Siren was thinking about pine trees. Despite the comfortable weight of the untested staff leaning against her thigh, her afternoon had been completely preoccupied by thoughts of the sticky, spiny bastards. Their airy scent had suspiciously not abated--and it niggled at Siren that the earthy, robust smells of deciduous forest categorically dominated even the most distal valleys of Burgis’ perimeter. What’s different today? She considered the immolated forest, where her boon had awaited her. Two interesting events, but to Siren they appeared linked only by circumstance.

Plus the unpleasantness with Paldrun and Deltric, the sacrifice of the adolescent elm…busy day, and a lot of bad tidings--even if they seemed (blessedly) disconnected.

But her mind always came snapping back to the pines.

The priestesses of Burgis, the Temple Sorority, made a great fuss over the forest’s seasonal cycles. Birth, rebirth, etc. They were always stressing the paramount role of death in birth (as well as its more intuitive reverse). The turning of the leaves. Siren had often wondered where evergreens fit into the metaphor, when she was feeling cosmological, and found herself once again pondering it. She’d never cared to ask (she’d never cared for the priestesses in general), and her current hypothesis was that those needle-boughed trees, and perhaps the twisting junipers which clung into rocky soil, existed separately from Burgis. They dotted this periphery of forest, even dominated the surrounding mountain sides and high valleys. To whom did they belong?

Can a tree have a spirit, she wondered again, separate from the forest.

She was distracted from her idle cosmologizing when she caught two of Condur’s lieutenants, riding beside their own chariot, staring oddly intently at her--lounging, lost-in-thought. She caught it only in her peripherals, enough to unpleasantly alert her. But when she turned, their eyes were back on the road, with much blinking and rubbing of noses.

“Why are they doing that?” she snapped at Condur.

“Hm?”

“Looking at me,” she continued, “and when I look at them they look away, like they weren’t looking at me in the first place.”

Condur shrugged. “You’re the archon. Splendid…capricious…powerful.”

“They’re Hollows, Condur--they ought to be used to it…did you just call me capricious?”

“Maybe you’ll have them admitted to your harem,” he continued, ignoring her.

“I haven’t got a harem. I’m not the King of Gothesgal.”

“Concubines?” he offered nonchalantly.

“Oh, Ath’s foot, Condur! What did you tell them? The Hollows know I don’t keep concubines. Unless these two are green…or morons.”

“Maybe you’re sneaky about it?”

“What reason would I have to sneak?” It was a rhetorical question, heavily leveraged by the imperious way she denoted herself.

“Well,” Condur began.

Oh, here goes “father”…

“For exactly the same reason you’re upset about the implication,” he said, then with a cough: “my lady.”

“What?” she seethed.

“Politics. What you don’t want to be accused of is, you know, exactly what you will be accused of.”

“But not by my--” she stopped herself. The two lieutenants, by then, had dropped back, looking slightly irritated and greatly embarrassed. “Not by someone I love,” she finished, quieted by her own embarrassment.

“Yes, Siren…” he sighed, his voice reaching into the low, warm registers which Siren always typified of fathers. A voice like wood. His small eyes shone through their creased furrow, and the lines of his forehead could have been carved in stone. “I do love you. You are, and always were, a much better child than any of those little sucklings I sired,” he smiled--it affected nothing north of his lips, “and I didn’t even have you for the good years.”

Then he cleared his throat. “Be that as it may,” he continued, dropping the fatherliness, “you are, my lady, still unmarried on the eve of your thirtieth year. People will wonder. Then, they’ll do more than wonder. It would be utter foolishness to ignore such an advantage, my lady.”

“So, what, bravest man on the battlefield gets to fuck the archon? Are you pimping this…hypothetical me to your soldiers?”

“Good gods, no!” He sounded legitimately offended. But the way he inclined his head, and the grimace that followed, showed that perhaps he had underappreciated the thin semantic difference: “I just told the lads how much you…appreciate…bravery.”

“Well, loth as I am to imagine exactly what words you used--”

She didn’t want to think about this…she wanted to think about pines. The cart jolted over an errant stone in the road, and Siren’s head knocked against the wooden side where she reclined. She rose with an awful scowl, rubbing her head and grunting curses.

“You should behave with more poise, lady,” said Condur, glancing back at the lagging Hollow Guards.

“Says the notorious ‘Sorority farter,’” she shot back. He looked at her gravely. “I’m still not convinced you didn’t do it that one time. With Sister Horaati.”

Condur’s grave look cracked into a mean grin. “Alas, half of Burgisnor had a motive to smoke out that old bitch. I could fill her cell with a spring wind’s worth of my flatulence--and I wouldn’t lose a wink of sleep over it.”

Siren smiled through the ache under the lip of her skull. “I actually petitioned Burgis for her once,” she wryly admitted. “I asked if the Dread Lady could see, in her prodigious wisdom, the good sense in letting her holy sister get fucked.”

