Page 119 of Through Battle and Blades (The Wolf Queen 2)

And what a dream it was.

“You stupid little bitch!” Callum’s hand snapped out and around Eleanor’s wrist, not caring that he dragged his sister naked from her lover’s bed. He barely gave her a second glance before finding one of Nordred’s robes hanging from the back of his door and shoving it at her. “And don’t you think about going anywhere!” he snarled at Nordred.

“I wouldn’t dream of it, my prince,” Nordred replied, using the correct honorific, but with none of the implied respect. He rose though, donning his trews and following along behind as the prince dragged his sister through the castle.

Did it say something about his position in the palace, that no one remarked as Callum manhandled their queen? The corridors were largely empty at this time of morning, but still, guards saw them pass, as did ladies’ maids and cleaners. But it wasn’t until Callum started to drag Eleanor down the steps that Nordred interjected.

“Where are you taking our queen, Callum?”

No ‘my prince’ now. His title was dropped, but hers was re-emphasised.

“To see what her inaction has wrought.”

Time seemed to compress, in the way of dreams and visions, because in the next instance, they were walking through the gates of the barracks. The place was the same and different all once. But we didn’t get a chance to dwell on any of that as Callum dragged Eleanor closer to a sombre looking building.

“Your Highness, we—”

A man with the bearing of a general hustled forward, ready to make a request of the king, but Callum just shook his head.

“I know, General. I’m in the process of convincing the queen of the wisdom of our proposal now.”

The man took in the way Callum gripped the queen, catching the way her skin was blanched white and bloodless beneath his fingers and the hastily wrapped robe she was clad in, but all he did was nod.

“We will speak after you’ve had a chance to… show the queen the situation.”

And with that, any witness to what was about to happen was whisked away. All but Nordred.

“You want to bring the queen to the army mortuary?” he asked, stepping forward. Nordred might have been barefoot and wearing only trews, but he did not seem to lose any of his dignity with it. Actually, the complete opposite happened. As he walked, you could see the evidence of his wolf in the sure tread of his feet, the prowling pace of his steps. A wolf that Callum lacked.

“She needs to see, Nordred.” Callum’s voice wavered then, all the anger and disgust bleeding from his eyes, his posture, right before he stiffened his spine. “She is the queen and she needs to understand that people are dying due to her inaction.”

The smell was what she noticed first, her eyes being forced to try and compensate for the darkness of the room. Then there were the flies. But it was bodies, so many bodies, stacked up like cordwood in the room, that had the hand that was available to her covering her mouth. That helped her not suck breaths in of the stench, and to prevent flies going into her mouth, but that’s not what she was thinking. How? was her first thought. And then: Why?

“This is what the Granians are doing to us, sister,” Callum hissed. “Every soldier that has died on the battlefield, trying to drive those bastards out, has been returned here. Those with families left to claim them take their bodies to be buried and those that don’t…”

The prince now looked nothing like the heartless Reaver lord I’d just seen on the battlefield. He was wide-eyed, distraught with pain. I could see now why he was manhandling his sister so, because otherwise she would have just jerked away from him, from what was here. Given her choice, she would not have come in here in the first place, would have preferred to retire back to her rooms or to Nordred’s for more love play, there to wrap herself up in the warm blanket of pleasure and desire which the two of them created, to the exclusion of everything else.

Here, that wasn’t possible. Instead, she pulled free of her brother’s grip and walked further in, despite every instinct in her telling her not to, drawn closer by the sight of a little hand.

The child’s skin was mottled blue and white, his or her little fingers hanging still in a way that seemed incompatible with what I knew of young children. Why sit when you could stand? Why walk when you could run? Why talk when you could shriek and shout and cajole and whine…? But this child would do none of that. They were frozen in time now, preserved as a gruesome monument to childhood, their tiny body wedged in between the bodies of so many other children.

Eleanor’s hand slid to her belly then, the small swell there hidden by the voluminous folds of her dress.

I hadn’t felt the golden light in me since the battle. Seeing Nordred die seemed to kill it, but now it awoke. It fluttered, like a candle in the wind, valiantly trying to stay alight, just like it did in her. Somehow I could see, even feel Eleanor’s vision, of the same Mother statue her grandmother had presented her to when she’d first became a woman, then again, just before her grandmother’s death. She’d memorised that blank face with its rudimentary design and, just like I had, she now saw those eye sockets fill with blood, as her own tears slid down her cheeks.

“There’s children here too,” Callum said, anger giving way to despair. “The generals wanted me to burn them or bury them in a mass grave, but I…” He shook his head. “I wanted to see if their families could be found, if someone could take responsibility for them and see them interred properly. These damn flies are making that impossible. We’re due to burn the lot of them today. You’ll smell it up in the castle, but I didn’t want Nordred or one of your other courtiers to brush it off as wildfire or something. This is what the invaders are doing to our people. Your people, Eleanor.”

She’d rushed out then, gasping in great lungfuls of clean air, but the lazy hum of flies in the background prevented her from recovering her equilibrium. So she stopped trying. She vomited up what was left in her stomach over by one of the fenceposts, then straightened up. Her brother shook off his jacket and handed it to her, allowing her to button it up over the robe and then he led her away to meet with the war council.

Nordred nodded to everyone there, obviously having already made their acquaintance, and that made her feel like more of a fool than ever. Everyone in her inner circle knew what was going on. Everyone but her.

“We have to look at conscription,” one lord said, getting to his feet and eyeing the dishevelled queen. “The invaders have a whole empire behind them, sending fresh troops, armaments and supplies every day, to supplement that which they take from the land. Most of the south is gone.”

His finger trailed over a part of the map we called Grania now.

“Even then, it might not be enough. If every able man was deployed against the invaders…” The lord looked meaningfully at Callum, then Eleanor.

“Perhaps we can send envoys to neighbouring countries?” another said. “See if an alliance could be struck. Our queen is still unmarried.”

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