Blades Of Illusion: Crown Service #2 Page 2

  “These lands are supposed to be filled with fields of golden wheat and brown barley for as far as the eye can see,” she muttered distastefully as she eyed a frog-like creature that gazed right back at her with two of its three eyes; the last one tracked on an insect she couldn’t see.

  As Ezekiel had nodded in understanding and given the captain his somewhat-sincere apologies that he couldn’t help, after all, he was stuck here— too—and if the captain was lost, so were they all, he kept a tight grip on Sara’s left wrist. Because she wasn’t thinking of pleasantries or even giving the man who had brought them here a sympathetic look. No, Sara knew and Ezekiel knew, that she was very likely to bring up her clenched fist in a swift left hook, being ambidextrous had its benefits after all, and clock the captain straight into his nose. She hoped her fist broke the captain’s fine, patrician nose too. It would serve him right.

  Sara couldn’t abide incompetents any more than she could evil-doers. This captain, in her mind’s eye, was a lot of one and a slight bit of the other. A person had to have a little bit of evil in them to blithely make the decision to leave his mercenaries in the path of an assault like sitting ducks while he took cover. Sara’s left wrist had ached, not from Ezekiel’s grip, but from the tremor that ran through her muscles as she fought the urge to jerk free and assault her captain. It would do them no good here. She had known that. She hadn’t liked it, but she had known.

  Under the captain’s assessing gaze, she had watched as he had figured out that she would deck him if he had stayed a minute more. To his credit, Captain Barthis Simon had turned away quietly, not questioning the defiant rage in her orange eyes that undoubtedly made them glow like the coals of a banked fire. He didn’t turn away because he was afraid; he, too, was one of the fabled battle mages. He had turned away because he was smart, and Sara Fairchild was a fight he didn’t need at the moment.

  As she had watched him walk away with rage and disgust in her heart, Sara remembered huffing and irritably yanking her left wrist out of Ezekiel’s bruising hold. She had stared at the retreating captain’s back and said to Ezekiel beside her, “Don’t ever get in my way again.”

  “Fine, I’ll just let you hang in the gallows for assaulting an officer,” he had said dryly.

  Sara had then turned to him with a solemn look on her face and a bit of the anger still in her eyes.

  Ezekiel had stilled at the look. “I was only trying to help.”

  “When I need your help, I’ll ask for it.”

  A tic had appeared in Ezekiel’s eye. “You see, Sara, that’s something friends do.”

  She folded her arms crossly as she watched him. “What?”

  “They help without being asked.”

  Before she could get another word in, Ezekiel Crane had proceeded to do what he did best in a huff—ignore her. He had strode forward silently. She had followed moments later, and they had been silent marchers for the better part of an hour before Ezekiel broke as he spotted a crested-something-or-other bird that he had to get Sara’s attention for.

  “Look at that, Sara! That’s a black-crested Willow Pike C—,” Ezekiel had exclaimed.

  Sara hadn’t paid his words the least bit of mind. But she had obediently trained her eyes on the bird Ezekiel’s trembling finger pointed at while putting a hand on his raised arm and forcing him to lower it. Caution had forced her to put a wary hand on a knife even as her eyes sought out his prey. She wouldn’t know if the bird was one of those caged balls of feathers so popular with nobles on Market Street or a terrifying, razor-beaked predator until she had set her eyes on it. Relief that it was the former and not the latter put a small half-smile on her face. You could never actually tell if whatever Ezekiel was pointing at like an attraction in the central square was dangerous or simply interesting. He seemed to find both qualities mesmerizing. Both because the bird was the former and he was talking to her again. Sara tensely wondered for a minute if she could have trusted Ezekiel to shoot it out of the sky; she hadn’t exactly had a chance to test his mettle with the old bow-and-arrow.

  She had reluctantly decided to just be grateful the issue hadn’t come up.

  “You’re sure it’s not a threat?” she had teased.

  “Of course it’s not a threat,” had said Ezekiel, “But I don’t know what it’s doing here. They’re woodland birds, not swamp creatures.”