Condur spat breath. “No…”

“Well, I didn’t say it quite like that,” she said, smirking suggestively. “She said ‘no,’ of course. Back in Burgisnor, I still asked her for everything--an intercession for every selfish, little whim. But I guess…well, that’s how the elves do it.”

Condur glanced over with a sudden interest, but Siren was immediately quiet. She sunk peevishly back into the corner, looking cold and sullen. She silently wished for another bump in the road. My head could use a good knocking.

Condur said nothing. And what could he say? Siren had never been pressed on the issue of her woodland cohabitants. Her reticence thereon was famous--the subject of not just a few camp brawls, back in the early years. She could be wine drunk to oblivion, and still her lips remained preciously pursed.

Even during the migration, when Siren (with her seven clans behind her) beat back waves of the little creatures--swarms of them, spilling from the forest periphery; even when, later, she led her forces into her old homeland, and drew their blood in earnest--she did not speak of them.

The ones who did have me for the good years…

Siren sniffed. She sniffed again, searching.

“Smoke?”

“The flames of war,” Condur answered indifferently.

She noticed the, in the gusty autumn sky, the sinuous pallor of brown just visible beneath the few but robust clouds.

Then a cocktail of sensations: a dull murmur racking the atmosphere, shivering in her feet and in her ears, the product of armies on the move; the smell of cooking meat--and not likely the kind one ate. It might have been her imagination--a phantom procedure of the many battlegrounds she’d survived. She was excited. Furious and excited.

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Siren woke in a groggy fit of confusion. It took her more than a moment to recognize her own war tent, and each moment hence brought more revelations: there was the gold-backed bear skin, a gift from Timney of the Tandun (a warrior whose prowess, muscles, and straight teeth she had always been fond of), who was slain by the Tushikan Grantildo five summers ago. A flame of anger whitened in her heart.

Then there was the soothlamp of Sister Kilfon, the (unusually) warlike priestess, which had been given to Siren after the Temple Sorority had given up on sorting out the properties of its enchantment. Sister Kilfon, of whom Siren was decidedly unfond, had nonetheless become a martyr to the barbarous curiosity of the godless Tushikans when she was spirited away in the night almost a decade ago, back when the eastern fort was little more than line of sagging, wooden stakes, and a few ramshackle half-tents.

By the time Siren had brought herself up to her feet, anger had thoroughly burned away the fog of confusion. Everywhere she looked, a relic of this contentious history caught her eyes, pleading for justice. Her purpose was laid plainly bare:

Time to kill some Tushikans.

She donned her armor with comfortable efficiency. She slipped into the curtained leather doublet and clasped it tight as if by reflex; rolled a pair of trousers up her legs, standing wide as she affixed them to her waist with the plated belly belt. Then she folded in the final curtain of iron mesh which would cover her femoral soft spots. She stepped into her boots as easily as she might step into a warm bath, and simultaneously cinched them around her calves.

She rolled her shoulders, wiggled her hips--let the armor settle into place. Then she nodded, reached for her staff, and pressed out the tent flap.

Emerging from her tent to the ubiquitous, salutatory clattering of her Hollows, Siren beheld the familiar battlefield. Her army was camped out just east of the fort walls, on a set of bluffs and hills which effectively looked over the whole Eastern March. The sky was clear and tinged with gray smoke and a rather impotent fog dissolving off the lake.

To the north was the great meadow, expanding out like a great, green table cloth, where the tribes fed their pastures--and had even begun cutting out parcels of farmland. At its northern edge, Lake Andow stretched fog-laden into the distance, and to its hazy west, the dark shadow of Burgis hugged the horizon. On the lake’s other side Siren could just make out, though in only abstract detail, the rising creeks of the Pond Country, and several petty copses which might have been the Sparrow Woods which the messenger had described. It hardly mattered now--if there were any Tushikans left hiding behind trees, they could hardly have added much to the already stunning force assembled at the eastern edge of the meadow. There were at least three thousand of the godless cretins spread out like queued ants along the base of their homeward mountains, obscuring the Great Atheist Pass which led into the Melk’s Canyon Country.

Siren bit her lip, her blood stirring until her fingertips tingled in the brisk, wet air. She clawed the soft wood of her staff until her hand joints locked reluctantly in their grip.

With a determinate nod to her guards, she marched away from the tent. The Hollows clattered beside her like darkly designed wards. It was easy to forget that there was ordinary flesh and blood beneath the bone armor of the Hollow Guard. That was good--fear made them doubly effective.

They hiked down the shallow rise of the bluff. Soldiers, faceless minions, bowed at her approach. They peered curiously at the staff; and some, more than curiously--even despondently.

What do you know? They miss Bleeding Leaf. There was a giddiness Siren felt about the fame of her beloved spear: Is this how a parent feels? And then there was sadness--when she realized that she missed Bleeding Leaf, too. She still wore her dagger, Heart Lover, but nobody knew its name, nor cared to. And while Heart Lover had certainly caressed its share of hearts, Bleeding Leaf was always the more promiscuous of the pair.

