Chapter 23 Valley of the Vale Blues
Valley of the Vale Blues
Day three hundred and fifty
Dear Diary,
It’s been a while since I last wrote. Here’s the new beef—we spent a week in Redmoth debating future plans and preparations for the march on Warshire.
We also appointed a new magnate for the city, recruited many of its citizens into the rebellion, and I joined the Fleet Foot Club.
Ever since I took them to Sebastián’s Scrumptious Bakery, they’d been trying to make me an honorary member.
Ha! They were so insistent that I finally relented, but only if they made Benjamin and her kids members as well.
The joke is on them. All of their rules were boring rules like being honest, helpful, and benevolent.
If they knew that Benjamin purposefully peed inside random rebels’ helmets and I let her, they’d feel like fools for not vetting their new initiates.
Anyways, we’re approaching the Valley of the Vale and should start passing through its villages tomorrow.
It’s funny, because I guess in my extreme terror while fleeing south I’d forgotten just how boring the roads are.
There’s very little to look at, just grass and hills, although there are little pansies growing along the trail.
Drezella put purple ones in Bronwen’s hair this morning, and it made the green in her eyes pop
Morfran paused, noticed what he’d written, and crossed the last sentence out.
War preparations are going fine. We have a great deal more numbers now, even though I’ve no idea how exactly we’ll invade the three cities of Warshire.
Brim is also upset since we lost the rebellion’s only knight, who he says was a bright symbol for the rebellion.
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention: Gueldefore ran away the day after our duel.
Hugh saw him stuffing his gear into his bags and taking off on his horse.
Despite my fears, no one seemed to take his last words seriously, so right now my secret is still safe. Though we’ve not seen him since.
I don’t miss him.
As Morfran had written in his diary, the lands of the Valley of the Vale were quite boring. Summer was straddling autumn, and the grasses that swept over the rolling hills were thick and dying and the color of bleached bone.
Because they were boring, Morfran had taught those nearby how to play the alphabet game, where they’d try to find all the letters in the alphabet on passing signs.
He’d made it clear to J, thanks to advertisements about the 64th Jam Convention of Warshire.
Halfway through the game they ran into complications when half of those playing said they couldn’t read, which baffled Morfran as much as it irritated him.
“Why wait until now to say you can’t read?
” he’d argued. Eventually he dissolved the game and joined the group ahead of him, but quickly realized he’d made another mistake.
This group could not stand the silence and began to sing, thinking they could improve on it.
They could not improve on it.
Morfran took to isolation, set Dirtclobber on a steady pace, and tried not to think about anything.
Not the coming days, when he’d have to fight his men at their home base in Warshire.
Not the fact that he still hadn’t found the right sword, and how was he to lead an army if he was constantly hemming and hawing over his choice of a weapon?
Not the thought of what happened if—when?
—the rebels discovered that he was the one responsible for their twenty years of pain and suffering.
He felt slightly better about this whenever he helped Bronwen discover more loopholes—and limits—with her hex, or made Brim laugh at a joke, or taught Bill and Theodore a new technique on the sword.
But would that be enough? At what point would he repay all the pain he’d caused?
He’d seen the burned-out villages while passing through the kingdom.
Seen the shoeless beggars asking for a crust of bread in the hamlets and villages they visited.
He’d wrecked these people’s lives. He could spend the rest of his life trying to mend the cracks he’d made, but the signs of the cracks would still be there in the end.
It was this that justified his actual plans for the battle on Warshire: he’d help them conquer the first two cities, Lestershire and Mestershire, but they were on their own for attacking the remaining city of Warchester, infiltrating Castle Atrago, and killing Ravana.
He planned to be halfway to Redmoth by then, where he’d jump on a ship to go west this time.
He couldn’t repair the damage he’d done.
So he’d try until it was convenient, and then he’d leave.
Of course, this was all if he could come up with a plan to conquer Warshire first, which made him lose sleep at night, especially whenever anyone asked him about it. The question always went:
“Hey, Bernard! How’re the plans going for our most important battle of the war that’ll decide our fate?”
