Jim Butcher - First Lord's Fury

The Calderon Valley was ready to fight.

“There’s a dent in it somewhere,” growled Antillus Raucus, slapping one paw back at the ornate lorica covering his right shoulder. “It isn’t moving right.”

“You’re imagining things,” High Lord Phrygius answered. “There’s no bloody dent.”

“Well, something’s not right.”

“Yes,” said High Lord Placida in a patient tone. “You slept in it again. You aren’t young enough to keep doing that, Raucus. You’ve injured your shoulder joint, likely.”

“I’m young enough to toss your short ass right off this wall,” Raucus snapped back. “We’ll see whose joint gets injured.”

“Boys, boys,” Placidus Aria said. “Please don’t set a bad example for the other children.”

Ehren, standing well behind the High Lords, was too self-contained to smile. But he rocked back and forth on his heels in silent amusement before turning his head to cast a wink at Amara.

She rolled her eyes at him in response and stepped up to stand beside Lady Placida. They stared out at the wide-open plain rolling out of the mouth of the Calderon Valley, a sea of gently rising and falling green. The sun had risen bright, the day fair. Crows had been wheeling overhead for days, first in dozens, then hundreds, and now in thousands. They cast a steady stream of flickering shadows over the earth. The enemy had used them to drop takers into Aleran defensive positions before—now any such attempt would be thwarted by the earth furies on constant patrol among the Aleran forces, which had created a side benefit of all but exterminating the rats, slives, and other vermin that tended to haunt garbage piles around a Legion position.

Let the vord try to use the crows against them again. Calderon was ready.

“Countess,” Lady Placida said. “I believe I heard Lady Veradis tell you to sleep for at least twelve hours.”

“Which is ridiculous,” Amara replied. “It was just a broken wrist.”

“And several injuries from Riva, I believe,” Lady Placida said.

“She only told me twelve because she knew I needed six,” Amara said.

“A most excellent rationale.”

“Thank you,” Amara said gravely. After a moment, she said, “I have to be here. He still can’t talk very clearly. Interpreting for him could be important.”

“I understand,” Lady Placida said. She turned to face Amara, her lovely face calm and hardly showing the weariness Amara knew she had to be feeling. “Countess… should we win this battle, not all of us are going to survive it. Should we lose, none of us will.”

Amara glanced away, out at the plain, and nodded.

Lady Placida took a step forward and put a hand on Amara’s shoulder. “I am just as mortal as anyone else. There is something I would say to you, in case there’s not another chance.”

Amara frowned and nodded.

“I owe you my life, Countess,” Aria said, simply. “It has been my honor to have known you.”

Tears stung Amara’s eyes. She tried to smile at the High Lady, stepped closer, and embraced her. “Thank you. I feel the same way.”

Lady Placida’s hug was nearly as strong as Bernard’s. Amara tried not to wheeze.

Lord Placida had approached as they spoke, and he smiled briefly as they both turned to him. “In point of fact, dear, all of us owe her our lives.”

Aria arched an imperious eyebrow. “You are not going to hug the pretty little Parcian girl, you goat.”

Placida nodded gravely. “Foiled again.”

From perhaps twenty feet down the battlements, a legionare pointed to the southwest, and cried, “Signal arrow!”

Amara turned to see a tiny, blazing sphere of light reaching the top of its arc and beginning to fall. Thousands of eyes turned to follow the firecrafting on the arrow, blazing so bright that it could be seen clearly even under the morning sun. No one spoke, but sudden tension and controlled fear lanced up and down the length of the wall like a lightning bolt.

“Well,” Antillus Raucus said. “There it is.”

“Brilliant last words,” Phrygius said beside him. “We’ll put them on your memorium. Right next to, ‘He died stating the obvious.’ ”

“Ah,” Lord Placida said. “It begins.”

“See?” Phrygius said. “Sandos knows how to go out with style.”

“You want to go out with style, I’ll strangle you with your best silk tunic,” growled Antillus.

Amara found herself letting out a breathless laugh, very nearly a giggle, despite the fear running through her. The fear didn’t go away, but it became easier to accept. Her husband, his holders, the legionares assigned to him and, over the last months, some of the most powerful members of the Dianic League had been working to prepare this place for this very morning.

Time, then, to make it all worthwhile.

“I must join my husband,” Amara said firmly. “Good luck, Aria.”

“Of course,” Aria replied. “I’ll try to keep the children here from fighting each other instead of the vord. Good luck, Amara.”

Amara called upon Cirrus, stepped off the wall, and rose into the air. She glided a swift mile down the wall, over a river of men clad in steel, morning light flashing off the polished metal as surely and brightly as if from water. Drums below began rattling the signal to stand ready, so many of them that it sounded to Amara like the rumble of a distant thunder.

Other couriers and messengers were darting up and down the wall, in the air and mounted upon swift horses. Amara narrowly avoided a collision with another flier, a panicked-looking young Citizen in armor too large for him, who called a hasty apology over his shoulder as he struggled to maintain his own windstream. She did not think he looked old enough to attend the Academy, much less serve as a courier in a war.

But he could fly, and the vord had taken away the Alerans’ ability to spare their young from the deadly realities at hand. At least he’d been given a duty he could perform rather than simply being relegated to the ranks of Knights Aeris.

Amara arrowed neatly down to the command group, positioned at the center of the wall’s north-south axis. Her landing hardly stirred the capes of the elite Knights Ferrous and Terra serving as bodyguards for the command staff. Evidently, word of how she had dealt with the young idiot outside the Princeps’ tent had spread, at least enough to ensure that she would be readily recognized. The leader of the contingent was waving her past before she’d settled her weight completely onto her feet again.

Amara brushed past them with a nod, settling her own sword a little more comfortably on her hip. She had declined the offer of a suit of lorica. A body had to be conditioned to bear its weight over the course of months of effort, and Amara had not had that kind of time to spare. Instead, she wore a far-more-comfortable leather coat lined with small plates of light, strong steel. It would almost certainly preserve her hide against an arrow or the slash of a scalpel-edged dueling blade.

Pity the vord didn’t fight with either of those weapons.

Amara strode forward to the low observation platform built upon the wall in lieu of an actual tower and mounted the steps to it rapidly.

“I’m simply saying that it’s the sort of thing that one can’t take too seriously,” High Lord Riva was saying. The rather dumpy Lord of Riva looked a bit out of place in Legion lorica, finely made as it might be. “Bloody crows, man,” he sputtered. “You’ve built a bloody campaign fortress right in my own backyard!”

“Good thing I did, too,” Bernard said mildly, through his stiffened jaw.

Lord Riva scowled, and said, “I never even appointed you. Bloody Sextus did it, interfering old busybody.”