At the slope’s base, the archon reached the stable, and ordered her chariot prepared. The lieutenant in charge--not faceless (Siren vaguely recognized her high, tight lips, and prominent chin), but still nameless--acceded somewhat ruefully.

“You got a problem with me riding out?” At first, the lieutenant didn’t seem to think she’d been asked. When it struck her that nobody else but the silent Hollows were present, her jaw fell pathetically.

“Oh, no, my lady…I would never…”

“Out with it,” Siren ordered, snorting out a sigh.

“It’s just…these barbarians. I don’t trust them to deal rightly with you, my lady. I know it’s not my place, but…”

“You’re worried about me?” She must have sounded incredulous. The lieutenant consequently offered a smile, tender enough for the stark features of her mouth.

“Of course,” she said. “You’re my archon--my ruler…and my lady.”

That gave the cynical, young Siren plenty to distract her from conifers and memories of the handsome Timney. She’d spent so long combatting--not just the enemies abroad, but fickle allies and stubborn subjects. The cadre of clan heads which surrounded her…well, mostly showed proper reverence, but even then it was always perfunctory. Even Condur…hell, especially Condur. He still thought of her as a greenhorn--a child wearing an adult’s belly belt.

She drove her chariot through the army camps, and those soldiers who weren’t too busy with the morning preparations yelped and raised their fists as she rolled through. At the edge of the camp, and looking back at it from the gaps between its staked defenses, spouting off orders with wild hands as much as harsh words, stood the bald, bronze-scaled figure of her general.

“Hail, archon,” he said, just as easily as he might beckon a peasant traveler.

“How do our boots look, Condur?”

He tilted his head to the side, examining. “A bit loose, my lady. Did we have help getting dressed this morning?”

“I meant the men, you old fuck.”

Condur grinned. “They’re a bit loose, too, but they’ll fight.”

“I was thinking of heading out to the dueling ground.”

“Not thinking of fighting, my lady,” said Condur--with a much more comfortable looking frown.

“Maybe I’d just like to see a few good fights.”

“Well,” the old soldier relaxed, shrugging, “Rinrinta of the Felktis and my niece, Serun, just went to field. Sounds like there were a few fights yesterday morning, but they were more like tepid skirmishes than duels.”

“Any monks?”

Condur's face sank gravely. He nodded. “I should say. We lost Elort of the Tandun yesterday. Did you ever see him fight? He could have been the next clan head, depending on how long Dakur intends to carry on living.”

“Moot point now,” said Siren.

“Aye, my lady.”

“He was Tilort’s son, eh? Oldest?”

“Oh, no. Third son. But everybody’s favorite.”

“Suppose we’ll have a feast about it…”

“As you wish, my lady.” They stood, each of them vacantly gazing between the distance and each other.

“Tushikans never were much for dueling,” Siren said, a tactless conciliation.

“Tell that to Dakur and Tilort,” snorted Condur.

“Didn’t say they weren’t good at it, they just don’t seem to put much stock in it.”

“Astute, archon. They do seem to prefer a pitched battle.”

“Baffling barbarians…so much more death. You’d think godless creatures like them wouldn’t relish it.”

“Well,” Condur grimaced, “you have to admit they always come out of it alright. They suffer routes much better than those white barbarians, or the Gothesgalites.” Then he snorted, full-bodied, so that his heels lifted. “Hell, they take it better than we ever have. We’ve never lost a battle with them, have we? Not really, anyway. And yet our frontier lies only half a day’s ride from the city. We’ve never pressed them east of the pass.”

“We’ve never tried,” Siren retorted.

“Yes, but you know we couldn’t if we did. Their skirmishing tactics…well, there’s a reason--”

“I know Condur,” snapped Siren, though she kept a modicum of patience. “I’m the one who built the fucking fort. I remember why we put it where we did.

“I’m aware that, despite our many victories, we’ve never been able to advance against them, and I intend to end that--today. Whether by myself or with my army.” She jetted out a hot breath, and sneered. “Now I’m just dawdling.”

Condur coughed, loudly hocked up a wad of phlegm and spat it in the dirt. “Well, how about you scoot over.” He hailed a distant lieutenant, lassoed his finger in the air, and turned back to the chariot.

An earnest smile rather snuck up on Siren, whose sense of relief hinted at a peculiar nervousness which she hadn’t previously detected. Then Condur stepped aboard, his thick legs cramped in the chariot’s narrow cab. He examined her smile quizzically, looking quite pleased with the results.

“Sorry--’my lady.’” He sprawled out his upper half into a wide, sarcastic bow.

Siren laughed and shook the reins. The horses shivered and nodded, and the chariot bounced into motion, knocking the bewildered Condur onto his seat.

“Oh--” he groaned, “I’m too old for that.”

But even as he rubbed his bruised backside, he couldn’t stop his grinning. Siren snickered, and then the two erupted together. It was like the old days: even before they shared language, they had shared laughter. Cheerfully, they rode to the field of battle. Just like the old days: a daughter and her newfound father.