Chapter Thirty-Two: Storm Maiden

We'd captured the town of Gold River, but that was small potatoes. Yes, we could defeat a few dozen soldiers without much problem. But a few thousand? That was another issue. We marched through autumnal, and all the while I wondered what, if anything, we could realistically do of Calivar was surrounded by a besieging army out Mount Savryn.

There were more villages Gold River, all of them guarded by modestly-armed detachments of enemy soldiers, usually around twenty men. By the time we reached Mount Savryn, we had around a hundred prisoners and had left thirty enemy casualties behind to our two - not a bad haul for the first leg of our campaign. It wasn't until the next day that we reached the Everfell Plains, the low, flat valley between the northwestern hillsides and the mountain range separating them from central Autumnal. Those mountains were airy, snow-capped things about as high as the Rockies with jagged ridges of crumbling scree between them. They were passable, but not easily. But at the center of the range was a depression with two mild passes and a thousand-foot hill in the middle - the Mount Savryn Fortress. Legend had it that the depression was a crater formed when the fae fled from the moon at the end of the Sylvan Age, but that was debatable.

What wasn't debatable was that the fortress was surrounded by about three thousand enemy troops and had clearly seen better days. From our vantage coming out of the hills of the countryside, it was hard to see much of the fortress beyond its black and clearly crumbling edifice. In the evening light, I would see the pinpricks of cooking fires from the enemy encampments. They'd erected trenches and shrapnel fields around the fortress, and my keen eyes could make out one artillery cannon, which meant they had the other one on the other side. it was a jury-rigged thing and not real artillery, thank Gaia, or the old fort would have been completely obliterated by now. Even so, there were great cratered out sections of wall and some of the battlements had collapsed. One of the towers was half-destroyed while the other looked mostly-unscathed.

Captain Vittoro squinted at the fortress, his dark eyes glittering in the waning light. "If we advance under cover of darkness, we can break their ranks and lift the siege."

I shook my head. "If even a tenth of them have rifles, they'll annihilate us. We'll need to distract them like we did before, but we can't fly over their lines. There's no decent cover between them and the fort, and if we fly up to the fort and shoot from there, we might end up eating artillery."

"Can't we just…" Meliswe shrugged - she was no tactician. "Can't we just attack them anywhere that's not here? It doesn't have to be on the other side of their group, right? We just need to draw them away."

"That's a really good point! We could fly over to that group of trees over there… we could fly into the trees and start picking them off from eight hundred yards. If they try to shoot back, they'll be shooting below us at the ground level, and so they'll eventually have to send men out to deal with us, and the bigger the problem we make the more they have to divert - maybe enough for the distraction we need!" I kissed Meliswe. "My most beautiful strategist."

Vittoro cleared his throat. "Yes… well… that's not a bad plan. But you're a high value target, princess. At the first sign of things turning south, you need to retreat."

"Where? You'll be attacking?"

"If Artoro's battalion holds back as reserves, you'll be able to retreat to them. Promise me you'll do it."

"I don't have to promise you anything, captain," I stated. "But, for whatever it's worth, I will endeavor to stay alive."

We held back until night was fully upon us. Fortunately, it was a half-moon, the green moon of Alfheim casting enough light for our keen fae eyes to see but not enough for humans to see more than grainy outlines. There were fourteen of us in all - twelve men from Alvaelic's fae-kin rifle squad, plus Meliswe and myself. Meliswe could barely use a gun, but she absolutely refused to leave my side.

"The last time you went on a foolish mission, you almost got yourself captured," she said.

I nodded - there was no point in trying to dissuade her. "If there's the slightest hint of danger, you'd better flee."

"I'll flee when and where you flee."

That meant I'd need to be smart about my fleeing, I supposed. The fourteen of us buzzed over to the copse of trees, climbing around the boughs for thirty minutes or so to find a good variety of vantage points at the enemy camp. Then we tried to get a few hours of shuteye… which, surprisingly, wasn't that hard. Sleep in a tree once with your beautiful, buxom lover and it's a piece of cake, I guess.

