The Fall of Erlon Read online

  Pitt couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “Your Majesty, we’ve been camped for two days. My men are ready to move.”

  The king belched again. “And mine need rest. We have all the time in the world. You Brunians are so uptight while on campaign.”

  Pitt couldn’t argue with the man. The Coalition had agreed the Wahrians would lead this part of the campaign and Charles commanded the joint army. Pitt was still as trapped as ever.

  The king rambled on about other topics. Pitt drank his cup politely and listened. It was a long time before Pitt had an opening to excuse himself. He walked out of the tent and rode back towards the Brunian camp filled with frustration.

  He’d missed the war. The Horde would take Plancenoit and find the last bits of the Erlonian army. They would have the victory spoils. Pitt would have nothing. No chance to win the glory he desired.

  Back home, his sisters would be forced into low marriages and their lives would be ruined. His family’s stature would continue to fall.

  All because their only remaining son was a lowly land general who couldn’t win glory in a war full of it.

  Pitt’s greatest accomplishment would be observing King Charles’s eating habits and the type of wine he favored in the evening. Pitt sighed and walked on through the cold night and felt hopeless as the stars spun above him.

  Chapter 7

  A battle is won many days before the first shot is fired.

  Maxims of War, Entry Three

  Emperor Gerald Lannes

  Rapp

  The cliff edge crumbled and fell away with a crack to tumble to the pits below. Rapp stood on the execution platform on the lawn of the palace and watched the workers dangling off the edge of the rock in front of him.

  The plateau had been shrinking for centuries. Bit by bit the edge fell away and tumbled down into the pits at the bottom of the rock. The cliff’s edge slowly approached the foundation of the royal palace year after year.

  Rapp hated metaphors.

  The prince turned and stared up at the great spires and the gargoyle-adorned roof of the palace. Back during his teenage years, when the family was in exile and Erlon dominated the Continent, Rapp had always assumed he would feel joy upon returning to this place. He had fond childhood memories here and the palace was vast and comfortable and filled with everything a royal could want.

  He’d been close to running, to fleeing his mother and her summit and joining the eastern front along the Lakmian Range. But now he had a divine mission. The Ascended One had chosen Rapp.

  The Tome taught that the war god only visited those he deemed worthy and even then only in times of great need. The Continent was approaching peace after decades of war between the empire and Coalition. Why would the Ascended One approach Rapp now?

  There had to be an evil lurking in the shadows that no one had seen yet. Rapp would find out. It’d been three days since the voice had come to him in the temple. He’d made no progress yet, but Rapp wouldn’t fail the Ascended One.

  “Falling away!”

  The cries of the workers behind Rapp stole his attention back to the cliff. He turned in time to see another section of the rock crack and break away, this time very close to the wooden lift structure that brought the royals and their guests down to the city and back.

  Beyond the crumbling cliff, the city bustled below the royal seat of the realm. The morning market was in full swing in the main square. Smoke drifted up from chimneys and the city guard moved about the walls.

  Another bit of the cliffside shifted under the engineers near Rapp as they worked. It didn’t break completely free, but the workers gave the spot a wide berth.

  The prince shook his head and walked away from the workers. Some said the engineers from Erlon, brought by the foreign emperor when occupying the city, had been able to fix parts of the erosion and stabilize the cliff. Most Wahrians believed that to be lies spread by the emperor’s political advisors.

  Rapp’s mother had spent the months after their return to Citiva sending men in harnesses over the cliff to investigate the supports put in by the Erlonians, but none of the experts had been able to discern how the contraptions worked, or if they provided any benefit at all. It was just another way that Rapp’s family was outsmarted by Erlon, while their ancestral home literally crumbled around them.

  Erlon’s supremacy was finally coming to an end, though. Plancenoit had fallen, the war was almost won. Rapp had just missed it all.

  Though he still had a chance at glory. It wasn’t through war, but the Ascended One had chosen Rapp to find the traitor in the summit. This was the way for Rapp to make up for all the battles he’d missed while his family wallowed in exile. This was his last opportunity.

  Rapp was due to attend another summit meeting, something to do with mining rights on the Erlonian side of the Antres Range. It was pointless and Rapp didn’t feel like attending. He had too much else to think about.

  He stepped off the execution platform and walked along the perimeter of the cliffside. He stepped around the engineers as they worked and kept well away from the barrier ropes they’d strung along the weakened parts of the edge.

  How would Rapp find the traitor within the Coalition? That question pounded inside his head and drowned out his other thoughts as he walked.

  He’d spent the first full day after the god’s visit observing the diplomats from the various countries while in meetings. He watched the reactions to various bits of news from the war fronts or a turn in the debate over parts of a treaty or agreement. It would’ve been extremely boring for the prince if he wasn’t on a divine mission.

  Some of the dignitaries he was able to cross off immediately. The Lainian ambassador was small-minded and weak. He talked of nothing but trade for his peaceful nation and Rapp could never see him being clever enough to come up with a scheme big enough to warrant the attention of the Ascended One.

