Rom turned his face away and spat out a mouthful of drena-leaf juice. Chewing drena leaves was a habit of the mountain men that a lot of Megs’s crew had picked up. She didn’t like the stuff herself; the leaves were too bitter and despite the initial surge of euphoria and power the leaf juice brought, she didn’t like the shaky, jittery feeling that lingered for hours afterwards. Rom and the others said it gave them more energy for a fight, and Megs wasn’t going to argue with them about that, but she hated the way it stained their teeth a dull ochre color and made them smell like tribesmen.
Sometimes, on the nights when it was hard to sleep no matter how much moonshine she’d had, Megs couldn’t help but wonder if the displaced farmers and ex-soldiers who made up her crew had simply traded places with the mountain men. Once, the mountain men had lived in roving bands in the Sunrise Mountains and raided the valleys below. Now, Megs and her crew were the ones living in the mountains and conducting raids, while the mountain men settled into the villages that used to be their homes. Maybe this was how it happened, the transformation of a person’s spirit from human to animal, from civilized to barbarian. Already, her crew wore the mountain man furs and wielded the mountain man weapons they’d won in raids like today’s. As the hardness required for survival crept across their hearts like rainclouds gradually covering the sun, how much longer would it be before Megs and Rom and Grent and all the others were more tribal than Imperial?
But such questions didn’t matter right now. What mattered was getting back to the safety of their camp with as much loot as they could haul before the sun burned away the morning mist and rose to midday. What mattered was giving Handy Sam a proper burial so that the men could say goodbye. What mattered was the fact they’d just gained six new ponies and the meat of a seventh.
“Keep the body at the back of the train,” Megs told Rom. “I don’t want the men staring at Sam’s corpse the whole march back.”
Rom, the right-hand man who was practically old enough to be Megs’s father, inclined his head in acknowledgment of the order and walked off to supervise the clean-up, reaching into his pouch for a fresh clump of drena leaves as he went.
Even though Rom had told Megs they’d only lost one, she found herself doing a head count anyway. It was one of the few habits from her short stint as squad leader in the Imperial Army that she still found herself doing almost compulsively.
Grent was still skinning the dead pony, and he’d been joined by Allard. Dwennon and Rudd were laughing far too loudly while Dwennon cut the ear off one of the mountain men he’d slain. Megs hated the collection of dried ears and scalps Dwennon had sewn onto his armor, but she supposed it did make him look more intimidating in a battle, and each time he added a new one, he grew more compliant and less pugnacious for a week or two, so she didn’t stop him.
Rudd, meanwhile, was using an axe that used to be for splitting logs to chop through their victims. When he was done, he’d string the body parts up from trees. Desecrating the dead that way was probably twice as gruesome and brutal as Dwennon’s collection of scalps and ears, but Megs didn’t mind as much. Stringing up the dead was what the mountain men always did after they’d defeated a patrol or razed a village, so it only seemed fair to give them a taste of their own brutality. Megs couldn’t speak their tongue, but she and her crew were still capable of sending them a message that would be loud and clear:
Whatever you do to our people, we will do to yours and then some.
Desecrating the dead and hanging the bodies from trees was what the mountain men had done Megs’s home, Druet Village, when they’d finished with it. Those who hadn’t been turned into shadow-infected, that was. But what she’d witnessed in Druet Village was on the list of things that Megs didn’t think about anymore.
Big Seth and Little Seth weren’t far off from Dwennon and Rudd; the father and son team were studiously ignoring the butchering of the bodies and instead focused on inventorying the saddlebags hanging on one of the ponies. Dalon was doing the same next to them; Ellick was collecting the unbroken arrows and swords; Jart was relieving the bodies of their boots and fur cloaks.
Megs kept counting men until she reached twenty-four.
They left camp with twenty-five; they’d return with twenty-four and supplies that would last for close to a month.
Not bad for a morning’s work.
“Hey, you sorry lot of dullards,” she called. A few heads turned her way, but most continued with what they were doing. She twirled her index finger in a hurry-up gesture. “Speed it along. We need to get out of here before someone starts missing these ones.”
A broken chorus of Ayes and Aye, Empress came back to her from those who’d bothered to reply.
Empress.She ground her teeth at the stupid title but didn’t say Stop calling me that. Whenever she argued, it only seemed to amuse and thereby encourage them.
