Blades Of Illusion: Crown Service #2 Read online

  Sara and her mother had always stood in the public reception area where the nobles waited under awnings as she proudly watched her father in his shining armor accept the Empress’s gratitude and welcome home. Contrast that to what she had later learned was true war, and it still didn’t compare to the disgusting conditions she endured this day. Sara had known to expect hardship, sacrifice, and even defeat. She had learned that while riding a winged horse was a nice ideal, it didn’t match the realities of war on the ground. Hell, it taken hours studying history books to learn that that the only use for a winged steed was to fight dragons in airborne battles like they had done during the founding wars. Fortunately, those days had long since passed.

  It hadn’t taken Sara long before she wondered what other fables from a young girl’s imagination would be very different from the realities of war. When her father’s guard pinned their lips shut and wouldn’t utter a further word under her father’s orders, she had decided to find soldiers who weren’t so tight-lipped. She had gone to the seedy underbelly where a man, once a good amount of ale was imbibed, wouldn’t hold his tongue. In those places, she had heard whispers about the battlefield and the march to war floating through dark taverns on nights when drunk soldiers stumbled in as easy pickings. They came looking for their next ale, trencher of dubious food, or women. Or all three. They left with lighter pockets and sometimes bruised knuckles. They had told of the long march on the empress’s road, banners snapping in the windy air, miles-long columns of soldiers and supplies, and then finally making camp on the rise from which they would mount their campaign.

  But their harsh recollections still did not match her reality. Not one of them had mentioned dragging dead weight through a bug-infested swamp, being bitten in places she didn’t even want to mention, and being so starved that they were almost forced to eat horse-jerky after all but one of their supply wagons had sunk in a mud hole.

  Sara kept her lips pinned together tightly as she breathed through her nose and shift the uncomfortable weight on her right shoulder. Despite her sword on her back and her knives at her waist, she was almost defenseless, as she was using both hands to keep up. She didn’t want to be here. She wanted to be where the Kade mages were. She wanted to be finding out what Matteas Hillan knew, and certainly before the Red Lion guard questioned him themselves. Or at least the Red Lions affiliated with the necromancer and guardsman who had barged into her home, demanded the file on her father, and killed her mother in a single night.

  “But no,” she muttered under her breath, “I’m slogging through knee-deep muddy water and hoping not to get gangrene from an infection. This isn’t war. This is torture.”

  Chapter 4

  Her mind flashed back to the men she had met in the taverns. She had done her best to get as much information out of them as she could. Back then, when she was fourteen, she still had the hopes of joining the imperial army as an officer. And why wouldn’t she? She was a commander’s daughter and trained in the art of battle. But Sara knew that her abrupt appearance in the seedy underbelly of the city would not be taken well, especially if her father’s men spotted her. An imperial war brat born and raised had no business in a seedy tavern after all.

  If my father had known where I was going after slipping out of my chambers at night, he would have tanned my hide, Sara thought to herself wryly.

  Fortunately for a sneaky young woman, her father’s frequent relocations for war made it easier to evade his constant surveillance. Not that he didn’t try to make sure his men stationed in Sandrin kept a wary eye on her. Sara missed those loyal to her father. Most had traveled with him on his last assignment out as a Commander of the imperial forces—the assignment he had died on. She didn’t have concrete knowledge about what happened to his men. Mostly because an army that refused to disclose information about her father’s death certainly had no compunctions about keeping back information on the men and women who served under him. Where Sara once would have access to the highest levels of military information as she grew older, now she languished as a pariah in their eyes just because of who her father was and what he had done. Consequently, she only knew as much as any one person was willing to pass on to her. She had heard that the majority of her father’s people had been re-assigned to far-flung outposts. To keep them out of ‘trouble’ and away from each other, she supposed. Sara had to wonder what the imperial forces were so afraid of that they would execute her father, seal his records, disappear the files, and disband his men.

  “Whatever it is,” she said grimly, “It had better have been worth his death. Because I swear I will find out this empire’s secrets or die trying. I owe my father that much.”

  A small, tight smile crossed Sara’s face as she remembered her father’s heavily-muscled form training in the arena, with his short-cropped brown hair plastered to his head with sweat and his clear, grey eyes squinting in concentration at his opponent. Sara knew she and her father hadn’t looked a thing alike. But appearances could be deceiving. Sara had inherited her father’s talent for fighting, his tenacity and his height. From her mother, Sara had taken her darker skin and her long black curls that bounced with every movement of her body. Where he burned with the sun and peeled, she darkened and evened out. Even when tan, her father hadn’t gotten much darker than the inside of a pecan’s shell.

  Still, Sara thought she had the best of both parents. Her mother’s vivacity. Her father’s determination. Sara had no idea where she had gotten her vivid orange eyes from, as neither of her parents had her eye coloring.

  “Cat eyes,” her father had approvingly called them, “Cat eyes for my kitling that can see in the night like a fierce huntress on the prowl.”

