Fang Claws and Spells: The Bastard's War

The rain over Edom did not fall so much as it fell apart—thin, grey, and endless, turning the churned fields beyond the ridge into something that swallowed boots and men in equal measure. Smoke from the night's fires still clung low to the ground, refusing to rise, as if even the sky wanted no part of what had been done here along the bloodied borders of the Twelve Lands. General Abner of Kish stood at the mouth of his tent with his arms crossed over a breastplate gone dull with old blood, watching the last of the wounded carried past on stretchers of broken spear-shafts. A boy—no more than sixteen, one of the newer levies from Pekod—caught his eye and tried to salute through the pain of a wound that had taken most of his shoulder. Abner returned the gesture with a small, tired nod as it was the only mercy he had left to give tonight. Three days they had pushed against the enemy lines along the Edom border, and three days they had refused to break. It should not have taken this long. With the Twelve Lands' combined might—Absalom's disciplined ranks from the eastern districts, and Abner's own harder, hungrier men from the north—they should have finished this campaign inside a week. Instead the mud kept the dead longer than the living, and Abner had begun to wonder, in the small hours when sleep wouldn't come, whether the cost of this war was being paid by the wrong side. "You're thinking too loudly again," a voice said behind him. "I can hear it from here." Absalom came up beside him, still in half his armor, ​holding a cup of stale, dark blood—taken from a fresh kill in the camp—that he drank as casually as wine. Even after three days without proper rest beneath the stifling sun, his vampire brother had a way of looking impossibly unbothered, with his skin pale and unmarred as if the war was merely a coat he could take off when it suited him. It was, Abner thought, the most enduring difference between them—not birth order, but that Absalom never looked like the c*****e cost him a single thing. "I'm thinking we've lost too much for a war against men who don't even have the sense the gods gave a bear pup," Abner said. "Humans adapt fast when they're dying." Absalom said, drinking from the cup. "That's the one thing they're good for." Abner said nothing. There was a particular silence that had grown between them over the last year—the silence of two men who had started counting things differently. Absalom counted districts, tribute, and the shape of the throne that neither of their father's lines would ever sit on unless one of them built it themselves. Abner counted the boy from Pekod with half a shoulder left. He did not know when the counting had diverged. He only knew that it had. "There's a woman in the eastern camp," Absalom said, changing the subject the way he always did when he sensed Abner drifting somewhere he couldn't follow. "A healer, as they say. Came in with the Sheban levy, though no one seems to know whose banner she rides under." "A camp healer. Fascinating." Abner did not look at him. "She set Colonel Ruz's arm back into its socket with her bare hands and he didn't even scream." Absalom smiled, still genuinely amused by the idea…or moment. "You should go thank her. You know... morale and all that." "You go thank her." "I have a war to plan, brother. Someone in this command tent has to." Absalom clapped him once on the shoulder—hard enough to be brotherly, light enough to remind Abner who still, on paper, held seniority between them—and disappeared back into the command tent, already calling for his cartographers. Abner stood alone a while longer in the thinning rain. He told himself that looking for the healer was only because sleep would not come and the tent had begun to feel like a box built for a smaller man than he was. He told himself many things, in the minutes that followed, about why he was walking by the tree line at the edge of camp instead of returning to his cot. None of them were entirely lies. None of them were entirely true, either. The forest past the eastern picket line was old growth, untouched by the war's churn—black trunks, and silver where the rain caught them, having the kind of quiet that made a soldier's ears ring after days of siege-noise. Abner had almost turned back twice before he saw the light. Not a firelight, but something paler, something that moved wrong for a flame—low to the ground, and flickering between the roots of an ancient oak like something breathing. He should have called the watch. He was, after all, a war-leader of the Twelve Lands, and strange lights in enemy-adjacent woodland were exactly the sort of thing that got men killed by getting curious about them. Instead he walked toward it. She was kneeling at the base of the tree when he found her, hands cupped around that same pale light, murmuring something in a tongue he didn't recognize and somehow understood anyway, the way a man understands a lullaby he hasn't heard since childhood. She did not startle when his boot cracked a fallen branch. She simply looked up, and the light in her hands dimmed and went out, and Abner found himself standing very still, the way he imagined prey stood still, though he could not for the life of him have said why. "You're the general," she said. "And you're the healer with no banner," he answered. Something in her face moved—it was not quite a smile, but something