Blades Of Illusion: Crown Service #2 (3 page)

Which was why it was so odd that Sara Fairchild had elected to join the guild. Her family made it their creed and their passion to protect and serve the empire. As a whole. Not for money, but for loyalty to the crown. After her father had left the gladiator’s arena, he had his choice of positions in the military, in the guilds, in private households. All offered him sums that would ransom a king. Overseas and at home. But he had chosen the empress’ service, because he believed. He believed in their empire and its integrity.

So the fact that he had betrayed his empress and been executed for that desertion made the blight on the family name just that much worse. That was why Sara was here. If not to clear her father’s name—which she doubted could be done—then to at least show that she had honor and was no coward. But how could she serve under a commander that was a coward himself.

Does a warrior have honor if their leader has none?

Should
she serve under a turncoat like Barthis Simon?

All those questions filled her head. Questions that made her doubt. Doubt her sanctity. Doubt her training. Doubt herself.

“The answer is I have no choice,” Sara murmured to herself sadly, “None of us do. And right now I need to get to Matteas Hillan, not lead a revolt against a man who isn’t fit to herd pigs.”

She sighed and looked around. The truth of the matter was that the captain was losing the faith of his people on his own with each passing day. She might have to do nothing. If they continued to starve and wander a swamp in circles, his precious mercenaries would turn on him without further provocation.

The man hadn’t just left the majority of the mercenaries who served under him behind, he had watched and listened as his people were slaughtered on the open battlefield. His men and women may not challenge him on that. May have even lauded him for his foresight when it was first revealed, but make no mistake—a well-thought-out plan that foreswore their comrades was one thing; abandoning them to the depths of the swamp would be another thing entirely.

Sara snorted. His callous leadership wasn’t the only thing she questioned about him. His morality was lacking, but it seemed that his intelligence was worse off. Captain Barthis Simon had either been too stupid to realize before it was too late that his prisoner’s wagon was stuck in the middle of an attack, or too much of a coward to order his men directly into the line of fire in order to retrieve said prisoner—Nissa Sardonien. So his careful maneuverings to keep his elite guard and the prisoner away from the center of attack had failed. That is, until Sara Fairchild had stepped forward. When the attack had commenced, Sara’s only thought was to get to a rallying vantage point with her fellow soldiers who had survived the onslaught and rout the unseen foe. Little had she known that the captain she sought for orders and strategy was the type of coward that ran for tree lines at his first opportunity. Besides, it hadn’t been long before she realized that the enemy was felling the Corcoran mercenaries like trees in a forest with a hail of poisoned arrows and rain of battle fire. The Kade mages had decimated the Corcoran company without suffering a single casualty themselves.

It hadn’t been a battle. It hadn’t even been a rout. That would require two distinct entities coming together as foes and one fighting back the other.

“Ha,” she laughed bitterly, “We had no foe. Instead a hail of arrows and battle fire decimated us.”

Her first ‘battle’ had been a slaughter from the beginning. When Sara came across Nissa imprisoned in a covered wagon, she had hesitated. She wasn’t stupid. There was a reason the woman had been shackled to the wall and hidden away from prying eyes in a mage-concealed wagon. Sara hadn’t known what danger the woman presented or even who she was, but she had deduced that it would be better to bring her along rather than leave her to die. After Nissa had explained that she held value to both sides, Kade and Algardis, it had only confirmed that Sara needed to transfer this prisoner back into Algardis custody. After dodging hails of battle fire and poisoned arrows Sara had managed to reunite with one bumbling curator, and with Nissa and Ezekiel by her side, had raced into the protective darkness of the forest where arrows and fire did not fall.

But Nissa hadn’t been as helpless she had once seemed. After what felt like hours of tramping through the dark but silent forest they had run into a group of Nissa’s compatriots.

“Well, ambushed by a group of shady assassins would be more like it,” Sara grumbled. Assassins she had quickly dispatched thanks, in part, due to one curator. It amused and astonished Sara each time she thought about that day after which she could ‘Ezekiel Crane save my life’.

