I loosened my grip on Cedric and darted forward through the people still shocked by my sudden appearance and locked my arms around Elm, holding onto him tighter than I did Cedric. I was making sure what I was seeing was real. Relief I’d been desperately awaiting had been given to me.
I felt his arm slowly come down to pat me on the back.
“Hey kid.” He said warmly. My head was burrowed deep into his chest, but I could hear the others in the room lower their hostility. I wanted to hide the few tears running down my cheeks, and I was definitely failing.
“I thought you were dead.” I reluctantly admitted.
“Well I’m not.”
I chuckled. It was good to hear his voice again. I raised up one of my hands to wipe the tears from my face and let go and stood in front of him. Nothing about his physical appearance had changed except for his outfit, but there was a new confidence in his stature. The shell of being just another trapped slave was starting to fade and allow me to see the man that once was.
“I’m assuming you and your Urilan steed aren’t the only two.”
“No, we’re not. We’ve got a full group… although we lost nearly everyone when we got attacked on the road. Except for my central crew, everyone is a new recruit.” I turned back to Cedric, who seemed miffed at being called a steed, “Cedric, can you tell everyone that it is safe to come into town? We’re in the presence of comrades.”
“I can tell.” He said blankly before exiting and running off with the wind literally at his back.
“Fucking Urilans…” Elm mumbled grumpily. With how he talked about Uril’s campaign, it wasn’t surprising he might be carrying a grudge.
“Sir?”
“Nothing. Let’s get you and your people set up with some food before we figure shit out.”
“Yeah. We’ve got a lot to talk about.” I grinned up at him.
I looked outside the door and could see the caravan coming from over the hill with Cedric leading them. Doors swung open to see the sudden arrival, and I could see a mix of familiar faces and new ones.
“Did you bring your full force?” I asked him. He shook his head.
“Only the essentials. The others we left to tend to the camps and make sure that Arlin couldn’t reclaim them. They’ve got enough supplies to last. How many did you manage to get for yourself?”
I visibly shrank in response. “Only the miners. Wand- sorry, Weiss sacrificed himself to summon the forest and destroy the camp while I protected the people in the mine.”
“Finally told you his name at the end?” Elm immediately picked up on who I was referencing.
“Yeah. He said the magore poisoning would have made him a burden.”
Elm frowned, a bitter taste holding back words of comfort I could tell he was searching for. Alex had told me to try and focus on those I could save and be more realistic, but Weiss could have lived. I could barely even guess what he might have lost on his way here.
“I’ll leave telling her to you. Plus, Elina’s got a nasty burner wound in her arm that she could used healed.” He said almost flippantly.
“Sir, why did you come to this village?” I asked as I watched the caravan grow closer to us step by step.
“Kid, that’s a whole other fucking issue.”
“Huh?”
----------------------------------------
It took some time for everyone to get situated in the village. Discussions were had as old members met new ones and the group coalesced. A lot of the people seemed to group together based on their nationalities. Seeing people get the chance to engage with their own culture which had been so grievously stolen from them felt a bit gratifying.
The main leaders of the group had coalesced around me, in the same village elders house where I’d initially ran into Elm. The new additions were apprehensive to talk to Elm or interact with the other rebels.
I stood by Elm’s side as we gathered around with Ruby’s maps and a few more sheets of paper we’d managed to wrench from her grasp. The door had been closed to keep out the chill of the night, with the only things left to light the room being three lanterns.
There was a lump in the back of my throat after hearing Elm’s explanation of why he was here, and I felt wrong even saying it. Except for Cedric, I had limited the room to the people who had been in the original caravan. Matthias, to many’s irritation, was also at the table. The man had information, and had also requested to meet with Elm.
He looked at Elm with a level of reverence that I’d never seen in him before, a respect that could only come from seeing a person as a childhood hero. Arlinian nationalism was something I could never understand, since Corith didn’t really prop up anyone as a figure to be revered that wasn’t the king.
“Researcher Grayson, I’m honored to meet you.” Matthias happily declared, extending out his hand. Elm looked at it like a dead fish.
