The Invasion of the Tearling Read online

  Map

  Dedication

  Every child should have someone like Barty.

  This book is for my father, Curt Johansen.

  Contents

  Map

  Dedication

  Book I

  Chapter 1: Hall

  Chapter 2: Lily

  Chapter 3: Ducarte

  Chapter 4: Matters of Conscience

  Chapter 5: Dorian

  Book II

  Chapter 6: Ewen

  Chapter 7: The Gallery

  Chapter 8: Row Finn

  Chapter 9: The Dark Thing

  Chapter 10: Father Tyler

  Chapter 11: Blue Horizon

  Book III

  Chapter 12: Night

  Chapter 13: September First

  Chapter 14: The Red Queen

  And at the End: The Crossing

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Erika Johansen

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Chapter 1

  Hall

  The Second Mort Invasion had all the makings of a slaughter. On one side was the vastly superior Mort army, armed with the best weapons available in the New World and commanded by a man who would balk at nothing. On the other was the Tear army, one-fourth the size and bearing weapons of cheaply forged iron that would break under the impact of good steel. The odds were not so much lopsided as catastrophic. There seemed no way for the Tearling to escape disaster.

  —The Tearling as a Military Nation, CALLOW THE MARTYR

  Dawn came quickly on the Mort border. One minute there was nothing but a hazy line of blue against the horizon, and the next, bright streaks stretched upward from eastern Mortmesne, drenching the sky. The luminous reflection spread across Lake Karczmar until the surface was nothing but a glowing sheet of fire, an effect only broken when a light breeze lapped at the shores and the smooth surface divided into waves.

  The Mort border was a tricky business in this region. No one knew precisely where the dividing line was drawn. The Mort asserted that the lake was in Mort territory, but the Tear staked its own claim to the water, since a noted Tear explorer named Martin Karczmar had discovered the lake in the first place. Karczmar had been laid in his grave nearly three centuries since, but the Tearling had never quite relinquished its shaky claim to the lake. The water itself was of little value, filled with predatory fish that were no good to eat, but the lake was an important spot, the only concrete geographical landmark on the border for miles to the north or south. Both kingdoms had always been anxious to establish a definitive claim. At one point, long ago, there had been some talk of negotiating a specific treaty, but nothing had ever come of it. The eastern and southern edges of the lake were salt flats, the territory alternating between silt and marshland. These flats stretched eastward for miles before they ran into a forest of Mort pine. But on the western edge of Lake Karczmar, the salt flats continued for only a few hundred feet before they climbed abruptly into the Border Hills, steep slopes covered with a thick layer of pine trees. The trees wrapped up and over the Hills, descending on the other side into the Tearling proper and flattening out into the northern Almont Plain.

  Although the steep eastern slopes of the Border Hills were uninhabited forest, the hilltops and western slopes were dotted with small Tear villages. These villages did some foraging in the Almont, but they mostly bred livestock—sheep and goats—and dealt in wool and milk and mutton, trading primarily with each other. Occasionally they would pool their resources and send a heavily guarded shipment to New London, where goods—particularly wool—fetched a greater price, and the payment was not in barter but in coin. The villages stretched across the hillside: Woodend, Idyllwild, Devin’s Slope, Griffen . . . easy pickings, their inhabitants armed with wooden weapons and burdened with animals they were unwilling to leave behind.

  Colonel Hall wondered how it was possible to love a stretch of land so much and yet thank great God for the fate that had taken you away. Hall had grown up the son of a sheep farmer in the village of Idyllwild, and the smell of those villages—wet wool caked with a generous helping of manure—was such a fixed part of his memory that he could smell it even now, though the nearest village was on the western side of the Border Hills, several miles away and well out of sight.

  Fortune had taken Hall away from Idyllwild, not good fortune, but the backhanded sort that gave with one hand while it stabbed with the other. Their village was too far north to have suffered badly in the first Mort invasion; a party of raiders had come one night and taken some of the sheep from an unguarded paddock, but that was all. When the Mort Treaty was signed, Idyllwild and its neighbor villages had thrown a festival. Hall and his twin brother, Simon, had gotten roaring drunk and woken up in a pigpen in Devin’s Slope. Father said their village had gotten off easy, and Hall thought so too, until eight months later, when Simon’s name was pulled in the second public lottery.

  Hall and Simon were fifteen, already men by border lights, but their parents forgot that fact over the next three weeks. Mum made Simon’s favorite foods; Pa relieved both boys from work. Near the end of the month they made the journey to New London, just as so many families had made since, with Pa weeping in the front of the wagon, Mum grim and silent, and Hall and Simon working hard to produce a forced gaiety on the way.

  His parents hadn’t wanted Hall to see the shipment. They’d left him in a pub on the Great Boulevard, with three pounds and instructions to stay there until they returned. But Hall wasn’t a child, and he left the pub and followed them to the Keep Lawn. Pa had collapsed shortly before the shipment departed, leaving Mum to try to revive him, so in the end it was only Hall who saw the shipment leave, only Hall who saw Simon disappear into the city and out of their lives forever.

  Their family stayed in New London that night, in one of the filthiest inns the Gut had to offer. The horrendous smell finally drove Hall outside, and he wandered the Gut, looking for a horse to steal, determined to follow the cages down the Mort Road, break Simon out or die trying. He found a horse tied outside one of the pubs and was working on the complicated knot when a hand fell on his shoulder.

  “What do you think you’re doing, country rat?”

  The man was big, taller than Hall’s father, and covered in armor and weapons. Hall thought he would likely die within moments, and part of him was glad. “I need a horse.”

  The man looked at him shrewdly. “Someone in the shipment?”

