Sadly Sings Destiny

18

Heather stood next to Valerian on the bank of the Tyne River, facing south and toward the general location of Rachedale. It was the day that the deadline had come, and as expected, there had been no word from the Wolf Hound Queen in Lotherania. It was a dark day for the young girl and her curiously un-aging counterpart. The two stood in silence as they waited for the third person to join the informal meeting. They watched the water pass by as Valerian’s pocket watch ticked by the seconds and into the minutes. King Charles’s footsteps in the dry fall grass told of the coming of the aging monarch.

“Still no word from Queen Conroy,” he said as he took his place on Heather’s right side. Heather let the words sink in as Valerian replied by striking a match and lighting one of his pungent cigars he seemed to only insist on smoking when she was standing near him.

“That’s a big shock, no?” he said after his first drag.

“We shouldn’t have given her the option. We should have started our campaign while Lord Tretyakov dealt with his people.” Charles said, shooting the other man a quick dirty look over the smoke drifting into his face.

“I know, but I couldn’t declare war without giving peace a chance,” Heather said with a sigh.

“I went up again this afternoon,” Valerian said, looking to the sky, “The fortifications on hills haven’t changed. The valleys would be the easiest way in terms of marching and for my panzerwagons, but they’re built up so much it would be impractical. We can go ahead with taking the high ground and maybe route them or decimate them. Whatever you pick, we’ll be stuck with, it’ll take a long time to bring the panzers and artillery across the Tyne.”

“How can you be sure about that? Those hills are covered in trees.” Heather asked.

“Exactly, if they had done anything on the hills, we would see a difference in the forest cover,” Valerian replied with a casual shrug. Heather and Charles exchanged a look. They had been over the strategy options a thousand times in the last week, and this information was not new. King Charles seemed to trust Valerian’s surveys for reasons she didn’t understand and that he wouldn’t tell her, and he had more military experience than her or the banker.

“Then tomorrow we’ll take the hills, but we’ll advance cautiously. Put the mages in the front ranks and have them be sure to look for any traps. I don’t like the way this looks. They’ve had too much time to prepare. No matter what, this will be a hard-won fight. I’m going to get some sleep, you two know the plans.” Charles said as he turned and walked away.

“Fancy that,” Valerian huffed when the king was out of earshot, “Sleeping before a battle. He’s either showing his age or flaunting how hardened he is to this sort of thing.”

“Would I be mistaken in guessing that you’re nervous? I never thought I’d see the day.” Heather said, glancing at the ordinarily calm and emotionless banker.

“If you’re not nervous about what we’re doing tomorrow, then you’re not human,” he replied, taking another puff from his cigar. She looked him over without turning her head. “I’m not going to lie to you Heather, I’m not going to sleep, I’m going to go lay in bed and wait for this thing to start,” he said turning and striding into the camp with his typical lackadaisical gate. Even with his carefree bearing, Heather could still tell that he was on edge as she watched him disappear into the camp. She turned to take one last look over the river before walking into the camp to try and find a trivial problem to deal with to distract herself.

The next morning the Lotheranian and Elsiderian soldiers were met with no resistance as they crossed the river with the aid of the Sabbistahni airships, and when a sizable number had been ferried across, Heather and Charles lead their men south towards the line of wooded hills where the soldiers would meet their enemy. Somewhere overhead, Heather fancied she could hear the metallic rasping and buzzing of the strange airplanes that Valerian led. She turned her eyes to the sky and looked, but there was nothing to be seen in the grey clouds that hung low over the region, threatening either snow or rain.

Heather marched at the head of her foot soldiers while Charles led with a battalion of his mages. The three leaders had selected three hills to take and use to punch a hole through the Lotheranian defenses. Charles lead the assault on the hill to the east, and his Boar lead the march to the western slope while Heather lead for the middle one, somewhere above Valerian and a wing of mechanical birds were sneaking through the clouds performing scouting missions and waiting for the most opportune chance drop shrapnel bombs on the waiting Lotheranians.

As the three divisions of the army marched, the vital airships were left behind to ferry the division of iron sided horseless carriages with their mounted cannons across the Tyne River. Heather adjusted the rucksack on her back and shifted the repeating rifle that Valerian had given her in her hands. Something about the dark hardwood forests ahead seemed sinister. She immediately shook her head and pushed that thought away, of course to forests seemed sinister, the trees hid unseen legions of soldiers or a dense web of magic traps or both. She let out a shaking, pent up breath as she racked her rifle, ready to fire on any threat. From behind her, she could hear thousands of tell-tale clicks as her soldiers followed the wordless order. Despite knowing what was to come, there was something comforting in knowing that there was a city of people ready to stand with her.

