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~ PRESENT DAY: MEGS ~
Megs of Druet Village, who these days also answered to ridiculous nicknames like “the Empress” or “Your Majesty,” crouched behind a fallen log, breath misting in the frigid morning air. The log had not fallen naturally, of course, but Megs and her crew had been careful to artfully place the log as if it had fallen naturally.
From her position behind the log, Megs peered down the ridge without showing herself. The band of two dozen or so mountain men were nearly in place, wending their way around the curve in the trail below.
It was a damned good spot for an ambush, and Megs silently congratulated herself on the picking of it. The trail below the log where they hid not only curved, it also narrowed, and on the trail’s other side the ground dropped off steeply. As the mountain men came around the curve, they would be forced to shift into a single-file formation.
Perfect. The gods themselves couldn’t have crafted a better spot for an ambush.
For the third time, Megs slid a few inches of her rune-marked dagger from its sheath. The runes etched on the surface were still dull and flat, which put Megs in an even better mood. Mother Moon must be with them: the fact that the blade refused to glow meant that there weren’t even any shadow-infected amongst the mountain men.
Rom’s eyes were upon her, waiting. She could feel his gaze, could feel the unspoken question in them, but Rom was a loaded crossbow with a sensitive trigger, likely to fire if she so much as glanced his way. So Megs kept her eyes on the moss of the fallen log an inch from her face, counting her breaths and listening to the hooves of the mountain men’s ponies clomp, clomp, clomp along the trail below. She’d counted seven ponies so far. That was good. Her crew had been forced to slaughter one of their mares last week for food. They needed new beasts. And if any of the ponies got injured in the fight … well, Megs had certainly eaten worse than pony stew over the past four years. Hopefully it wouldn’t come to that. If it did, well, sometimes pony stew was the price of survival.
Clomp, clomp, clomp.Just a few more seconds now.
But panic seized her then, the same irrational panic she’d had to fight almost every day since she first took the regal and became an Imperial soldier eight years earlier. Megs closed her eyes, forcing the panic down, transmuting the energy of fear into the energy of strength as if she was an alchemist. It was a trick she’d had to teach herself, a trick a lot of soldiers never mastered. There was a fine line between battle panic and battle readiness. Those who didn’t learn how to let go of one and seize the other usually wound up dead.
For Milton,she told herself. And not just for Milton, but for all the farmers’ sons like her brother, boys who’d met their deaths decades too soon, who’d never gotten to know the simple joys of taking a wife, starting a family, and inheriting their fathers’ farms.
The transmutation of fear slowly took hold. In place of her initial panic, Megs felt the familiar grip of rage around her heart.
Yes, that was what she needed right now. The rage of a vengeful soldier, not the panic of a farm girl.
It had rained earlier. The mountainside still smelled of it, and Megs could hear the irregular rhythm of raindrops slinking down fir needles and then plink-plonk onto the ground below. Other than the sound of dripping trees and clomping ponies, the forest was perfectly still. She couldn’t hear her own breath, or Rom’s, or the rest of her men’s. She certainly couldn’t hear the mountain men. They didn’t let out so much as a cough or a clearing of the throat or even the creak of leather as they traversed the path below.
Megs couldn’t help but admire them. For two years, she’d tried to train her own men to move through the mountains with that kind of disciplined quiet, but they still sounded like hogs rolling around in a bed of dried reeds every time they moved from place to place.
She drew the rune-marked blade from its scabbard without allowing steel to whisper against leather. The runes still didn’t glow. This time, she didn’t slide it back into place. She hoped today’s ambush would yield a new sword for her. It had been a pain in her arse to fight with only a dagger these last two weeks.
Clomp, clomp, clomp.
Megs finally turned her head towards Rom, nodded. Then, with a discipline her old Imperial Army squad had never possessed, the ambush began.
At a hand signal from Rom, longbows and crossbows popped up from their hiding places along the ridge, raining arrows and bolts down on the mountain men before the enemy was even aware of their presence. The moment the bowmen reached into their quivers to reload, Megs shot to her feet, thrusting her dagger into the air to signal the charge. She and her men catapulted over their carefully placed log and raced down the ridge.
