While her retinue had spruced up the tent with a silken comforter, a chest of delicacies, and a wardrobe hung with her favorite gowns, her mattress smelled of horses. To be fair, what did not stink of horse and manure stank of the malodorous undercurrent of army life, whether the reek of sweaty soldiers drilling or the wafting aroma of simmering onions and garlic. There wasn't a clean breath anywhere.
While she couldn't sleep at first, and never grew accustomed to it, she learned to shrug and settle in the aroma, not unlike sinking into a broken-in mattress, except that no matter how slowly you sank into an unpleasant scent, it was never restful. At best, you became such a part of the the stink that you tolerated it like you tolerated yourself.
For Michel had to be generous with herself now, as being the Marchioness of Ghulmarque wasn't a flag that would fly in the roving mad-eye of the Queen and her bloodthirsty army. For all Michel's power in Ghulmarque, here only idle soldiers stooped to her beck and call, while the vast majority marched on lethal, and sometimes fatal, designs. She sighed.
She had only enjoyed her newfound privilege for a few days before she lost her unfaithful friends, her soft bed, and her warm room. When the Queen's army, marching to Ephremia, had stopped at Ghulmarque, Prince Vemulus bade Michel's mother, The Marquessa of Ghulmarqye, to bind her soldiers to his cause. When The Marquessa ordered her consort to take command, he fled in the night, leaving The Marquessa to direct her own forces, which she did from the rear, ensconced in a train of ladies, courtiers, and minstrels, and last but not least, Michel.
As extravagant as this retinue was, Suvani's forces were mindboggingly vast. Although blind, Michel knew the constant clamor was not a hundred, or even a thousand, but a veritable city of soldiers. Suvani's army was so vast that Michel did not understand why their four hundred footmen and one hundred horse were wanted by Vemulus. Taking them left Ghulmarque defended only by its surrounding mountains.
"As warriors, we are only a pittance, my dear Marchioness, but as tribute, we are very meaningful. Despite our meager lands, our size is not so significant as our strategic importance and wealth. Moreover, not only am I a high ranking lady in my own right, holding one of the most ancient titles in the kingdom, but I am sixth in line to the throne, and you are seventh. "
"I am?"
The Marquessa giggled. "You would have to assassinate, The Queen, Vemulus, and your own mother, among others.
"I would never—"
"Of course not," her mother sighed. "Do you think I don't know my own daughter?" She tittered again. "You needn't answer that, Michel. I was speaking figuratively. And I do hope we get to know each other better."
"Why wouldn't we?"
"In case you haven't noticed, we're on a battlefield. Whehter we're here to make a stand with our queen, or only a statement as to where our loyalties lie, blood is spilled on battlefields. Both lowborn and highborn."
"But isn't our presence only symbolic?"
"It would be," said the Marquessa evenly, "had your friends not embarrassed Vemulus. This feels not only symbolic, but overly symbolic, and highly personal. That's why Francuso fled."
Not only was her high station ignored by the army, but her mother's troops were often requisitioned on royal duties. If not for the handful of resplendent gowns packed by her mother to stage a grand impression on the Alsantian officers, Michel herself would not know herself to be a Marchioness. Even wearing them, she was only a decorated plaything, like one of Merrick's wooden soldiers, or worse, like a robed Animalyte in the Mansion of the Shining Prince.
Only one holdover from the castle deigned to treat her with the courtesy she deserved. Somehow, Helia had transitioned from Chiyo's nurse to Michel's attendant, although there was nothing wrong with Michel, physically or mentally, other than betrayal, loneliness, a longing for Akachi, and the blindness she had always known. She was better than fine. If their bivouac stunk, and her bedding was only adequate, she was used to strange smells and lumpy beds at The Mansion of the Shining Prince. She didn't expect to be waited on hand and foot, like Suvani.
At the thought of the Alsantian Queen, Michel became heated. If Suvani was a little kinder, none of this would have happened. Why must this teenaged queen war with everyone? More than anyone, the Queen had a perfect excuse to loll around and enjoy the idleness that absolute power could enjoy. Instead, her forces tore across her kingdom, bullying her own allies into war with Ephremia, an already conquered kingdom.