  She had watched the black and white winged creature flit from branch-to-branch before it took flight, away from the direction they were heading. Its movement left her both with a sense of unease and cautious satisfaction. Satisfaction because she had been right. Unease because being right meant they were stuck up the creek without a paddle, so to speak. In other words, they were screwed.

  “It’s going away from us,” Sara said.

  “I know,” grumbled Ezekiel as he hastily put away the sketchbook he had brought out from a pocket of his non-regulation gear.

  “That’s bad,” Sara said.

  “I know,” Ezekiel repeated with slumped shoulders while staring ahead. Then he side-eyed Sara in surprise. “Wait. Why do you think it was bad?”

  It was obvious he thought it was the end of the world because he had just missed his opportunity to illustrate the rare bird.

  “Because,” Sara said as she looked forward into the endless swamp that lay before them, “You never want to go somewhere a damned bird won’t, and...“

  “And?” Ezekiel prodded after she was silent for a moment.

  “And,” said Sara grimly, “We’re three miles into this swamp trek, by my estimations, and we’ve yet to see anything as close to normal as that bird, rare though it is, as we walked by. That tells me two things: one, the builder was right—this swamp is mage-made.”

  “And the other?” Ezekiel asked quietly.

  Sara looked over at him, “That we’ve barely reached the beginning. The bird turned around because it could. It would rather turn back to fly to normal land, presumably, than go further into this swamp.”

  “Oh,” said Ezekiel with a thoughtful look. “How much longer do you think the swamp lasts?”

  “I don’t know,” Sara remembered answering, “And that’s what worries me.”

  Ezekiel nodded to the rapidly receding form of their red-haired captain visible in the distance and said, “You’re not the only one.”

  Chapter 3

  Sara eyed the captain’s back, her gaze still filled with anger, but pure pity resided in it as well. He may have abandoned his men, but she doubted he wanted to be anywhere near this group of mercenaries if he tried the same with them. Two hundred-and-seventy-five mercenaries meant two hundred-and-seventy-five well-trained killers who would hunt him down at the first sign of treachery.

  They may have been loyal to him, but they weren’t fools. Sara had seen what he had done to his other mercenaries. So had the surviving division—now her division, as she been promptly promoted after surviving the fray and returning to the fold with a very valuable prisoner in tow. But it wasn’t just Sara the captain had to worry about, because it was those two hundred-and-seventy-five mercenaries who had seen him abandon his other troops without batting an eyelash. They wouldn’t care that he had done it for the greater good, not when it came down to their asses being on the line. Mercenaries were mercenaries for a reason. They were ruthless killers and shrewd practitioners of war. Everyone knew that you didn’t join the mercenaries’ guild because of your loyalty to the crown. You joined for the sense of the adventure, the excellent pay of the guild, and the damned-fearsome fight training you received.

  Which was why it was so odd that Sara Fairchild had elected to join the guild. Her family made it their creed and their passion to protect and serve the empire. As a whole. Not for money, but for loyalty to the crown. After her father had left the gladiator’s arena, he had his choice of positions in the military, in the guilds, in private households. All offered him sums that would ransom a king. Overseas and at home. But he had chosen the empress’ service, because
he believed. He believed in their empire and its integrity.

  So the fact that he had betrayed his empress and been executed for that desertion made the blight on the family name just that much worse. That was why Sara was here. If not to clear her father’s name—which she doubted could be done—then to at least show that she had honor and was no coward. But how could she serve under a commander that was a coward himself.

  Does a warrior have honor if their leader has none?

  Should she serve under a turncoat like Barthis Simon?

  All those questions filled her head. Questions that made her doubt. Doubt her sanctity. Doubt her training. Doubt herself.

  “The answer is I have no choice,” Sara murmured to herself sadly, “None of us do. And right now I need to get to Matteas Hillan, not lead a revolt against a man who isn’t fit to herd pigs.”

  She sighed and looked around. The truth of the matter was that the captain was losing the faith of his people on his own with each passing day. She might have to do nothing. If they continued to starve and wander a swamp in circles, his precious mercenaries would turn on him without further provocation.

