Chapter Six
Ronan
Kira makes it back to the palace just as the sun rises over the sea. I help Taran down from her back, stretching my legs and rolling my neck, stiff after hours of riding.
She’s exhausted too, and I apologize to her for pushing her so far. I feed her a bucket of her favorite herring and scratch her neck under her reins. She nuzzles against me, and I sense her feelings: concern, along with a maternal desire to protect me.
Taran watches with trepidation, his hand on the hilt of his sword, but then Marta comes over to tend to her and get her back into her stable, and he relaxes somewhat when Kira’s lion legs lower into the hay.
“So you’ll be leading my griffin legion then, I take it?”
Taran yawns loudly, shaking his head. “Never again. I’m not sure I’m in any condition to lead any of your legions today.”
“That makes two of us. But I’m not sure Nithyria is going to give us the day off.”
In reality, I’m not expecting much from today’s fighting.
The Nithyrian forward regions have organized, but they’re no match for Faros’s defenses.
The city’s earth-born have spent all day and night digging ditches around the walls and repairing the defensive barriers, the nature-born and water-born have draped soaking sheets and skins over the roofs of important buildings to protect them from fire, the fire-born have targeted any siege weapon that dares come too close, and the air-born have repelled most of their missile-fire, with the shadow-born helping all of them keep working through the night.
The entire city has organized itself to repel the attack, and so far, we’ve been successful. I doubt much more fighting will occur until the rear legions advance, but I’ll be there at the front nonetheless.
“Perhaps if you stay up on the walls today, sir,” says Taran, knowing exactly what I’ll say.
“And miss all the fun?” There won’t be any fun to be had, and we both know it. But I do indulge Taran a bit by not heading immediately for my horse and armor. “Let’s check in with the war council first; tell them what we saw. Then we can decide.”
The palace has been busy over the past couple of days rearranging itself to support the war effort.
The ballrooms have been turned into an infirmary, the courtyards into forges and training grounds, the kitchens opened to make use of as much of the perishable food we have as possible before it spoils.
The war council has moved from my living room into the library, the room my father used for the same purpose just a few years ago.
The situation, as they explain it to me, isn’t great, but it could be far worse.
We’re equipped to withstand something like eighteen months of siege conditions, but we expect to breach the naval blockade long before then.
There’s an issue of certain Selaran Houses joining with Nithyria, House Faber being the greatest blow due to their weapon stores, but most of the Houses great and small are doing what they can to support Selara in the field and within the walls of Faros.
The most pressing issue is the elixir situation.
The Alchemists’ Guild upheaval, while apparently unrelated to the Nithyrian war plans, was nonetheless incredibly poorly timed.
It has left us with almost no elixirs to care for the wounded in the war, of which there will be many, and virtually no means to make more without freeing everyone who conspired against me.
“You could order them to send some of the gold alchemists out of the refining rooms to make elixirs. Or you could keep the others in chains, sir,” says Cyrus, stroking his silver mustache as he does when he knows I’m going to cave.
“Or bring their equipment into the jails if you have to. People will die without the elixirs, your majesty. You know this.”
I do know this, but I also know that it won’t stop at the elixirs.
At one point, Cyrus mentioned that Zara’s research into magic suppression could be useful in the war effort.
He knew how I would react to the suggestion; I know he only made it to make his later asks seem more reasonable.
This game we play is nothing new, and I suspect we’ll play it many more times before the fighting is over.
But he is right about the elixirs. I know he is.
“Bring them back to the Guild in chains and under constant supervision. They may make healing elixirs only. Actually, add silphium to that.” Silphium, the contraceptive elixir.
The last thing this city needs during the siege is a baby boom.
“Nothing else. Those are my own people outside of the gates. I’ll fight them if I must, but I’m not turning untested alchemical research on them. ”
“Very good, sir,” says Cyrus.
Before I don my armor, I stop in to check on Quinn.
It’s strange to see her so motionless in the bed where the healers have kept her, to see her skin so devoid of color.
She has always been the brightest and liveliest of my friends.
There’s been no sign of her waking. The healer who tends to her doesn’t tell me this is a bad sign, but I know it must be.
“Are you more awake now?” I ask Taran as we tighten our chainmail out in the courtyard. “I should tell Cyrus to add stimulant elixirs to the allowed list. We’re going to need them.”
“I took a short nap while you were arguing with Cyrus.”
“I should have done that too.”
Sylvie is sleeping now, I think. It’s not like the drugged sleep they’ve had her in during the night that makes me lose track of her entirely.
It’s a peaceful lull in her emotions, familiar to me now after feeling it for weeks.
I hope for her sake that her dreams are pleasant.
I know she doesn’t care for her brother—let’s face it, who does?
—but at least he had the sense not to bring her to the battlefield.
She’s safe for now. This distance kills me, but at least she’s safe.
“Ready?” says Taran. He’s replaced his Royal Guard blade with a freshly sharpened longsword, and I do the same. We both take spears from the forge, the same weapons my people are using. This isn’t the time for beautiful craftmanship or fancy gilded blades with ancient names.
This is the time for steel, hardened and sharpened and ready for battle.