“Do I know you?” Elm responded bitterly to hearing his old title being used.
“Well- no. I’m Matthias, Researcher in Magore Geology at the Vyris branch. I’m a fan of much of your early research into my field. I’ve read your part on how to calculate magore density in a mining location based on local geography at least five times by now. I planned on using it as a central source in my own current research before… this.”
Elm’s frown transitioned into something more neutral as he began to nod. “I always liked that paper. It’s one of the few things I did for Arlin that I don’t entirely regret. Is the geology branch still underfunded?”
“We’re fighting for scraps at this point. You wouldn’t believe how intense the arguments with old Solomon get.”
“That bag of bones is still alive?”
“The Fourth has done his best to ensure that stays the case. I’ve only seen him on the stairwell, when he’s heading up to his office or to the basement.”
Elm grumbled, his eyes turning towards Arlin. Something about the mention of the basement had ticked him off.
“If it’s possible, could I consult you on my theory? I’d love to hear your thoughts on it.”
Elm turned to ponder this for a moment until a hand slammed itself on the table. We all turned to see Cedric oozing bloodlust at my mentor.
“Elm…. Grayson?”
Elm scowled and placed both his hands on the table. The small flames of the candles seemed to shudder in the growing tension.
“That name is dead.” Elm said bluntly.
“So it’s true.”
The room fell eerily silent as the two men simply glared at each other. I was watching Cedric with such care, yet I was only able to briefly catch his hand moving behind his back and pulling out a knife. In a single swift motion, Cedric tossed the knife directly at Elm’s head.
Time seemed to slow as hands were raised and attunements released. Mell and Alex were both darting forward as Cedric started to jump off the ground and onto the table behind the knife. Elm’s hand raised up from the table and, instead of using his attunement, placed itself in the path of the blade. It pierced through the middle of his palm, but was stopped from reaching his face.
Elm intentionally fell backwards as the ground beneath us started to rumble. I was too stunned to move or do anything to prevent Cedric from continuing his rush. Just as he had made it halfway, his momentum stopped and he was slammed directly down into the table. Mell had latched onto his ankle with his iron grip.
Being stopped, Cedric looked up to see everyone else in the room ready to attack and dropped the second knife that I’d not even realized he’d pulled. A flame and a knife of ice were both locked on to him and ready to fire at any moment.
“Cedric, what the fuck!” I yelled at him.
“This is the Elm you’ve been telling me about? The Urilan Butcher is your mentor?”
“He’s on our side!”
“The Mother and Father do not forgive men like him!” Cedric cried back with a religious zeal.
“Well I do, and that’s what matters.” I snapped back. I was done with people trying to justify the murder of comrades through their culture and religion.
“You have no idea what he did to our people.”
“I don’t need to.” I looked over at Elm, who was carefully removing the knife from his palm, “I trust him. He’s been with me since the beginning, something I can’t say for you.”
Cedric grumbled as Elm made his way to his feet, extending his bloody hand over to me. I quickly began to heal it, focusing my flow over to him. The flesh that had been removed was replaced, although his clothes and arm were still covered in blood.
“Kid’s right. I won’t deny what I did in Uril in the name of Arlin. We were angry in a way that Arlin had never been before in one of its campaigns, and that led to us doing unspeakable things. If I was you, I’d kill me too. But we’ve got things to do, and grudges like that aren’t going to make fighting Arlin any easier.”
I finished healing the hand and nearly dropped, using my hands on my knees to hold my upper body.
“Before this fucking happened, the kid asked me to explain the situation so far. Apparently he thought it was best coming from me. Now unless you want to keep this going, calm the fuck down and listen.” Elm glared down at Cedric.
Cedric gave a reluctant nod and slowly scooted back off the table and stood in between Mell and Alex. I gave a knowing glance to Mell, a silent order to keep watch. He smiled briefly in confirmation.
