Still resistant, Erryn thought about Aedran’s words. She decided that the most galling thing was the emissary naming her a whore. Other than those who had ravished her, she had never been with a man for coin or for love. Naming her a whore belittled her suffering and more to the point, was an affront to her her station. What king or queen would ever tolerate such flagrant insults? Not a one of them would, Erryn was certain.
In a blink and a slash, her sword ended the emissary’s insults. Almost. Her steel sank deep, but halted when it met the bones of the emissary’s neck. He loosed a gurgling squawk and wrapped his hands around the blade. The razor edges cut deeply into his fingers, adding to the blood pumping like a wellspring from the side of his neck.
With their faces now freckled in crimson, the rest of the emissaries gaped at each other, at her, at their dying but still standing leader. By the sudden ripe stench, at least one of them had filled his silken smallclothes.
Erryn jerked her sword loose, and the emissary’s bones seemed to melt. He hit the ground with a wet slap, his stunned features slathered in a mess of blood and dripping muck. His mouth worked like a landed perch, but no sound came. As her soldiers and those of the Kingsguard began moving, Erryn had time to think that murdering the emissary was not only a heinous breach of etiquette, but an open declaration of war.
“Hold!” she cried, once and again, before her men obeyed. The three remaining emissaries didn’t heed her in the least. They stumbled in the mud and wet grass, making for their gaudy carriages. The Kingsguard, far outnumbered by Erryn’s arrayed forces, lowered their lances and prepared to charge. One of the curly headed emissaries warned them off with a string of desperate shouts, which grew muffled when he hurled himself into the pillowed gloom of his carriage.
“We kill them all now, it will save us the effort of killing them later,” Aedran said. “Kill them now, and we can send their heads back to Onareth in baskets.”
“Why would I do that?” Erryn asked, genuinely curious.
“To let King Nabar know you’re serious about laying claim to these lands. It will also get an army worth fighting up here before winter sets in. If my brothers don’t get a little blood on their hands before long, they’re like to start killing each other.”
“What’s starting a war before winter have to do with anything? Fighting is fighting, cold or warm.”
Aedran gently tapped the tip of her nose with a forefinger, like a father instructing a daughter. The gesture peeved her, but at the same time made her blush. “That’s where you’re wrong, Queen Erryn,” he said, a hint of laughter in his voice when he spoke her title. “And that’s at the heart of the reason you hired me and my men. You need proper guidance in winning this war you’ve now started.” He glanced at the emissary at her feet, who was good and truly dead. “And what a beginning!”
By now, the drivers of the carriages had turned them off the road and into the field, where they bounced and rattled over rough ground. From inside, Erryn could hear the remaining emissaries shrieking like little girls. After getting turned around, the carriage drivers whipped the horses into a gallop back the way they had come, taking their screeching loads out of earshot. At a word from the commander of the Kingsguard, the soldiers raised their lances in preparation to ride away. Their eyes showed no fear but plenty of hate.
“You see,” Aedran said urgently, “wise kings don’t make war in winter, especially these thin-blooded, southern wretches. Trust me on this, I have many brothers who’ve sold their swords to the kings of Cerrikoth. Now is the time to strike, before they flee.”
“Would it not be better to take the time to build up the fortress?”
“Perhaps,” Aedran admitted. “But what would be the fun in that? Come, you’ve already gone and killed one of these pompous fools, why not kill them all?”
Erryn looked at the dead emissary. She had laid claim to her title and to Valdar after killing Mitros, and here was yet another dead man. With his death, war was sure to follow. She decided enough blood had been spilled for now. And Despite what Aedran advised, she felt certain that building up Valdar’s fortifications was the highest priority.
“Let them go,” she ordered, as Nabar’s Kingsguard broke into two columns and wheeled to follow after the fleeing emissaries.
Aedran shrugged. “I suppose that’ll save us the waste of good baskets.”
Erryn glanced at the sky, gray and cold as usual. Snow could fall at any time of year north of the Shadow Road, but true winter was still a ways off. She guessed they had a month at most before King Nabar reacted to the news that she had murdered one of his men. “Trust that we’ll have plenty of war before long.”
“I suggest you triple your army.”
“A lot of gold,” she said warily.
Aedran spread his hands. “The barest pittance to keep Valdar and your crown, don’t you think?”
“I don’t have a crown, save in name.” That was true enough. The folk of Valdar were miners, not goldsmiths.
“Be that as it may, what are your orders?”
Erryn raised herself up, assuring herself that she had acted rightly against the emissary, if not properly. “Dispatch a rider to Pryth, at once….”
King Nabar, it turned out, had reacted slowly and without enough force to crush Valdar, suggesting he either knew little of war, or was a weak sovereign, as rumored. Erryn’s Prythian reinforcements had arrived long before Nabar’s forces, and were able to use their skills and backs to quickly fortify the fortress.
Thinking on the day she had killed the emissary, and all the battles that had followed, Erryn rested a gloved hand on the raw logs of a turret she had taken shelter beside. Woodcutters had stripped most of the bark off the new logs, but reddish strings remained. Winter would gray them, but for now they fluttered in the breeze like bits of withered skin attached to yellowed bone. She shivered. Is it getting colder?
“Erryn,” Aedran called, his heavy boots thumping near.
When he halted, the smell of him engulfed her. Sweat, horse, steel, blood. The same scents cloaked all the Prythians, but on Aedran it seemed … sweeter. She frowned at the thought, as much as at his lack of courtesy. Come to think of it, he had stopped calling her queen some time ago. She thought to correct him, but when she looked into his eyes, her breath froze in her chest.
“What’s happened?”
His answering grin was huge and a touch wild. “Nothing,” he drawled, “unless you’re of the mind to gain an entire realm, instead of holding this tiny patch of frozen ground.” He thrust a worn bit of parchment into her hand.
She opened the missive and scanned words written in a blocky script. Her own hand might have penned the words, except that she avoided writing almost as vigorously as she avoided reading. Nesaea had taken it upon herself to teach Erryn to read and write during their short time together. She had been a quick study, but was still far from proficient.
As Erryn carefully reread the message, Aedran waited in silence. When she began again, the toe of his boot drummed impatiently. Erryn looked up. “What does this mean?”
He raised his finger toward the tip of her nose, as was his wont. Instead of letting him touch her, she flinched back. “Tell me, you fool.”
“It means,” he said slowly, unperturbed by her reaction, “that the gods have favored you with a rare chance to crush your greatest foe. Most never get an opportunity such as this. Most never dream of one.”
She thought again about the message, put that with what Aedran had said, and in their mingling she began to see. “But what of Valdar? If it falls to my enemies,” she said, pointing at the brooding forest, now half lost behind swirling curtains of snow, “all the gold of the north falls back into Nabar’s hands.”