“Ezekiel did well tackling that fat thief from the warehouse, who if possible was even more inept at fighting than he is,” Sara muttered, “But taking on an assassin? That’s something else entirely.”

Great thing about Ezekiel? He didn’t let it go to his head. Unlike some puffed-up warriors-in-training she had grown up with. And even better. Ezekiel wasn’t too proud to attack from a distance and run. In Sara’s mind, she was as proud as a mother crow teaching her chick to scavenge on the battlefields for the first time.

A morbid thought, but with her training Ezekiel, perhaps he could at least be good enough of a survivor to only need her protection during the most severe of battlefields. Or, at least, that was her hope.

With a sigh as she continued walking in the never-ending swamp, Sara remembered the first time she had truly gotten a glimpse of Nissa’s character. Not the guile she displayed for others, but the empty shell she was. Sara would never forget the coldness on Nissa Sardonien’s face as she had said, “Kill her” with a simple expediency. The ‘Kill her’ order of course referring to Sara Fairchild, who stood in the way of her escape. Of course, Nissa hadn’t known—couldn’t have known—that Sara was quite capable of taking on a half dozen assassins and leaving them in bloody piles in her wake.

Even if she had, that wouldn’t have stopped her from ordering her men to take Sara on. There was no bond between them. Hell, Sara was planning to turn Nissa over to the Algardis empress’s men as soon as she could. And yet still, Sara had flinched when that order came. The coldness and the efficiency in the simple wave of her hand to a black-clothed assassin in the shadows with a red band about his bicep as Nissa said with a blankness that left a chill down Sara’s spine, “Kill her” told Sara more than she needed to know about the woman’s psyche.

People who gave orders like that, with no compunction nor hesitation, weren’t normal killers. And despite her training, she had yet to come across someone like Nissa before. Her father had referred to a former commander he knew with the same snap and emotionless judgment ability as a ‘cold-hearted son of a bitch.’

He had unfortunately happened to say it to Sara just as her mother was walking into the room. Anna Beth had swiftly corrected his language, while turning to Sara to say, “What your father meant to say was ‘
psychopath
’, dear.”

Then her mother’s voice had dipped in hardness that had her father looking like a whipped dog. “We don’t use that other word here.”

Sara hadn’t been able to keep her mouth shut then or now. So she had cheekily replied to her mother, “What? Cold-hearted or bitch?”

The slap on her jaw that had been given as retribution stung worse than any blow that landed on her flesh in the training yard. Not because it had been thrown with more force, heavens no, but because it had come from her mother. The woman wouldn’t hurt a fly and almost never hit her daughter. Anna Beth Fairchild had other ways of making her only child suffer. She had put that inventive mind to good use in devising the second portion of Sara Fairchild’s punishment for impudence that day. Sara had been scrubbing latrines for the house for the rest of the day. And there had been a
lot
of them. She hadn’t said either word again in the presence of her mother since then.

Sara sighed as she rocketed back to the present and she put one foot in front of the other. She’d been doing a lot of daydreaming lately. There was nothing else
to
do. If she just kept assessing the swamp around them she would go mad. Not that it was
easy
to just keep marching like a living doll in this muck. It was harder than it seemed since the earth below didn’t want to let go of her booted feet. The wet mud clung to each rising leg as the slime on top ran down her boots like ooze. As soon as the wet sludge released her foot with sickening plop, she had to set it down again and do the entire exercise once more with her other foot. This didn’t feel like a march to certain victory but rather a trek further down the road to death.

Following the man she spotted up ahead—solely by the vibrancy of his bright red hair through the density of green ferns, dulled metal shields and hunched shoulders—further into a swamp of hell gave her no illusions about this outcome. She doubted that the sparkling company that had left the darkness of the forest on the edge of the battlefield would triumphantly march onto the battlefield this day, if they reached the waiting Algardis army at all.

Based on the decision process of their red-haired captain, who had managed to save his strike force only to lead them into an even deadlier swamp, it was looking less likely with each passing hour that they continued to slog. They slogged through the wet earth, the stagnant water, the buzzing mosquitoes like a cloud of pestilence that hovered around them, and to a man rued the day they had signed up to serve in the Corcoran Guard under a man like the red-headed captain who was leading them to their deaths...or worse.

