Chapter Thirty-One: A Campaign in Fallen Autumn

The citizens of Estivalia treated our march into town as a parade - Calivar had marched his men out on the sly early in the morning, so there'd been hardly any spectators to see them go. But we marched right into the Old Amphitheatre in the Water Gardens district and the throngs turned out to watch us trot and march in, eighteen hundred Vernal soldiers with Captain Vittoro in his gleaming, ornate armor at the front of the cavalry and Meliswe and myself leading them all, streaming pennants for both Vernal and Estival, since we were now technically subjects of both realms. I carried two swords at my side with a rifle slung over my shoulder. And, yes, I'd tried extending my wings with the rifle slung and they always got stuck. The rifle had to come off before I could fly anywhere.

We rode into the Old Amphitheatre because King Alvaelic didn’t like the optics of a foreign army marching all the way to his palace. The delegation of officers and nobles that rode up to the Upper Courts to meet with the king was much smaller, one dozen of us on finely-armored horses, half of us carrying rifles that we each had about ten shots for. I would have liked to carry around ten times as many.

"Eighteen hundred men - you must have some sway with Alathea, my dear!" the king chuckled.

"She is my mother," I said. "I'd like to take the two hundred men you're preparing to send and join them with our group to form a unified force. They'll be used for tactical assaults and securing smaller villages."

Alvaelic leaned forward in his chair, steepling his fingers and looking rather amused. "Oh? Under whose command? I've already picked out a captain and I trust his judgment better on his own than I trust Captain Vittoro, whom I hardly know at all. If you will march under Captain Artoro's unified command, then you may join up with him."

It was an audacious request, but he was a king. They were known to throw their weight around now and again. I simply shook my head. "No. We will unify them under my command."

He waved dismissively. "I've already forbidden you to go into Autumnal, daughter, and I haven't changed my mind. Vernal marches under my commander or you march separately - the choice is yours, Captain Vittoro."

"The choice is mine," I stated. "My mother, Queen Alathea, gave me leave to lead the troops. If you wish to deny me the right to lead your troops, so be it, but I think that would be awfully foolish, and you are too old and too respected to be a fool. Through discussions and tactical rundowns with Ben Boyd, I am more familiar with the enemy's tactics than anybody else in the army and I've been following Project Boomstick since its inception. I respect Captain Artoro, but unless he's been practicing incognito, he's never practiced with our rifles and isn't familiar with squad tactics. If you want an Estivalian to rescue the prince, it will have to be me."

"You are not Estivalian…"

"Do you deny the fae law, then?" I'd done quite a bit of reading on unions in an attempt to figure out the strange magic that accompanied them, and the fae law was this: "If the Mother Gaia should consecrate the union, then their blood shall pour together, and it shall be as the same, and what one possesses so too does the other. That's our law. This means that Calivar is now a subject of Vernal and I am a subject of Estival, and as Princess of the Estival, I will claim your crown when you sail to Elysheim if Calivar is not around to assume his rightful throne."

To my surprise, King Alvaelic laughed at that. He pounded his palm on the table and called for wine. "Very well, daughter, you will go and save your husband. I care not - if Alathea gives her own daughter leave to ride into danger, she must think it worthwhile or she would be even more forceful than me in her displeasure. I wanted only to put you in your place, as some have whispered to me that the Princess Laeanna is too big for her britches. But now I see why your britches are so big that they resemble a sorceress's gown - you kick like a horse! Captain Artoro shall serve under you… but his rank shall be identical to your Captain Vittoro despite the difference in number."

"Agreed," Vittoro said. "There will be many more Estivalic troops for him to captain once we lift the siege.."

+++++

We'd never quite figured out how to make gunpowder, but I'd come up with a good workaround. More precisely, I'd designed a bullet that would work even better than earth bullets, but with a little caveat: instead of gunpowder, they used an alchemical explosive. Normally, alchemical concoctions have only a limited shelf life, usually on the span of hours to a few days, but I'd devised a clever workaround: the bullets were built with two separate chambers at the base. The activating solution was easy to enchant and held its enchantment for an unusually long time - several weeks. A reasonably competent mage could enchant hundreds of the tiny concoctions at once, at which point the bullets would stay good for a few weeks. Each bullet had a tiny silken strip that, when pulled, would mix the activating solution with the combustion solution. Once this activation happened, the alchemical concoction was even more explosive than gunpowder, but only for about ten minutes.