  Her mother had been less complimentary about the topic. Sara remembered her mother saying reprovingly, “She does not have cat eyes.” Usually her mother’s own brown eyes would be sparkling with a teasing gleam when she looked at Sara’s father, but that day she hadn’t been joking. She never joked when the subject of Sara’s eyes came up.

  Anna Beth Fairchild had feared nothing and no one, but Sara could have sworn that more than once, as she stared into her mother’s eyes, there was a flicker of fear to be found there.

  Fear not caused by Sara and her cat eyes, but rather fear of what their strange color would mean for her future growing up.

  Whatever had caused that fear, she hadn’t seen fit to explain it to Sara.

  When Sara was caught one night returning from the taverns, though, her mother’s eyes only held passionate anger. No trace of the fear that marked her worry for her daughter and her almost-glowing eyes. Instead the look on her mother’s face had been one of rage, a fire burning hot. For a brief moment, Sara considered that she would have preferred her father’s retribution over her mother’s swift punishment. Anna Beth had followed her one evening, unbeknownst to the young girl who was supposed to have the tracking and deceptive tactics of a ‘feral huntress’, but it had been Sara’s own fault. She had impetuously decided to go after they had finished shopping at the market, instead of waiting until later in the night as was her usual practice. In short, Sara hadn’t been as careful about slipping off as she was later. In fact, it was her mother’s stealthy pursuit of her daughter that had taught her to be cagier about slipping off alone and keeping a watchful eye out for followers. After that Sara had learned to duck into alleys, walk along circuitous routes, and even backtrack if needed to throw off a person following her.

  But the night Sara’s mother had followed and snuck up on her in the tavern alone, she was embarrassed to admit, she had let her guard down. Feeling her mother’s presence behind her like a ghost bearing down had made her nearly jump out of her skin. Her hand reached for the knife sticking awkwardly out of her belt at her waist and she shifted into a combat-ready stance with feet apart and shoulders braced, not knowing who was behind her or what they intended. But her mother’s voice hadn’t been far behind and the blistering lecture from Anna Beth’s tongue had quickly wilted Sara
’s confidence as her mother’s swarthy and lithe fingers had latched onto her daughter’s ear.

  Anna Beth Fairchild hadn’t known it, but she’d been lucky that she launched into a long and loud tirade the moment she’d reached her daughter. As embarrassing as the moment had been for the daughter, it had saved the mother’s life. Sara’s hands might have been sweaty, her pulse jumpy and her mind a nervous wreck at the thought of her first bar brawl, but her hands were steady and ready to deliver death. She had slipped the knife from her waist and twisted to stab it straight into her mother’s neck. Before the knife could rise out of her cloak—and more importantly, before her mother had seen the weapon—Sara had recognized who held her by the ear and backed down.

  Then she had listened numbly. Outwardly, her face had been bowed in shame. Most of the tavern patrons had probably thought the flames of embarrassment lit her cheeks.

  Sara had coldly thought, Let them think that.

  The sweat beading down her spine and the ache in her heart had told her that it wasn’t embarrassment that made her lower her head and listen with half her concentration on the task. No, it was cold fear that launched through her as she thought about what she had almost done. She didn’t regret taking a defensive action. Never that. But the thought that she had been seconds away from killing the person who meant the most in the world to her—after the father she revered—had made her more fearful than anything. Because of that moment, Sara had vowed that her mother would never catch her unawares again. For her own sake.

  As the memories continued to flow through her during their walk forward, she thought of the tirade she’d been forced to endure from her oblivious mother, “What business does a young girl have in a tavern? Especially seedy ones like this.”

  Sara had meekly followed her mother out with her shoulders hunched and the obnoxious laughter of dozens of soldiers, dockworkers and mercenaries trailing them out.

  Thinking of home, Sara shivered thousands of miles away from Sandrin and the capital city of the Algardis Empire. Not in fear. In anticipation. Even if she had never technically been to war before, she could feel its call like a bloodhound could pick up the scent of prey a mile away. The song of blood and war ran in Sara Fairchild’s veins. In one sense, she felt like she was coming home. It had long been the sacred duty of the Fairchild descendants to serve their imperial family in battle. It was a promise that harkened back to the days when the members of the imperial family were humble servants to an even more powerful family of the Sahalian race—the dragons across the sea. Her father had told the tales of the great deeds of those Fairchilds, renamed when they had landed on the shores of Algardis and had been given their freedom from bondage as indentured servants. It was a noble history. A fair history and one of the reasons that family lore stated they had taken the name ‘Fairchild’.

  Before, coming from the servitude of a fair family—and being known as fair individuals in kind—was an honor. Not every dragon master or family was known for such honor. In fact, most weren’t. Even now, the word ‘kind’ brought about connotations of sweetness, happiness and concern to her mind. In Sahalian society, that meaning couldn’t have been further from the truth. Kind meant the dragon masters hadn’t made a habit of eating their servants on a regular basis; kind meant that the humans weren’t treated like disposable chattel when a dragon grew angry; kind meant the dragons only restricted their servants’ freedom of will instead of shackling them for their own pleasure.