While Helia had nothing in hand or on her mind that did not have something to do with caring for Michel, she sometimes seemed less than caring and helpful—once carelessly spilling on Michel's coverlet, and on another occasion, helpless to uncork a bottle of wine.
When the tent flap rustled, in blustered the chilled morning air, a rude stomp circling the floor, and a snotty grumble: "where's your mother?"
While Michel knew it was Vemulus who rudely accosted her in her own tent, why should she make things easy for the prince? She didn't like him, and on remembering the rumors of how her friends (former friends, she admitted with icy sadness) had overpowered him, she nearly smirked. While Michel was by no means as cold as her mother, she had learned as a toddler to mask her emotions when she was unable to see her smiles and frowns reflected in others' faces, and her feelings rippled back, echoless. Being as adept at suppressing smiles as tears, scowls, or peals of laughter, she stifled her mirth now.
"Who should I say is asking?"
"Fool, don't you know your prince?"
"Forgive me, your highness," said Michel frostily, "if I am not so foolish as to mistake a prince for a pretender, neither am I so blessed as to know good from evil by sight; nor am I so common to be addressed so, even by you."
"Fine. I'm feeling generous." A smugness in Vemulus's voice seemed ready to swallow her like a boa constrictor. "I'll grant you just one Marchioness. Since such a long title sticks in my craw, how are you called?"
"Is his highness tired? We only just discussed that."
"No, your given name, f—" He sseethed. "Now."
"Michel. We have met before, highness."
"Have we? I have no recollection of that. No worries. It's not you. This selective memory of mine prefers important people." As he strolled around the tent, his boots crunched the cotton floor. She winced, hoping his heels weren't too muddy. "Don't bother telling her anything. I'll find your mother, Michel."
"I think she was looking for you, your highness."
Vemulus let loose an agonized growl. "Of course she did. This could take all day. Why doesn't she have the sense to stay where she's ordered?"
"I hear you're fond of stables, your highness," said Michel.
"So?" retored Vemulus.
"Then you know stables by sight."
"A curious expression—for you. Your point?"
Michel ignored his mocking tone. "That you should know these are the Marquessa's tents, not a stable; nor are we so domesticated as to wait on princes when her majesty's orders are quite explicit."
"You make a good point, Michel." His menacing tone was anything but princely. "Since you would range all over camp, I'll send you to the front."
"You couldn't do that." Despite the slightest shiver in her voice, Michel was proud of herself for sounding so steady, when his sword might be an inch from her throat, and she would never know. "We're in the line of succession."
"I'd never ask you something I haven't done myself. My uncle, the regent, gods rest his soul, taught that risk and leadership go hand in hand. While I now have a multitude of shadows at my beck and call, if my first thought is of my own skin, those black-souled legions will be repelled by my lily whiteness. So I'll go with you. But I'll save my right flank for Ghulmarque. My left hand will still be werewolves," he mused, as if he had forgotten Michel was there. "I had thought to prefer Cortero's battalion, but this is better, as it will make his knights more desperate to win back my favor, while giving the werewolves more to prove as well."
"But you can't! We're the smallest contingent here."
"Like you said, line of succession. Not only do you have just as much skin in the game, you're fighting for the soul and future of Alsantia...not to mention your own. "Don't worry. You'll never see the front line." Michel's spine shivered as he sneered the word see. "And the first to fall are spared the sounds of screams."
***
"Merrick," Michel whispered. When she had laid down beside her little brother, he had curled up to her arm. While he did not stir, his quickening breath tickled her neck and ruffled her hair. "Merrick." When his eyes batted open, she felt the flutter on her wrist. "Talk to me."
"I'm too scared."
"Why?"
"Don't you hear them?"
While hoof stomps and the clash of marching armor should be comforting, Michel found it even more jarring than Merrick, who slipped in and out of fitful sleep as she lolled, noise-ridden and restless, even when she jammed the pillow over her ears.