She’d meant to yell something that would inspire her men and strike fear into her enemy, something like “For the Empire!” or “Die, mountain scum!” but the battle rage had eliminated her ability to make words, and her battlecry came out as a wordless scream.
Like a mountain lioness springing onto its prey from above, Megs leapt into the air and slammed into the first mountain man she reached. The collision knocked him from his pony, and he was dead by the time he hit the ground, Megs’s dagger buried in his chest. She yanked it free and searched for her next victim, even as the dead man’s terrified pony whinnied behind her.
Beside her, Rom collided with another mounted man, staving in the man’s skull with the makeshift mace he’d formed from a branch and a rock a few days earlier. Like her, he’d lost his sword in the last battle. But Rom was at least two heads taller than Megs, and brute strength made the long-handled mace a perfect weapon for him.
She turned away from Rom and spotted a mountain man on the ground a few yards away. He’d apparently been thrown from his mount and his leg – no, both legs – were broken. He dragged himself towards his weapon. Megs didn’t care if he was already harmless; she stomped hard on the hand reaching for the war hammer, then bent to drive her dagger swiftly into his jugular.
Killing a defenseless, already incapacitated man was one of those things that might have kept the old Megs from sleeping in the past. But today’s Megs had learned that mercy didn’t lie in letting the injured ones live; mercy lay in making the end as swift and painless as possible.
The mountain men should be glad to meet their end at Megs’s hands instead of those of her men. Most of them didn’t have any notion of mercy at all. Who could blame them, really? They’d seen their villages burned, their wives raped, their children hung from trees like gruesome festival ornaments. Or worse, their villages had been emptied while they’d left to fight under the banner of the House of Dorsa, and by the time they returned, their families had been sold into slavery. The things that had once made them civilized men – merciful men – had been ripped away from them. What was left now was only this – a raw fury that had them driving swords into gullets, laughing with a madman’s glee as they crushed skulls with makeshift maces like Rom’s.
As the man at Megs’s feet bled to death, she braced for the mountain men’s counterstrike.
But none came.
Up and down the curve in the trail were only dead and dying mountain men, some of them lying facedown on the ground, some slumped sideways on ponies that had somehow not bolted away from the carnage. Speaking of ponies, one lay dead on its side halfway down the hill. A skid mark of leaves and dirt marked the spot where it had fallen and slid down, its passage stopped abruptly by a pine tree. Grent was already kneeling beside it, skinning it. Losing the pony was too bad, but at least it was only one, and at least the butcher’s apprentice would salvage some meat from it. Megs looked away, some part of her aware that there was an irony, perhaps even a dark humor, to the fact that she could drive a dagger into the throat of an injured man and feel nothing, yet still feel the threat of tears watching the death of a common pack animal.
It was over. The whole encounter had lasted less than five minutes.
“Oi, Majesty,” Rom said, approaching. His red-brown mustache was covered in specks of blood, and a glob of something fleshy Megs didn’t want to identify clung to his cheek.
“Don’t bleeding call me that,” Megs grumbled.
Rom flashed a crooked grin, revealing a chipped tooth and stained, yellowed teeth, but it disappeared as quickly as it had come. Rom wasn’t one to give smiles away so freely.
“Twenty-seven dead,” Rom reported. He glanced over his shoulder. “Well, twenty-something, but twenty-seven will be dead within the next minute.”
“How many of ours?”
His lip curled, and for a moment Megs thought he would snarl like an animal. “One.”
“Who?”
Megs’s stomach clenched, steeling herself for the news. She’d learned not to grow too attached to the men who found their way to her and joined her crew.
At least, that was what she told herself. The truth was that each loss drew a cut across Megs’s heart that she knew would never quite heal. Her heart was naught but a mass of scars anymore.
“The one what they called Handy Sam,” Rom said, already using the past tense to refer to the man.
Or boy, really. Handy Sam hadn’t been that old – eighteen summers, if Megs remembered. Nineteen at most. Old enough to fight. Young enough he’d never known anything but an East engulfed in war.
Sam hadn’t been with the crew long – a month at most, a farmer’s son who’d run away from a village that had been under the rulership of mountain men for the past four years.
“We have enough of him left to bury him?” Megs asked.
“Aye.”