  Moradan Ambassador Leberecht wasn’t a good candidate either. While Leberecht was certainly intelligent enough to scheme behind the scenes of the summit, he’d always been jolly and friendly with the Wahrians and a staunch supporter of the Coalition. It was true in his younger days the ambassador had been a supporter of republics, including the Erlonians’ revolution when the people overthrew and executed their own king long before they promoted Lannes to Emperor, but now Leberecht worked with and supported the Moradan monarchy. Rapp didn’t suspect him in the slightest.

  The rest of the Moradan delegation were the same in Rapp’s mind as Leberecht, as were the representatives from Wavre and Vith and the countries of the Southern Confederacy.

  Rapp approached the southwestern edge of the plateau and turned up the path that led back to the main street in the center of the plateau. The temple to the Ascended One towered above him and only made the pressure of his task worse in his mind.

  Rapp’s main suspects were the Brunians and, as much as it pained him to say it, the Wahrians.

  His mother would be horrified to think that a traitor could come from her own advisors, but Rapp didn’t trust a handful of them. The biggest suspect was a slender man named Ambassador Trier.

  Rapp had never liked the soft-spoken but extremely wealthy merchant. He spoke to the royals like he knew better than them, even Rapp’s mother, and he’d never served in the Wahrian military. This last point was a mark of shame Rapp could never get over and he vowed to watch Trier’s every move.

  Rapp turned up the main street and headed back towards the palace. The flags of the various countries fluttered in the wind over the doors of the diplomatic housing on either side of him. He didn’t have a direction or destination in mind, he only walked to give his mind space to ramble on about the potential traitors.

  The other big suspect came from Brun. The Sorceress Thirona, when Rapp looked past the sparkling dress and shiny hair, was the exact kind of representative to have ulterior motives and goals for the summit. The Brunians had always been schemers against Wahrian interests, even in times of peace. On to
p of that, Brunian King Nelson had chosen not to attend the Coalition’s gathering in person. Rapp could easily see Thirona running a larger Brunian scheme to weaken Wahring and take control of the Continent after the war was over.

  There were other suspects, of course. The possibilities were endless with this many diplomats in one place, but Rapp’s thoughts always returned to Ambassador Trier and the Sorceress as the two main candidates.

  Rapp stopped at the end of the street before reaching the palace lawn again and the cliff engineers. He needed to take action. He needed to be decisive.

  If he were on the march with his army, he wouldn’t sit quietly and think. He would talk with advisors and come up with a plan.

  To catch the traitor and save the summit, Rapp needed help. He needed an advisor. He decided on the person easily enough. He wouldn’t go to his mother; she would either not believe him or she would set the entire palace staff on the Coalition members to draw out the traitor.

  No, Rapp needed an ally that was more subtle and used to moving in the background. He turned his head slightly and saw the purple of the Moradan flag hanging over the door of the second house from the palace.

  Rapp nodded to himself. He needed help from Ambassador Leberecht.

  Rapp smiled as he settled on his course of action. Leberecht would know how to handle this situation. He would know more about the other dignitaries than anyone and would have a plan to find out their true allegiances.

  Together, they would find the traitor in no time at all. Rapp would save the summit and the Ascended One would praise him as a worthy follower and send glory down from the heavens.

  Elisa

  Elisa’s daily view was nothing but Mon’s pack and the musket slung over his shoulder. They walked all day and made camp late at night and ate cold bits of meat or some trail biscuits Mon had brought from the farm. The princess’s stomach growled at her continuously and her legs ached and stiffened up every night.

  On the fifth day after shooting the deer, Elisa found herself in the same position. The forest didn’t change, the trail stayed the same. The farm seemed to be hundreds of miles away now, but Elisa knew they still had a long way to go before they found the Erlonian army.

  And Elisa could still feel the terrible foreign soldiers that chased her behind them.

  She dropped a hand and brushed one of her silver pistols with her fingertips. They would be her defense against anything that attacked them in these woods, her pistols and Mon’s musket and whatever fighting experience the old farmer had from his mysterious past.

  If Elisa’s time on the farm already seemed like a lifetime ago, then her time as a young princess in the Plancenoit palace seemed like another life entirely. The pistols had been a gift from her father when she’d expressed interested in learning how to shoot. The palace smiths forged them and her mother helped with a little magic to improve the design.

  Elisa had seen the pistols given to her father’s marshals and Epona’s magic had made Elisa’s smaller and lighter and more smooth. Elisa loved the feel of the cold metal and how the weight felt in her hand when she held them out to aim.

  She wondered if her father ever envisioned Elisa would be put in a situation to use them against Kurakin Scythes. When he’d watched her unwrap them and learn to shoot all those years ago, had he even considered this current situation as a possibility?

  Not a chance. Elisa didn’t think anyone in the palace or Plancenoit or anywhere in Erlon could’ve predicted what would happen when the emperor marched off from the capital for the final time. No one had seen the fall coming at all.

  Mon crested a hill in front of her and Elisa thought about asking for a quick break but decided against it. Mon would refuse and push them on even faster if she asked now.

