The messenger sent to Ashcairn returned four days later looking considerably older than when he'd left, and the letter he carried back for the King's eyes only turned Belsarius's face a shade paler with every line he read.
"He doesn't believe the message came from me at all," the King said. "He's requesting my presence in person, to confirm it himself."
"I'll go with you," Pompey said, immediately.
"I have a bad feeling about this," Andrea said.
"What could possibly happen," Annabelle asked, and caught, a half-second too late, the look on Remus's face.
"That's a jinx," Remus said. "You just jinxed all of us."
"I don't believe in jinxes," Annabelle said, though her own voice wavered slightly on the way out.
The second letter arrived three days after that, addressed to Remus directly, and his face went pale enough reading it that Duke Ferron, standing close enough to catch the change, took it gently from his hands to finish it himself.
"Heavens," his father said, voice gone flat with something between disbelief and dread. "It's worse than any of us feared. Duke Corvath has taken King Belsarius captive. He's declared the Eastlands an independent kingdom under his own crown, and declared war on the Southlands in the same breath."
"That fat, small-hearted coward," Andrea said, her fist coming down hard on the table between them, her whole frame taut with a fury Remus had rarely seen her let show this openly. "He cares nothing for the people of the Eastlands. Only for what he can still hold onto once everyone stronger than him has finished fighting."
"We march east," Andrea said. "Now, before he has time to dig in further."
"Hold your horses," Remus said, keeping his voice level with real effort. "The Eastlands are mountains and fortified passes, and Corvath has a trained, well-supplied army waiting behind both. We'd lose more than we'd gain even if we somehow won outright, and I don't think we can spare a single man or woman we don't already have. On top of that, I have worse news still. The Nightforged are throwing everything they have at the barrier. I can't tell you how long it holds. Years, maybe. Months, maybe. Days, if we're unlucky."
"Then what do we do," Annabelle asked.
"We survive him," Remus said. "That's the whole plan, and I know it isn't the one any of you wanted to hear."
That same day, every soul in the Southlands who could carry a bundle on their back began the long walk west into the swamp country, whatever couldn't be carried burned rather than left standing for Corvath's army to feed itself on. Entire towns went up in slow, deliberate columns of smoke behind them as they walked, and Remus found himself, more than once on that first day's march, having to look away from his own handiwork rather than watch it finish.
"We didn't bring axes," Julius said, falling into step beside him somewhere past the old northern boundary marker, the family steward's dialect thick as ever despite the exhaustion plain in his voice. "Nor picks, nor much else besides what we could sling over our own backs in the time we had."
"Then bring me sticks and stones instead," Remus said, "and I'll turn them into whatever we're short of."
Craft: Stone Axe. Materials Used: 2 x Stone, 1 x Hardwood Handle.
Craft: Stone Pick-Axe. Materials Used: 2 x Stone, 1 x Hardwood Handle.
Craft: Water Catcher. Materials Used: 1 x Canvas, 1 x Woven Reed Frame.
Julius took the first axe off his hands with the same skeptical squint he'd once given a barrel of fermenting urine years earlier, weighed it once, and grunted something that might, from a more expressive man, have counted as approval.
"You're your father's son after all, whatever the two of you keep insisting to the contrary," Julius said. "Don't let it go to your head, mind. I've said worse things to him and meant them less."
Building anything permanent in ground with the consistency of wet oats took considerably longer than either the axes or the picks made easy, and Remus spent the better part of the first week simply learning, the hard way, exactly how much of the swamp's own water table needed managing before a single stilted house could be trusted to stand through a full season of rain.
Craft: Water Dam. Materials Used: extensive Timber, extensive Packed Clay.
Craft: Water Mill. Materials Used: moderate Timber, 1 x Salvaged Millstone.
Dam after dam rose across the valley floor in a slow, deliberate staircase, each one draining a little more of the standing water down toward the river proper, exposing black, silt-rich soil behind it that Andrea, of all people, turned out to have a genuine knack for coaxing crops from within days of the ground drying enough to walk on without sinking to the ankle.
The Eastland army crossed the old border three weeks later, and found, mile after mile in every direction, nothing at all: no grain, no livestock, no roof left standing worth sheltering under, only ash and a hollow, deliberate silence, a land that had already decided, on its own terms, to give an invading army absolutely nothing to take.
They lasted seven days on whatever they'd carried in themselves before hunger forced the retreat, and were gone entirely within three weeks of first crossing, having captured a great deal of scorched, useless ground and not one single thing worth the cost of holding it.
"Even a Duke can lose a war by winning the wrong ground," Duke Ferron said, watching the last of the retreating banners disappear back over the eastern ridge from the safety of the swamp settlement's own new watchtower.
Aminala climbed the last few steps to join him there, breathing hard from the effort, and set a hand briefly over his where it rested on the rail. "You keep saying 'a Duke,' as though you weren't the one who moved every household in the Southlands out from under Corvath's boots without losing a single one of them to the walk."
"You had half those households fed and moved before I'd finished deciding it needed doing at all," Ferron said. "Don't hand me the whole of that credit. I only signed off on what you'd already organized."
"Then we'll share it," Aminala said, "the way we've shared everything else since the day you married a woman better at logistics than you were ever going to be at war."
Somewhere beyond that ridge, in a war room Remus would never see and a mood he could only guess at, Duke Corvath was almost certainly telling himself something considerably less comfortable about the exact same retreat.
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