  The man hadn’t just left the majority of the mercenaries who served under him behind, he had watched and listened as his people were slaughtered on the open battlefield. His men and women may not challenge him on that. May have even lauded him for his foresight when it was first revealed, but make no mistake—a well-thought-out plan that foreswore their comrades was one thing; abandoning them to the depths of the swamp would be another thing entirely.

  Sara snorted. His callous leadership wasn’t the only thing she questioned about him. His morality was lacking, but it seemed that his intelligence was worse off. Captain Barthis Simon had either been too stupid to realize before it was too late that his prisoner’s wagon was stuck in the middle of an attack, or too much of a coward to order his men directly into the line of fire in order to retrieve said prisoner—Nissa Sardonien. So his careful maneuverings to keep his elite guard and the prisoner away from the center of attack had failed. That is, until Sara Fairchild had stepped forward. When the attack had commenced, Sara’s only thought was to get to a rallying vantage point with her fellow soldiers who had survived the onslaught and rout the unseen foe. Little had she known that the captain she sought for orders and strategy was the type of coward that ran for tree lines at his first opportunity. Besides, it hadn’t been long before she realized that the enemy was felling the Corcoran mercenaries like trees in a forest with a hail of poisoned arrows and rain of battle fire. The Kade mages had decimated the Corcoran company without suffering a single casualty themselves.

  It hadn’t been a battle. It hadn’t even been a rout. That would require two distinct entities coming together as foes and one fighting back the other.

  “Ha,” she laughed bitterly, “We had no foe. Instead a hail of arrows and battle fire decimated us.”

  Her first ‘battle’ had been a slaughter from the beginning. When Sara came across Nissa imprisoned in a covered wagon, she had hesitated. She wasn’t stupid. There was a reason the woman had been shackled to the wall and hidden away from prying eyes in a mage-concealed wagon. Sara hadn’t known what danger the woman presented or even who she was, but she had deduced that it would be better to bring her along rather than leave her to die. After Nissa had explained that she held value to both sides, Kade and Algardis, it had only confirmed that Sara needed to transfer this prisoner back into Algardis custody. After dodging hails of battle fire and poisoned arrows Sara had managed to reunite with one bumbling curator, and with Nissa and Ezekiel by her side, had raced into the protective darkness of the forest where arrows and fire did not fall.

  But Nissa hadn’t been as helpless she had once seemed. After what felt like hours of tramping through the dark but silent forest they had run into a group of Nissa’s compatriots.

  “Well, ambushed by a group of shady assassins would be more like it,” Sara grumbled. Assassins she had quickly dispatched thanks, in part, due to one curator. It amused and astonished Sara each time she thought about that day after which she could ‘Ezekiel Crane save my life’.

  “Ezekiel did well tackling that fat thief from the warehouse, who if possible was even more inept at fighting than he is,” Sara muttered, “But taking on an assassin? That’s something else entirely.”

  Great thing about Ezekiel? He didn’t let it go to his head. Unlike some puffed-up warriors-in-training she had grown up with. And even better. Ezekiel wasn’t too proud to attack from a distance and run. In Sara’s mind, she was as proud as a mother crow teaching her chick to scavenge on the battlefields for the first time.

  A morbid thought, but with her training Ezekiel, perhaps he could at least be good enough of a survivor to only need her protection during the most severe of battlefields. Or, at least, that was her hope.

  With a sigh as she continued walking in the never-ending swamp, Sara remembered the first time she had truly gotten a glimpse of Nissa’s character. Not the guile she displayed for others, but the empty shell she was. Sara would never forget the coldness on Nissa Sardonien’s face as she had said, “Kill her” with a simple expediency. The ‘Kill her’ order of course referring to Sara Fairchild, who stood in the way of her escape. Of course, Nissa hadn’t known—couldn’t have known—that Sara was quite capable of taking on a half dozen assassins and leaving them in bloody piles in her wake.

