Bertrice Small - Lara

“I know I speak for Petruso as well as myself when I thank you,” Imre of the Tormod said. “For the sake of our peoples I only wish we had gotten to you sooner.”

“Do not thank us until you are back safe in your own house with your wife by your side, Imre. Many will die in this undertaking, but there will be more grief in Hetar than in the Outlands when this is finished,” Vartan said fiercely.

Early the next morning, before the sun was even up, the clan families dispersed from the Gathering place. Imre, Petruso and their men went with Vartan’s clan for they dared not return to their own homes yet. On the day following their arrival in Camdene, Vartan dispatched riders to each of his villages issuing a call to arms. Every Fiacre clansman between the ages of fourteen and sixty was expected to answer that call if he was physically able. The villages and the herds would be looked after by the elderly, the women and the children. Any woman able to fight was invited to come as well, although it was not mandated that women answer the chieftain’s call. Still, several came from each village, and were put into Sholeh’s care. Lara, it was agreed, would fight by her husband’s side.

“I will come, too,” Noss said bravely.

“You do not like discord,” Lara reminded her friend and companion. “This will be terrible, dearest. Remain behind with Bera, Elin and Liam’s mother.”

“No,” Noss replied. “While you will fight with Andraste, I am a better archer than you. Why did I carry the long bow the prince gave me on my back from the Desert kingdom if I was not to use it? And what better use than in the defense of our homeland? And Sakari tells me she, like Dasras, was trained for battle. She is eager, and I feel safe with her. I but ask one thing of you, Lara. Let me wed with Liam now.”

Lara sighed. In her eyes Noss was yet a child, but in truth she was not. Lara still saw Noss as the frightened girl who the Foresters had refused to accept as a breeding slave because she was too young, but two years had passed, and Noss was no longer that youngster. She had small, firm breasts, and a way of tossing her head that bespoke someone on the verge of womanhood. Liam loved her. What if he was among those killed in the coming Winter War? Could she forgive herself if she forbade Noss even a brief happiness? “I will have Vartan speak to Liam,” she said, and her heart swelled at the look of happiness that engulfed Noss’s pretty face.

Tears spilled down that face. “Thank you!” Noss said softly, and she hugged Lara hard. “I was so afraid you would make us wait, and what if he doesn’t come back?” She sniffled. “Or I don’t?”

“Have you spoken to him about coming with us yet?” Lara asked.

“Yes, and while he is not pleased, he has consented, for he knows that I must go with you. How could I not?”

“You must not think you owe me because the Forest Lords did not want you and took me instead. That was part of my destiny, Noss, as unpleasant as it was,” Lara said. “If you would prefer to remain behind I will not think you craven.”

“Nay, it is not that. I feel I must do this, just as you feel your destiny so strongly,” Noss responded. “I sense no impending doom about me. I shall come home to Camdene again with my Liam when this is all over, Lara.”

“Very well then. I shall be glad for your company, as always,” Lara told her.

No time was wasted in the matter of Liam of the Fiacre and Noss of Hetar-the marriage was performed that same night in Vartan’s hall. Liam’s mother, Asta, was pleased with her new daughter-in-law’s sweet nature, and equally pleased that Noss would go with her husband to fight by his side.

“Mayhap,” she said, “the ordinary Hetarian is not as bad as we have always supposed they were. Noss might have been born here in the Outlands did I not know otherwise. But when this Winter War is over and done with I shall have grandchildren at last!” She laughed heartily. “I am pleased with this marriage.”

Vartan gave the bride and groom two days to hide away by themselves. “Be back in my hall on the third morning,” he said.

After the brief respite the wedding offered them, Lara and Vartan became engrossed in planning how they would attack and triumph over Hetar’s invasion of the Tormod and Piaras lands. All the Outlanders were trained in the arts of war, though they had not been forced to use that tuition in centuries. Their greatest advantage was that neither had the Hetarians, for there had been peace between the two cultures for years. The great Crusader Knights were an army never used. It was the mercenaries who fought in the small squabbles between the law-abiding citizens, and the bandits who roamed all the provinces. But no one in the Outlands could remember a great battle being fought.

They learned from Imre that the householders in each village had been forced to take in their oppressors. Those forced to toil in the mines now were kept in barracks they had been forced to build themselves, and the barracks were enclosed by high wooden fences. The old women were sent into these enclosures to cook for the miners and wash their clothing. The women left behind in the cottages caring for their young children were more often than not forced to offer pleasures to the men now living in their homes. The young girls, as Imre had told them, were confined in his house and forced to act as Pleasure Women for those men in charge and for important visitors from the City. Old men who could work at tilling the fields that fed these clan families were left in peace. Any who were unfit and showed no signs of recovering were slain without mercy.

“They are clever,” Vartan said to the circle of men around him in his hall. “They inhabit every house, which makes it difficult to mount an attack.”

“Why must a battle be noisy and heroic?” Lara said. “Is not the victory the same even if the battle is a quiet one?”

“What do you mean?” Vartan asked her.

“Death is inevitable in war, but if we can keep all knowledge of our coming from the Hetarians, if we can get word to all in each village before we attack, do you not think they will rise up to aid us? We will move stealthily from village to village until the Tormod and Piaras regions are free of the invaders. In each village we will spare one among the enemy, and they will drive the wagons of Hetarian dead back to the City, to the very door of Gaius Prospero’s beautiful house in the Golden District.”