#
“So then the Empress gives the signal, an’ me an’ Ellick an’ Ryland an’ Reece stands up – ”
“An’ others besides you lot,” Wymer put in irritably.
“Aye, an’ others,” agreed Dwennon, waving Wymer’s comment away dismissively. “Anyways, we stands up and – thop, thop, thop!” He snapped his fingers. “Ten dead from arrows and bolts, another three injured, just as quick as ye please.”
“While the rest of ’em shat themselves,” Ellick added. He pitched his voice high in imitation of frightened tribesmen. “Oh, wha’s happening! Oh, methinks we’s getting attacked!”
Ellick’s new love interest kissed his cheek proudly while the other men and women gathered around the campfire laughed.
Megs took another swallow of the makeshift ale one of the camp’s former tavern owners had brewed from a recently stolen batch of barley. This ale was stronger than the last barrel the tavern owner had brewed, and Megs was glad for that. She’d be well in her cups soon. Megs never enjoyed the retellings of their battles; living through it once was enough for her. But she found she could generally enjoy the men’s tales more when she was drunk.
Beside her, Azza looped an arm through Megs’s and squeezed her closer, giving Megs a light kiss on the cheek before resting her head on Megs’s shoulder. Megs closed her eyes for a moment and took in a deep breath. Azza smelled good, like spruce needles and purple bell flowers. If Megs kept her eyes closed and blocked out Dwennon’s voice, Azza’s smell could transport her back in time to the meadow outside Druet Village, where Megs used to pick spring flowers with her mother for dye-making.
“Was it really all as glorious as Dwennon said?” Azza asked a few hours later when Megs stumbled into the tent after her.
“If by ‘glorious,’ you mean we couldn’t’ve pulled off a better ambush, then yes,” Megs slurred. She flopped down onto the bedroll. The top of the tent was spinning, so she looked away from it and tried to focus on Azza’s face. “If you mean listening to the sound of dying men was ‘glorious’ … And Handy Sam – not even twenty summers, y’know, never goin’ to …”
It was as if a hand closed around Megs’s throat. She couldn’t complete the sentence about how Handy Sam would never marry, never inherit his father’s farm. Milton had been about twenty summers when he died.
Azza’s eyes were filled with tender sympathy, so Megs looked away.
“Oh, darling. I’m sorry,” Azza said gently, but she didn’t say more than that. She didn’t have to.
Megs couldn’t exactly say that she loved Azza. There’d been another woman Megs had loved once, four years earlier, a fellow soldier. Megs had lost her in that final, horrific battle in the fields outside Pellon.…
Azza understood Megs. And Megs understood Azza. In a way, that mutual understanding was even better than love. Love was too dangerous. No one should ever permit themselves to fall in love in the middle of a war.
Megs rolled onto her side and patted the open space on their sleeping mat. “C’mon, lie down wit’ me.”
Azza toed off her boots and slid into the space beside Megs, pulling the patched-together furs they used as a blanket over them. The furs used to be mountain man cloaks; Azza had gotten the blood stains out as best she could and sewn three of them together to form a thick blanket. Azza was skillful that way. Sewing had never been one of Megs’s strengths.
Megs ran a hand down Azza’s tunic until she found its bottom edge, then pushed it up to find Azza’s smooth, bare flank.
Azza shivered, her skin turning to gooseflesh beneath Megs’s hand. “Gods, your hand is freezing,” she complained.
“Sorry.” Megs put her hand back on the outside of Azza’s tunic and tugged her closer. “Been waiting for this all day.” She gave Azza a sloppy kiss, then nipped lightly at her jaw before letting her head flop down onto the straw-stuffed pillow they shared.
Her eyes drifted shut.
Azza chuckled. “I think you’re going to have to wait a bit longer. You can’t even keep your eyes open, sweets.”
“I can.” Megs forced her eyelids open to prove it, moving a hand to clumsily squeeze one of Azza’s breasts. But then Megs’s hand refused to obey her anymore. It slid away, and her eyes fell closed again a moment later.
Megs felt the soft texture of Azza’s lips against her cheek, her neck, her earlobe.
Azza hummed a vaguely familiar melody – a lullaby, Megs’s sluggish brain informed her – and then draped an arm over Megs’s side.
“Sleep,” Azza said. “I have you now.”
And because Megs couldn’t fight it anymore, and because her eyelids refused to open, and because it had been another long, hard day after far too many years of long, hard days—and also because she was well and drunk—she did.