The trick had been re-engineering the gun's firing mechanism to pull the silken strip out before activating the bolt. My coffee guru Otto and Jacopo, the Italian soldier who'd once taken pot shots at the royal procession, had collaborated to make a little pin that pulled the strip just enough to mix the solutions whenever a bullet was loaded into the chamber (so any chambered bullet had to be fired within ten minutes). Then the little string got ejected with the rest of the shell. The resulting weapon had greater range, accuracy, and piercing power than the original Lebel we'd copied, but there was a higher incidence of dud bullets (maybe one in ten) and if the string got stuck in the breech (which happened occasionally), you'd have to manually remove it. On the whole, it was a lot better than not having rifles. Instead, we had about fifty and the king's reinforcements contained a squad of a dozen fae-kin and a few fae who'd practiced with the rifles and could also fly, which would prove to be a real boon.

When we left at dawn the next morning, the throngs had already begun to gather to cheer us out of the city. In consideration of patriotism and optics, we had the Estivalic troops in the front, marching proud and waving their pennants and flags. Meliswe and I were at the front of the parade, rifles slung across our backs with two of the new holsters - these ones were slightly more vertical so we could extend our wings with the rifle in place, though it would be a pretty bad idea to try to take the rifle out mid-flight.

"I could get used to this adulation," Meliswe said.

I nodded. "If we come back successful, we deserve it."

It was a day and half from Estivalia to the border with Autumnal. By mid-afternoon, we'd passed the plantations and fruit groves, passed the great humid press of jungle, and traversed the cooler and increasingly arid trails of the Serpentine Pass, which amounted to a hilly hike between the two ranges of the Serpentine Mountains. Past that was a great expanse of arid land - not quite desert, but not far off. Scrubby shrubs and cactus dotted the landscape, little lizards skittering from the path as we clopped along, and broad mesas loomed in the distance. I'd never been to Utah before, though there was a branch of the Born clan that had converted to Mormonism and gone off there to live in polygamy. A bit like me, I guess, but I was barely religious and I was clopping through an Estivalic dryland that only looked like Utah. The heat blasted us and I had to summon a zephrylite to blow the nattering little flies away, but as the sun dipped low, the flies settled for the night and the heat ebbed. It was close to sundown when we trotted into the oasis town of Silver Crescent, named after the shape of the mile-long natural spring that fed the town.

That night, we dined with the Earless of the Blue Crescent and the lord mayor of the town, who were both keen to point out how many men they'd already sent to Autumnal with Prince Calivar. A whopping fifty in a holding with a population of three thousand.

"I'm not going to poach any of your young men," I said. "But I have no control over King Alvaelic's levy - you will have to provide the men for the good of the realm."

"For the good of the realm, yes, princess," the earless said, a dark-skinned fae with unusually sharp features, her curled crimson hair up in a bouffant with little jewels studded within. "But bear in mind that this is not an agricultural holding where farmhands can sit out half the year with no ill repercussion. My people are merchants, and when they're away from their livelihoods, they don't earn money and families are hurt."

"They don't have to train in Estivalia, do they?" Meliswe asked.

"Good question," I said. "Captain Artoro… can we send a training unit out here to train the men on site? With any luck, the war will be over before they have to ship out and nobody will miss out on a trade."

"That should be possible. I'll write a letter to the king."

"I'll endorse it, too," I said. "I would be very surprised if he didn't indulge you."

"Thank you, princess," the Earless said.

"It was Lady Meliswe's idea."

The lord mayor cleared his throat. "You're going to fight with the men, are you?"

"To the best of my knowledge, wars aren't sex segregated, so I suppose I am," I said. "Don't worry, we'll only be gunning for the enemy lads."

"Gunning?"

"Aiming our weapons at." Faeric didn't yet have a vocabulary for firearms.

If you come across this story on Amazon, it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.

The earless invited us VIPs to stay at her estate for the night, an intricate castle carved right into the stone of a nearby mesa using fae magic. Our chambers were right next to the earless's, overlooking the town, palms and groves sprawling around the oasis and petering out four or five blocks out as the water table sank below easy access. Beyond were mile upon mile of flat scrubland interspersed with buttes and mesas. From our vantage a mile out, the oasis was a pale green glimmer in the moonlight, its whole surface was carpeted by a gauzy and luminous haze that must have been whatever equivalent Alfheim had for lightning bugs.

"We'll be in Autumnal tomorrow," I said.

Meliswe curled into the porch divan next to me. "We aren't there yet," she said. "Just think… this time tomorrow we might be victorious in Mount Savryn, celebrating our victory with fine autumnal cider and our wayward prince."

"I miss him, too," I said. "This 'desert sangria' isn't a bad way to forget, though." I offered Meliswe a sip of my drink - rose wine mixed with a host of sweet, slightly tart tropical fruits that, if they had any Earth equivalent, I do not know the name for them.

"Not bad," she said. "A bit tart for my tastes."

"True. I have all the tart I need right here," and I pulled her into a kiss, the warm desert breeze billowing incense up from somewhere below and sending our night dresses and hair fluttering and flapping in the night.

