wandered into the human lands.
It was time to get moving, Ferris concluded. “Adole, Mitchell, it’s time,” he called as he stood up, his raspy voice carrying across the meadow. All the men started to rise, and the two of them he named promptly picked up their axes and sacks of supplies before they crossed the creek and disappeared into the forest ahead of the others, one a tall, thin scarecrow of a man, the other a short, rotund clown who usually kept the squad laughing with his pratfall jokes. Ferris was glad he had a disciplined group to work with — he wouldn’t have to waste any breath or time re-explaining assignments to anyone of the men he’d been on duty with for the past few years, including the past few days dedicated to the fire-starting assignment. All his men had heard the assignment explained numerous times, they understood it, and now that the time for action had come, they’d carry it out efficiently and swiftly, provided the diversion down south had truly drawn all the elves way from this sector.
Ferris watched briefly until Adole and Mitchell were quickly out of sight in the forest gloom, then turned to help the rest of his squad prepare to follow them in. Adole and Mitchell were solid, reliable men; they were sprouting gray at their temples, signs that they were career members of the army; they were men he could count on. He knew that they would blaze a trail, notching a tree trunk every twenty feet or so, as they headed straight into the forest, moving inward for fifteen minutes, then stopping. They were supposed to gather tinder, start a fire in the forest, and erect a tripod over the fire.
Ferris and the rest of the men would follow them into the forest, traveling more slowly as they carried the needed tools for their assignment — in this case, a large iron pot and heavy bags filled with lumps of pitch, accompanied by four archers. They all prayed that the archers would not be called upon for their primary purpose — to try to defend them from attack by the elves, because none of them had any illusions about the probability of surviving an attack by forest elves defending their home territory; hopefully the feint down south was successful in drawing the elves away from this seldom-visited portion of the border, so that there would be no elves present to attack them.
Presuming the elves did not attack, the squad would arrive at Adole and Mitchell’s fire, finding it blazing away, and then place an iron pot upon the tripod, so that they could fill it with the pitch they carried. When the pitch liquefied from the heat of the fire, the squad members would begin to take it around the forest in their vicinity, smearing it on tree trunks and setting them aflame. They hoped to set numerous trees on fire, and then begin their retreat back out of the forest, setting more trees ablaze on their way out; a successful fire would hopefully burn out thousands or even tens of thousands of acres of land that could eventually be cultivated and claimed as territory of Hydrotaz instead of the forest elves.
Ferris was the first of his men to cross the stream. His eyes shifted rapidly, looking at the tree trunks around him for signs of blaze marks that would show which way the first two soldiers had gone, then his gaze quickly lifted upward into the trees, looking for indications that the elves might be up among the branches, arrows already aimed with deadly accuracy at Ferris’s men. He spotted a blaze, and began to move towards the bright white notch in the tree trunk, then took a look upward. There was nothing in the tree limbs, not even a squirrel or a bird. He stumbled over a tree branch on the forest floor, making him look back at ground level as his arms flew up to catch his balance, then he resumed moving forward, searching for the next blaze. No one laughed at his stumble, the way the members of his squad usually jibed one another; they were all fully aware of the importance of scanning the trees, and were as likely to stumble themselves before they got to the fire that they hoped to find inside the forest.
Ten minutes later they spotted a bright set of flames within the gloomy forest, and Ferris breathed a sigh of relief at the sight. He urged his squad forward and had them begin to quickly manhandle the iron pot onto the tripod, fingertips getting scorched without sympathy as everyone hurried to get the pitch melted and spread upon the trees. Seven men knelt with arrows drawn on their bows, searching the tree branches in all directions as the first bubbles began to rise through the pitch, and the other soldiers in the squad began to fill rough wooden ladles with pitch, then carried it out into the nearby forest.
The firemen traveled in pairs, one carrying the pitch, the other carrying a burning branch. Ferris remained by the fire, tending it, feeding new pitch into the pot, watching in all directions, sending men back out into the woods again and again with new supplies of pitch, running in directions that he hoped would establish the widest front for the fire to spread throughout the forest.
Within half an hour thick smoke began to roll along the ground, and a wide semicircle of numerous tree trunks were vibrantly lit with flames that danced high into the upper branches. “Fall back! Everyone back to the center and prepare to depart!” he called loudly. The fire start had been a success, he judged, and he thanked his stars that the forces down south had so effectively removed the elves from his remote corner of the forest, allowing his squad to live.
The iron pot was still half full with boiling pitch, but the smoke and the increasing heat made the site no longer tenable for the squad to use, and they had a fire burning brightly throughout the forest. They would have to abandon the pot and tripod Ferris quickly concluded, with no safe way to carry such searing hot pieces of metal out of the woods. He did a quick head count of the men around him, and determined that the whole squad was together. “Lead us out, Adole!” he called out, and with that the squad of armsmen began their withdrawal from the successful mission, confident that they were going to make Hydrotaz a little bit bigger.
Chapter 2 — The Smell of Danger
Kestrel sat in the forest, watching a cricket crawl along the branch next to him. It was unusual to see a cricket so high up in the tree, above the litter on the forest floor where most crickets resided, but the insect provided a distraction from his troubled thoughts. Crickets were considered an enjoyable snack by most elves, an easy source of nutrition with a nutty, earthy flavor that appealed to the elven palate. His hand darted out and grabbed the unfortunate climber, then popped it in his mouth, as he sat atop his favorite chestnut, stewing over the recent orders that had arrived, calling for every elf of fighting age, every elf but him, to hurry south towards the double border, when a large force of men from Hydrotaz were invading the forest.
Kestrel had been excluded from the call to arms, and told to remain on duty in the central portion of the border, the area where the red stag deer maintained his dominance over the other local deer, an antlered patriarch whose large size and deep reddish-brown color set him apart from the rest of the herd; the red stag stood out so much that the elves used him as a reference point, naming that area of the forest after him, just as the one-eyed puma to the north and the tusked boars to the south provided other area references in the Eastern Forest closest to Hydrotaz.
There hadn’t been a war with the men of Hydrotaz in thirty years, and that had only been a minor skirmish back in the days before Kestrel was born. All the young starry-eyed elves in the western section of the Eastern Forest had longed for the prospect of glory and violence that came with fighting in a war, and now, based on the reports from down south, at last it was about to happen — for everyone except him.
Kestrel’s unhappy heritage, the fractional strain of human blood that tainted his appearance, made him suspect with regards to a war against the humans. When the time had come to engage in battle, the leaders of the elven forces had made the snap decision to not trust him in the fray, and had kept him away from the battle, where he couldn’t potentially betray his elven comrades. And so he stewed, and contemplated how to address his frustration. He’d end up in a fight with someone, sooner or later, he was sure. He’d just wait for the elven militia members to come back to their homes after the battle, and when the first one of them made some cheap, cutting remark about Kestrel missing the fighting, he’d end up in a fight that would let him land several satisfying blows on some too-smug elf.
Cheryl had seen the hurt in his eyes when he’d been dispatched up to the red stag patch of woods, and had tried to comfort him, but he’d wanted no pity, and had brusquely left her behind when he’d stormed out of the guard lodge and left everyone behind. He felt badly for having been rude to Cheryl, and he knew he needed to apologize. Their relationship was on undecided ground as it was, as Kestrel competed with every other full- blooded elf in the western end of the forest to capture the affection of the lovely girl. Kestrel couldn’t compose bad poetry that compared her red hair to the flowers that blossomed in the spring, nor could he offer her combs of honey that the bees magically led some elves to find and confiscate, nor could he offer her riches and prestige, especially not prestige with his shameful heritage. He knew that all of those elements were part of the wooing