It was easy enough to see that they were several miles out from the epicenter of the fighting. This type of terrain wasn’t conducive to any kind of battles she had heard of. Neither side, imperial nor Kade, would have chosen to fight here or send their troops to strike another enemy down. That was the only consolation during the slog—the knowledge that a Kade wouldn’t pop up over a hill or ghost through the moss-covered tree branches like silent assassins.

Sara opened her mouth and tried to breathe in quickly. She inhaled at least two mosquitoes and coughed them out with a bitter taste in her mouth. This was not what she had thought about when she had dreamed of her first march to war as a young girl. Then she had thought she would ride to war in the empress’s service on a winged horse in shining armor with a pike by her side and triumphant grin in place as she imagined doing the crown’s service. As she grew, Sara had learned that war was—and would always be—very different from the gilded battlefield that matched a young girl’s dreams. She had come up with those dreams after seeing her father ride triumphantly through the gates of Sandrin twice. He had marched down the pillars of Sorce’ and directly into the city center with adoring cheers from the public, gales of petals streaming down on his troops heads and the Empress herself waiting at the end to welcome him home from a successful campaign.

Sara and her mother had always stood in the public reception area where the nobles waited under awnings as she proudly watched her father in his shining armor accept the Empress’s gratitude and welcome home. Contrast that to what she had later learned was true war, and it still didn’t compare to the disgusting conditions she endured this day. Sara had known to expect hardship, sacrifice, and even defeat. She had learned that while riding a winged horse was a nice ideal, it didn’t match the realities of war on the ground. Hell, it taken hours studying history books to learn that that the only use for a winged steed was to fight dragons in airborne battles like they had done during the founding wars. Fortunately, those days had long since passed.

It hadn’t taken Sara long before she wondered what other fables from a young girl’s imagination would be very different from the realities of war. When her father’s guard pinned their lips shut and wouldn’t utter a further word under her father’s orders, she had decided to find soldiers who
weren’t
so tight-lipped. She had gone to the seedy underbelly where a man, once a good amount of ale was imbibed, wouldn’t hold his tongue. In those places, she had heard whispers about the battlefield and the march to war floating through dark taverns on nights when drunk soldiers stumbled in as easy pickings. They came looking for their next ale, trencher of dubious food, or women. Or all three. They left with lighter pockets and sometimes bruised knuckles. They had told of the long march on the empress’s road, banners snapping in the windy air, miles-long columns of soldiers and supplies, and then finally making camp on the rise from which they would mount their campaign.

But their harsh recollections still did not match her reality. Not one of them had mentioned dragging dead weight through a bug-infested swamp, being bitten in places she didn’t even want to mention, and being so starved that they were almost forced to eat horse-jerky after all but one of their supply wagons had sunk in a mud hole.

Sara kept her lips pinned together tightly as she breathed through her nose and shift the uncomfortable weight on her right shoulder. Despite her sword on her back and her knives at her waist, she was almost defenseless, as she was using both hands to keep up. She didn’t want to be here. She wanted to be where the Kade mages were. She wanted to be finding out what Matteas Hillan knew, and certainly before the Red Lion guard questioned him themselves. Or at least the Red Lions affiliated with the necromancer and guardsman who had barged into her home, demanded the file on her father, and killed her mother in a single night.

“But no,” she muttered under her breath, “I’m slogging through knee-deep muddy water and hoping not to get gangrene from an infection. This isn’t
war
. This is torture.”

H
er mind flashed back to the men she had met in the taverns. She had done her best to get as much information out of them as she could. Back then, when she was fourteen, she still had the hopes of joining the imperial army as an officer. And why wouldn’t she? She was a commander’s daughter and trained in the art of battle. But Sara knew that her abrupt appearance in the seedy underbelly of the city would not be taken well, especially if her father’s men spotted her. An imperial war brat born and raised had no business in a seedy tavern after all.