Not seeing the world's hazards was such a commonplace to Michel that no matter how her mother dressed up the swaying war houda with sumptuous, castle-worthy furnishings—not even the rose and citrus perfumes could mask the manure constantly baked by the monstrous, lumbering karik
bearing the palanquin, and the tea set, rattling in a wicker basket, would never be stomached in such abominable animal stink—these luxuries were thin as onionskin to the blind girl so rattled by the incessant hammer-tread of the cavalry and the mobbed scurrying of snarling werewolves that she seemed mashed between hooves, paws, shouting, and growling.
"I mean why bring us."
"I begged her."
"Even if you did," said Michel, "mother wanted to show me off to the officers. But why bring us to the front?"
"Vemulus made her."
Michel shrank inside as she realized the truth of this. Were they being punished for what she said to the prince? Would Merrick die for her loose tongue?
"That's insane," said Michel. "He's a monster, not a king. Why would she comply with such a barbaric request? We're only children!"
"Not only is Queen Suvani only sixteen, but many of our Kings and Queens were children. Some of those marching are only a year older than you." Merrick sighed. "I was to begin training with sword and lance next year."
If six-year old Merrick, so calmly prepared to grapple with the impending horrors of war, was what finally penetrated the illusion of her belongingness, she realized, as if by a series of aftershocks, it was not the least of what she had experienced in Alsantia. Alsantia was not only barbaric, but a land of human-made horrors. Like a distant observer, she remembered how aloof she had been as the dwarf cut away Chiyo's eye, the squelching sounds registering neither a chill in her heart, a flutter of her eyelids, or a murmur on her lips. Even when they had whispered of the bodies dangling above her mother's courtyard, Michel had brushed it aside with a laugh and suggested they had surely deserved it, given how generous and kind the Marquessa was to Michel. Was she generous and kind? Or was she only magnanimous and covetous, for Michel's sake, of the world's stock of good things, and desirous that all of it should go to her own flesh and blood? And what was Michel? At worst, tolerant of evil; at best, as cold as ice.
"I wouldn't worry, Michel." Merrick yawned.
"We're in the middle of an army!"
Merrick yawned again. "By now, we're near the front of it."
"You mean literally on a battlefield!"
"Not yet." A third yawn. "The battle hasn't happened yet. This is just the siege."
"How can you be so calm?"
"Prince Vemulus might be a monster, Michel, but he's our monster, a monster faithful to the kingdom. And the Terianans are said to be good people."
"That's the best fairy tale yet," said Michel. "I haven't known many good people." As her voice shrank, she seemed to shrivel until on a level with her brother; in accepting his powerlessness, she felt half her age.
"While Akachi and I were once two peas in a pod, an inseparable team, now we are not only nothing alike, but she snubs me worse than her shadow, having left me behind to make her lightfooted escape. Moreover, the pod and its other peas are rotten: Conrad the bully, Berangere the know-it-all, Loren the show off, Aito the wannabe Elderlich, and Chiyo, who forgets about me when I'm not there.
Michel guessed this would be Merrick's last yawn when his eyes fluttered shut and his chest heaved a drowsy sigh. "Lightfooted...I wish the karik was lightfooted." But despite the beast's stomping tread, Merrick drifted off into sleep.
Michel would have liked to see the karik, a fabulous beast poached as a foal from the royal reserves of Ephremia. No sooner had Vemulus fetched her mother than he commissioned her to lead his right-hand battalion, and, with a courtly, magnanimous sneer, gifted her the monstrous, obscenely stinky warbeast, which, to hear Merrick's description, seemed a goonish unicorn: twelve feet at the shoulder, a curlicue pig's tail as thick as rope, and a rhino's head sporting a slightly curved golden horn.
But whereas Alsantian unicorns were brutes, the karik might have been a humongous, plodding behemoth, but it was so quiet that its only sounds were coarse breathing and cumbrous hooves, and she mistook it for gentle until it had trampled a hapless warrior.
"Was he from Ghulmarque, mother?" she had asked.
"What does it matter?" snapped the Marquessa. "Dead is dead, Michel."
