Page 3 of Of Blood and Fire
“What sort of movement?” I walked over to the young officer—Jenkins, I thought his name was—manning the table lined with scribe tablets. The front line were the pairs of quills being held by soldiers manning the long viewing tubes on both the upper wall and lower walls, and though the latter wasn’t really necessary, I was working on a “more eyes on the bastards, the better” theory. Two of the back eight were connected to our people at Hopetown and Jakarra—the main island in a cluster of five just off our eastern shore, and a place where I still had some kin, even if they were currently hiding within cavernrefuges. The third was on a ship headed for Kriton, the nearest major seaport to Zephrine. Aric might, for reasons known only to himself, be headed back here to Esan rather than going home as he’d initially intended before the attack, but he’d undoubtedly left Tayte, his youngest son, in charge. Whether he’d have the nous to replace the old scribe and reestablish contact was unclear. A sound military mind he apparently was not. In fact, if the military grapevine was to be believed, he was something of a ninnyhammer.
A ninnyhammer who’d done all that he possibly could to get out of marrying me, therefore giving Aric no choice but to offer marriage to his oldest son or risk war with a fed-up Esan. It might have been a decision made under duress, but one I would be eternally grateful for.
The other five tablets were linked to our watch stations, though the last one wasn’t yet activated. Yara and Kele were currently flying out to the post with its pair and hopefully would not be fired upon. I’d ordered the other sentry points along the Blue Steel Mountains—three of which had fired—to send the fifth station a warning of their approach, but it remained hard to break centuries of conditioning when it came to the drakkons.
Jenkins sent back my question. The cursor blinked for a few seconds before the reply came.Swirling. Occasional dark shape.
“Suggesting they’re moving something big through that mist, perhaps getting ready for another attack,” Jarin said.
“Well, they’re not likely to be retreating. It’s not in their nature.” I paused. “Any word from the scout teams out in the wastelands?”
We currently only had five squads in rotation for scouting duties, having lost one just before the Mareritten attack. We’d yet to recover their bodies, and in all truth, I doubted we would.
“A scribe came in from Kerryn Vertale’s team last night, according to Neera. They’re keeping back from the fog, as ordered, but they can hear construction noise.”
Neera being Jarin’s night replacement, and Kerryn the man who’d been my second when I’d been the team’s captain. One of the many things I’d signed off on over the last forty-eight hours was permanently elevating him into the position as team leader. “Any sign of Mareritten patrols?”
“No reports, but they did almost run into a sentry position and were forced into a fast retreat. They should be here in Esan within the hour.”
“The valley remains open?”
“Aye. The sentries positioned at the head will send warning if there’s any effort to close it.”
“Good.” I rubbed my head yet again. “And Cate’s team?”
“No word from them this morning. Last report was two hours ago.”
“Their location at that time?”
“She said they’d passed the tail end of the Barrain Ghost Forest over an hour ago and were heading west.”
The Barrain was a fucking horrid forest filled with ghostlike trees whose fronds appeared to have a liking for human flesh, but if they’d passed the end of it three hours ago now, that meant they’d already crossed the Igna River—the largest river in Mareritten—and they were heading deep into Mareritten territory.Dangerouslydeep.
“Did they say why?”
“They were tracking the movement of a large force.”
“If the Mareritt were going west, then they were likely in retreat.”
Orkadden—one of their largest living hubs—was situated out that way, although anyone approaching on foot or even on the back of a courser would see little evidence of it. Marerittenwas basically little more than a vast subarctic wilderness whose conditions were so harsh for nine months of the year that its people lived in multiple underground cities, many of them located within the vast eight-hundred-mile volcanic crack that ran through Mareritten from north to south, drawing on the ground’s deeper heat to survive the long winters in much the same way we did.
“Cate didn’t believe it was Mareritt. She said it looked like cart tracks and foot soldiers.”
“Both of which the Mareritt have used in the past.”
“She said the footprints were differently shaped.”
I hesitated. “It’s possible the gilded riders have landed a force of foot soldiers—they’re using Jakarra as a base to hold them, remember, and they did have three ships docked at K’Anor when we flew over a few days ago.”
“Yeah, but why would they be heading toward Orkadden rather than us?”
“Perhaps they also intend to take out their trading partners.”
His grunt suggested he no more believed that than I did. “I guess it would depend on the gilded riders being as bloody-minded as the Mareritt.”
I had no doubt that they were, but every instinct I had said this force—whatever it was—was meant for us rather than the Mareritt. Mom might have been the one with seeress abilities, but it seemed my merging with Kaia had strengthened the gift within me. Of course, it might also be my natural pessimism coming to the fore, given most of my insights tended to be of the doom-and-gloom variety.
“Keep trying to raise them, Jarin. We can’t afford to lose another team.”
