Page 2 of The Summer War
“Celie,” he said, his voice cracking. “No—that’s not—” But thatwasit, no matter how hard he pretended it wasn’t, and when she stared at him and refused to go along with the lie, he sputtered to a halt. But then he triedagain,like a mouse scurrying desperately in another direction, trying to find another hole. He said, “I’m not going to be safe. I’m going to the Summer Lands—”
“Stop it!” she said. “If you won’t even be honest to me, if you won’t let me matter even that littlest bit, justgo!” She jerked her hands free and stepped back and awayfrom him. “Go to the Summer Lands! Go ride a shaihul, fight a dragon, be the greatest knight who ever lived. Just see if it makes you happy! I hope you meet a hundred beautiful summerling boys and none of them love you. I hope no one else is ever stupid enough to love you again!”
She ran away from him and back inside the stable door, so he wouldn’t see her crying, but as soon as she was over the threshold and out of sight, she burst into a huge sob that shook her whole body when she gulped it down painfully to keep the sound in, and another one wanted to come right after it. She bent over her aching belly and then just sank down on her knees in the dirty corridor and crawled herself over to huddle against the wall next to the mucking shovels and pitchforks. She pressed her head against her knees and her mouth against her folded arms to keep quiet, listening as hard as she could until she heard the horrible sound of the horse’s hooves clattering as Argent rode away forever, and then she could let the rage and misery come burning out of her in tears.
She wanted to believe, afterwards, that she wouldn’t have said the curse if she’d known that it would work. She loved Argent more than she hated him, even in the moment. But oh—she wanted so much for the words to hurt him a little, to stick in his head like a pebble in his shoe, so hewouldhave to take her, some part of her, away with him for just a little while, until he cast even that off and found himself some summer lord to fall in love with, in theircourts of endless green, and lived happily ever after for a hundred years, likely forgetting the whole mortal world and her along with it.
Celia had been taught over and over not to ill-wish. Father reminded her often, to make her proud, that she was of the bloodline of the great Witch-Queen Selina, who had founded Prosper’s line of kings. His third wife, her mother, had been the bastard sister of the king, and the great tapestry in their dining hall, which Father had commissioned after her birth, showed Selina’s Seventh Wyrd: Queen Selina standing stern and beautiful on a mountaintop, looking down on the army of the shadowlords, and the summerlings and the mortal armies of Prosper united behind her, about to be drowned in darkness.
And Celia also had a book that showed Selina’s First Wyrd: the illustration of Selina holding her hands out to her parents, her mouth open in a wail of horror and grief, while they stretched their own out to her in return, with stone twining itself up around their bodies like a winding sheet. Celia had read it over and over; she’d played private games in the gardens, whispering pretend spells, imagining that when she became a woman, she would be the one, the next sorceress of Prosper.
But more than sixty girls descended of Witch-Queen Selina had been born over the long years since her death without another sorceress flowering in the line, and Celia didn’t feel anything like a woman at the moment. She feltlike the opposite—a stupid angry little child, deceived and hurt and crying in a corner, trying to nurse her wounded heart and pride. Even after Argent rode away, Celia still didn’t know that she’d cursed him. She didn’t even know that her courses had started.
She sat in the dark weeping with her head against her knees, thinking the cold and wet and pain were only sorrow, until one of the grooms came yawning on his way to the stables and thought he saw a servant girl in a shift crying and said in rough kindness, “Here, lambkin, what’s the blubbing for? Someone’s hurt ye?”
She jerked her head up and stared at him as he came closer with his candle, and he went pale as a bleached sheet and said, “Gods, milady!” and turned and shouted down the hall, “Here! Here’s milady hurt! Rouse up the house, come quick, go tell the duke!” and he ran to her even as a bell started clanging.
He knelt and put the candle down and reached halfway out with his hands, not quite daring to touch her, full of worry. “Where is’t, milady, where are you hurt?” he asked, and she looked down at herself and in the candlelight she saw the blood, bright crimson spreading like a terrible flower through the soft white linen of her shift, and felt the dreadful chill of power spreading through her body with it. She stared at it, and then she realized what she’d done. She screamed just as three guards came running from the gate, and they all fell down and coveredtheir heads in terror as their swords turned to glass and shattered in their hands.
The summer war had gonefor a hundred years before Father had finally won it. There hadn’t been endless fighting all of that time; the summerlings only ever attacked during summer, and sometimes they forgot about the war and didn’t turn up for years at a time, and all the king’s men just sat in the border keeps along the Meanwhile River, bored and drinking and sweltering in summer heat. But Prosper still had to have an army ready every year, because every so often the summerlingsdidremember about the Betrayal, and as soon as they did, they all blazed up with rage and came storming across the border, swords out for every man, woman, and child in Prosper.