"Well..." Michel was still so impressed by her regal mother that she had to suppress a trace stammer every time she answered her directly. "If he's not Ghulmarquean, at least he's not our responsibility."
"My responsibility," sniffed the Marquessa. "Not yours, Michel. Not yet." The Marquessa's long, drawn-out sigh spelled out just how testy she felt at being questioned by her long-lost child. "Had I kept you here, you might have learned decorum and propriety, such as not to interrupt your devoted mother, Michel. Even in repose, I am always working, for ruling requires unceasing vigilance." She sighed again. "Will knowing help you sleep?"
"I can hope."
"He was Cortero's. A deaf fool too senseless to see the karik's shadow."
Michel felt a chill. She turned over on the bed, hoping that she faced away from the Marquessa.
As the soldier's death had disconcerted the karik, it was some time before the beast could be motivated to lumber towards the front line, where the Ghulmarquean three hundred had paused behind Cortero's battalion. When the Marquessa was outraged, having given no order to suspend their march, she flung open the hatch and screeched so piercingly that it rang in the houda and silenced the murmuring troops even down to the far-off hollers of the Alsantian sergeants. Their hasty, double-time march set the ground trembling and the air roaring with shouting officers.
When they next stopped, the yells pitched up and down, some bottoming out into bully roars and others as shrill as schoolteachers, as the march became a constant, hustling shuffle of boots around the encampment. This was it, Michel realized. From this staging ground, the Ghulmarqueans would lead the assault on Teriana. Not only might the order be given any moment, but Vemulus would not deign to give them more than a moment's notice.
At the knock, Michel sat up in bed. "Come in," she whispered, taking care not to disturb Merrick. When the knock persisted, she spoke a little louder, and the hatch swung open with a wooden clatter barely muffled by the thick burlap of the houda. The vile stench of horse, karik, and unicorn manure billowed in, the piercing shouts echoed in the canopy, and when their guest clambered in with the grunts and groans of an overlarge man, he was echoed by the indignant, booming oink of the karik.
As the houda shivered and lurched, Michel's belly fluttered, the floor creaked, and their visitor slammed into their bed post, or so Michel judged from the shaking of that brass pole and the numbed groan of their guest. From their driver's curses filtering through the houda fabric, followed by "Get up! Get up!", Michel gathered that, dissatisfied by the added weight, their karik had squatted on the ground.
"Milady." The gruff voice was General Cortero, whom Merrick said was so immense, his piggy flab plopped down a staircase of chins to jiggle over vast muscles and the obscenely huge navel, as wide as a coffee mug, peeking under his stretched hauberk. Not only did Michel only barely tolerate Cortero, she could not bring herself to speak in his massive, malodorous presence. While he smothered himself in cologne, it did not mask a body odor rivaling the karik's, an overwhelming aroma further soured by his labored puffing and a bodily presence so overbearing that she flinched from the weight of his shadow and trembled whenever his gigantic step lurched toward her in a travesty of a gallant bow.
When Cortero last visited, these vile odors and creepy noises were smeared with a new fetid scent, as well as wincing groans with each shuddering step. Merrick had said the general's face was overwritten with scars, and his leg wrapped in a bandage reddened, browned, and crusted by blood. While these scents were faint today, it was a small comfort, and she scooted back to the head of the bed.
When the pause lingered, then stretched to an embarrasing, obnoxious silence, unwilled words were fluttering to her tongue when he saved her from the indignity of whatever stammered reply she was about to gush.
"Milady?" Like the pig Merrick had alluded to in his description, Cortero slowly, stubbornly forged ahead. "You are well, milady?"
As it was a tiny, dismal agony to force a reply to the smelly hulk, a sarcastic sigh bubbled up from her depths, but breathing back in the wafting cavalry stench made her postpone her biting sentiment. "Close the hatch, will you?"
"Presently." The smug smirk floating in the oily voice sounded too much like gloating. As the obese but mighty knight paced inside the houda, the floorboards squeaked and the karik snorted, reminding her of the fearsome echoes of the dwarven city. "You will forgive my discourtesy one day, milady."