I wish my nerves had gotten the message. Although my mind is too tired to race, my body remembers the feeling before battle, and it sends the message to my shaking hands, my legs that won’t stand still, the pounding of my heart beneath my mail.
I could die today. That’s true every day, of course, but like everyone, I manage to avoid thinking about it long enough to go about my business most of the time. But here, on the brink of battle, it’s harder to forget.
It’s harder still to forget when I think of what I would lose if I did.
What if the last time I saw Sylvie was truly the last time?
She’d fought alongside me, she’d fought for me, in the streets, fought her own people.
I kept us going as long as I could, but in the end, I hadn’t even been able to heal her aching muscles.
I’d held her in my arms, feeling her pain and terror and misery and had been able to do nothing about it.
There was nothing I could offer her to make it go away, nothing I could say to make it right.
And now there’s a war between us. This entire war lies between the two of us.
And I could despair of it, I could lament it and scream to the gods how unfair it is to finally have the one thing I’ve ever wanted only to lose it before it had even truly begun, how cruel of them to force the woman I love to choose between her family and a life with me.
Because I know she loves me, no matter how much Taran or the others may doubt it. She told me she loves me, and I could never dishonor her by doubting it when she’s given me no reason to do so.
No, I will not despair of this war, no matter what it has cost me. What it will cost me to bring her back. Instead, I will let my love for her guide me. Let it show me the way back to her, let it motivate me to be the man I need to be, to fight whatever I need to fight, to have her back.
Across the miles, I send my love to her. I have no idea if she can feel it, but I hope she can.
I kiss my fingertips and hold them out to the western sky, and then I lower my helmet.
One breath. Left foot forward. Strike.
Breathe out. Right foot. Block. Strike again.
The battle is like a dance, strangely rhythmic, almost automatic in the way my arms and feet move, the way my eyes snap to injury, the way my magic stirs to heal it.
Before I walked onto the battlefield for the first time at seventeen, I thought the fear would keep me focused, but I was wrong.
It’s strange how quickly your body adapts to the state of constant threat, how quickly it fades into the background until afterwards, when you’re walking among the dead, kneeling to help the injured or delivering the final, merciful blow, you can’t even remember much of the fight that came before.
Maybe it’s a defense of the mind that does it.
Some part of you that protects you from understanding the true peril of the situation, that keeps you from crumbling under the pressure, that makes you move forward to strike again and again.
Some instinct towards self-preservation that drowns out all the other warring voices in your head, voices that are aware that one wrong move—one unlucky move—could be your last.
An enemy earth-born raises a path through the ditch, and a narrow column charges forward into our formation. It’s a desperate move, a foolish move made by a boy, a bare-faced child of no more than sixteen. I watch him fall as I parry a strike to my shoulder, another son that won’t return home.
The people I cut through are the children of my kingdom, the parents, the grandparents, even. A thrust into the side of someone’s daughter. A slice through the neck of someone’s father. I save my magic. It isn’t needed here, not for killing.
The fight doesn’t last long, not this time.
It’s a test of our defenses rather than a battle, and we pass the test quickly.
The Nithyrian legion breaks formation as we overwhelm them and push them back to their camp.
I give the order to allow them to retreat, and a pair of horn blasts echoes it down the line.
We won’t defeat them today, not here on this field.
But every victory holds them back a little longer.
Every step forward is a step they’ll have to take back to threaten Faros, every inch buys us a little more time.
I walk through the lines as they separate, healing wounds as I go. And then I do something my father never would have done, something my own advisors will admonish me for doing.
I walk through the fallen enemies, and I offer them a chance to surrender.
They are my people too.
Not all of them agree. “Take your fucking mercy and shove it up your ass,” spits a woman with a deep wound in her leg. “I fight for Nithyria, and I’ll die for it too.”
I give her what she asks for. Even I’m not so foolish as to bring someone with that level of determination into my besieged city.
But when I find the earth-born boy who led the charge, he cries at my feet. “Please,” he says. “Please help me.”
I give him what he asks for too. I pull the arrows from his chest and heal the wounds they leave behind as best I can. Then I heal the hip wound that brought him to the ground.
“Can we afford to take prisoners now, sir?” asks Taran as I help the boy up. “They wouldn’t do the same for us if it had gone the other way.”
I point at a fallen member of the city guard on the ground not a dozen feet away. She’s beyond healing. “He can eat her ration.”
Taran shakes his head at my soft heart as I knew he would, but he doesn’t argue. The healers from the city temples take the field and join me. By the time the sun is overhead, we’ve carried thirty wounded back into Faros, more than half of them Nithyrian.
“Urgent message for you, your majesty,” says a palace servant on my fifth trip back out into the field.
I groan and take the folded note, which can only be bad news. Whatever is inside is almost certainly going to keep me from the rest I so desperately need at this point.
Sighing and squinting at it won’t make it go away, so I open it and face the music.
I was wrong. It isn’t bad news after all.
“Let’s go,” I say to Taran, pushing the elixir I’m carrying into the arms of a nearby healer.
“What’s happened?” he asks, following close behind.
“Quinn’s awake.”