The Humbled (The Lost Words: Volume 4) (51 page)

But maybe it was just a metaphor. The book might be lying, revealing a childish illusion of some greater truth in a way that a nine-year-old could understand. Maybe her son was destined for greatness, and the only way he could perceive that was through princely deeds. Sheldon was a smart lad, and she did not doubt he could achieve greatness one day if properly guided.

Only, looking outside the window, she could see that Caytor no longer belonged to its people. There were no people left. Just these Naum strangers. Sheldon might be a prince, but it would be of a nation that spoke a different language, abode by a different culture.

Maybe Sirtai? Yes, that could be it. Her son might succeed in her homeland? Perhaps the future was bright and happy, but she still had not deciphered all the pieces, and she was drowning in the gruesome parts. Perhaps Calemore would lose in his war. What then? What did it mean for her? Or for Sheldon? And what if he won?

What if he won?

She looked at her son. He was everything she had. Nothing else mattered.

“Shel.”

The boy raised his head from the impromptu battlefield. “Yes, Mom?” He was bored, but he did not look sad or angry.

“You know I love you, Son, more than anything in the world?”

Sheldon nodded. “I know, Mom.”

Suddenly, she had an urge to hug him. She rose and walked over, knelt by the mattress. Her hands crushed him to her chest, and he protested. Sheldon did not like to be hugged. No man did, as far as she knew.

“I won’t let anything hurt you.”

“Can I be a prince, Mom?” he whispered against her bosom.

Nigella stroked his head before he yanked himself away, slowly but persistently. What could she tell him? A prince of what? But he deserved it. After all the hard life he’d had, all the abandonment, he deserved greatness.

“Maybe.”

He pushed his soldiers away. “Are you crying, Mom?”

Almost guiltily, she removed her spectacles and swiped a lone tear away. “No. It’s too dark, and my eyes are tired.”

“I want to read more,” Sheldon insisted.

“That book is not good for you. It’s a book for adults,” she tried to reason.

“But I like it. I want to know what happens next.” He squirmed.

Nigella raked her hair. “No. But you know what? When the rains end, I will ask the soldiers to try to salvage books from the library in Marlheim, if there are any left. You will like that, won’t you?”

“Can I go with them?” His face lit up.

A gust of panic slammed her, even as the torrent outside lashed against the cabin walls on all sides, trying to bring it down. “No, Son. Those men are soldiers. Their profession is dangerous. You must stay with me, here.” Then she remembered
his strange ability to understand their tongue.
One day, I will have enough courage to try to unravel that
. “You will tell me if they ask you to do anything.”

Sheldon nodded again, silent.

Nigella remained on the floor, her knees cold and itching. Her son, a prince. Who would believe that? It sounded nice, almost story-like, a poor boy rising to greatness and glory, but then, if she glanced at the burned-out husks of the nearby town, if she stared at the convoys of hard-eyed foreigners leaving for a war of extinction in the south, the sweet illusion evaporated.

Whatever Calemore was planning, it could not be good.

Now, her son might be involved. She would die before she let harm touch him.

When it came to her boy, there was nothing in this world that could stop her. Not even a pale-eyed witch whom she thought she might be in love with.

I’ll die first
, she swore.
Die or kill
.

CHAPTER 36

W
hat kind of enemy does not respond to your baits?
Mali wondered.
One that is too stupid to comprehend the situation or one too powerful to care?

So far, the foreign army had not bothered halting its advance just because they had a thorn in their backside. Oh, they would send a sizable body of troops to engage the pest now and then, but the vast legion would just plow on south.

Mali hated being wrong. And with this white foe, everything she decided turned out badly.

She had thought severing its supply route would cripple it, or at least slow it down, make it distracted and weak. She had thought attacking from behind would give the enemy pause, force it to reconsider its plan, make it veer off its course. Perhaps she had contributed to the defense of the realms somehow, but it would take a brilliant strategist to explain it to her, because she could not see it.

They were somewhere in Caytor now. Or maybe Athesia, her son’s realm. She wasn’t certain. Without any people around to tell her whose taxes they tried to avoid once or twice a year, it was hard telling where the borders touched. Any stream, hill, or large village could be a landmark. Without any folks left, everything looked the same. Wild, eerie, grim.

“What do you think?” she rasped.

Alexa was licking her lower lip industriously, concentrating. They had one old map, but it depicted a world full of people. Still, they thought they were somewhere in northern Athesia, about five days from Bassac. The road they followed was supposed to be the Traders’ Stretch, and it supposedly went all the way to Pain Daye, and that was where James might be. Only days back, they had passed a large intersection where the road forked south toward Ecol, Gasua, and eventually Roalas.

Some Eracians called this artery the Road of Old Memories, because it had barely been traveled for centuries, until Emperor Adam restored the commerce between Caytor and her land. Well, perhaps it was that. Because she could not really be certain.

The river bisecting the horizon was definitely the Hebane, and it was fat with rain and mud. The banks were overflowing, licking at the willows and twenty-foot cattails growing on the marshy banks. A long bridge ran across, and half a dozen livestock barges thudded gently against one another in the shallows on the western side.

Getting ready to step onto the rafts was the tail of the northern enemy.

It was such a perfect ambush location, and she knew it, and she knew the enemy also knew. Finley and she had been nipping at their heels for weeks now, taunting, teasing, raiding, killing them. A few times, the monster had reared and roared and fought back, but always kept on moving south, almost fanatically.

So the northerners must be aware of the few Eracians trying to be heroes just behind them. Why would they not take more precaution then? Why leave their baggage train almost
unprotected? Why bother loading the barges when the bridge could also be used?