“We’re not here because we wanted to be. Honestly, the only reason we’re talking with each other is good fortune and timing. Although I would prefer the reasoning be under better circumstances. We’ve managed to clear out the camps on our way here, and I intentionally left some to hold the ground. They’d been keeping a larger food supply than I would have thought, and it seems they’d even maintained some of the farms they stole. Our position on the roads was hard, but I managed to push through despite some losses.” Elm took a deep breath as I felt the candles shudder once more.
“When we made it to Toranir, it was gone. Trampled. Looked like a hundred Iron Chariots ran through the thing like they were tilling a field. Almost made me doubt our cartographer for a second until I found this.” Elm reached behind him to something lying against the wall and placed it on the table. It was the remnants of a sign, the same type one would have at the entrance to a village. It was the middle part of the sign, with half of the letters in Toranir missing. The areas that had been cut off looked like it had been through a variety of bite marks and claws.
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“They couldn’t have…” Sera breathlessly exclaimed.
“North told me about the unforgivable sin, and it fits with what I saw. They must have done it only a bit before we got there, but for what reason, I can’t say. Best guess from an Arlinian standpoint, they might have been preemptively punishing a place that they expected to rebel once we got there. Which is a problem, because that means they knew where we were heading and decided to do that instead of holding their ground.”
The table stood silent for a moment, mourning for a people we could never know. It had distracted us from the attempt on Elm’s life that had occurred minutes earlier.
“For the moment, I’d say it’s best to count our blessings that we’ve reunited as a force. If North is planning what I think he is trying to plan, we will need all that we can get. Coups don’t work like war. If war is a brawl, a coup is an ambush on a sleeping monster. If we slow down at any moment during the attack, we’re fucked.”
“You know a lot about these?” asked Alex.
“Military training for higher ranks came with a lot of preliminary study in order to command troops. Understanding prior military strategy is useful for creating new ones. Coups are as old as the kings they were intended to oust. Usually coups are occurring from someone inside the government, which is why I’d say this doesn’t fall into the normal category.”
“Sir, should we start planning tonight?” I piped up.
“I’d rather not. We need fresh minds, and with how things have gone, I don’t expect us to get much done.” Elm sighed, glancing down at his hand, “We can return to this in the morning.”
The group nodded in agreement and split in their separate ways. As Elm and I made my way to the door, he gestured in the direction of one of the cabins near the village’s end. It wasn’t hard to guess who he was trying to lead me in the direction of. I smiled and formed a light in my thumb, pantomiming holding a torch as I made my way towards Elina.
The door to the cabin creaked open slowly, the inside bathed in shadow. In the darkness, a flash of steel hair glinted in the light of my thumb.
“Where is he?” echoed out through the darkness.
Of course that’s the first thing she’d ask.
“He’s dead. It was a self-sacrifice.” I answered. There was a growing tightness in my chest.
“Then Wanderer got a better fate than he deserved.”
“His name was Weiss, and I won’t let you sully his death. You may have given your word to me but he gave his life. I don’t care what your culture says but I won’t let you disrespect a man who gave everything for my cause.”
The Ireborian woman stared at me, although I wasn’t able to read her face.
“Just heal me.”
I obliged and stepped forward where I could finally see her face. It was scarred more than ever, cuts and bruises covering every inch. I couldn’t heal injuries like that if I wanted to, but I didn’t. She began to peel back the bandages on her left shoulder, revealing that a chunk of flesh had been burned off of it. The muscle, skin, and even some of the bone were missing from the top of her shoulder.
I made a prayer to the mana and felt her flow, tapping into it and letting my natural talent do the work. After a minute, when I felt that the part had been correctly replaced, I opened my eyes and nearly fell onto my butt. I had to hold my body against a countertop somewhere in the dark to not collapse.
I waited briefly for a thanks which I didn’t receive, then left to find my own lodging.
Alex was right. There were some people I couldn’t save.
----------------------------------------
I awoke with a headache inside of a toolshed I’d been offered for the night from a villager. I didn’t know whether it was from frustration or doing multiple healings in one day. Slowly, I made my way to my feet and exited only to be greeted with what seemed like a grand feast out in the middle of the village. Tables had been placed in a long row with people entering and exiting a nearby house with plates of food. There had to be over a hundred just out in front of me, showing the size of our new force. I couldn’t help but grin.