  For a brief moment, Sara closed her eyes and thrust away the history her father had told her over and over. She was a Fairchild, descended from a family that had served great dragon lords and now served a great human family, but as a citizen of the empire instead of property, no matter how fairly they had been treated by their Sahalian masters. As Sara breathed out through her nose, she thought about what her journey to the heart of Kade territory meant. As a warrior who trained all of her life, she knew what it meant technically. She had been trained that when they went to war, she no longer had a home outside of her division. Her division—her comrades and her commander—were her family. It was the man to your right and the woman to your back that was your family. The people who would take up arms by your side and slay your foes.

  For Sara Fairchild, that war idiom was more true than most. She had no family left. Her mother was dead. Her father was dead. One murdered. The other executed. Nevertheless, Sandrin represented the safety of home in her thoughts. She ruthlessly pushed that to the back of her mind; she couldn’t think of Sandrin as home. Her entire being depended on focusing not only on the here and now, but also ensuring that she discovered the secrets of her new life as quickly as possible.

  “Home,” Sara muttered wistfully as she thought of what it had been like when her parents were alive, when she lived in the villa by the sea, miles from Sandrin, and all was right with the world. Now she slogged through mud to a new place, a new home. A home whose foundation would be built from the broken bones and spilt blood of the fallen. Home to a land claimed inch by inch on the backs of gutting knives and slashing swords. Home to a field filled with the screams of the dying and the roars of the victorious.

  Chapter 5

  Almost there, Sara lied to herself as perspiration dripped from her brow and her shoulders hunched under the weight she carried. She wasn’t really sure. She estimated based on the number of days they had walked and the pace they were setting that they were no more than a quarter of a mile from the edge of this heinous bog. At least she hoped so. But with nothing but stagnant water, mud, and the darkness of a shroud of trees covering even the slightest hint of the sun’s rays, she was pretty sure none of them was sure if they really knew how much longer it would be. After some more tense words with Captain Simon where she might have mentioned that they were ‘walking in circles’ again, he had settled on a plan to assure her and more muttering mercenaries with disparaging comments that they were not in fact lost. He had one man climb up a thick tree trunk as far as he could go every night to check the position of the stars and assure them all they were on course. But the damn swamp seemed endless. It could be as big as the entire city of Sandrin for all she knew.

  On top of that, dehydration was setting in, and she was beginning to think mass hallucinations weren’t too far off. They had started rationing fresh water the moment they entered the swamp and more men carried empty canteens each day. Someone had tried lapping from the murky water below the layer of algae and moss that covered the bog waters. Tried being the operative word. Like water from the ocean, the swamp water hadn’t been fit for consumption. They had ended up drinking more of a dark, oily substance—that she later learned was the runoff from the decayed vegetation of peat—than anything resembling pure water. In addition to the fact, that first soldier had been sick for three days on a march that was already hell.

  Now every mercenary had half a bag of water rationed to them in the morning from a large barrel carried by their only remaining war elephant. The water was running out, and thanks to the intense heat of the swamp even in the shade, they were all over-compensating for the temperatures with the rivulets of sweat running down their backs between their tunics and skin. Rivulets that made them dehydrate faster and drain their remaining water supplies even quicker.

  Water wasn’t their only problem. It was only thanks to the quick thinking of several mercenaries that they weren’t already starving to death. A group had managed to save one of the food supply wagons as the other wagons sank into quicksand on their second day and so the close to three hundred men and women had some provisions to eat. The food had been partitioned out so that every mercenary now carried two weeks’ worth of dried sticks of nut and grain in their knapsacks. What remained was wrapped up and thumping around in a sack just above the war elephant’s hindquarters.

  For a few days, everything had been going as well as could be expected. They marched in time to one another and kept eager eyes peeled for the end of the dank swamp. Then Sara’s worst nightmare hap
pened. A loud trumpeting pierced the air. She turned to look over her shoulder to see the elephant’s trunk raised in the air and guested that the loud noise was coming from the sinuous gray trunk that writhed about in a desperate plea for aid. The swamp was flat, but somehow Sara had managed to wind up on the raised earth that surrounded a large cypress tree, with its roots arcing high above ground. Edging closer to the tree, she gingerly positioned herself so the weight on her shoulders was taken away by the roots she leaned it on. Then Sara gripped the bark of one of the thinner roots that arced high enough above the ground that it was shoulder-height with her and she vaulted onto the top of it. She steadied herself with both hands and legs and slowly stood to see what the commotion was about.

  It didn’t take long to spot the massive grey elephant in the dense vegetation. It stood out like a sore thumb.

  “But what’s wrong with it?” Sara said.

  Spotting the elephant’s problem was a lot harder. The shifting shadows on the swamp floor, courtesy of the dense vegetation and swaying vines, made it more difficult to see what exactly lay at its feet. And because its head and trunk were fine she had to assume the problem was with its feet. Perhaps it had gotten a leg stuck between some roots?

  “No,” Sara muttered to herself as her eyes strained to pierce the darkness.

  Then she thought but didn’t voice aloud a deeper answer. That was a scream of pain and primal fear. Not frustration.