"A noble wish, Cortero." In your dreams. When would the rude general charge the Terianan wall, hopefully to be trampled by a a grim horde of snickering rabbits? When his sweaty fist clamped her wrist, hoisting her roughly from the bed, she gasped so deep her chest hurt, her head swam, and the scream rang and shivered, raged to a squeak, then died in a sob and a slow breath. It was as if she had been tamping down a fluid fear, and Cortero's rude fingers only broke through this seawall.
When the breeze squeezed by as he dragged her through the hatch, she flailed at the lintel, pulling peeled paint under her fingernails. His weighty tread, now heavier from his fistful of Michel,
clattered down the ladder and crunched grass. As her head flopped, cracking on metal, it jiggled forth another whine, answered by Merrick's snuffle. As Cortero lumbered forward, her head smacked cold steel again, Merrick screeched and blubbered, and she understood the general had swung them over his armored shoulders. While her ears—and no doubt Cortero's—were hot from her own screams and her baby brother's shrieks, their pitiful yelps never rose over the drowning din of the soldiers.
"Shut it," Cortero growled. "Now, milady. Miladies, given the little lord screams like a girl." While this insult only made Merrick howl louder, Michel stifled her screams, and her mouth was flooded by hot tears of shame, embarrassment, and anger.
When he flung her over the smelly withers of some furry beast, then threw Merrick on top, their heads cracked, and she tasted fire and iron as the din of the marching, massing army faded out and in.
Michel was too dazed to do anything but reel in the vile fur, tears of pain sliding down her nose
to mat the rank, shaggy coat, but when Merrick tried to wiggle down, he was flung back, pounding their skulls again, and ropes looped over and over, creasing their backs, then winding their hands into the giant, tangled knot.
"Help!" Michel screamed until the stinking brush of Cortero's breath, which was so raspy and coarse it seemed more beard than breath. She waited. He had brought his head just beside hers, she knew, from the hot jets of his nostrils. "What?" Silence. "I won't stop."
"Don't make me gag you," said Cortero. "I'm helping you, milady."
Michel's sarcastic snort, mingled with fear, jetted stinging air back at Cortero. "Do you call this help?"
"To help miladies, I must first help myself." Cortero's humble airs bubbled with sarcastic gloating. "Having tried patriotism, and being rewarded with spite from the crown and indifference from my country, I shall try being true to my self, that first and final cause, or so the philosophers say, making me the cornerstone, the number one, of my personal universe."
When no one came to Michel's cry, it gave her cause to wonder: was her voice so small, were the soldiers that indifferent to a suffering child, or was Cortero the ringleader of a conspiracy?
"That said, while I'm delivering you to Teriania to infuriate Vemulus and drive a wedge between Ghulmarque and Alsantia, it will save you from the front."
Michel could not believe her ears. "You're defecting?"
Cortero sniffed. "To Teriana? I have higher hopes that that. Still, any port in a storm, even when I'm brewing the storm." As he mounted, grunting, rear hooves clicked in protest, and as his whinnying steed shuffled a few steps backward, the ropes tightened, pinching Michel's wrists and waist.
Although Michel expected they would any moment be recognized and saved from their kidnapper, they trotted for several minutes through the din of the army. Did they not know who she was? Or didn't they care? Or were they so fearful that they didn't dare challenge their General, let alone venture an opinion?
When the bugles blew, Cortero reined in his steed, which came to a stop with a whinny and a clack of its hooves. Feeling its heart hammering under hairy flanks. Michel guessed it either a horse or a unicorn.
"That wasn't the signal," Cortero muttered. "That's a call to arms."
"Take us back!" screeched Merrick. "Back! We'll be killed!"
"That way lies court martial and a swift battlefield execution, young man, assuming we're not cut down by Terianans. Death is all around us now."
"And we're in the open! Back to the houda!" While Merrick's screeching had shriveled to sniveling, his baleful glowering hit Michel with so much force, that while she couldn't see his anger, she felt it as fact.
"We can't run back, sneak home, or circle around," Cortero sighed. "Not now. We must go forward."
"Forward?" screamed Merrick.