I woke up just before dawn when I heard a group of hunters from the King in the South's army tromping and cracking through the woods with their kill - a doe and two fauns. Something about that angered me, though it's hard to put my finger on what. I'd hunted before and didn't see much wrong with it, so maybe it was that these weren't their lands or that they'd killed a mother and her children. For whatever reason, I found myself singing to the woodland below me:

That which steals

is close to you,

it treads upon your leaves,

crushes your stalks so carelessly,

takes from the cycle.

I give you leave to take revenge,

this is a song of revenge,

of hurting,

do you feel it, too?

Your roots are stronger than iron -

your roots and shoots are sharp,

they pierce, they cut

they drink,

and what do they drink?

Blood.

Slake your thirst,

for it is not a crime

to consume what only takes.

This is your right.

The men looked up, perhaps wondering what strange bird made such beautiful sounds. Soon, though, they were too concerned about the vegetation creeping about them, enmeshing and entrapping them. Then one cried out and then another as the roots and shoots of the bloodwood pierced into their skin, and soon the struggled for their lives. But I'd sung my song well and the wood crushed them and drained them, leaving them lifeless and engulfed by a hardy mass of bloodwood within a minute.

Perhaps I should have felt bad about killing them, but I didn't. That was three fewer enemy fighters to deal with and food for a few dozen guns, bows, or blades that wouldn't find itself to their plates. Instead of thinking too deeply on it, I shimmied down the bough that Meliswe and I perched upon twenty yards from the forest floor and took sight at the enemy encampment eight hundred yards distant. As soon as the morning reveille sounded, men started to emerge from their tents, and at my signal, we opened fire.

It took them a good two minutes to figure out what was happening, and by the time men started to get behind cover and shoot back (wildly and into the copse of trees), we'd already downed at least a dozen of their number. The morning sun rising over the copse made the muzzle flashes of our shots virtually invisible, so they assumed we were firing from ground level and returned fire accordingly. We continued to fire freely whenever we had a good shot. My aim was decent but not great - I figure I landed a kill or significant wound with every other shot and I lined up about twenty shots. That was about twice the average for our group, brought down a bit by Meliswe, who was pretty sure she got one.

Within a few minutes, the enemy figured out what was happening and sent a large contingent of the nearby army at us - close to two hundred men, most of them with axes or bows, many with shields, charging as we free fired at them. Our bullets traveled a lot faster than a regular Lebel shot and could punch right through most shields, but enough of our shots deflected to reduce our effectiveness and it's always harder to hit moving targets, which is why small groups can't rely on volley fire. I'd be surprised if we got more than a dozen of the charging men before they hit the copse, but they were confused enough by the lack of anybody at ground level that we probably got that number to twenty by the time they raised their shields to protect themselves from death from above.

Arrows zipped past us and I almost considered taking flight then and there. What really made up my mind was when one of the lieutenants scrambling around below didn't even try to aim at us. He lit a signal arrow on fire with a flint spark and shot it straight up… a marker for our location. Then the nearby men scattered in all directions - anywhere but where we were.

"Fly!" I shouted. My scream drew more attention and more arrows, so I grabbed Meliswe's hand and launched off, wings battering through the treetops and shooting up into the morning sky. An instant later, an artillery shell landed behind us and the shockwave pushed me off into the unknown. I flew madly and desperately, gunshots cracking below me, praying that Meliswe was behind me and following.

This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

+++++

For the first few seconds, I flew more or less blindly, propelled by the blast, my wings scratched by tree shrapnel and twigs and beating unevenly from flying right through the canopy. Leaves slapped me right in the face and left me tearing and blinking against the wind for a good five seconds before I could get my bearings aside from my instinct to fly in a generally upward direction. By the time I did wipe the tears and grit from my eyes and glance about, I was buzzing right over the enemy lines with rifles cracking below me as the soldiers below scrambled to shoot at the dispersing fae riflemen - soon enough, though, they were distracted by Vittoro's men making their own charge toward the weak spot in their ranks and I don't think a single one of us was hit, let alone downed by their fire.

