Simon.
Hall shut his eyes, opened them again. The smart man trained his imagination not to venture too far down the Mort Road, but in these past few weeks, with all of western Mortmesne spread out before him, Hall had found himself thinking of his twin brother more often than usuaclass="underline" where Simon might be, who owned him now, how he had been used. Probably labor; Simon was considered one of the best shearers on the western slope. It would be wasteful to use such a man for anything besides heavy labor; Hall told himself this again and again, but probability held no sway. His mind dwelled constantly on the small percentage, the chance that Simon might have been sold for something else.
“Bastard.”
Blaser’s quiet curse brought Hall back to himself, and he snuck a look back over his shoulder to make sure his lieutenant hadn’t been bitten. But Blaser had only slipped slightly before regaining his hold. Hall continued to climb, shaking his head to clear it of unwanted thoughts. The shipment was a wound, one that did not heal with the passage of time.
Hall gained the top of the rise and broke into the clearing to find his men waiting, their gazes expectant. Over the last month they had worked quickly, with none of the complaining that usually marked a military construction project, and had finished so early that Hall was able to test the entire operation multiple times before the Mort army had even reached the flats. The hawk handler, Jasper, was also waiting, his twelve hooded charges tethered to a long perch at the crest of the hill. The hawks had cost a pretty penny, but the Queen had listened carefully and then approved the cost without blinking.
Hall walked over to one of the catapults and placed a hand on its arm, feeling a fierce stab of pride as he touched the smooth wood. Hall was a lover of mechanisms, of gadgets. He constantly sought ways to do things faster and better. In his early career, he had invented a stronger yet more flexible longbow that was now favored by the Tear archers. On loan to a civilian construction project, he had tested and proved a pump-based irrigation system that now carried water from the Caddell to a vast, parched portion of the southern Almont. But these were his crowning achievement: five catapults, each sixty feet long, with thick arms made of Tear oak and lighter cups of pine. Each catapult could fling at least two hundred pounds, with a range of nearly four hundred yards into the wind. The arms were secured to the bases with rope, and on either side of each arm stood a soldier with an axe.
Peeking into the cup of the first catapult, Hall saw fifteen large, bulky canvas bundles, each wrapped in a thin layer of sky-blue fabric. Hall had originally planned to fling boulders, like the siege catapults of old, and flatten a significant portion of the Mort encampment. But these bundles, which had been Blaser’s idea, were much better, well worth several weeks of unpleasant work. The topmost bundle shifted slightly in the wind, its canvas sides rippling, and Hall backed away, raising a clenched hand into the stillness of the morning. His axemen grabbed their weapons and heaved them high over their shoulders.
Blaser had begun humming. He always hummed to himself in tight situations: an annoying tic. Hall, listening with half an ear, identified the tune: “The Queen of the Tearling,” the notes badly off-key but recognizable all the same. The song had taken hold with his men; Hall had heard it more than once in the past few weeks as they sanded lumber or sharpened blades.
My gift to you, Queen Kelsea, he thought, and dropped his hand toward the ground.
Axes hissed through the air, and then the stillness of the morning wrenched wide open, the hillside echoing with an enormous creaking and cracking as the arms of the catapults realized they were free. One by one they levered upward, gaining speed as they lunged into the sky, and Hall felt his heart lift in a pure joy that never evaporated, a joy he’d felt even as a small child testing his first rabbit trap.
My design! It works!
The arms of the catapults reached their limits and halted, with a boom that echoed across the hillside. That would wake the Mort, but it was already too late.
Hall socketed his spyglass and followed the progress of the light-blue bundles as they hurtled toward the Mort camp. They reached their zenith and began to drop, seventy-five of them in all, the sky-blue parachutes unraveling as they caught the wind, their canvas burdens swinging innocuously in the breeze.
The Mort were moving about now. Hall spied knots of activity: soldiers emerging from tents with weapons, sentries withdrawing into the camp in preparation for an attack.
“Jasper!” he called. “Two minutes!”
Jasper nodded and began to pull the hoods from his hawks, feeding each bird a small piece of meat. Major Caffrey, with his uncanny gift for recognizing a dependable mercenary, had found Jasper in a Mort border village three weeks ago. Hall didn’t like Mort hawks any more now than he had as a child, when the birds used to swoop across the hillside looking for easy prey, but he still had to admire Jasper’s skill with his charges. The hawks watched their handler attentively, heads cocked, like dogs waiting for their master to throw a stick.
A warning shout went up from the Mort camp. They had spotted the parachutes, which dropped faster now as wind resistance decreased. Hall watched through his spyglass, counting under his breath, as the first bundle disappeared behind one of the tents. Twelve seconds had elapsed when the first scream echoed across the flats.
More of the parachutes descended on the camp. One landed on an ordnance wagon, and Hall watched, fascinated despite himself, as the ropes relaxed. The bundle shivered for a moment, then sprang open as five furious rattlesnakes realized they were free. Their mottled skins curled and streaked over the pikes and arrows, dropping from the wagon and disappearing from sight.
Screams echoed against the hillside, and in less than a minute, the camp devolved into utter chaos. Soldiers ran into each other; half-dressed men stabbed wildly at their own feet with swords. Some tried to climb to higher ground, the tops of wagons and tents, even each other’s backs. But most of them fled for the boundaries of the camp, desperate to get clear. Officers shouted orders, to no avail; panic had taken hold, and now the Mort army began to pour from the camp on all sides, fleeing west toward the Border Hills or away to the east and south, across the flats. Some even sprinted mindlessly north and splashed into the shallows of Lake Karczmar. They had no armor or weapons; many were stark naked. Several had cheeks still covered with shaving cream.
“Jasper!” Hall called. “Time!”
One by one, Jasper coaxed his hawks onto the thick leather glove that covered his arm from thumb to shoulder and sent them into the air. Hall’s men watched the birds uneasily as they gained altitude, but the hawks were well trained; they ignored the Tear soldiers entirely, soaring down the hillside toward the Mort camp. They dove directly into the exodus of men who streamed from the southern and eastern ends of the campsite, talons opening as they dropped, and Hall watched the first of them seize the neck of a fleeing man who wore only a half-buttoned pair of trousers. The hawk ripped out his jugular, spraying the morning sunlight with a fine mist of blood.
On the west side of the camp, wave after wave of Mort soldiers sprinted mindlessly toward the trees at the foot of the hillside. But fifty Tear archers were scattered among the treetops, and now the Mort went down in droves, their bodies riddled with arrows, sinking into the mud of the flats. New screams came from the lake; the men who’d sought shelter there had discovered their error and now they thrashed back toward the shore, bellowing in pain. Hall smiled with a touch of nostalgia. Going into the lake was a rite of passage among the children of Idyllwild, and Hall still had the scars on his legs to prove it.