  More memories flooded forward in Elisa’s mind as they started down the slope on the far side of the hill. The images of her father leaving the palace for the final time pressed to the front. Her mother rode next him and the army marched out of the city in a long column. Elisa had watched from the top of the palace and tried to count the standards above each section as the army moved towards the northern horizon into the very forest she now walked.

  Her childhood had been filled throughout with similar goodbyes with her father. This last goodbye had felt no different.

  She remembered going to the barracks and taking shooting practice right after the last of the soldiers disappeared from view into the distant woods. She’d thought she’d see her father again after the campaign season.

  He’d always returned victorious. Always.

  Even after Three Bridges and the Moradan campaigns, where the army had suffered some of its worst casualty rates, her farther had found a way to strengthen the empire and return home. But his campaign against the Southern Confederacy and eventually General Duroc and the Kurakin proved different.

  Elisa knew she shouldn’t dwell on these things, but the questions came too quickly and answers never followed.

  Where had her mother gone during that campaign? Why had she abandoned her father?

  The Kurakin had been too strong on their own ice fields for the mighty Erlonian army. Her father had retreated north and fought the Coalition once again and the army’s power slowly diminished. To hear the stories from those final battles, her father would’ve still made it safely back to the north along the eastern edge of the Antres and Lakmian Ranges had he not been captured.

  But the emperor had been betrayed again and sent into exile.

  Did the same fate await Elisa at the end of the fall of Erlon? Or, with the Kurakin Scythes chasing her and Mon, was there a worse ending coming for her?

  Mon was afraid of what would happen to them if the Kurakin caught up to them. He was afraid of the Scythes.

  The old farmer ducked under a branch as they walked. Elisa walked cleanly under its height without moving her head.

  Elisa decided to use the farmer as an excuse to stop dwelling on the questions surrounding her parents and the failures that had led to her current situation. Mon had fought in her father’s wars. When had he left the army? Which of the famous campaigns of the past two decades had he marched in?

  Elisa had tried to ask him directly a few more times on the trail or as they made camp at night, but the farmer never told her anything. He avoided the questions and changed the subject to something else or ordered Elisa to help gather firewood.

  Maybe none of the questions around Mon’s past mattered anymore. Maybe Elisa wasn’t long for this world. It certainly seemed like it, given what chased them and the enemy armies that marched all around them.

  How could she possibly survive the end of this war?

  The voice of the strange guide that had appeared to her twice now cut through her thoughts as Mon led her up another densely wooded hill.

  The first time he’d appeared, on the hill overlooking Plancenoit as it fell, he’d told her to run north. Then he’d said something else, something strange that Elisa was only just now remembering.

  “You’re far too important to this war to be lost at the very beginning.”

  At the very beginning? This war was already over, there was only the final part of the fall of the empire to deal with.

  What could the guide possibly mean by that?

  Elisa’s fingertips brushed over the imperial seal protruding from the silver of her pistols as she thought on the questions. Mon stopped at the top of the next hill and moved off the path. Elisa let out a sigh and let her pack drop to the ground as Mon leaned his musket against a tree.

  “Time for a short break,” Mon said.

  Elisa couldn’t be more thankful. She collapsed against another tree and leaned back against it, stretching her legs out and working on the tight and cramping muscles.

  This break wouldn’t be long; none of them ever were. Mon pulled out his canteen and Elisa wondered briefly whether it was full of water or wine before her thoughts went back to the questions surrounding her family and the mysterious vision and th
e war and her destroyed home.

  The question that broke through to the fore again was regarding the guide’s statement. He must have misspoken. How could the war only just be beginning?

  Elisa took a long drink of water from her canteen and tried to rest while she waited for Mon to start back on the trail and the questions and worries and fears swirled inside her head.

  Andrei

  Andrei rode in the middle of the line of wolverines. Standard Scythe hunting procedure had Jerkal, Andrei’s second-in-command, leading the way in the front to allow Andrei to focus on his hawk scouting above them.

  The air was cold and the wind picked up far above the forest. Andrei could feel everything through his hawk’s feathers and saw the forest stretch north before him and turn into rolling hills. The sparkle of a large river came from the western horizon. Massive peaks rose white and gray in the east.

  And there was no sign of the Scythe’s prey.

  Yet.

  No sign of the prey yet, Andrei had to remind himself. His eyes opened back on the ground and he returned to focusing on the trail. The forest looked the same as before, as if the group hadn’t moved at all during his time in the hawk’s eyes above.

  Andrei let out a soft sigh that wasn’t loud enough to be heard by the others around him. The prey had to be close. Andrei could feel the end of this latest mission coming. He was ready for it.

  He was ready for the end of the war.

  Thoughts of his home came involuntarily and flooded his mind. The images were blurry. He’d been away for too long, fighting wars against the north with Duroc and the Horde.

  He could see the details slipping away the farther he marched north, the farther he marched from his home. He’d lost the memories of his wife’s face long ago. His children’s gap-toothed smiles and bright eyes were long gone as well. All Andrei could see now was his house up on a windswept and snowy hill in the distance.