His desire was to answer:
“Oh, you know. They aren’t.”
But he couldn’t tell them that. Ever since the duel with Gueldefore, the rebels adored him.
They hollered in glee whenever he entered the room.
He got too many love taps to count whenever he walked past the daily training sessions.
Drezella gave him flowers on the daily, Brim trusted him enough to leave the plans in his lap, and even Hugh was asking for his advice.
It all pressed on his guilt, all of it.
By the time they reached the villages scattered like breadcrumbs throughout the Valley of the Vale, it was clear to everyone that although their rebellion friends had been successful, it’d been a tough few weeks of battle.
Entire hamlets were burned to the ground.
Corpses from both sides were left to decompose inside crow cages hanging from tall trees.
Dead collectors tugged their carts around, shouting to everyone to discard their dead on the pile in the back.
Owain and Bill tried to lighten the mood by seizing Hugh and flinging him atop the pile, saying he was dead weight, but even that did little to ease tensions.
When they reached Sunflor, the northernmost town six miles from Warshire, everyone’s anger and disgust had reached its boiling point. For impaled on dozens of pikes in an open, bloodied field was an obscene number of severed feet.
“The work of Queen Ravana.” Brim spat at his boots while standing atop the hill overlooking the vast field. “She’s sending a message.”
Morfran shifted uneasily.
“Yes, a message that Lord Morfran isn’t in Warshire.” Bronwen was beside him, absently spinning her dagger in fancy twirls between her fingers. The sun was setting, and it cast the father-daughter pair in a pale, golden light.
Morfran was already looking at her. “What makes you say that?”
“Scenes of lingering violence aren’t his style,” she said. “Ravana is all about gore and shock horror. If it were him, he’d leave a bloodied boot or two in the field. Make the horror more subtle. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but he’s a bit more tasteful than his wife.”
He forced back a grim smile. He was touched to find she considered him more digestible than Ravana, and impressed that she’d theorized correctly that he was not there. But he was uneasy that what everyone else considered mere rumor she believed as fact.
He tried to find the good in the situation. “Perhaps he’s gone-gone. Maybe we just have to kill Ravana.”
She turned, her expression sharp, and he was reminded of the Bronwen he first met in the forest, the vengeful, callous woman who rarely cracked a smile.
Her severity faded as she looked at him, and he was left wondering who she’d be if he hadn’t killed her true love.
“I understand you were friends,” she said softly.
“But he needs to be eradicated just as much as she does. I’ll chase him across continents if I have to. ”
Damn this woman. Her drive was praiseworthy. If only her desire for vengeance didn’t conflict with his desire to live. She left towards their campsite for the night.
Brim glanced away from the field to look at him. “You’ve been rather secretive about the official plan to attack Warshire these past few weeks.” He paused. “Let me guess. You don’t have one.”
Morfran sighed. He didn’t have a plan. He had twenty-seven plans. All of them had flaws, holes big enough to stick an invading army through, and each one ended in one thing: the deaths of too many rebels.
They’d snowballed into a worthy resistance.
People from all directions had flocked to the Valley of the Vale to join the last push into Warshire.
They had ex-soldiers, spies, warriors. A collection of top-of-the-line weapons they’d stolen from more shipments.
And heart. Morfran had been both repelled and enchanted by their heart and wholesomeness.
And yet Ravana had been hoarding armies meant for all of the kingdom up in Warshire. They’d be outnumbered two to one. No, three to one. And she had her magic ring; that alone would provide enough manpower to slaughter people by the dozens.
It didn’t help that they all had gold prices on their heads.
There’d been Wanted: Dead or Mostly Dead posters littered throughout the inns and pubs of the Valley of the Vale.
Brim was priced at 500 gold pieces, his men 250 apiece.
Bronwen was priced at 175; apparently, his men didn’t know she was the Red Rogue, otherwise it would’ve higher.
Morfran, or rather “Bernard the Necromancer,” was worth 1,000 gold pieces, which he was quite proud of, but which also meant they couldn’t waltz around in cities still belonging to his rule.
It had to be a covert mission. But then how to sneak into the city?