  Even if she had, that wouldn’t have stopped her from ordering her men to take Sara on. There was no bond between them. Hell, Sara was planning to turn Nissa over to the Algardis empress’s men as soon as she could. And yet still, Sara had flinched when that order came. The coldness and the efficiency in the simple wave of her hand to a black-clothed assassin in the shadows with a red band about his bicep as Nissa said with a blankness that left a chill down Sara’s spine, “Kill her” told Sara more than she needed to know about the woman’s psyche.

  People who gave orders like that, with no compunction nor hesitation, weren’t normal killers. And despite her training, she had yet to come across someone like Nissa before. Her father had referred to a former commander he knew with the same snap and emotionless judgment ability as a ‘cold-hearted son of a bitch.’

  He had unfortunately happened to say it to Sara just as her mother was walking into the room. Anna Beth had swiftly corrected his language, while turning to Sara to say, “What your father meant to say was ‘psychopath’, dear.”

  Then her mother’s voice had dipped in hardness that had her father looking like a whipped dog. “We don’t use that other word here.”

  Sara hadn’t been able to keep her mouth shut then or now. So she had cheekily replied to her mother, “What? Cold-hearted or bitch?”

  The slap on her jaw that had been given as retribution stung worse than any blow that landed on her flesh in the training yard. Not because it had been thrown with more force, heavens no, but because it had come from her mother. The woman wouldn’t hurt a fly and almost never hit her daughter. Anna Beth Fairchild had other ways of making her only child suffer. She had put that inventive mind to good use in devising the second portion of Sara Fairchild’s punishment for impudence that day. Sara had been scrubbing latrines for the house for the rest of the day. And there had been a lot of them. She hadn’t said either word again in the presence of her mother since then.

  Sara sighed as she rocketed back to the present and she put one foot in front of the other. She’d been doing a lot of daydreaming lately. There was nothing else to do. If she just kept assessing the swamp around them she would go mad. Not that it was easy to just keep marching like a living doll in this muck. It was harder than it seemed since the earth below didn’t want to let go of her booted feet. The wet mud clung to each rising leg as the slime on top ran down her boots like ooze. As soon as the wet sludge released her foot with sickening plop, she had to set it down again and do the entire exercise once more with her other foot. This didn’t feel like a march to certain victory
but rather a trek further down the road to death.

  Following the man she spotted up ahead—solely by the vibrancy of his bright red hair through the density of green ferns, dulled metal shields and hunched shoulders—further into a swamp of hell gave her no illusions about this outcome. She doubted that the sparkling company that had left the darkness of the forest on the edge of the battlefield would triumphantly march onto the battlefield this day, if they reached the waiting Algardis army at all.

  Based on the decision process of their red-haired captain, who had managed to save his strike force only to lead them into an even deadlier swamp, it was looking less likely with each passing hour that they continued to slog. They slogged through the wet earth, the stagnant water, the buzzing mosquitoes like a cloud of pestilence that hovered around them, and to a man rued the day they had signed up to serve in the Corcoran Guard under a man like the red-headed captain who was leading them to their deaths...or worse.

  It was easy enough to see that they were several miles out from the epicenter of the fighting. This type of terrain wasn’t conducive to any kind of battles she had heard of. Neither side, imperial nor Kade, would have chosen to fight here or send their troops to strike another enemy down. That was the only consolation during the slog—the knowledge that a Kade wouldn’t pop up over a hill or ghost through the moss-covered tree branches like silent assassins.

  Sara opened her mouth and tried to breathe in quickly. She inhaled at least two mosquitoes and coughed them out with a bitter taste in her mouth. This was not what she had thought about when she had dreamed of her first march to war as a young girl. Then she had thought she would ride to war in the empress’s service on a winged horse in shining armor with a pike by her side and triumphant grin in place as she imagined doing the crown’s service. As she grew, Sara had learned that war was—and would always be—very different from the gilded battlefield that matched a young girl’s dreams. She had come up with those dreams after seeing her father ride triumphantly through the gates of Sandrin twice. He had marched down the pillars of Sorce’ and directly into the city center with adoring cheers from the public, gales of petals streaming down on his troops heads and the Empress herself waiting at the end to welcome him home from a successful campaign.