The secretary nodded but did not set to it. He worked his nervousness with fingers, curling them over each other like spider legs. “You will have to change, Sire. Your clothing…”
Dagon looked down. “Yes, I’m filthy. This is not my blood. I don’t know if it is blood. It’s filth. It’s…”
“We’ll run a bath,” the man said. “I’ll get fresh clothes. We’ll burn those. Do not concern yourself with them.” He darted away.
Into the silence after his departure, Dagon said, “He thinks you’re mad, you fool.”
He ran his fingers over the crackly, yellowed pages of Jeflen’s account. He flipped the pages absently, lost not in thought but in the absence of it. So much to think through, and yet he felt empty. His gaze drifted down to the pages of their own account. His eyes began to move across the words there with an interest not really matched by the mind seeing through them. Monsters. The words described monsters. Wolves, leviathans, a great worm at the black bottom of the ocean…
He tore his eyes away.
What am I thinking? I can’t go to the queen and tell her she’s dead on her feet. That would be madness. Don’t make yourself a fool, Dagon.
He called his secretary back and retracted the message to the palace. Fortunately, it had not yet been sent. “Bring me parchment and a pen. Oh, and the fading ink. I’ll write a note. Much better idea. And then alert all the staff-everyone essential-that we are leaving.”
“Leaving, Sire?”
“Yes. We will take everything we can and… go.”
“For how long, Sire?”
“Assume that we will not be returning at all.” End of Book Two
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Mena arrived back at Mein Tahalian partially snow-blind, with the tips of her fingers and toes frozen twigs, yellow patches on her nose and cheeks. Despite the protests of Perrin and the other officers, she did not go to the physician. She slept right there in the relative warmth of the stables, curled against Elya’s exhausted body. Mena let attendants pull off her boots and gloves, and then ordered them to step back. When her hands and feet were free, she pressed them up against her mount’s plumage. She slept like that, the two of them dead to the world and nearly dead outright. It was the best thing she could have done.
When she awoke hours later, she lay for a time without moving, knowing that any motion would stir the interest of the people watching over her. She could tell that life had tingled back into her limbs and facial skin, stimulated by that amazing healing power that Elya’s feathers had. She was whole again. She would still be able to grip a sword, to run into battle. Though she very much wished that she could roll over and return to sleep, she knew she could not. Images of mornings she had lain wrapped in her sheets in the palace rose up to haunt her, as a girl, as a woman, with the heat of Melio’s body just a finger’s breadth away. Days spent stretched naked on her pallet in Vumu, or times she had watched the morning chase the stars from a bedroll in Talay. She hated that those moments were forever in the past. They taunted. They teased her. They would not let her go, but she could not have them back, either. They were moments of peace that seemed impossible luxuries now. Had life ever been so carefree? She did not trust that those moments had ever been as she imagined, but she wanted them so badly for those first few waking moments that she bled tears as her body healed.
And then she rose and called her officers for a briefing in which she explained what she had seen and done instead of flying to the coronation. After that, she sent several letters via messenger bird to Acacia, detailing everything she had learned from her meeting with the Auldek and everything she now planned. She wrote things, in fact, that she had not disclosed to her own captains. She asked-more openly than she ever had, more like a younger sister than ever before-for any guidance Corinn could offer.
That done, she kept moving. She did all the things she had to as she waited for a response, all the tasks and problems and duties that kept her from being too much with herself. She mustered the troops. She sent horsemen riding for all the remote, northern settlements they could safely reach, warning that war was upon them. They should evacuate for the south, if possible, or come to see out the winter in Tahalian, if they could not. With her officers, she went over battle plans and studied charts and calculated the probable toll in human lives. It was not an arithmetic she could live with, though she betrayed no sign of it. Secretly, she met alone with Haleeven and the Scav Kant, talking late into the night.
The work of each day kept her busy. Every minute she hoped to hear back from Corinn. From Aliver, for that matter! Though she could not yet really believe he lived. Part of her clung to a hope that Corinn would find some way to fix it all, a solution only her cunning mind could manage, something that would save the troops Mena had grown to love. She slept little, and when she did she often woke in the pitch-black of the Meinish night, her mind a cacophony of concerns, problems, calculations, doubts. On occasion, she started awake in the hope that Corinn was there in the room with her, or a dream-travel version of her moving in Perrin’s body. But that did not happen. Nothing came back from the south. Nothing at all.
Behind it all, she chastised herself for not having done better when she spoke to the Auldek. She should have found a way to make peace with them. Instead, she had let anxious bravado snap her tongue, puff out her chest like some adolescent boy’s. Because of it, they would have war. Because of it, many would die. That had always been the purpose of her mission-not so much to defeat the Auldek but to blunt their attack so that a second army led by the queen could finish them. What sort of plan was that? A desperate one. A cruel one. One with a cold, calculating efficiency that she did her best to sharpen, even while she did not, secretly, accept it as the only way.
At the last meeting she was to have with her officers before some of them went into the field, she asked them to attend her after all the other business had been concluded. The troops were again gathering inside the Calathrock, to hear their orders as a group one last time within that chamber.
“Before you go to them,” she said, “I have two things to ask of you. I’m sure you have all thought much about why we were sent here. We’ve had even more time since coming here to Tahalian, but things will unfold quickly from now on. I think it best that we are honest about it. We are not marching to defeat the Auldek. I’ve seen them. We can’t do that, not with the troops we have. They control the air, so we cannot surprise them or flank them or any such thing. When we fight them, it will be in the open, our cunning against their might.”
Bledas, the Marah captain, began to tout the training they had put in recently.
Mena quieted him just by touching him with her eyes. “All that aside, Bledas, we don’t march to defeat them. I need us all to acknowledge this. Our task is to die fighting them. To die. To kill as many of them as possible, and to hurt and delay them as much as we can, to fall so that our bodies trip their feet and slow them. That way, they will enter the Known World battered and frozen, weakened. It will then fall upon the next army to destroy them. If we do our work, they’ll be able to, but none of us should think that we will see that victory. I want to ask two things of you. First, I ask you to decide today that you are going to die in this fight. I need each of you to do that. If you cannot, you may leave my service.”
Letting this sit with them, she glanced around the room at each man’s face, offering him the opportunity to respond. Talkative Edell said nothing. Bledas worked his finger into a crack in the old wooden table. Perceven’s Senivalian mouth, narrow and full, pursed, accentuating the two mountain peaks of his upper lip. Mena read thought behind the gesture. Kissing life good-bye. That’s what he was doing. Haleeven was a comfort to look upon. His face was solid, untroubled, as if he welcomed this conversation and thought it right. Perrin watched her with his lover’s eyes. Despite herself, she had often wondered if Melio would mind if she sought solace in the soldier’s arms. She would not do it, but at times she wished to.
“All right,” Mena said. “Now the second thing. I want you to go before me to your troops. Tell them what I have just told you. Make them the same offer.”
“Princess Mena!” Edell started. “We can’t offer them-”
“I have to,” Mena said. “I won’t order soldiers to die. I’ll lead them to it, but not command them. I’ve thought about this a long time, Edell. You will not change my mind. I will command an army only of willing soldiers. That’s what I want for Acacia after this war. If we are to win it, we must start now. So, that’s all. If you wish to leave my service, do so now. If not, go and speak to your soldiers.”
