This thought had already crossed Thaddeus’s mind. He had rolled it over as he marched across northern Talay. He had dismissed it, though. Everything depended on his retrieving the book, and rescuing the princess added layer upon layer of complexity to the mission. It provided many more opportunities to fail. And he could not fail. He had even gone so far as to imagine conversations with Hanish in which the still-captive Corinn was used as a bargaining point. He doubted Hanish would hurt her. Not after having kept her alive and in health for so long, not after lying night after night in the same bed with her. She’d be safe enough, he had thought, until the conflict reached its conclusion.
But that was before, when Corinn had been but a notion, a phantom he thought of daily but had not laid eyes on in nine years. How different he felt now that he saw her. If he managed to escape this island with both The Song of Elenet and with Princess Corinn, he would have made great strides toward redeeming his earlier sins. All the children would be safe. The future of the world would lie in their capable hands. The fact that he might be able to make this happen meant that he had to try. Of course he did.
CHAPTER
Maeander had watched it all from a platform set up beside his tent back in the Meinish camp. He had his own seeing aid, two spyglasses strapped together to bring the distant scenes into binocular view. He had hummed as the Acacians marched down the slope in battle formation. He had smiled at their hesitation as they spotted the antok cages. He had imagined the bewildered expressions on their faces and laughed out loud in occasional, quick guffaws that startled the men around him.
Still, the destruction the beasts caused when unleashed stunned him. He thought he knew what to expect. Over the years since the league had brought antok pups as gifts from the Lothan Aklun, he personally checked on the training the creatures received. He watched them grow from the size of suckling pigs. He had instructed the trainers to prepare them for some moment like this. They taught them to hate all color, infused them with fear of visual variation. Through long months of work they forced them to equate orange and red, purple and green and blue with pain, with suffering. And they had taught them that the only way to answer such things was through fury. For the most part this had not been difficult. Fury was in their nature from the moment they kicked their belligerent ways out of their mothers’ wombs.
But what he watched during those first few hours went beyond his imaginings. With a view of the entire field, he saw the way the four monsters worked in loose coordination. They plowed through the dense concentrations of troops, but not with the random abandon the Acacians must have perceived. They also looped out to the edges, pulling in the fleeing, herding them back, controlling the entirety of the frenzy. Amazed, Maeander realized that the trainers hadn’t lied about their potential; the Lothan Aklun tales about these creatures were true. He was, he believed, going to watch them slaughter every last one of the Acacians and their allies. They would not stop until every scrap of moving color was squashed or shredded. He had felt, mixed in with the euphoria, a pulsing dread of the foreigners from across the Gray Slopes. If they gave weapons such as these away, what sort of powers did they keep for themselves?
This thought was cut short before it went too far. The small band of strangers arrived, Vumuans he soon learned. He knew exactly why the antok did not destroy them, but he did not anticipate that in all the confusion of battle the Acacians would be able to put together the clues themselves. He cursed when he saw them stripping off their clothes. He wanted to shout for them to stop. That won’t save you! Die with bravery, not with backsides exposed to the world! And yet he watched as they slowly brought the beasts under control, surrounded them, hemmed them in with walls made of their very flesh. Each and every one of them stood naked and vulnerable, their hearts exposed. By no other means than that they calmed the antoks’ savagery. He would never have imagined such a thing.
Nor could he believe his eyes as he watched Aliver find a way to kill the antoks. There he was, naked as the day he was born and looking much like the Talayans around him, wielding only two lengths of steel in a show of bravery that would have made Maeander himself proud. He could not see every detail precisely, but he saw Aliver leap on the beast’s side. He saw it charge Aliver a few moments later and could tell that when the creature collapsed whatever wound had dropped it had been fatal. The others of Aliver’s army simply followed his example, with variations. Within a half hour all four of the antoks lay dead. Triumphant Talayans climbed on them and danced their jubilation.
The generals who sat in council with him that evening sought to highlight the gains they had made. The Acacians would not be able to field an army the following day. The officers estimated the enemy had lost more than fifteen thousand souls to the antoks in the short space of time they had rampaged. It was a phenomenal number. About a quarter of their entire force. Also, there had been no sign of sorcery on the field. No outside force aided them. Perhaps the one who had been working magic for them had perished before the antoks. Or perhaps he had had only so much of the witchcraft at his disposal. It may have been used up, just as anything else can be used up.
“Aliver has delayed his defeat,” one general said, “but we’ll be ready to finish this now. We should march on them in full force in the morning. Overrun them. Even if they don’t take the field. Let us slaughter them in their camps and lay them beside their unburied dead.”
Several murmured agreement. Another, filling the silence where Maeander’s response should have been, said, “Remember, we lost not a single soldier today. Not one. Not even Hanish could have done better.”
But such things were cold comfort to Maeander. This time it was he, not his advisers, who saw the gains the enemy had made despite what looked like defeat. The tale of Aliver killing the first antok himself would course across the land with the speed of a contagion. It would make the prince a legend of gigantic proportions and stir the land into an even greater frenzy.
He got word of two other disturbing developments that night. The league-controlled vessels all along the coast had withdrawn. They gave no explanation and refused all efforts at dialogue offered by the few Meinish captains in control of their own boats. There was treachery in this, but it went as yet unexplained. It meant, of course, that Maeander could not evacuate his forces if they were driven up against the sea. Though he did not voice it aloud to anyone, he wondered if this was not his brother’s doing, a chastisement, a challenge. It did not make any sense, but that did not stop the thought from spinning about inside his head like a wheel in perpetual motion.
Even later that evening, sitting alone in his tent, his gaze fixed on the motionless flame of the oil lamp on his table, a messenger brought him another piece of correspondence. It was a letter from his brother, sent across the sea pinned to a messenger bird. It mentioned nothing about the league-perhaps Hanish had not yet heard what happened. Instead, he wrote with enthusiasm, reporting that he had already sailed from the Mainland. The Tunishnevre were with him. All of them. They were undamaged by the journey and writhing with life. They were bursting to be free. He would have them safely within the new chamber on Acacia within a few days’ time. And then he’d free them.
And then, Maeander thought, you’ll have completed your life’s work. And I-I’ll have done nothing more than helped secure your fame.