  “None of your business.”

  “It certainly is my business. It’s my horse.”

  Hall drew his knife. It was a sheep-shearing knife, but he hoped the stranger wouldn’t know. “I don’t have time to argue with you. I need your horse.”

  “Put that away, boy, and stop being a fool. The shipment is guarded by eight Caden. I’m sure you’ve heard of the Caden, even out in whatever shithole town you come from. They could break your puny little knife with their teeth.”

  The stranger made to grab the horse’s bridle, but Hall held the knife up higher, blocking his path. “I am sorry to be a thief, but that’s the way it is. I have to go.”

  The stranger gazed at him for a long moment, assessing. “You’ve got stones, boy, I’ll give you that. What are you, farmer?”

  “Shepherd.”

  The stranger considered him for another moment and then said, “All right, boy. Here’s how it plays out. I will lend you my horse. His name, appropriately enough, is Favor. You ride him down the Mort Road and take a look at that shipment. If you’re smart, you’ll realize that it’s a no-win proposition, and then you have two choices. You can die senselessly, achieving nothing. Or you can turn a
round and ride to the army barracks in the Wells, so we can talk about your future.”

  “What future?”

  “As a soldier, boy. Unless you want to spend the rest of your life stinking of sheep shit.”

  Hall eyed him uncertainly, wondering if his words were a trick. “What if I just ride off with your horse?”

  “You won’t. You’ve a sense of obligation in you, or you’d never be off on this fool’s errand in the first place. Besides, I have an entire army’s worth of horses if I need to come after you.”

  The stranger turned and headed back into the pub, leaving Hall standing there at the hitching post.

  “Who are you?” Hall called after him.

  “Major Bermond, of the Right Front. Ride fast, boy. And if any harm comes to my horse, I’ll take it out of your miserable sheep-loving hide.”

  After a hard night’s ride, Hall caught up to the shipment and found that Bermond was right: it was a fortress. Soldiers surrounded each cage, their formations dotted by the red cloaks of the Caden. Hall didn’t have a sword, but he wasn’t fool enough to believe that a sword would make any difference. He couldn’t even get close enough to distinguish Simon; when he tried to approach the cages, one of the Caden launched an arrow that missed him by no more than a foot. It was just as the Major had said.

  Still, he considered charging the shipment and ending everything, the terrible future he had already sensed on the trip to New London, a future in which his parents looked at him and only saw Simon missing. Hall’s face would not be a comfort to them, only a terrible reminder. He tightened his grip on the reins, preparing to charge, and then something happened that he would never be able to explain: through the mass of tightly packed prisoners in the sixth cage, he suddenly glimpsed Simon. The cages were too far away for Hall to have seen anything, but seen it he had, all the same: his brother’s face. His own face. If he rode to his death, there would be nothing left of Simon, nothing to even mark his passage. And then Hall saw that this was not about Simon at all, but about his own guilt, his own sorrow. Selfishness and self-destruction, riding hand in hand, as they so often did.

  Hall turned the horse, rode back to New London, and joined the Tear army. Major Bermond was his sponsor, and although Bermond would never admit it, Hall thought that the Major must have spoken a word in someone’s ear, because even during Hall’s years in the unranked infantry, he had never been pulled for shipment duty. He sent a portion of his earnings home each month, and on his rare journeys to Idyllwild, his parents surprised him by being gruff but proud of their soldier son. He rose quickly through the ranks, becoming the General’s Executive Officer by the young age of thirty-one. It wasn’t rewarding work; a soldier’s life under the Regency consisted of breaking up brawls and hunting down petty criminals. There was no glory in it. But this . . .

  “Sir.”

  Hall looked up and saw Lieutenant-Colonel Blaser, his second-in-command. Blaser’s face was darkened with soot.

  “What is it?”

  “Major Caffrey’s signal, sir. Ready on your command.”

  “A few more minutes.”

  The two of them sat in a bird’s nest deep on the eastern slope of the Border Hills. Hall’s battalion had been out here for several weeks now, working steadily, as they watched the dark mass move across the Mort Flats. The sheer size of the Mort army hindered its progress, but it had come, all the same, and now the encampment sprawled along the southern edge of Lake Karczmar, a black city that stretched halfway to the horizon.

  Through his spyglass, Hall could see only four sentries, posted at wide lengths on the western edge of the Mort camp. They were dressed to blend in with the dark, silty surface of the salt flats, but Hall knew the banks of this lake well, and outliers were easy to spot in the growing light. Two of them weren’t even patrolling; they’d dozed off at their posts. The Mort were resting easy, just as they should. The Mace’s reports said that the Mort army numbered over twenty thousand, and their swords and armor were good iron, tipped with steel. And by any measure, the Tear army was weak. Bermond was partly to blame. Hall loved the old man like a father, but Bermond had become too accustomed to peacetime. He toured the Tearling like a farmer inspecting his acres, not a soldier preparing for battle. The Tear army wasn’t ready for war, but now it was upon them, all the same.

  Hall’s attention returned, as it had so often in the past week, to the cannons, which sat in a heavily fortified area right in the center of the Mort camp. Until Hall had seen them with his own eyes, he hadn’t believed the Queen, though he didn’t doubt that she’d had some sort of vision. But now, as the light brightened in the east, it gleamed off the iron monsters, accentuating their smooth, cylindrical shapes, and Hall felt the familiar twist of anger in his gut. He was as comfortable with a sword as any man alive, but a sword was a limited weapon. The Mort were trying to bend the rules of warfare as Hall had known it all of his life.

  “Fine,” he murmured, tucking away his spyglass, unaware that he spoke aloud. “So will we.”

  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 arm
y 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.