"You can't!" shouted Michel.
Already kicked by Cortero's heavy heels, their steed burst to such a gallop that the surrounding noise quickened to a whir.
"It's suicide!"
"Don't be so gloomy," roared Cortero. Sounds like wasps and dragonflies whizzed by her ear and over their bouncing heads.
"Are they shooting at us?" moaned Michel.
"Nothing so personal," scoffed Cortero. "They're shooting at the army!"
"We're the army!" howled Merrick.
"You?" Cortero snickered. "Don't make me laugh. And I'm defecting, remember?"
"Do they know that?"
"Know..." The general trailed off into a gasp.
"What are those?" groaned Merrick.
"Wizardry. Genius. Proof we're going to the right side." When Cortero dug in his heels and leaned deeply over the beast, its hooves pounded, Michel tipped forward, and blood rushed to her head and flailing feet. Fearing the slackingening ropes were coming undone, Michel clutched them in a white-knuckled grip.
"What are they, Merrick?" Michel hoped to take her mind off her racing thoughts of their precarious situation.
"They're metal."
"What's metal?"
"The army."
"Tin men? Like your toy soldiers?"
"No, not men. Or tin. Iron animals leaped the wall, Michel. The Queen's army is being cut down with every swing of their metal paws."
"What?"
"Giant iron animals. A wolf, a squirrel, a rabbit, and an owl, all twice the size of a karik."
"They're not moving?"
"Yes and no."
"What do you mean yes and no? That makes no sense!"
"Well, they're like clocks. Even while waiting, their gears spin head to toe. Now purple fire is streaking over the wall." As if just realizing what he said, Merrick's voice rose to a strident screech: "Cortero! You're heading for the fireballs!"
A tremor shook Cortero's voice. "They're aiming for us, Lord Merrick. I hope not to be here when they fall." Their steed whinnied when he drove his heels into the beast's flanks.
"Merrick?" Michel asked.
"What?"
"What is this?"
"Huh? Are you alright?"
"Just answer me."
"It's a kidnapping, Michel."
"No," she sighed in exasperation, "what are we riding?"
"A unicorn."
"Is it safe?"
"No," said Merrick. "More riders have been thrown from unicorns than any other animal."
"Oh. So if we aren't crisped by a fireball, shredded by steel talons or teeth, or pincushioned by arrows, we might be flung to our deaths."
"No we won't. The ropes."
"Came loose a while ago," said Michel. "I'm holding us on."
Having slackened to the point that only their wrists were sloppily tethered, their ties might have slipped into a heap of rope had she not drawn their end tight as she could.
"Michel!" Merrick wailed, "don't let go!"
"I'm trying. It's so hard."
When Merrick fumbled for the tangle, in one unnerving instant Michel nearly let go, but when both clasped the unraveling rope, it snagged into a knot, which they used like a handle to maintain their precarious perch on the rump of the unicorn.
In negotiating the rope, they forgot the falling fireballs, so when a tumutulous explosion impacted just behind them, Merrick screamed in Michel's ear, and she hollered louder than she ever had, as if she hoped to vent the excrutiating ringing in her yelled-in ear.
"Ring ring ring ring ring." Despite Merrick's urgent tone, Michel only heard ringing.
"Roaring roaring roaring." When Cortero's bellow drowned the ringing, she felt like she was in a humungous seashell.
"Chingle chingle changle." This new voice seemed to chirp as it rang out, then dropped from high above, like a bird on a faroff branch.
When Cortero turned, his leathery hands groped at their knotted wrists, as if racing against time. "Roaring roaring roaring!" When the ringing suddenly shrunk to an irritable ping, a whisper bubbled up, as if from a waterfall: "help me! She's coming!" As her fingers were still strained claws from holding on, she fumbled at the ties weakly, and he yelled, "faster! Fas-"
When his whisper was pinched off and squished to a wheeze, Michel had the ominous feeling it was the end of Cortero.
When the ropes were flicked away, she fell in a jumble with Merrick onto hairy leather that wrapped them in a mighty clench, and they fell up, up, and up.