older and warier than that. "I have no banner because I have no home to fly one from." She rose, brushing wet leaves from a cloak the color of standing water. "You should go back to your camp, General. The wood after dark isn't kind to men who count themselves safe." "Is that a threat?" She snorted. "It's the truth. I find men prefer it dressed as a threat. Easier to ignore that way." Abner should have laughed it off, should have turned back toward the fires and the war that would still be waiting for him at dawn. But instead he found himself asking her name, and she found herself, after a long moment of studying him the way one studies a door that might or might not be locked, telling him. "Margaret." It was too plain a name for a woman who cupped light in her bare hands and knelt to trees like they owed her an answer. He said as much, without quite meaning to, and something in her face cracked open just enough to let a real smile through. "You expected something grander." "I expected something that matched the rest of you." Abner shrugged. "Careful, General. Flattery from a man with a war on his hands usually comes with a price he hasn't mentioned yet." "No price," he said, raising his hands in surrender. "Just a question though. What is a healer with no banner doing kneeling to an oak tree in the middle of enemy ground, and talking to it like it might talk back?" Margaret was quiet long enough that he thought she wouldn't answer at all. When she did, her voice had lost some of its dry edge. "Old habits," she said. "Some of us learned to listen for things that answer, long before we learned it wasn't safe to." "And does it? Answer?" "Not tonight." She studied him again, that same weighing look, as if trying to decide how much of the truth a man like him could carry without dropping it. "Go back to your fires, General. Whatever you came looking for out here, it isn't going to be found before the war ends." "Maybe I wasn't looking for anything." "No," she agreed, and there was something almost gentle in it now, something that unsettled him more than her earlier warnings had. "Maybe you weren't. That's usually when men find the most trouble—when they've stopped looking for it." He should have left then. Every instinct built by years of command told him to leave—a general had no business standing in the dark with a witch, a woman whom nobody knew, on ground that wasn't fully his own, this close to a war that still needed him whole and clear-headed at dawn. But the rain had eased to almost nothing, and the strange light she'd been cupping still seemed to hang faintly behind his eyes, and for the first time in three days of counting the dead, Abner found himself thinking of something other than the cost of Edom. Whatever passed between them after that—in the hush beneath the old oak, with the war a distant, patient thing beyond the tree line—was theirs alone, and neither the fires of the camp nor the coming dawn would ever hear a full account of it. By the time Abner returned to camp, the rain had stopped entirely, and the sky over Edom had begun, very faintly, to grey toward morning. He did not sleep. He sat instead at the edge of his cot with his boots still on, staring at a tent wall he'd stared at for three nights running, except tonight it looked different somehow—the same canvas, the same water stains shaped like old wounds, and yet he found himself turning the last few hours over and over, the way a man turns a coin he isn't sure is real gold or a very good imitation. He told himself it meant nothing. A war did strange things to men—made them reckless in the dark, made them reach for warmth they'd never admit to wanting in daylight. By the time the horns sounded for the dawn muster, he had half convinced himself of it. But he went looking for her anyway, once the lines had formed and the day's orders were given. The eastern camp had no record of a healer riding with the Sheban levy. No one recalled a woman answering her description—not the quartermaster, not the surgeons, not even Colonel Ruz, whose shoulder she was supposed to have set with her bare hands a night before, and who only frowned and said 'his arm had been sound the whole campaign, thank you, and what exactly was the general implying.' Abner did not raise it again. The lines broke four days later, not from any brilliance of strategy but from simple attrition—Absalom's disciplined ranks grinding forward an inch at a time until they had nothing left to grind against. It was, as Absalom would say, the kind of victory that didn't feel like one. Too many dead on both sides to call it clean. Too many boys from Pekod who wouldn't walk home the way they had walked in. Abner told no one about the woman in the woods. Not to Absalom, who would have made a joke of it and then, worse, never let him hear the end of it for the rest of his life. Not to his officers, who had enough to carry without their general's private ghosts. He folded the whole strange night away somewhere he didn't often look, and let the war's ending carry him back north, back to Queen Beersheba and the children, and the slow, grinding business of holding six districts together with a brother who counted the world in territories and tribute. He did not think of Edom again for years... until the day rumors reached the court of a bastard boy born in secret—a child whose very existence threatened to burn both their kingdoms to the ground.