The army appeared over the horizon as the last stones were being piled upon the grave of the phoenix. It was now a huge stone mound stretching all across the farmlands that had been cleared for the battle. Not only had the pit where the phoenix had fallen been covered up with huge boulders but everything around it had as well in case the phoenix burned its way up somewhere nearby. The work had taken up much of the army’s manpower and half of them were still at the quarry gathering more stones despite everyone’s insistence that they had enough. The old witch wanted to be sure apparently, and sure she had been, although now it just might have cost them all their lives.
Weary soldiers sweated on the piles of stones and looked down at the approaching force. There’d been no warning, they were still exhausted from hauling rocks all day and they had left all their weapons in the armoury. The army was huge, made up of many lords from many lands, each with their own colours and banners arrayed out along the crest. They were still far away but there wasn’t much time before they’d be bearing down upon them. The soldiers ran, tumbling down from their perches they loped into the armoury to grab what weapons they could. Those who had been sergeants, captains, commanders, struggled to bring some order to the chaos but they’d lost long ago the men they were supposed to be commanding. In the rush to slay the phoenix the army had fallen apart. They trudged to their posts along the walls. Castle Elkring was formidable, a huge fortress built around a huge oak tree as big as a small mountain. But to guard all those walls took a lot of soldiers and they didn’t have that many soldiers any more.
The army approached, it had a lot of soldiers.
Within the castle the Oaken Court looked out from the king’s high balcony. It was the middle of the day and it was unnaturally hot, but not so unnatural that embers were howling down out of the sky and the grass was drying up. Still, it wasn’t ideal, their greatest weapon worked best at night.
Eyr Ragoth, Queen of Xith ignored the heat blazing down on her and watched the army with another queen, the Witch Queen Nath. They were both new to the court and disliked some of the other members who thought to preside over them. They also represented what little hope Elkring still had.
“Eyr, Nath,” King Ramon said, stepping up to them. “How fast can you be ready?”
“I will be prepared long before that army arrives,” Nath said.
Eyr nodded, she would be ready as well.
Ramon turned and faced the older witches, Gushkabel and Magda. “What does the future hold? Can you see it?”
“I’ll tell you what the future holds my lord,” Bariel, the Master of Arms said. “That army is going to march in here and the magnificent force that we’ve been building up these past few months is going to be unable to stop it because they’ve been too busy piling rocks on top of each other!”
“That phoenix would have destroyed the entire castle if not for-” Gushkabel began, she did not get far.
“If not for the trap my men set for it and the fisher girl who fought it for us!” Bariel interrupted. “I haven’t seen you lot do much of anything except order us around and get us into ridiculous positions like this!”
Gushkabel refused to answer and the king tried to calm his Master of Arms. He didn’t succeed.
“Bariel, you can’t-”
“Can’t I, your majesty? These witches have all but admitted they have no magic! All four of them-” he gestured broadly to Gushkabel, Magda, Eyr and Nath. “They can’t do anything to help us! What are we supposed to do?!”
“Run,” said Vered, the chairman of the Oaken Court, stepping out onto the balcony. “You should run.”
Bariel finally quietened, mainly because of the confusion that distorted his face. “But... but...”
Peppers, the Queen of Fools burst into laughter. “Bariel’s arms are all tired from lifting boulders so he is a master of nothing.” No one else seemed to find it at all funny.
“This is our greatest castle, if we can’t defend this we can’t defend anything!” Deagon, the Master of Coin said.
“We’ll be defending our lives,” Vered replied. “Something we certainly can’t do here.”
“We can,” Magda said nervously, her watery eyes looking out at the army and her fingers clutched tightly around a red bag.
Vered raised his eyebrow. “Really, forgive me for having some skepticism.”
“This is our best chance and we have more of a chance than you think. We have a lot more magic than they do.”
“We thought that before and they set a phoenix on us.”
“The phoenix is dead and buried,” Gushkabel spat. “All that’s left are weapons and warriors, predictable, monotonous. We have the beasts of Xith at our call, we have the potions of the Witch Queen and we have the fiefling.”
“Yes you’ve said that before, what exactly does this fiefling do?” Deagon asked.
