delays and inconveniences they created: small victories. On the rare occasions when they killed an Auldek: jubilation. Howlk had died; the frekete Nawth had been taken out of the war. Things that had seemed impossible could be accomplished. If they could keep doing what they were doing… If Aliver and his army ever arrived…
F or the second time, Mena found herself standing inside a ring of her officers, interrogating a bedraggled, stammering, nearly frozen Rialus Neptos. This time, however, he brought a companion. The woman stood beside Rialus, unflinching under the men’s scrutiny. She wore a full body suit of some sort, so thick it would have hidden her completely, except that in the relative warmth of the tent she had pulled off her hood and stripped back the top of it. She stood with her shoulders and arms exposed, her chest covered by a thin tunic that showed both the sweat around her neck and the outline of her breasts. Meinish, if ever a woman was: gray eyed, delicately featured, with hair so blond it seemed to light the room with its own luminescence. She searched the collected faces with her eyes, touching on Mena briefly before moving on. Her gaze caught on Haleeven.
“Who are you?” Mena asked.
Rialus had been trying to say something, but he jerked to a halt. “Her?” he asked.
“Yes, but I asked her, not you.”
“Sh-she doesn’t speak much Acacian. Maybe none. I don’t know. I never-”
“Meinish, then? Haleeven, speak to her.”
He did, and she answered readily enough, her voice calm and deliberate. After a few exchanges, Haleeven said, “She wishes to join us. She was a slave to the Auldek, she says, but only a slave. Never willingly your enemy. She was like Rialus, trapped by the Auldek.”
Rialus ceased trembling. His head turned slowly to the woman, and he stared at her. He could not have looked more perplexed.
“She said that?” Edell asked.
“She did.”
“What’s her name?”
Haleeven asked her. “Fingel. She has served Rialus Neptos since he arrived in Avina, all the way to here.”
“We’ll have to ask her a thing or two about him, then,” Edell said, fixing Rialus with a dry, hostile gaze.
The two Meins talked a little longer. Haleeven screwed up his mouth at something she said. It looked like a grimace, but as he held the expression it showed itself as a smile. “She claims that Rialus is a good man.”
“She has reason to think we’d doubt it?”
“He told her as much himself. Rambled on often, even talked in his sleep sometimes.”
Rialus actually could look more perplexed, after all. His face reddened, and it was not from the warmth in the tent.
“I really look forward to talking with her at length,” Edell said.
Mena could see that there was something more behind her facade. “What else? She has more to say, I think.”
Fingel fixed her eyes on Mena for the first extended time. She listened to Haleeven’s translation and deliberated her answer by pressing it between her thin lips for a moment. When she answered, Rialus, obviously understanding her Meinish, sat down on a campstool. He stared at her with an expression of complete mystification.
“She represents a contingent of domestic slaves,” Haleeven said. “A few hundred of them who want to desert the Auldek. She is a scout to find out if they would be received kindly. She’s asking for refuge among us. They’ll be coming tonight. She wants to make sure that they are not attacked when they approach.”
“She wants us not to attack a few hundred figures walking into our camp in the middle of the night?” Mena asked. “That could be a very foolish thing for us to do.”
Haleeven translated. Fingel dug around inside her body suit for a moment, and brought her hand out with a note pinched in her fingers. She offered it to Haleeven and then spoke at length. Haleeven listened a long time before offering his translation. “She says she found this, one of the notes you dropped among them. She’s not the only one who hid them and began hoping they were true. She says they will fight any way they can. Those who can will put poison in their masters’ kettles. They’ll take a few souls out of them. You asked for them to trust you in these notes; she asks that you trust her now as she returns it to you.”
The Meinish chieftain handed Mena the note. She rolled it over in her fingers. She let it look like she had to weigh the hazards carefully, but really she was hiding a swell of euphoria. This was what she wanted. This was the beginning of it. If some came now, more would follow soon. “Haleeven, tell her she is very welcome among us. They all are. We’ll accept every one of them home. When we have a moment of peace to do so, we’ll drop to our knees and ask forgiveness of them. I mean that literally.”
“Won’t she and Rialus be missed today?” Perrin asked.
“The other slaves will cover for them today. Say Rialus is sick, keep the door to his room closed. They won’t be found out today, and tonight they flee.”
“Only a couple of hundred?” Edell asked.
Haleeven had the explanation for this already, too. “They kept the conspiracy very tight. They could have gotten more, but it was too risky.”
“Any warriors with them?”
Fingel must have understood the question. She guffawed and answered straightaway. “No,” Haleeven translated, “those ones will not come over. They are too far up the Auldek’s asses. But, she says, they will all suffer from the lack of well-cooked food, laundered clothes.” He smiled. “I think she’s right.”
“A couple of hundred may not be much,” Perrin said, “but it’s a start. It will put the idea in others’ heads.”
“Let’s hope it’s the trickle that starts the flood,” Mena said.
For a time the conversation turned to the practical matters of aiding the deserters. Gandrel suggested setting up a distraction like the explosions the Scav created on the first night that Neptos came across. A good idea, Mena thought, but not easy to arrange. The Auldek were more vigilant about patrolling their camp at night-or their lions were. The pitch was guarded particularly well. The small amount the Scav had stolen was all but used up. Mena had a single flame bomb left, and had not decided how best to use it.
Fingel, once she knew what they were discussing, explained that they had arranged for such a distraction themselves. One of the men who tended the woolly rhinoceroses was going to let them loose after feeding them a concoction that would put fire in their bowels. The creatures would purge themselves in great gouts of excrement. It would be messy, and they would be angry, hard to gain control of. While they rampaged, the others would make their escape.
The officers sat in silence for a moment, all of them, likely, imagining that scene. “There was never a war like this one,” Gandrel said. “Or if there was, they didn’t write it all down in the official records.”
“Maybe we shouldn’t either,” Edell said.
Looking at Rialus, Mena edged her tone and asked, “This is what you thought would buy your pardon? A few hundred cook slaves and bed servants. I thought you understood that I expected more from you, Rialus.”
The man blinked rapidly. He really did look confused.
“Rialus?”
It took him a while, but eventually he managed to say, “I-I brought other information.”
“Tell it, then,” Mena said, crossing her arms to wait through the long delay of his stammer. End of Book Three
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
The hunting lodge of Calfa Ven had once perched on a stone buttress high above the thick woodland of the King’s Preserve. The “nest of the mountain condor,” as the translation of its Senivalian name went, had catered to Acacian nobility for more than two hundred years. Standing on its balconies with wild valleys stretching out beneath her had been the closest Corinn had come to experiencing flight before her dragons brought it to her for real. It was a place of memories, of long horseback rides, of pastoral opulence, rich meals served by rustic staff, of cordials