The summerlings had been something like their friends before the war. For as long as anyone had lived in Prosper—or at least as long as anyone knew about—each year the summerlings had come across the Green Bridge to trade “silk and leather and wine and cake for beautiful things of summer make,” as it went in the song. Summerlings couldn’t be bothered to grow crops or tend animals, but they made things no mortal could: enchanted glass as clear as water, arms of hardened gold and silver, jewels thatglowed with cool light. They’d fought together against the shadowlords, and after Witch-Queen Selina and the Summer King had died winning the final battle against them, Summer Prince Elithyon had given his sister in marriage to Selina’s son Sherdan, the new king of Prosper.
But the summerlings weren’t mortal. They lived in the simplicity of grand towering stories filled with magic and endless high beauty, and for them pride and love were tangled so close together that they couldn’t pry them apart. During the wedding feast, Princess Eislaing saw King Sherdan look at song-spinner Minata as she sang, and she instantly realized that not only hadn’t her new husband fallen in desperate love with her on first sight the way he should have, he was in love with someone else—an ordinary mortal woman, who wasn’t radiantly beautiful and didn’t even sing perfectly on-key. So as soon as the feast ended, Eislaing went straight up to the highest tower of the royal castle and threw herself off. Her story had gone all wrong, and she couldn’t see anything else to do.
Prince Elithyon and all the summerlings had loved their princess as the greatest treasure of their realm. To them, King Sherdan and the horrible people of Prosper, who hadn’t appreciated the impossibly glorious gift they’d been given, had driven her to a hideous death. The only possible response was to avenge her. And as far as Elithyon was concerned, that was going to take the blood of everyone in the entire kingdom.
So he’d started the summer war, and for a long time, no one had been able to end it. Prosper couldn’t invade them in return. If an army of mortal men marched into the Summer Lands, half of the soldiers wandered out again the next day, fifty years older, and the other half wandered out again ten years later not having aged a day and having forgotten who they were. The lords and generals came out gibbering mad. Only heroes and song-spinners could go into the Summer Lands, and half of those didn’t come back either—some because they’d died heroically, and some because a summerling had seduced them and persuaded them to stay. Summer lords didn’t seem to find anything odd about welcoming individual knights from Prosper into their halls as honored guests, even if they would have slaughtered them without mercy on the other side.
But even on the three occasions when the summerlings had broken through the wall of border keeps and started rampaging through Prosper, razing every town and slaughtering every person in their path, they’d only kept going until autumn. When the leaves started turning colors and falling from the trees, their magic and immortality started fading along with them, and they all panicked and fled pell-mell back to the Summer Lands in terror, abandoning all the ground they’d taken. And then they completely forgot all about autumn until the next time it happened.
So it seemed as though the summer war would just keep going forever and ever, and everyone in Prosper was just doomed to live under the threat of bursts of slaughter, until Father arrived on the border and changed everything, because he started winning.
Father always knew the right thing to do. He was born the son of a poor landless knight from the backwater of Prosper, the northern mountain country, all the way on the other side from the Summer Lands. His only inheritance was some patchy armor, a badly sized sword, a thin horse, and a lowly position with the local earl. But when the king sent one of his periodic demands for soldiers for the summer war, Father asked the earl to let him have the command. The request was granted with alacrity; no one lucky enough to live in the north wanted to be sent down to the summer war.
The strategy that Prosper had relied on for more than a hundred years by then was simple. The king maintained a ring of stone-walled forts all along the border. The forts were hideously uncomfortable, each one built of a few winter towers, naked with no autumn halls or shady summer gardens outside, and joined together by stone walls with almost no openings, except for one entrance just big enough to ride a single horse through at a time. They were oven-hot when the sun was out, full of greenish mold and mosquitoes when the summer rains fell, and often both at the same time. But they were hard to take without siegeequipment, which the summerlings almost never managed to finish building.
The men hunkered miserably down inside the forts and the commanders sent out their most gifted knights and well-arrayed companies to offer the summerlings individual challenges and small battles, just often enough to keep them from getting bored and organizing a more concerted advance. It worked reasonably well. Usually only two or three forts got overrun each season, and at worst only a few villages and towns got butchered before autumn came: acceptable losses.
Father’s assigned fort was an especially uncomfortable one: only three towers, all too stubby to risk a window bigger than an arrow-slit even on the topmost floors, and the stone walls were uneasily low and thin. The previous summer’s defenders had prudently dug a ditch around the whole thing to make a bit more of an obstacle, which was already filling up with water as the rains began, and stank to high heaven, since all the castle’s waste got thrown over the back wall and fell right into it.