“Well it made the phoenix for one thing.”
“We can make our own phoenix?”
“No, the fiefling is dead. But its body will burn far hotter than anything else, we can tie to arrows and set fires on the enemy that won’t go out.”
“That’s... not how fire works,” Vered said.
“It’s how this fire works.”
“Enough!” the king shouted and they all quieted, he didn’t shout very often, perhaps he was finally growing into the king he should have been years ago. “Bariel, Gurren, get your best archers to Gushkabel and Magda, I want this fire on them as soon as possible. Eyr, Nath, I want you working together as you planned. Vered and you other guildmasters, you’re in charge of logistics, I want everyone to have everything they need or could possibly want at all times. Peppers, run all over the castle and see what parts need shoring up, report back to me. Sireth, join the archers. Is that clear?”
Everyone looked at each other and nodded slowly.
“Excellent, then get off my balcony!”
They left and the king stood atop his castle and rubbed his aching temple. It took him a while to recover from an outburst like that, he had never been a natural born leader as everyone had wanted him to be. He had better become one though, or he was going to run out of chances.
The army hadn’t been marching long. They’d set up not far from the castle and relied on the Inkdrop Queen’s network of scouts to keep their location a secret. It hadn’t been easy but Ramon was fielding half the scouts he normally would and now most of them had been killed, or captured and tortured for information.
So now they were all refreshed and rested and they’d been joined by Lady Vessry and her forces to make a force many times larger than that at the castle. It was a good day, an excellent day to topple a dynasty.
The army marched upon the castle and the mound of stones before it. They were out of the reach of arrows or even siege weapons but they didn’t have to worry about that yet. First came the mist.
It was only clouds at first, slowly drifting clouds that no one noticed, at least not until they grew dark enough to blot out the sun and descended. Then the soldiers started to notice and they also started to see the swirling shapes hurtling through the mist. The swirling shapes that seemed to be spreading it. No one saw what the shapes were, no one could see much of anything at that point. But they all heard the screams as those shadows crashed into the soldiers and then swept away back into the air.
Lord Sturken shouted instructions to his men. “Form up behind me! Form-” His instructions ended in a crash and a scream as a shape knocked him from his horse, leaving his body mangled and torn, even through his armour.
Screams split the air and some men panicked, breaking rank entirely. Lord Farro pulled his horse under control and grimaced at the darkening sky. He could see nothing but the shapes of his men around him and beyond that he couldn’t see far. He grabbed a trembling man standing below him and leaned down into his face. In all the panic and mist and screams he remained calm and the man seemed even more terrified than he’d been before.
“Charge forward,” Farro told him. “And scream.”
The man obeyed, launching himself from Farro’s grip and sprinting off into the mist, toward what was hopefully the castle. He let out what Farro had hoped would be a battlecry but was far more similar to the screams of terror everyone else was making. Farro grimaced in annoyance and kicked his horse forward.
“Charge!” he shouted and galloped away. His men heard him and they charged, what else was there to do but wait there and die?
A shape came for him, hurtling down out of the mist but he was ready for it. He’d already drawn his sword and he plunged it into the shape as it bore down upon him. It was a winged monster, something like a bat but that was all he saw before it knocked him from his horse. It’s claws tearing through his armour, making him bleed. It bounced away and he groaned in pain as the ground knocked the wind out of him. He struggled to his feet, there was no time for this on a battlefield. He found the dead creature, it was a bat, a giant one, with his sword impaled through it, and it had a belt wrapped around it covered in bottles that were leaking the mist.
Farro took out his sword and through the rush of bodies charging forward managed to find his horse and mount her again. It took a while though, especially with blood slick on his chest and pain roaring from his side. So he wasn’t at the front of the charge when it emerged into a wall of fire.
Sireth, the head ranger of the Deepwood stood atop the walls of the castle and fired the last of the arrows tipped with the crumbled body of the fiefling. Most archers had been given two arrows, he’d been given three. He hoped he was up to that extra responsibility. The arrow hit a man who burst into flame instantly and set the ground around him on fire as well. A fire that didn’t go out. It was nice to be on this side of the magical fire for a change.