I was already half-way to the fortress and it didn't seem like the time to make a lazy turn above active shooters, so I continued onward. My flight still wasn't fully-controlled and I had to pull up at the last minute to avoid slamming into the half-ruined walls of the fortress. I skimmed over the battlements, lost altitude, and came to a disorganized, skidding landing in the fortress's central yard, slamming into a supply cart and knocking myself silly on the ground. I stumbled to my feet, my head still swimming as armed men rushed to surround me.

"Meliswe!" I shouted. "Meliswe!"

Some of the men recognized me, parting like the Red Sea as I wandered away, my eyes on the skies for Meliswe. Had she been shot down? Had she flown off in another direction? I breathed a sigh of relief a moment later when she barely transcended the lip of the battered battlements and flopped onto the walkway. Despite my bruises and exhaustion, I buzzed up to her.

"Meliswe! Are you okay?"

She groaned. "Mostly?"

Her wings were studded with the splinters of tree shrapnel and looked to have two nickel-sized bullet holes torn clean through them. I planted little kisses all over her face and then helped remove the splinters from her wings so she could retract them safely.

"That was close," I said. I hoped the others had fared better than us.

"If it's any consolation, my loves, I think most of your fellows flew away from the ranks of enemy troops," a deep voice said. Strong arms pulled me up into a hug and he kissed the top of my head.

"Calivar!" I said, my voice muffled against his shoulder. "You're safe!"

"Safe is being generous, he said, but yes. The brothers and I have managed to use stone magic to minimize the damage from their artillery, though any shot now could be the one that breaches our walls. I'm more worried about your army outside attacking the enemy defenses. The troops the enemy deployed to quash your distraction are heading back and they might be enough to pin their flank and prevent retreat."

I gasped - a defeat outside the fort would be an absolute disaster. After that, we'd be virtually powerless to lift the siege, let alone to retake Autumnal. "Do we have any rifles up here? Meliswe and I have two, and probably fifty bullets between the two of us, but they won't work with any Earth rifles."

Calivar shook his head. "We exhausted our bullets on the second day. I've had my few fae scouts fly out to fetch gunpowder or more ammo, but since one got shot down and the other seriously injured, I've had to call that off - we have few enough flyers as it is, and we'll all want to fly out of this place if the worst happens. No offense to the non-flyers who might get left behind, but that's the reality of the situation."

I raced to the front face of the battlements, looking down the slope of Mount Savryn toward the battle lines where the wedge formation of Vittoro's host had pushed into the weak spot of the enemy's lines and was pushing outward to decent effect. However, another sizable group of enemy soldiers, a hundred fifty or so, approached their rear from the north and were already firing arrows into the exposed rear of the troops, who had only a few shields between them and four swordsmen for every bowman. Artoro's men had pressed in close behind the Vernal host to force the wedge into the enemy formation, but now they were clustered and an easy target for the regrouping enemy. When Vittoro's shieldmen spread out to guard the flank, that made their front-facing defenses vulnerable enough that the enemy infantry got the occasional shot through, and when a shield fell and a new one didn't immediately replace it, that left a gap in the defenses that was highly vulnerable to gunfire. They'd fared well thus far, but they were about to get slaughtered. The enemy troops from the south line began to spread out to surround our men.

"We've got to do something!" Meliswe said.

"We can assemble in the yard and make a charge where the enemy is peeling away to surround Vittoro's men," Calivar said. "It'll be bloody, but they're weak there and we can punch through and blunt their thrust."

"And then we'll immediately be flanked as the troops further south move to reinforce them," I said. "We need something with range…"

"What's the range on your spellsword?" Meliswe asked. I was beginning to suspect my gentle wife, my former handmaiden, was a natural tactician.

"Let's find out," I said.

I'd only ever used the thing in practice, to channel spells without any materials on hand. Usually, you needed to come into contact with some component when casting a spell - conductive metal to channel electricity, coal to channel fire, glass to channel a viewing portal, and so on. But the onyx-black gem of the spellsword could channel any magical essence and channel it very well. The question was whether I could summon enough range to disrupt enemy troops a thousand yards away down the slope of Mount Savryn.