But Father didn’t sit there waiting to be besieged. Instead, he scouted out the nearest ford over the river, and when the spring mists began to clear, he took his men out and hid halfway along the way. When a small company of summer knights rode by on their way to besiege him—ashining troop in their armor of hardened silver, singing in clear voices about the joy of death in battle—he and hismen threw muck and shit and small rocks at them from cover, shouting insults. The summerlings charged after them at once and fell straight into a prepared pit trap, where Father had them ignominiously butchered by a crew of peasants he’d rounded up from the nearest villages, who stood on the edge and stabbed them with spears from a safe distance.
The rest of the summerlings were horrified and outraged, and all the more so when Father sent the nearest summerling lord an insulting message bragging of his victory over them, written crudely on dirty paper. The summer lord immediately gathered a large force of knights to take Father’s small and unimportant fort and slaughter everyone in it. The summerlings arrived, overwhelmed the handful of defenders on the gate, stormed into the fort, and were bewildered to find it completely empty. Outside, Father and the rest of his men came out of their hiding places in the nearby brush and threw torches over the walls into the courtyard, which had been drenched with oil and smeared with tar. Nearly four hundred summer knights and a summer lord died, and Father lost less than twenty men.
The king made Father a baron after that, granting him his own lands and a thousand men to command. It wasn’t a sincere gesture of appreciation; King Morthimer—Sherdan’s great-great-grandson—wasn’t pleased to have a hedgeborn knight from the hinterlands showing him up tothe common folk, and for that matter mucking around with his tried-and-true strategy. But all the summerlings were going to be out for Father’s blood now, so he didn’t have long to live, and the king wanted tolookgenerous. That was made easier because Father humbly asked for a modest grant of lands neighboring his old backwater home.
Father also asked for a short leave, went back to his former lord, and made his first match: he asked for the hand of the earl’s daughter Farria in marriage. The earl was privately indignant at such a request coming from his jumped-up former servant, but he grudgingly agreed, and to a hasty wedding—since, after all, everyone knew Father wasn’t going to survive to the autumn, and then his daughter would inherit the conveniently nearby lands.
Before heading back to the front, Father took a chunk of Lady Farria’s dowry, bought himself a shield and a banner with a red fox on them, and paid one of the best songwrights in Prosper to write a romantic song calling him Veris the Fox, the poor and clever hedgeborn knight who had fallen in love with his lord’s beautiful daughter and had been determined to win her hand, and had outwitted the summerlings and become a hero of the realm to do it. It was wildly popular, and as soon as the summerlings heard it on the border, they immediately forgave Father all his unspeakable crimes against them.
Over the rest of that summer, he proceeded to carryout an utterly ruthless campaign full of every lie, cheat, and trick he could invent, winning one battle after another. The summerlings sent him the gifts and honors they only bestowed on worthy enemies, and he grew rapidly in popularity on the mortal side of the war as well. The common folk of Prosper perhaps disagreed with their king about just how acceptable the annual losses were.
The next summer, the king gave Father the command of the aptly named Fort Resignation, a six-tower castle on the leading edge of the border that had been sacked by the summerlings more than twenty times over the course of the war, and granted him another thousand men, which would have been more generous if the castle hadn’t needed at bare minimum a garrison twice as large. Father promptly sent song-spinners out to ten different summerling lords on the border nearby to sing them a song about how the single most valiant summer lord would be the one who took Fort Resignation from Veris the Fox. The instant the mists opened, all of them made straight for the castle. When they were a few days out, Father held a parley with each of them and said apologetically that of course he welcomed their challenge, but he’d already accepted a challenge from the next one over, and couldn’t face anyone else until that one was defeated.
The summer lords proceeded to spend half the summer fighting one another savagely for the right to faceFather, who meanwhile spent the same time building a much more secure inner fortification out of just one of the towers, and undermining the rest of the walls and turning the courtyard into a bog of quicksand. When the last three surviving summer lords finally worked out that they’d been tricked and agreed to join forces to besiege and take the castle, Father waited for a summer thunderstorm, then collapsed the walls outward onto them, killing half their force. Then he immediately hailed them with a blizzard of small pebbles: he’d recruited boys from all the villages nearby to come with their slingshots, and they were lining every nook and cranny of the inner walls. Half blinded with rain and hailing pebbles, the summerlings charged over the fallen walls and straight into the quicksand, where many of them drowned in the mud struggling to get out, and the rest became easy targets for arrows and spears.
When the skies cleared, the much-reduced remnant of the summerling force besieged the inner tower, seething. Father wasn’t there anymore. He’d slipped out through a tunnel during the thunderstorm along with most of his men, leaving only a small garrison to hold the tower. He snuck along to the next border keep, which was also under siege, and fired an arrow over the walls with a song for the men inside to sing, about how Veris the Fox had tricked the summerling lords who now didn’t have enough men to take him out of his tower. The summerlings besieging thatkeep all rode off to join the siege on what was left of Father’s castle, and Father rode in and told the knight commanding the keep to come join him.