Sireth reached for his regular quiver and knocked a regular arrow. There were soldiers breaking through the wall of fire that they’d built up and starting to form ranks. One of the vampires burst from the mist behind them and took out some soldiers before disappearing again. Sireth took aim and fired, they were close now, possibly too close.
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He heard shouts of alarm and looked toward the grave of the phoenix. Boulders and rocks were crumbling away as the army clambered over it. Magical fire or not it didn’t seem to be able to burn stone. There was a gap in the fire and the enemy poured through. Sireth could do nothing to stop the torrent of soldiers but he could pick off the enemy archers who were setting up atop boulders and firing at the defenders. He hit one, then another. Their focus was on the defenders in front of them, not on him. He took aim at the third.
Then an arrow stabbed through his arm. He screamed and his shot fell apart in front of him. His aim disappeared and the arrow fell away to nowhere, the bowstring catching on the arrow sticking from his arm and yanking it, causing yet more pain. He collapsed down beneath the walls and cursed.
He’d been watching the archers at the grave, but there had been other archers getting through elsewhere. Idiot! Blood was trickling down his arm and onto his fingers which twitched painfully. The arrow still stuck right through his arm so he used his other one to snap it off and pull it out. Ignoring the pain as best he could. Around him other soldiers dropped from similar arrow wounds. They’d had a good start but the enemy just seemed to have more archers than them, many many more archers.
His body shaking with pain he pulled a torn piece of his shirt tight around the wound with his teeth. He panted with exhaustion and tried to stand up, leaning on the wall. Then he heard the clash of swords from atop the wall. The enemy was somehow here already.
Farro emerged from the mist onto the circle of stones. He teetered on his horse, his head still reeling from his run in with the great bat earlier. Around him soldiers screamed and died in the fire but he looked ahead. Ahead the elite shock troops of the Inkdrop Queen had reached the wall and were shooting their grappling arrows. Farro had almost laughed at the concept when he’d first seen it. You would have to be impossibly accurate and having ropes on the end of an arrow would weigh it down far too much. Not to mention the defenders could simply remove them.
But he was now starting to think he’d been wrong. Too many roped arrows to count sprung up along the walls and the troops began scaling them incredibly fast. Streams of men running up the walls like spiders on their webs. A few of them were knocked down of course and they all crashed to the ground humiliatingly, but many others reached the top. He was thankful for that. The wall of fire didn’t seem to be dying down and the only way through seemed to be the circle of rocks which hardly seemed a place fit to bring a siege tower.
He walked his horse slowly through the rocks and listened to the sounds of battle ahead of him. Then more of those mist potions began to fall from the castle walls, their telltale trails of mist flowing behind them. It was a different colour this time Farro realised, darker than before. It wouldn’t be the same thing, there was little advantage to using a blinding mist that close to the walls. Over the sounds of battle he began to hear the screams.
Sireth staggered to the breached part of the wall above the grave of the phoenix, clutching a sword in his good hand. The battle was a press of bodies, both sides crushed together in a pile of shouts and screams and cries. Sireth could smell sweat and blood and fear all coming off the men in waves. Beside him other soldiers poured some of the witch queen’s potions down at the invaders. He didn’t know what those ones did but from the screams below it didn’t sound good. He also didn’t care, he reached the press of bodies and jumped.
The men closest to him were all on his side, he had to reach the other side in order to do anything. For most men that would’ve been difficult, even impossible, but Sireth was a ranger of the Deepwood. He’d been running along tree branches before he’d been running on the ground.
He landed on the merlons and ran along them, the battle on one side and the sheer drop to the ground on the other. His sword found the face of an invader and he tore through it, moving on to the next one. That one saw him coming and tried to block but was too late, he joined his friend on the ground. They hadn’t expected an attack from this direction and he was going to take full advantage of their surprise while it lasted. It didn’t last long.
The next one got his sword up to block in time and pushed. Sireth realised his mistake at running along the castle so precariously. It left him very little room to fight. He let out a desperate lash at the face of his attacker as he fell. He twisted and caught the wall with his other hand, a trick he’d picked up from many falls in the forest. But in the forest his arm hadn’t had an arrow through it.