"I'm very glad we brought our zephrylites," she sighed, and we retreated to the bed, all thoughts of war and battle forgotten… but not for long.

+++++

It was mid-afternoon when I could finally claim to have visited all four of the Vernal realms. Four hours out of silver crescent, we reached the Desert Gate, and from there continued across the stretch of wilderness between Estival and Autumnal. The broken badlands of southeast Estival gradually turned to rolling hills with increasingly more vegetation, and the temperature gradually dropped from 'bloody hot' to 'a bit o' autumn in the air'.

As we rode toward the gate, not a soul came to greet us or to let us in. The whole gate fortress looked to be abandoned. I had my fae squad buzz up to the top and poke about, and they reported signs of combat around the fortress but nobody in residence. Instead, there were several dozen men busily constructing palisades and other fortifications along the hill a hundred yards from the gate fortress.

"Go on and crack the gate open and the lot of us can trot out to ask those boys what they're building."

"What if they're foes, princess?" Captain Vittoro asked.

"Rifle infantry don't build palisades. They build trenches. The best defense is picking off the enemy from a thousand yards from behind a bunker."

There were, in fact, thirty-seven soldiers out there. Roughly half were from Calivar's force and the other half were Autumnal soldiers. When Calivar had come through, he'd left fifty men behind to bolster the fifty that Presimiwe's captain had left to hold the gate. When a squad of enemy fae and dancers managed to sneak in and open the defensive doors, a larger enemy unit had come out of hiding and stormed the place. The defenders finally managed to drive them off, but not without losing nearly two thirds of their number. They decided to build palisades and groundworks around the entrance to hamper any other enemy force that might try to press the attack.

"What if they come from the wild side of the gate?" Captain Artoro asked.

"Excuse me, sir?" the autumnal lieutenant asked.

He pointed back toward the wilderness. "This fortress is here to keep folks out there from coming in here, not the other way around. Just because they came from your side the first time doesn't mean that's what they'll do next time. I'm leaving a squad behind to man the fortress wall and draw up plans for wild-side defenses. We're about to go in there and fight these bastards, and the last thing we need is to have enemy forces sneaking through the gate and attacking our rear. Do you understand, lieutenant?"

"Yes, sir. I'm to do whatever the sergeant you leave behind says."

"Beautiful."

Beyond the gate was the countryside of Autumnal, gently rolling hills crowned with trees of every color, from those only starting to loose their summer green to those turning brown and crisp. They rustled in the mild breeze like millions of tiny bells sushing, creaking, and clattering. Since it was always autumn here, the trees were always like this, and they only shed about a quarter of their leaves in true winter and regrew them in true summer. We marched along the fae road, that meticulously-maintained road that made a complete circuit through the four realms, over quiet streams and past half-harvested golden fields. Some of the buildings were burnt and some had clearly been damaged and many fields had been burned or trampled. We passed around a long line of destroyed carts and farm equipment that had been assembled to form a barricade. A dozen bodies lay rotting in the sun - they were days old, and rats and flies bustled about them.

"They just leave the dead to rot? And why do they burn the farms?" Meliswe asked me, her lip quivering.

"That's a scorched earth tactic. You take what you want and leave nothing behind that your enemy can take advantage of. It's not the tactic of an enemy looking for some kind of peaceful reconciliation."

"I don't care for these Earth tactics. They seem a more barbarous people than we."

"In most ways, they are," I agreed. "But also much better at war, and in a world of strife, that's a lot more important than civility, I'm sad to say."

We passed villages, many of which had been damaged by the invaders but didn't currently appear to be occupied by anybody. We didn't catch a hint of any authority, whether that might be Queen Presimiwe's, that of Calivar's army, or the forces of the King in the South, the whole region had been abandoned for more strategically-important areas. We saw people picking through the wreckage of farms and burnt buildings, and we stopped for an hour or so to help dig a mass grave for the several dozen dead, mostly villagers and Presimiwe's troops, though there were a handful of invaders, too, one of whom had a British corporal's stripes and insignia sewn into his armor - the King in the South sampled his men from all sides, it seemed.

We continued along the fae road, toward Mount Savryn and Calivar's besieged army, when we encountered our first resistance, an old stone wall delineating the border between holdings, behind which a dozen mixed riflemen and archers had been stationed. A few shots rang out, one of them striking Meliswe's horse and causing the poor thing to understandably panic. She took to the air as the poor thing bucked away from the road, and they tried to shoot her out of the air. Fortunately, hitting a flitting fae mid-flight is a lot harder than hitting a horse trotting down the open road and nothing hit her. Vittoro was about to send his men charging through the breach but was flexible enough to remember our discussion of tactics.

"Shield wall!" he bellowed, and fifty men with shields formed up at the front of our group.