The men gathered around her nodded, and smiles wreathed their faces.

“Some Outlanders, for whatever reasons, will have cooperated with the enemy,” Vartan said wisely. “They must be rooted out and slain as a warning to any who would betray their own kind. This will be difficult, but we must be hard.”

Again there was agreement.

“I would send a traitor from each village with the wagons. They will hardly be welcome, and they will not be able to come back. Execution is a quick death. Exile is a long one. There is no place in the City for strangers,” she told them. “They will suffer bitterly before they finally die.”

“Is it your destiny to destroy the world that spawned you, my Lady Lara?” Imre asked her politely. “Is Hetar doomed?”

“My destiny for now is to be Vartan’s wife, and to ride with you in what is a just and righteous cause. What is to come I do not know, my lord Imre. I am but half faerie.” She smiled at him, her green eyes twinkling.

“Will your faerie kin come to our aid if you ask?” he wondered.

“We do not need them in this endeavor, my lord Imre. The clan families of the Outlands are strong because they are pure of heart,” Lara told them.

Vartan put an arm about Lara. “You have all heard my wife,” he said. “Now we must decide how to execute our plans that all be in place when we meet with the others at the Gathering place in a few days. Speak now, and let me hear your voices.”

THE ARMIES of the clan families convened in late autumn. Lara was very pleased to see how large a force had been gathered, and how impressively they were caparisoned. When word got back to the City, the High Council would be very impressed. The flags flown by each clan family were different. The eagle was embroidered upon the purple and gold banner of the Fiacre. A white horse galloped across the blue and gold banner of the Aghy. The Felan flew a banner of sky blue with a black and gray wolf upon it. The Devyns’ red flag was decorated with a golden harp. The Gitta’s flag was green with sheaves of grain, the Blathma’s green with multicolored flowers. The Tormod flew a banner of silver that twinkled with gemstones. The Piaras’s flag was coal black with gold and silver lines running through it.

It had been decided that each clan family would free a single village, but for the last two. Each individual army would move off to secure its designated village, before joining together for the assault on the two villages of the Tormod and Piaras left to be freed. The Devyn would send their bards into the villages beforehand, singing in the ancient language of the Outlands before both they and the Hetarians spoke a single tongue. All Outlanders were taught the old speech in their schooling, and many of their songs were sung in it.

“We are less apt to be seen if we travel singly,” Vartan told them. “Beware of mercenary scouts. Send your own ahead of you. We will lose fewer of our own men if we maintain the element of surprise. Kill all the enemy but the one chosen to drive the cart. We will all meet in the mountains at the Crystalline Falls, and move out from there.”

Even with less than half a day’s light left, the clan families departed the Gathering Place, their trumpeters and banners hidden until the moment of triumph to come. The Desert moon was waning, but the butter-yellow moon of the Coastal Region lit the way for Vartan’s army until they finally stopped to rest themselves and the horses. None of the other clan families was visible to them.

“What if the mercenaries have posted a watchtower on the mountains?” Lara asked her husband. “That could ruin all of our carefully laid plans.”

“I will take the eagle’s form, and fly ahead in the morning,” Vartan said.

“Nay, you must lead your army, husband,” Lara told him. “Nor do you want it known that you shape-shift. It must remain your secret, and it cannot if you disappear from the head of your troop. Yet nothing will be thought if I disappear, and then return suddenly. I am the Fiacre chieftain’s halfling wife,” Lara said with a chuckle. “I possess faerie magic.”

“But what if you are seen?” he worried.

“By whom? An eagle seen flying in the mountains will not be thought unusual, my lord,” she reassured him.

He nodded. “Then go with the dawn, my love and my life, but return to me safely.” He kissed her brow, his blue eyes filled with his love for her.

“I will, husband,” Lara told him, and when the dark began to retreat from the autumn skies over the plains the next day a small golden eagle soared above the sleeping encampment of the Fiacre. The bird’s speed was swift, and by late morning it cruised among the peaks of the Purple Mountains, eyes sharply viewing the landscape below. She was pleased to find that there were no sentries’ outposts posted on the heights. Obviously the mercenaries felt safe, which seemed rather careless to Lara. Did the men who had escaped them not concern them? Or were they so arrogant as to believe that any Outlanders who came upon them could be easily beaten? Satisfied that their plan would hold, Lara turned and flew back, spying Vartan and his troop as they traveled across the grasslands.

She circled above them calling, and her husband looked up. Lara realized that perhaps now was the time to display some of her small magic to her husband’s people. It would put them in fear or awe of her, and one day she might need that advantage. She flew down to the riders, alighting upon her own saddle as Dasras cantered along. “Lara return!” she said, and was immediately restored to her human form. She reached out for her reins, knees gripping her stallion’s heaving sides, laughing at Vartan as she did.

Around her she heard the gasps of surprise, and low murmurs.

Her husband chuckled. “That was well done, and you are now completely established as a magical creature,” Vartan told her.

“It may be of help to us one day that they are convinced of my powers, and perhaps even a little afraid, husband,” Lara told him.

Liam rode up, coming between them. “Noss did not tell me you can shape-shift,” he said admiringly. “You have frightened many of those who ride with us, especially Adon.” He chortled wickedly.

“I suspect that is a good thing,” Lara told Liam. “If I should ever have to act for Vartan I do not want to waste my time arguing with him. He is, I fear, a man who has but to open his mouth, and I find I am annoyed.”