Continuing the story of Sergeant Vardan and her patrol of Halverics in northern Lyonya after the Pargunese released scathefire.<\/p>\n
Northern Lyonya is, like most of Lyonya, forested country ranging from some swampy forest near the Honnorgat and along some of its tributaries, to forested uplands with rocky outcrops.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Although dominated by deciduous trees for the most part, there are some stands of conifers (and isolated conifers throughout).\u00a0 Pargun, north of the river, has fewer deciduous and more coniferous trees.\u00a0 Blackwood, the best wood for longbows on that world,\u00a0 grows only south of the river.<\/p>\n
In winter, with the leaves fallen,\u00a0 the forest may seem easier to navigate,\u00a0 harder to hide in…but not to its natives.<\/p>\n
Vardan blinked back tears.\u00a0 No fire she’d ever seen had done that to human bodies…but it was too late to help them, and she had the others to think of.\u00a0 “Pick ’em up,” she said to the others.\u00a0 “My guess is the Pargunese will come this way–we don’t want them messing our friends about.”<\/p>\n
“Where are we going?” Malden asked.<\/p>\n
That was the question.\u00a0 They’d been on the way back to camp when they first saw the fire loom and heard that fearful roar…and from the look, it might’ve passed over the camp.\u00a0 Vardan shuddered, and told herself it was the cold.<\/p>\n
“We’re taking their bodies into the woods,” she said.\u00a0 “Then we’ll find the camp.”\u00a0 If it’s there.\u00a0 If anyone survived, as we did. <\/span><\/p>\n Moving the bodies into the woods proved difficult.\u00a0 The strange fire had kindled others along its margins, and that more normal burning left piles of smoldering trees, bushes, debris.\u00a0 Vardan finally gave up looking for a safe place to exit the lane the fire had made, and led her people back to what she thought was the site of their camp.<\/p>\n Nothing remained.\u00a0 She stared into the darkness, now lit only by the flickering of normal fires to right and left…the taste of bitter ash in her mouth as the wind blew it in her face.\u00a0 No camp.\u00a0 All the others dead, no doubt; she could only hope it had been quick, as quickly as the fire passed over their ditch.\u00a0 No camp and no supplies, no food–no spare weapons–no clothes to replace the wet remnants in which she and the others stood shivering.\u00a0 They had kicked through the ash–not so much as a metal buckle left.<\/p>\n “Well,” she said.\u00a0 For a moment she could say nothing more, her mouth dry with the taste of ashes and grief, her heart heavy with something near despair.\u00a0 But she had been at Dwarfwatch during the siege, not yet then a sergeant.\u00a0 She had despaired then–and she had survived because one person had not given up, one person had–beyond all hope–brought rescue and saved those who remained.\u00a0 Paks Yellow-hair hadn’t been a paladin then, only a common soldier of Phelan’s…and Phelan was now Lyonya’s king.<\/p>\n Vardan’s heart gave a single painful beat, then steadied.<\/p>\n “Your box…” Kir said.\u00a0 “Sergeant, your box.”<\/p>\n Her box, full of a lifetime’s collection of jewelry from the south: her security in old age, her delight always.\u00a0 The silver armlets with leaping fish, the gold ring with the ruby, the necklace like a wide silver collar: loot from campaigns in Aarenis that she’d found herself, and traded for, and purchased outright.<\/p>\n “Box doesn’t matter,” she said.<\/p>\n “But Sergeant–you always said–” Kir, barely twenty winters, had already shown a talent for not knowing when to keep quiet.<\/p>\n “It doesn’t matter,” she said.\u00a0 “We matter.\u00a0 Our people matter.\u00a0 Surviving matters, and killing Pargunese matters.\u00a0 That’s all.”\u00a0 They all had things they’d lost–Kir had kept a braided ring of his mother’s hair in his box.\u00a0 She told herself that hair meant as much to him as her finery did to her–and even if it didn’t, this wasn’t the time to worry about it.<\/p>\n “We’ll find some rangers,” she said.\u00a0 “When the Pargunese come–because they’ll be following this trail, I’ve no doubt–we’ll hold them until the king comes.”<\/p>\n “But–we’re less than two tensquads, sergeant.”<\/p>\n “We’re less than two Halveric<\/em> tensquads,” Vardan said.\u00a0 She squinted into the wind.\u00a0 No sign of Pargunese approaching, and with the wind from the north, she would hear them before she saw them in the dark.\u00a0 Would they have torches?\u00a0 “We’re going close to the edge-fires–get dry, clean our weapons–and then we’ll find a gap in the fires and a place to lay our comrades.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Continuing the story of Sergeant Vardan and her patrol of Halverics in northern Lyonya after the Pargunese released scathefire. Northern Lyonya is, like most of Lyonya, forested country ranging from some swampy forest near the Honnorgat and along some of its tributaries, to forested uplands with rocky outcrops.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Although dominated by deciduous trees for the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[115],"tags":[28],"class_list":["post-1398","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-snippet","tag-snippet"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1398"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1398"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1398\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1399,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1398\/revisions\/1399"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1398"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1398"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1398"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}