We'd developed this tactic for two reasons - first and most obviously, it kept anybody from shoving bullets down our gullet as we marched at them. From nearby and if they were spread out, enemy rifles could pick us off from the sides, but from a distance, they'd only hit the shields, which Meliswe had enchanted just a few hours ago. Normally, a bullet might get through them, but not when they had a little magic thrown into the mix. Our formation could advance to archery range, spread the shield wall, and then return fire with longbows, which had an accurate range of about two hundred yards if the bowman was any good. Secondly, it provided a great distraction for our crack squad of flying riflemen - a dozen Estivalic fae who'd practiced "death from above" tactics.

Our first notion had been to have them fly up and shoot from above, but I can tell you from personal experience that it's just about impossible to aim while flying. The motion of your wings wiggles you about a lot more than you'd expect, existing air currents make it a lot worse, and even when hovering there's enough drift to make aim a questionable thing. It's like shooting while running, only you're moving four times as fast and you're eighty feet up. Instead, our idea was to buzz overhead and to drop behind cover to take out the enemy while they were focused at our main group.

That's exactly what we did - six to the left and six to the right zipping around the men at the wall and touching down just behind the hill overlooking Gold River. I could have joined them, but this was our first time trying the tactic against an actual opponent and I wanted to see how it'd work from afar - while Second Lieutenant Larry Born could engage in suicide missions to his heart's content, Princess Laeanna couldn't say the same without dire international consequences. So I sat back, crouched with Meliswe behind the shield wall. With a few deft motions and a touch to her little hand mirror, she summoned a viewing portal - something useful for peering through walls, floors, or a shield wall. When she cast her mana, it cast a point of view about three yards in front of us, which let us peer through the mirror to see what was happening beyond the wall. The two of us crammed in as close as possible to get a good look at the little screen - we were cheek to cheek, so it's fortunate we were on kissing terms with one another.

The riflemen behind the wall pinged an occasional shot off the wall as we crept forward, and before too long we'd be in range of their archers. Our archers could start taking shots, too, but we didn't want to expose them unless we had to. From the slow krik!… krak! of fire, I gathered that they were trying to preserve bullets - they couldn't shoot more than they'd brought with them. I spotted our men touching behind the one hill and then the other - and the enemy was too distracted to notice. A few seconds later, I heard the kik… pok of more distant gunfire and the men behind the stone wall began to panic.

"Shield wall… advance!" Vittoro bellowed, and we started forward at a double march.

Now our feet were exposed, but the riflemen were too preoccupied with our own flying riflemen to do anything about it. They started to retreat before they thought better of it and threw their hands in the air to surrender. We bound those men together and marched them at the front of our group - that way, if anybody opened fire, they'd be firing on their own comrades first. From there, we proceeded from the town of Gold River, the site of Calivar's first major victory but now fallen back into the invader's hands.

We'd killed four of their number, which left nine survivors. Calivar's reports had noted the make-up of the enemy forces they'd encountered and this one looked to be similar - a hodgepodge of men from different races, about half of them human and a bit over half of those Earth men. That meant the King in the South (whoever that was) already had a sizable army in Alfheim and was only using troops and weapons from Earth to bolster that. But it didn't take many guns - and took even fewer artillery cannons - to dramatically change what tactics you could employ. A company with a dozen good rifles could wipe out another company in open combat without taking a loss. Wherever we went, we'd be outgunned, but we had a few rifles of our own and some serious magic to make up the difference.

We swept into Gold River, taking the local defenders off-guard and suffering one loss (one of our men lost an eye and most of an arm, which I was pretty upset about) to the nine or ten we inflicted before the defenders gave up and turned themselves in. The enemy commander, whoever that was, had left about sixty men to guard the town, of whom we'd killed or seriously injured about a dozen. The rest we captured as prisoners of war, setting up an old storehouse for them to bunk in and questioning their several higher-ups about the state of the enemy further along the road.

"They left us here, said we might expect two hundred men without guns," an American gunnery sergeant told us. "We figured we could handle that… ten times that number with guns of their own, not so much. The rest the vizier pulled back for the siege on Mount Savryn."

"The vizier is here?" I asked.

He nodded. "Here in Autumn-land, or whatever you pointy-ears call it. He's made himself king in Harvesthall and is busy handing out lordships and dukedoms to his officers."

"What has he done with Presimiwe?"

The sergeant shrugged. "That the pretty queen of this place? He's sent rangers out to find her, but she seems to have gone to ground. Word is the palace was long empty when they stormed it, so she could be just about anywhere." He chuckled. "They must be getting pretty desperate if they're sending pretty fairytale girls after us."

"We are desperate," I agreed. "But desperate doesn't mean 'weak', gunny. Sometimes it means the opposite."