Slamming into the wall like that was too much for the pain in his fingers and he bounced off. He tumbled down to die on the ground.
“They’ve taken the outer wall and opened the gate,” Peppers said, her usual happiness marred.
Ramon nodded grimly, he’d already sent everyone to the gate, there wasn’t much more he could do.
“It seems that there are too many of them and not enough of us,” the Queen of Fools continued.
“Yes Peppers,” Ramon replied. “It does seem that way.”
“I suppose I had better make up the numbers as best I can,” she smiled at him and ran off to the gate. He didn’t try to stop her, getting information as to what was going on hardly seemed important anymore. He knew what was going on, they were losing.
Gushkabel, Magda and Nath walked in, Queen Eyr was still out flying on a vampire somewhere.
“You don’t happen to have any good news for me?” he asked them sadly.
Gushkabel shook her head and Nath looked grim.
“We slowed them down,” Magda said. “They’ll have trouble getting through all that fire.”
“It won’t matter, the gate’s open,” Gushkabel said.
Ramon nodded. “We can’t hold it can we?”
They all shook their heads.
“Pull back. We’ll hold the keep then. We’ll make them pay for this.”
Lord Farro rode into Castle Elkring. The dead lay everywhere and that acidic mist still hadn’t completely dissipated so his wounds burned. But he rode all the same. It had taken years of planning to get to this point, years of waiting for this very day. He knew the victory wasn’t only his but that hardly seemed relevant right now. They’d done it. He’d done it.
The Inkdrop Queen rode up beside him and looked upon the keep with him. The keep brimming with soldiers loyal to the crown. They still had a lot of fighting to do, luckily they both liked fighting.
Eyr Ragoth, Queen of Xith flew over the battlefield. She’d seen battlefields before but never one like this one. Before the castle was a huge cloud of swirling mist, her vampires still dived in and out of that, breaking apart the considerable army still trapped there. In front of that was the huge circle of stones and on either side was the wall of fire pouring smoke up into the sky. The smoke cloud obscured her view a little but she was glad of it for hiding her from the enemy all the same. There were a lot of enemies.
They’d poured into the castle and now only the great keep with the oak tree growing through it remained unbreached. She dived down to get a better look, her supply of flechettes had all been used up killing soldiers in the mist so now she had to get her hands dirty. She didn’t mind.
Two people stood in the gate on horses, the way that they weren’t rushing about implied to her that they were important. She’d like to kill at least one important person today. She took the bigger one, swooping down silently, her vampire’s claws reaching for him.
He turned at the last second and shouted in alarm, alerting his companion. The companion swung a blade dripping with darkness at her as she crashed into the man. Claws puncturing his chest. She blocked the blade with her own and used the force of her dive to drive the woman away from her. The vampire jolted to a stop below her, landing claws deep in the man. Then it began to gather itself to fly off again but the woman was already coming back, whirling her horse around and charging.
The vampire spread its wings in a mighty flap and launched from the ground, there was a tugging sensation but that was all, they were away. But they weren’t, the tugging had been the woman’s dark sword tearing through the belly of the vampire. It made it a little way before spiralling back to the ground. It was still alive and so it didn’t crash, letting Eyr leap from its back to turn to face the woman charging toward her. She gripped her sword tightly and accepted her fate. Dying out here she’d never be stitched back together by the Bone Collector. She’d never see her home or her husband again.
She dodged to the side and swung as the horse passed her but she was too slow. The dark blade battered hers aside and found her shoulder. She crashed to the ground, barely able to think through the blood and pain. She tried to stand but the Inkdrop Queen decapitated her before she could.
The Inkdrop Queen turned from the corpse of the bat-riding woman and looked at Lord Farro, eviscerated in the middle of the courtyard. Well, at least she wouldn’t have to share her victory anymore.
The battering ram hammered against their door rhythmically. With each crash the soldiers barricading the door were flung back and hastily scrambled to hold it again. Behind them other soldiers were arrayed in battle lines, their weapons all pointing at the door. It didn’t seem like any of them were getting out alive.