I grabbed a plate of bread and a few vegetables I’d not seen in years, bringing back a painful amount of nostalgia. A mix of green and brown that had been carefully pulled out, likely in a larger number than the villagers would have preferred. I felt bad the strain we were putting on this town.
During the meal, Elm had come up to me and told me that it was best to grab the best strategic minds we had for the meeting, rather than just those from the original group. I hastily made my way through the rest of the meal and went around grabbing those I knew who had some knowledge of military strategy, and also Matthias for good measure. At this point, he seemed to have gotten used to being used as a source of knowledge.
We gathered once again in the village elder’s house. Myself, Silva, Elm, Ruby, Deborah, and Sera were all gathered together. I’d tried to get Cedric, but he’d turned down the offer. I didn’t blame him. Even with how much of himself he hid, I could feel the lingering bloodlust radiate off of him just mentioning my master’s name.
“Let me start,” Elm said, placing his hands on the table and leaning over the map, “North here says he wants to do a coup. Seems people decided to make him king, which is a decision I won’t comment on. Problem is, this dumbass doesn’t entirely understand what he is doing, which is why he came to me.”
Thanks for the confidence boost.
“Thanks to us getting lucky, we have more numbers which increases our capabilities. That leaves us with a lot of other problems, since if we want to do something resembling a coup, we need to reach four goals.” Elm continued, raising up three of his fingers, “First, we need to get inside the capital while suffering as few losses as possible and raising minimal alerts. Second, we need to destroy transport and communication. Third, we need to take over the central authority without killing them.”
“We don’t kill them?” I asked naively.
“Who do you think a bunch of Arlinian soldiers are going to listen to? No, we need the man alive to give them orders to stand down. We want to keep violence to a minimum, but we also need to make sure that the Arlinians feel threatened. Researcher, who's the governor of Corith?”
“I believe it is Bernard Laurian. Although I think he has abandoned the Laurian title.” Matthias meekly stammered. I didn’t recognize the name, but Elm made a facial expression as though he’d just smelled something rancid.
“Orven… if that walking piece of strig shit was my father, I’d abandon my title as well.” Elm spat.
“Minister Orven was recently executed by Emperor Arlin, last I heard.” Matthias awkwardly added. A bit of the bitter taste in Elm’s mouth faded hearing those words.
“Not soon enough. You met this Bernard?”
“No, but the other researchers talked about the man rather glowingly. They said he was doing a good job integrating the people of Corith into Arlin by mixing their cultures, rather than replacing it. He even took a Corithian as his wife, which caused a lot of scandal.”
“You got more random fun facts you want to share?” Deborah snapped at Matthias. He quickly shut his mouth and desperately shook his head to say no.
“All that matters is that we need to keep him alive long enough so he can order the troops to retreat and leave the capital. We can kill the stragglers who hold their Arlinian pride high enough to betray orders from authority, but we need to limit our kill count. After that, you and your storytelling group can figure out how to make the people of Corith believe your story. The problem right now is that we need to figure out how we get to that point.”
It was a very daunting problem. Figuring out how to face a stronger force with home advantage without using the forest as a cheat felt nearly impossible.
I stared down at the map drawn by ruby, who was mumbling and tracing lines across it at the same time. The capital was both the largest city and the largest source of magore in Corith, and both of them would be difficult to tackle.
“I know we are limiting violence, but we do need to take care of the mine. That’s likely where they will store the weaponry and will have the largest number of attuned we can free.” I pointed out, rubbing my chin, “And if we’re going fast, that means we need to have separate groups, right?”
Elm nodded along, and I could see the smallest turn upwards on his lips.
Is he proud?
“Three groups. One for the camps, one for transportation, and one for the capital. That way we can cover all of our bases at the same time. Generally, soundlines are located at mines, which means the mining camp team will have that to deal with as well.” He looked over at Matthias to confirm his guess. He nodded.
