“I know.”
“Do not tell me that they are only children. War happens to children. Slavery happens to children. The ravages of corruption happen to-”
“I know better than most that children deserve the truth of the world, explained as they can handle it, and reexamined as they grow. I would do the same with them myself. I swear I would. But our history is not all horrors. It’s still being written. If you show them what we have done, make sure to show them the things that will make them proud. Let them have that as well. And be kind to them. I know you will, but there is nothing harder for a monarch than to be asked to give back what he thought was his. This new world that you and I want so much, if it comes, it will not be easy for them. I had thought once that I would oversee changes myself. Now I see my work was not about me. It was about helping set the stage for them. I haven’t done it all that well, but I’m still trying. Here, please take this for me. Keep it safe.” He pulled a chain from around his neck and held it for Barad to take. A key dangled from it. “Keep it for the children, for Mena. When the time comes to offer it to them, you’ll know it.”
Barad closed his large hand over the chain. His expression deepened. It grew lined and grave even though his stone eyes remained still at the center of it. “You… you are not coming back. Aliver, there is a pall around you. Since the coronation, it’s been on you and the queen both. I thought it was just sadness, but it’s…”
“It’s the pall of war,” Aliver said. He forced his smile to look genuine. “I may as well be cautious. That’s all. I may as well leave the children in the hands of a tutor like you. That way, I know they will not face the future blind. You will do it?”
The instant he had the man’s affirmation, Aliver bid him farewell. He could look not a moment longer into Barad’s stone eyes. Aliver turned away as if his mind had moved on. It hadn’t, though. Moments later, though he was aboard the transport, talking with Kelis, shaking hands and patting backs and speaking to the crowd, he fought to contain the emotion of the arrangement he had just made.
And then, back on the pier, he took to the saddle on Kohl’s back and looked across at Ilabo on Tij, and at Dram on Thais a little farther away. Outfitted for war, they looked like characters of living myth. The dragons wore plates of armor kept in place by a snug lacework of cords. They went laden with packs and supplies, with swords and crossbows strapped into place. The riders wore chain mail tunics like Aliver. As a final touch they pulled snug helmets fashioned to replicate the heads of the mounts they rode. Aliver tugged on a black helm that flared behind his ears in imitation of Kohl’s crest feathers.
They all rose into the air at the same moment, propelled upward on the cheers of the onlookers. Kohl roared and Tij answered. Thais corkscrewed just above the heads of the crowd, a move that spurred them to even greater applause. For a few moments Aliver forgot the weight of responsibility and loss on him. The scene was too glorious not to fill him with pride. Surging into the air above a beauty of an island, climbing up the terraced levels of the city. Everywhere people waving and shouting for them. Over the palace itself, he saw Shen and Aaden at the balcony of the upper terraces, Rhrenna just behind them. He swooped past them with Kohl tilted to one side so that Aliver hung toward them in the saddle, one arm outstretched as if he were touching them over the distance.
For the first time in his second life, Prince Aliver Akaran went to war.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
Breaking camp after the first battle had been a terrible task for Mena’s army. They worked through the night, taking no rest, laboring in clothes and armor still smeared with gore. They tended the injured as they went, piling them-the living, the dying, and the dead-on sledges that they dragged toward the broken mangle of shore ice. The Scav had scouted and improved a half-submerged route that proved much more efficient than climbing up and down over the slabs and crevices. Trusting them with a completeness that would have been unimaginable a fortnight earlier, the Acacians followed their lead. They did not stop until they were all out on the frozen ground once more.
Even then the Scav did not rest. They went back into the labyrinth of ice to destroy the route and to set their traps. It was fortunate that they did. Watching from a distance as that Auldek station plunged into the water filled Mena with exhilaration. If only they could have dropped all of them into the depths, let the water and ice cover them, and forget about them. If only they would vanish like the phantoms of a nightmare.
They would not, of course, do any such thing. They rolled and marched, hauled and flew ever onward. They ate each passing mile and bayed to do battle the whole time. Mena refused to meet them again on the field. The Acacians backed across the glacier-scoured contours of the landscape, defensive, cautious, devious. All of it clearly drove the Auldek crazy.
For a time they flew into the Acacian camp on freketes, ignoring the rain of arrows that always greeted them. Speaking accented Acacian, they hurled insults. They implored the Acacians to fight like true soldiers, threatened that they were only making their nation’s fate worse by their cowardice. The freketes leaped about, crushing people with their feet and snatching others up in their fists. They bit chunks of flesh out of them and spat the meat on the ground. One Auldek leaped from his mount’s back and went running through the camp, hacking down anyone he could. If others had followed his example, the slaughter would have been horrible. Fortunately, the rampaging Auldek caught a crossbow bolt in the face. He went down clawing at it. He rose a moment later. His face blood- splattered, he tugged at the arrow as his body jerked and convulsed, unable to pull the bolt free. He managed to climb atop his frekete and took to the air again. After that, such attacks grew less frequent. Heartening, perhaps, except that not even a bolt right through the skull managed to kill these fiends.
That was why Mena pressed her bizarre form of warfare in every way and shape she could imagine, adjusting it daily as the circumstances changed. She once flew a mad gauntlet over the Auldek camp, dodging and dipping, cutting at sharp angles to avoid the freketes pursuing her. Behind her she trailed a falling snow of sorts, hundreds of short letters on small bits of paper, blowing out of the pack bags she had flipped open. Each note contained a personal entreaty to the quota slaves to desert the Auldek and come over to their own people. Each of them signed with the writer’s name, written in their native tongue, with the invitation to bring the note across to the Acacians and be personally welcomed home.
As far as she could tell, the freketes did not often fly at night. She knew they could because one had done so on the night of the Scav’s first fiery attack, but they had never again dropped out of the dark, something Mena had feared. Instead, she owned the dark skies herself. On a night of low cloud she flew in through the mist over their encampment. She circled several times, testing, on edge for the beat of any wing other than Elya’s. Nothing.
An hour later she returned with Perrin dangling from Elya’s claws. They both dropped to the ground well inside the Auldek encampment. By the time Elya swooped back in to retrieve them, they had slit the throats of five sleeping watchmen and had tossed a sack full of poisoned meat out to steam on the frozen ground. Food for lions, she hoped.
Nor was there anyone in the air to answer her an hour later when she dropped a flaming kettle filled with pitch into one of the pens that held the antoks. She watched the large backs of the creatures from above, the tiny glimmer of the wick falling with the pot. When it hit the ground, the pitch must have splashed out underneath their legs. It ignited in one large sheet beneath them. She stayed above long enough to verify the deadly furnace of kicking, bellowing creatures that she had created. One of them crashed through the pen wall, and in the next instant the creatures were rampaging through the camp, all sizzling hair and flesh.
Confusion. Damage. It must be taking a toll on them. Mena despised it. There was no honor in an assassin’s tactics, in making war on animals and supplies. A strange thing to a call a war, really, this running skirmish through the arctic. It was nothing Mena had trained for or read about or studied. Not a style of fighting she had ever imagined. Fighting was not even the right word for it, but she did not know what else to call something so deadly. So desperately important. When she doubted her tactics, she had only to think of the lives of her soldiers to remember why she did these things. She had as many reasons for each treachery as she had souls in her army. For them, she would do anything.
Ten days since that first battle. Hundreds of lives lost. The ranks of the injured and incapacitated growing. Mena could not claim that they were winning, but they were not losing either. Since not losing was about as positive a situation as she could envision, she kept her people focused on the small victories they were accumulating. Each slave warrior they killed, any animal they lamed, every carriage or station they crippled, all the