Ramon and what remained of the Oaken Court clustered at the back surrounded by what was left of the royal guard. Peppers and Vered hadn’t come back before they’d sealed the doors and they had reports of Sireth falling from the walls. Eyr Ragoth could have flown away by now and Ramon wouldn’t have blamed her.
The witches sat nervously and Bariel and Deagon fumed. They’d stopped critiquing everything the witches said now. They’d realised that it wouldn’t much matter anymore.
Ramon heard the door splinter and crack before the battering ram. He thought of his son, his horrible son who’d tortured and killed as he’d pleased. He’d tried stopping him but the truth was he’d feared him. He’d always feared him. But he was still his son. He wished he was here now.
“It looks like we’re all going to have to fight,” the king said, standing up and placing his hand on his sword. “I doubt any of us will leave here but we can take down a whole lot of these bastards with us!”
Bariel and Gurren leapt to their feet and cheered. The older witches stayed seated but Nath stood and put a hand on a thin sword at her waist. Ramon shuddered to think what poisons it might be coated in.
“For the King!” Bariel shouted.
“For the Hallowed Realm!” Nath cried.
“For Spite!” Gurren cheered and the crowd cheered with them.
The Inkdrop Queen steered her horse toward one of her captains who was running up to her.
“What is it?” she hissed at him, eager to get on her way to the keep.
“We’re experiencing a bit of a problem on the west side, your majesty.”
“What sort of problem?!” she screamed at him, she didn’t have time for these vague descriptions.
“Well there’s two of them and they have a... a string...”
“A what?”
“Come and see.”
She galloped to the west side and on her way saw dead men with cuts that were too thin to be made with a sword. She reached a building, an armoury or something, that had been boarded up and was surrounded by her soldiers. Around it lay many of the dead bodies with those cuts.
“Well go in,” she told the soldiers.
They looked at her nervously, they were all Farro’s soldiers, typical. Why did he have to get himself killed right when she needed him?
“If you surrender now no one else will be harmed,” a female voice from within the building shouted.
“Shut up Peppers,” a male voice hissed.
“We aren’t surrendering, we have you surrounded!” the Inkdrop Queen called back.
“You may have surrounded us physically but in truth it is we who have you surrounded. In the mind!”
“What?”
“You are not free thinkers, you are bound by-”
“Alright screw this, charge!” the Queen shouted and the soldiers reluctantly obeyed.
They were fast, these two, she had to give them that. Very fast. They leapt from the building, each holding one end of a string and they ducked and wove through her soldiers. The woman was dressed all in motley with a jangling hat and bells and the man wore a simple coat that had far too much thought put into it. Whenever a weapon struck at them they’d block with the string which held somehow and then duck away while the attacker reeled.
The woman stayed on the building side and the man ducked through the line of soldiers, pulling the string taught. It cut through armour and flesh easily spraying blood across the courtyard. In seconds half of her small force had perished and they quickly began wrapping the string around the other half.
The man spun out of the way of a sword and started to pull the string back. Then her sword impaled him from behind and he collapsed. The string went slack.
“Ah,” the woman dressed in motley said, dancing back to the armoury. “Could we maybe circle back around to the surrender idea. I’d be willing to compromise perhaps, we could always-”
“Kill her,” the Queen said, climbing off her horse to inspect the string. The man must be Vered, the famous tailor who knew more than he should about everything. He looked up at her with dying eyes beneath a fashionable haircut.
“You can use it... without me...” he lied as she picked up the string. The woman had dropped her end of it to run away.
“I’ll figure it out.” She said and raised her sword to stab him again. His eyes looked at her with terror then focused on something else above her. She spun around to see another one of those blasted bat creatures swooping down. She pointed her sword at it but it wasn’t coming for her, it landed on the roof of the armoury. Almost knocking off the motley woman who’d climbed up there to escape.
The Queen turned to face it and she felt a rush of fear, something she wasn’t used to feeling. It wasn’t that the winged monster was far bigger and uglier than any of the bats she’d seen. It wasn’t that the monster had an almost human face that looked at her with uncanny intelligence. It was the woman who rode the monster, and her golden eyes.