Colleen Oakes - War of the Cards

Each calculated, queenly step was exhausting. Her waking hours were filled with both longing and hatred for Wardley. She carried the weight of her love for him on her shoulders and in her chest. As they had marched north from the Darklands, he rode behind her, his eyes never leaving her back for long. Everywhere she turned, he was there, and each time their eyes met, Dinah was flooded with fresh pain.

They hadn’t spoken since that afternoon beside the waterfall, when he had broken her heart into pieces. But it wasn’t for Wardley’s lack of trying. Every afternoon, he greeted Dinah with a tray of lunch and awkwardly attempted to explain himself to her. She brushed him off without words, leaving him in the tent with the tray of bread in his hands. He was desperate for her forgiveness, and she would not give it, not now when the sight of him made her physically sick. Dinah knew that he wished for her to know he still cared for her. What he couldn’t understand was that for Dinah, it was torturous to see him. Two nights ago, when she awoke to him sitting on the edge of her bed and staring at her, Dinah finally forced her mouth to form the words.

“Wardley.” Her voice was barely a pleading whisper, choked with a restrained sob. “Please, leave me alone. I can’t bear to be near you right now.”

Wardley reached for her hand, but Dinah turned away and buried herself under a Yurkei feather blanket.

“If you care for me, you will leave.”

Finally, when it became apparent that she would not speak with him, Wardley sighed and stood. “Please don’t cut me off from you.”

“Go!” she snapped.

“Fine. I’ll do as you ask now. But I will not leave your side once the battle begins, so don’t ask me. I don’t care what you command. Do you understand?”

Dinah finally gave a slight nod, praying that he would leave before her tears overtook her. She heard the tent flap open, and when she turned around he had vanished into the early morning darkness, leaving her alone with a shattered heart.

Days had passed since then, and the pain was as fresh as an open wound.

“It’s good to take a break, Your Majesty,” muttered Ki-ershan, one of her two Yurkei bodyguards.

Dinah blinked in the sunlight. Morte stamped impatiently. She took a minute to shake herself awake and glanced behind her. The sight was staggering. Thousands of men were spread across the plains, like an ominous shadow that passed over the land. A hundred yards behind her, her advisers rode in an unregimented clump. Behind them, a line of two thousand Yurkei warriors on their sleek steeds moved smoothly as if they were of one mind. From up here, she thought, you would never know that they were a mostly peaceful and pleasant people. From here, they looked like a dark blot of death. Dinah swallowed hard.

As they would be, for those who fought for the king.

Almost half a mile behind the Yurkei marched the weary Spades and rogue Cards, a large horde of cantankerous and brutal men clothed in black that inched slowly across the grass-blown plain. They were all fighting for Dinah, but they fought for their own reasons: the Spades because of their unequal status within the Cards, the Yurkei because of hundreds of years of violent grievances with Wonderland Palace. A vastly larger group of Yurkei soldiers led by their chief, Mundoo, marched their way to Wonderland Palace from the north. Dinah and her motley bunch were to meet them there on the day of battle.

They would crush the larger Card army from both sides—Mundoo attacking from the north side of Wonderland Palace, and Dinah’s much smaller troop coming in from the south—with the idea that two armies would be a bigger psychological as well as a strategic threat.

She hoped it would work.

It was all Cheshire’s planning.

Dinah rode Morte out front, alone. She didn’t have much use for company lately. Silently, she watched as Wardley raised his arm and the brigade came to a sudden halt. The sound of the men’s obvious relief reached Dinah’s ears. I must remember that no matter how tired I am, I am not as weary as my men. Wardley brought Corning up beside her, with Bah-kan following grumpily at his heels.

“Why did we stop?” Bah-kan bellowed. “We are almost to the villages of Wonderland proper.”

Dinah cleared her throat and looked away from Wardley. The sight of his face made her heart twist so painfully that she almost lost her breath. “Please communicate to the army that we are camping here for the night.”

Wardley’s eyes lingered pitifully on her face before he spurred Corning off to aid the Spades with setting up camp.

Bah-kan growled in Dinah’s direction. “The Yurkei won’t be happy about this.”

“Thank you for telling me,” replied Dinah coldly. “I will keep that in mind.”

He was right, of course. The Yurkei were a thousand times more physically fit than the Spades, but more important, they rode horses that never seemed to tire. The Yurkei’s wild herds were miraculous beasts, and the Spades appeared quite taken with them. The warriors from Hu-Yuhar had mistakenly assumed they would be marching straight to Wonderland with very little time to stop and camp. The vast majority of the Spades were walking, and so they rightly required more breaks. This had led to an ever-growing discontent that only inflamed the two groups’ hatred for each other. In addition to this, the long march to Wonderland Palace had taken a deep physical toll on the men. While they had expected the march to take upward of two weeks, Dinah was surprised at just how difficult it was to move her small army.

Getting the Yurkei south had been easy compared to this. Returning the Spades back to where they’d just come from was an endless litany of negotiations, disappointment, and hunger. Most of them were not completely at ease with a woman leading them and directed their questions and complaints to Starey Belft, Cheshire, or Wardley.

While she at times quietly doubted her own ability to lead, she didn’t want her men doing it. Because of this, Dinah begrudgingly made it a point to interact with the men as much as possible. She joined them for dinner, watched their sparring bouts, and attempted to engage them in casual conversation. She made sure to personally thank each one for his loyalty. Yet despite all this effort, they still looked to Cheshire for answers. Around Dinah they acted shy but respectful. There was a lot of staring.

Dinah apparently wasn’t the only one being stared at. Yur-Jee, her fierce Yurkei guard, was staring with seething hatred at a Spade soldier who was attempting to feed one of the Yurkei steeds a piece of bread. Yur-Jee’s hand clutched his bow as he gestured frantically to the Spade.

“Lu-yusa! Ilu-fre!” He stumbled for broken Wonderlander, finally finding the word. “No!”

The Spade, a husky man with a giant black beard and red-rimmed eyes, stepped back.

“What the hell is he going on about now?” he grumbled.

Yur-Jee was climbing off his horse, tight, lean muscles tensing as his feet hit the ground. The Spade reached for his ax.

“Stop! Ja-Hohy!”

Both men wisely paused at the voice of their future queen. Dinah carefully dismounted Morte, sliding down half his body as her calloused hands clutched his red leather rein.

“Idiots!” she quietly whispered to herself as she closed the space between them. When she reached the men, she calmly took the bread out of the Spade’s hand and tossed it on the ground before meeting the Spade’s eyes. She heard a familiar nicker behind her from Cyndy, Sir Gorrann’s mare. She was reassured by his quiet presence.

Altercations like this seemed to happen every other hour, and she was learning to deal with them one by one. Ruling, it turned out, was terribly tedious and made up of a dozen small decisions every day that seemed to always upset someone. She smiled kindly at the Spade, who stared at her unnervingly.