I stood atop the battlements, the spellsword held high, my anger focused on the clustering of enemy melee troops surging to meet our troops head-on, and shaped a generous heaping of mana for a storm spell. The energy coursed down the spellsword like current down a live wire and, as I pointed to the sky, black clouds suddenly roiled out of nowhere, blotting out the sun. They rumbled and flickered and, as I traced a line from the sky to the ground, a massive jolt of lightning boomed down out of the sky, hitting the earth with a force as great as any artillery shell I've ever witnessed. A dozen men flew up from the blast, more died on the spot, their armor melted to slag around them, and I'm sure a few fortunate souls at the epicenter were vaporized immediately. Some of the enemy retreated back into their own ranks while others regrouped for the charge.

The charge group was much weakened, so I took aim at the dense grouping of troops further back, forming up to march on Vittoro's flank. I summoned another great mass of mana and tried the meteor spell that Prince Velda had once spoken of, which the Sorcerer Pentagrin had used to sink a destroyer. Flaming rocks streaking out of the sky seemed like a pretty effective weapon. I summoned the meteor, which punched through the veil of clouds, huge and flaming, streaking down toward the enemy. I realized at the last instant that the thing was following the point of my spellsword and adjusted to avoid hitting our own troops with the impact.

I think I still hit a few of ours - the impact was huge, a cracking boom that I felt trembling up my spine all the way atop the fortress on Mount Savryn. A shockwave of white-hot flame and hurtling boulders fanned out from the impact, incinerating hundreds of men in one fell swoop. I would appreciate the enormity of what I'd just done much later, weeping and wondering if I could have gone about my spellcraft without killing so many people, but in the moment I was only concerned with saving our skin.

"We have to weaken their other front," Calivar said.

I nodded. "This… listen, I've got a hell of a lot of mana, but summoning epic strikes at a thousand yards isn't exactly child's play. I can do maybe one more and then I'll need to rest."

"That sword of yours is doing the channeling?" Calivar said. "I know a channeling technique myself… I can't give you mana, but I can channel it into your sword to follow whatever shape you push in there. The brothers here taught it to me." The brothers, I would learn, were an order of monks who'd taken up residence in the fortress for over a century now, an order of Gaia who practiced healing magics - a form of magic that I frankly wished I'd paid more attention to.

"Better get the brothers up here, then. After this next go, I'm working on borrowed energy."

My next go was a big one - another meteor, since that seemed to be a lot more damaging - though meteors also took significantly more mana. I just about tapped my prodigious store, summoning another huge fireball from the sky and demolishing the northern flank of the enemy's forces, leaving Vittoro and Artoro's troops to mop up the disheveled survivors. Of course, there were another thousand and change soldiers on the other side of the fort circling around to reinforce their comrades and they'd been too far away to be shell-shocked by the epic display of magic that had just transpired, so more strikes were needed.

With the help of Calivar and the four Brothers of the Salubrious Order of Gaia, I managed four more lightning strikes - Calivar's mana store was about what Meliswe's was and the brothers were less than that, so a single meteor strike would have tapped them completely, but the lightning strikes were still plenty powerful and, as a side effect, the repeated storm casting whipped up a tornado that tore through the enemy's rear flank and cut off their route of retreat, driving the panicked survivors right into Captain Vittoro's clutches. Calivar finally sent his men out to circle around and entrap the remaining scattered enemy forces, promising to spare the lives of all who surrendered and offer them fair treatment. I buzzed out to rejoin with the captains while Meliswe stayed behind to have her wings tended by the Salubrious Brothers.

"Victory snatched from the jaws of defeat," Artoro said with a reverential bow. "I've never seen a display of sorcery like that, and I've been to eighteen of the last twenty competitive magecraft annuals."

As we herded our prisoners into the fortress yard and had the infantrymen bind and organize them, the archers stood along the battlements, looking down and chanting:

"Storm Maiden! Storm Maiden! Storm Maiden!"

So, if you ever hear the tall tale of the Storm Maiden, who electrocuted an army of ten thousand by channeling the power of the storm, that was me - though it was an army of three thousand, I only killed about half of them, there were two great big meteors in the mix, and I supplied a bit less than two thirds of the mana. Still, it has a nice ring to it. Storm Maiden.