“I can get in with relative ease as long as there’s an opening. I’m more confident in my invisibility with both myself and another person, but I can’t go farther than that. It would also require an open gate or bridge, I think.”
“Bridge?” Deborah blurted out.
“Is there not a moat?” I asked innocently. I’d heard about castles having them in the past, and assumed it was the norm.
“Freiweld wasn’t built to protect against invasions. Maybe it got bolstered after the war, but we only had wooden walls and watchtowers to protect against the forest.”
“Then I know how we can get in without relying on North.” Elm said confidently.
“Which is?” Deborah pressed him to continue.
“Tunneling. It’s going to be hell for me and the other stone attuned, but maybe we can go under instead of going through. The wooden walls can only reach down so far, and the longest distance we’d need to reach is someone’s cellar.”
“Freiweld does have a lot of cellars.”
“I can scout that out and find the best spot for us to tunnel to. Will tunneling be visible from above?” I inquired.
“At night, with the sounds of Corith’s forests?” Deborah said .
“Fair point.”
I pondered silently for a moment as others discussed more details of the plan. Deborah had offered to help us get through the secret passageways inside the castle.
“If we’re going to sabotage the roads, we’re either going to need magore bombs or stone attunements.” Deborah noted, leading to a brief silence.
“Attunements are the easiest, but if we have an extra day before we start, we could collect the necessary magore to make bombs.” Sera spoke up.
“Which would rely on me doing a multitude of runs to and from a heavily guarded mine.” I quickly responded.
“Kid’s right. Luckily, one of the new recruits is another stone attuned.” Elm said in a rather proud manner.
Jay mentioned his attunement being stone as well.
“Same here. Jay seems pretty confident in his abilities, and I’m sure we could get some other destructive powers.”
“Kid, I’ll leave the groups to you.” Elm said.
Of course. I have to decide who goes with what.
I scanned the table, thinking of the skill sets required. It was a hard thing to deliberate.
“Silva and Alex are good as a team and are used to fighting Arlin more directly. Can I trust you two with managing the sabotage team along with Jay?”
Silva and Alex glanced at each other, silently communicating before nodding.
“Good. For the camps… stealth would be best. Cedric and Elina are the strongest at leading ambushes and should work well together.” I said, knowing full well that neither of them were in the room to oppose the decision.
The last was the hardest, because it was the most essential.
“Deborah, would you say that a large force or a small force would be best in infiltrating through the hidden passageways?”
“Small. Any large group would limit speed.”
“Hm….”
I was going to be in the castle team, that was fairly obvious. But the rest could easily go to other positions and do completely fine.
“I’ll be leading with Deborah giving directions. If we’re going as a small group, I’ll choose who comes with.”
The rest of the table looked at me with wide eyes, hanging on my word.
“Elm, you’re coming. Having a stone attuned underground would be nice, and you understand Arlin’s military. Sera, you’ll also be coming with me. You understand Corith better than me, and that might help with dealing with Governor Larry.”
“Bernard Laurian.” Matthias corrected.
“Sure. I’ll want Ruby as well for scouting purposes. And I’m guessing that you probably want to stick with Mell, who would also be helpful.”
Ruby grinned in confirmation. Those two were very hard to separate, and I wasn’t planning on trying. I hadn’t decided where to put a few others such as Gwendolyn, but I could leave that up to the other team leaders to figure out.
The sore thumb in the room mumbled something under his breath, drawing all attention to the researcher.
“Oh and you….”
“Me?”
“You’ll be on the sidelines somewhere you can’t go squeaking to the Arlinians. Probably with any of the non-fighters.”
“Oh.”
“Try and keep up the good behavior.” I snarkily added. I was still holding out hope that he’d support us willingly, even with the malice that everyone else directed at him. “I think that covers most of what we can do. I’ll let team leaders decide their entourage.”
The meeting adjourned, and I slowly watched people filter out of the room. Elm looked at me with an expression I’d not seen before, his usual frown softened into something more friendly. It wasn’t happy, more like comfort.
I smiled back at him as I walked out into the village to prepare us for the journey ahead.