nearly eighty percent mortals, was designed for war.
Alluin and I put together a plan for the fighting retreat that took advantage of the powerful infantry force we had at hand, pairing two squads of the Second Army with two First Army squads.
The Second Army squads and one of the First Army squads would engage the dead; the second First Army squad would fall back with any injured to the rear field medics, get healed, down the horrid slurry of stimulants and liquid nutrients that would keep them on their feet, and then swap out with the fighting First Army squad to repeat the maneuver.
I spent the early part of the evening with my soldiers, joking and playing a few rounds of dice.
None of the mortals had ever seen army-to-army battle, but they told stories about games and plays in their world about fighting the undead, and most of them seemed to have no issue with desecrating reanimated bodies.
“They’re dead already, ain’t they?” one of my soldiers asked with a laugh, slapping me on the back. “Always wanted to see how I’d do in a zombie apocalypse. Who knew I’d get a shot, eh? Let’s go chase some glory, Commander.”
And that was that, I supposed. It was going to be a gruelling fight. If my people could go into it with high spirits and a desire to bash the skulls of murdered civilians in, that seemed like the best I could hope for.
Alluin let me drag him to bed for a few hours. He knew as well as I did that once the dead army reached us, there would be no more sleep until the war was done. Even the early reports had made it clear that the dead didn’t rest. We needed every ounce of endurance we could scrape together.
“I’m frightened,” he whispered while we lay there in the dark, my shield-love curled up on his side with me spooning him from behind.
“Only a fool wouldn’t be frightened,” I whispered back. I nuzzled his neck, breathing in his scent as if it could keep me from destruction. “I’m frightened, too.”
We lay there for a long while in silence, the sounds of the camp muffled by our tent. I slowly drifted towards sleep. My body was well-trained for resting in terrible circumstances. I knew I needed sleep, so I would rest.
“Zhi?” Alluin asked hesitantly, when I was on the verge of sleeping.
“Hmm?”
His fingers laced through mine. “Whatever happens, I want you to know that these past centuries with you have been the best of my long life.” He let out a shaky breath, like he was trying not to cry.
“Your name is written on my heart with indelible marks. I cannot bear for the world to be without you. So even if I die, will you live for me? Please?”
I squeezed my eyes closed, fighting the sting of tears. “Don’t ask that of me, Lu. Don’t die. There isn’t a world for me without you in it.”
Alluin lifted my hand to his mouth and placed a trembling kiss on my palm. “Will you at least promise not to seek to end your life if mine ends?” he asked. “That, if the choice is granted to you, you’ll choose to live?”
“Will having that promise make you more reckless with your own life?” I asked, my throat going tight.
“I want you to live. I want to go home after this and wash the soot and sweat out of your hair. I want to hold you until I can trust that you’re safe, and then I want to curl up in our bed together and be happy together.
You’re my varama tree, Lu,” I said hoarsely.
“If you fall, my heart and soul goes with you. Will you leave your shaeulo to mourn in the broken branches you leave behind?”
He shuddered and pressed back against me.
“A different promise, then,” Alluin said, his voice rough.
“Promise to go to Droesh at least one more time, and I will promise the same. If one of us falls and the other cannot do anything but fall with them, then we can at least rest with the bones of our family.”
Our family. He said it so easily. The memory of that night in Droesh when Alluin had made me his heir flickered into my mind again—the starlight, the flames, the taste of his blood.
It sank in, finally, that Droesh was mine.
That all of it—the land, the flowers, the songs, the blood; all of Alluin’s long and storied history—was mine.
Heirs didn’t become family only when death came calling.
They were family now, as much so as the ones who carried the titles.
“Of course the answer is yes. I’ll go to Droesh again, Lu.” I clung to him, my nose and mouth against his warm skin. “I want to go with you, though. I want to show Dain the flowers again and teach Leah how to sing our lineage.”
“‘Our’?” Alluin asked shakily.
“I’m your heir, dummy,” I said, as if I hadn’t only just realized what that truly meant. “I may still use the Ulahana name, but I’m as much a Xilsatra as you are. We made a blood-pact on exactly that topic, remember? Now make your promise.”
He leaned his head to the side, baring his throat for me. “I’ll go to Droesh again,” he said in a tearful voice. “And, Zhi… I’ll try to do my very best to keep us both alive in the meantime.”
“That’s the born general I know and love.” I pressed a chaste kiss to his pulse. “Let’s go chase some glory.”