The Invasion of the Tearling

He descended the ladder from the bird’s nest, Blaser right behind him, each dropping the last ten feet to the ground before they began to climb the hill. In the past twelve hours Hall had quietly deployed more than seven hundred men, archers and infantry, over the eastern slopes. But after weeks of hard physical work, his men found it difficult to remain still and simply lie in wait, particularly in the dark. One sign of increased activity on the hillside would have the Mort wide awake and on their guard, and so Hall had spent most of the night going from post to post, making sure his soldiers didn’t simply jump out of their skins.

The slope grew steeper, until Hall and Blaser were forced to scrabble for handholds among the rocks, their feet slipping in pine needles. Both of them wore thick leather gloves and climbed carefully, for it was dangerous terrain here. The rocks were riddled with tunnels and small caves, and rattlesnakes liked to use the caves for their dens. Border rattlers were tough brutes, the result of millennia spent grappling for survival in an unforgiving place. Thick, leathery skins rendered them nearly impervious to fire and their fangs delivered a carefully controlled dose of venom. One wrong handhold on this slope and it was your life. When Hall and Simon were ten years old, Simon had once captured a rattler with a cage trap and tried to make it into a pet, but the game had lasted less than a week. No matter how well Simon fed the snake, it could not be tamed, and would attack any movement. Finally Hall and Simon had let the snake go, opening the cage and then running for their lives back up the eastern slope. No one knew how long border rattlers lived; Simon’s snake might even be here somewhere, slithering among its brethren just behind the rocks.

Simon.

Hall shut his eyes, opened them again. The smart man trained his imagination not to venture too far down the Mort Road, but in these past few weeks, with all of western Mortmesne spread out before him, Hall had found himself thinking of his twin brother more often than usual: where Simon might be, who owned him now, how he had been used. Probably labor; Simon was considered one of the best shearers on the western slope. It would be wasteful to use such a man for anything besides heavy labor; Hall told himself this again and again, but probability held no sway. His mind dwelled constantly on the small percentage, the chance that Simon might have been sold for something else.

“Bastard.”

Blaser’s quiet curse brought Hall back to himself, and he snuck a look back over his shoulder to make sure his lieutenant hadn’t been bitten. But Blaser had only slipped slightly before regaining his hold. Hall continued to climb, shaking his head to clear it of unwanted thoughts. The shipment was a wound, one that did not heal with the passage of time.

Hall gained the top of the rise and broke into the clearing to find his men waiting, their gazes expectant. Over the last month they had worked quickly, with none of the complaining that usually marked a military construction project, and had finished so early that Hall was able to test the entire operation multiple times before the Mort army had even reached the flats. The hawk handler, Jasper, was also waiting, his twelve hooded charges tethered to a long perch at the crest of the hill. The hawks had cost a pretty penny, but the Queen had listened carefully and then approved the cost without blinking.

Hall walked over to one of the catapults and placed a hand on its arm, feeling a fierce stab of pride as he touched the smooth wood. Hall was a lover of mechanisms, of gadgets. He constantly sought ways to do things faster and better. In his early career, he had invented a stronger yet more flexible longbow that was now favored by the Tear archers. On loan to a civilian construction project, he had tested and proved a pump-based irrigation system that now carried water from the Caddell to a vast, parched portion of the southern Almont. But these were his crowning achievement: five catapults, each sixty feet long, with thick arms made of Tear oak and lighter cups of pine. Each catapult could fling at least two hundred pounds, with a range of nearly four hundred yards into the wind. The arms were secured to the bases with rope, and on either side of each arm stood a soldier with an axe.

Peeking into the cup of the first catapult, Hall saw fifteen large, bulky canvas bundles, each wrapped in a thin layer of sky-blue fabric. Hall had originally planned to fling boulders, like the siege catapults of old, and flatten a significant portion of the Mort encampment. But these bundles, which had been Blaser’s idea, were much better, well worth several weeks of unpleasant work. The topmost bundle shifted slightly in the wind, its canvas sides rippling, and Hall backed away, raising a clenched hand into the stillness of the morning. His axemen grabbed their weapons and heaved them high over their shoulders.

Blaser had begun humming. He always hummed to himself in tight situations: an annoying tic. Hall, listening with half an ear, identified the tune: “The Queen of the Tearling,” the notes badly off-key but recognizable all the same. The song had taken hold with his men; Hall had heard it more than once in the past few weeks as they sanded lumber or sharpened blades.