Heather didn’t hear the first gunshot come from the trees. The first sound to cut through the morning air was the blood-curdling scream of a wounded animal as someone to her far-left fell to the ground. The war did not start like a battle in one of the books she had read when she found time. There was no tattletale bang, there was no dramatic crumpling of an unsuspecting soldier as they fell dead, there was no silence, no valiant counter charge. Only the cacophony of thousands of untrained refugees seeking cover in the rock-strewn valley under the trees as more rifle balls hurtled out of the forest and ricocheted off the boulders or whistled through the air or found their fleshy marks.

From a great distance to the east and west, Heather could hear the echoes of rifle fire as she hid behind a large chunk of granite. She screamed orders to those near enough to hear her as some fired blindly over the rocks they hid behind. She could only hope that enough of her people found cover and that enough of the attackers had broken cover for the aircraft to see as they circled in the sky. Heather felt like she hid behind her rock for years, but in reality, the rifle fire only rained down from the tree line for five minutes. Forcing herself to think, to think of anything that she could do. Heather gave the order to all who were nearby and told them to pass it on to the rest of her division. The order was to dig in, to construct trenches and hold their line. For a reason Heather was not ready to guess, the defending Lotheranians were more than willing to let the attackers dig their defenses.

For days the attacking refugees were pinned down on the fringes of the hill country that they had chosen for their invasion. The Lotheranian nationals seemed content to let the invaders hold the lands three miles south of the river. However, there were unseen forces that kept them from going around the sides of the encamped defenders. Heather found herself at wit’s end as the days turned into weeks, and the nonstop flights of the Sabbistahnians failed to bring her any news. The airships didn’t dare break the enemy lines, knowing that there was a decent chance they could be lost too far away for the men to be rescued. Few pilots would risk flying over the previously unknown lines, one of them was Valerian himself. He would make his daily reports, and every time he came to her fox hole, he had the same thing to say: that there was no visible change in the enemy camps, and indeed there was little visible of the enemy.

The night came that the three leaders walked together. The summer heat had failed, and late fall was draping itself around the world as Heather, Valerian, and Charles walked along the second trench from the untrodden no man's land between the two armies. None of them spoke as they walked along the line. It had become a daily task for them to do this. After two months of holding the line and not gaining more than twelve feet, there was no real point in inspecting the defenses. They had examined every inch a dozen times over, and they and the soldiers had stopped caring about the orderliness of the trenches. War was chaos, and there was not much of a point in trying to correct any of that chaos.

Charles the Twelfth led the way in his traditional blue coat and tricorn hat. His hands were clasped behind his back, and his back was straight, and his head was held high as if he was not caught in the midst of the worst war his life had seen. Valerian followed in his black trench coat, hands forced into his pockets and shoulders hunched against the cold weather. Valerian carried himself with all the stress and the dejection of the ordinary foot soldiers. Heather followed him in the worn-out surplus uniform that all of her refugee soldiers wore. She watched the two men in front of her, and she couldn’t help but wonder what they were thinking. They seemed so different in every aspect, from the bright clothing on one to the dark clothing on the other, the different manner of carrying themselves, and the differences in their countries. Heather sighed to herself and stuffed her own hands into her pockets. It was hard for her to make these silent walks, Valerian and Charles seemed to be in control of everything around them, and of everything they touched. She couldn’t help but wonder if she had that level of confidence in her and if she could seriously consider herself to be a leader of any sort.

The cool leather of Valerian’s coat crashed into Heather’s face. She stumbled back and looked up, suddenly ripped from her thoughts. Valerian had straightened up, and his head was c****d to the side as the Elsiderian king continued to walk in front of them. Heather walked around the stopped man and stood by his side, following his eyes and trying to see what had caused him to stop. Whatever it was, she couldn’t see it. The Banker stood there, staring off into the mist somewhere towards the enemy lines. Then there was the dull thud of a body hitting the ground followed by the ringing of half a dozen screams and shouts. Valerian started, and his gaze was drawn to the source of the noise, as was that of Heather. In the trench the three had been walking down, lie the body of King Charles the Twelfth, the Angel of Elsideria and the Beast of the Four Lands.

Everything seemed to go silent around them. The occasional sounds of the gunshots faded from the field of her perception as she stood beside Valerian looking at the blue-clad corpse in the trench. They exchanged a glance before looking back down to see the king in the mud with blood slowly oozing from the shot clean into one temple and out the other. At the time, neither of them could predict how the death would affect the invasion of Lotherania. At the moment, the two were stunned, the leader of one of the oldest countries in the world, the man considered to be one of the greatest leaders in history, lay as dead as the refugee farmers who fought under him.