Mali suspected it was damaged. Some of the pillars stood at funny angles, and maybe the floods and the strain had made sections partially collapse or bend. She wondered if the entire army had crossed the river just there or followed the near bank south to another, more favorable location. But the torrents had washed away the prints, making scouting that much trickier.

“I sure do not like it,” Alexa admitted at last, and spat.

“It’s such a succulent prize,” Mali whispered. If she ordered an attack, it would be a slaughter. The enemy would be pinned against the riverside, unable to maneuver, with no cavalry to counterattack. Their precious cargo would be lost. So why did she fear this?

Ever since leaving the Barrin estate, they had enjoyed great success in combat. A couple of large, even tense skirmishes, a dozen smaller ones, countless interceptions of patrol units and small supply caravans, with few losses. She should feel confident and emboldened. Instead, she was chewing on fear.

“I really don’t like it,” Alexa insisted.

Mali nodded. She was still trying to figure out the terrain. But the plains and small, modest hills all looked the same. The heart of the realms was mostly flat, a bad place to get lost in. You had no way of knowing where you really were.

Theresa wiped her runny nose on her sleeve. The woman was sick, but she refused to relinquish her duty even for a few days. “If we defeat them, that means, what, five or six thousand fewer of these bastards to worry about? And we gain control of the river crossing. So if the enemy needs to get back, they either travel north, all the way to Elfast, or go south to Ecol. With the winter closing in, the Hebane is not going to get any slower or less deep, so it’s a strategic win for us.”

“Unless it’s a trap.” Mali voiced her suspicion for the tenth time that day.

“I don’t think we should engage them,” Nolene added. “After all, we’ve long left Eracia. It’s no longer our war. We should go back home.”

Mali looked at her youngest major. The woman was right, in a way. Fighting this war of sacrifice sometimes felt pointless. Who were they defending really? Their own realm? Their monarch? Who was their monarch?

“For the time being, the enemy wants to hurry south, but I have a feeling they will circle back to Eracia once they finish whatever they are looking for.” Alexa knelt down. “They have ravaged half our realm already. So it’s coincidence or luck that took them away from Somar, but this isn’t an army to leave an unfinished affair behind them.”

Like us
, Mali thought. She had other reasons to press south. She wanted to get closer to her son. She wanted to meet James. She wanted to help him. And the enemy force was marching south, into his empire, and it would probably not stop until it saw the shores of the Velvet Sea.

“We haven’t come here just to admire their organizational skills,” Finley chimed in. Mali had almost forgotten the colonel was there. But he and his staff mostly listened, deferring to her.

“We do our best,” Mali murmured.
Or die trying
. She had never liked that idiom.

Alexa grimaced. “This is bad. The earth is wet. Progress will be slow and tiring.”

“Our food reserves are low,” Mali reminded her. A lithe, fast army could pack only so much salted beef and old cheese. They had a big advantage over the northern enemy, but that also meant the land was nude of anything edible by the time they got there. The abandonment, the rot, the bad weather,
and the enemy hunger did their work quite thoroughly. “Those carts look heavy.”

“A mouse got caught in a trap,” Alexa singsonged.

Mali sighed. “We need to cross the river. We need to get to Ecol. If the town is empty, I want to salvage whatever we can before the snow. And if there are any Athesians left there, I want them to join our side so we can fight together.”

Her eyes scanned the crowd around her, seeking doubt and opposition. They lingered on Gordon a moment too long. He had not said anything about her affair with Bjaras, but he knew. If he were hurt or just vexed, he never showed it. He pretended things were as usual, but he lacked his usual gusto, his passion. Perhaps she was a coward, and she had ruined everything, yet again.

The fight would be a good distraction from her self-loathing, she figured.

Less than an hour later, the Third Battalion and the Third Division moved forward, side by side, Finley’s heavier body on the east flank. Mali sat on a horse, in the center of her force, surrounded by a small guard. They just plowed on, toward the Hebane.

The enemy stirred, and soon enough, shrill pipes moaned against the overcast sky. The two fishing villages hugging the bridge came alive. The convoy became a confused centipede, trying to untangle its many legs, but it could hardly move in time before the Eracian contingent slammed into it.

White-clad soldiers started forming a weak, disarrayed picket line, but it looked pathetic. Hardly professional, with too-wide gaps, a bending front too near the sloping riverbank. Mali did not object to easy victories. They were preferable to hard ones, and to losses.

Halfway to the enemy lines, she noticed Finley was lagging. That annoyed her. After so much time together, she expected more from her male colleagues. They were supposed to be able to march in discipline, and definitely maintain a unified spearhead.

“What is he doing?” she remarked loudly, but mostly to herself.

Alexa shielded her eyes. It was a dreary gray day, but the cloud cover was still quite brilliant, and patches of it shone like white gold, hiding the sun behind them. “Fuck.”

Mali reined her horse. It fidgeted, displeased to halt in a stream of soldiers. The line parted and flowed around her, girls with grim faces, concentrating on counting their steps and watching their comrades on the left and right.

Then she saw it, too, and she understood why Finley was lagging.

No road dust, but she could see a blot of white-clad troops approaching from the north, converging toward Finley’s division. The enemy wedge was huge, and it probably counted just as many souls as the supply train near the river. The odds had just doubled against her.

But that wasn’t all. The wedge was moving too fast for infantry.

The enemy had horses, thousands of them, and it seemed to have learned how to ride.

“Shit,” she heard herself say.
Stay calm, composed. You must remain confident
. “Keep moving.” Finley would have to fight his own war now. If she stopped, she would just create a choke point, making it impossible for all the troops in the rear to maneuver. Her own battalion might have fewer troops, but with its several detachments, it was a powerful, experienced force, and it could probably defeat the riverside
contingent, especially since she had the advantage of terrain and movement.