Kingmaker (13 page)

A row of charred skeletons in one farmhouse was a bad sign. Another row in the second house was grim confirmation. But after six farmhouses, she knew she had discovered a crime greater than the murder that had brought her to this world. The King's uncle or his Rissel allies had simply slaughtered the entire peasant population to prevent them from offering assistance to Sergius and his army.

Ellie knew that Sergius was a long way from representing good. But he wouldn't have done this. Or at least, he hadn't. And as long as she had anything to say, he wouldn't.

"We can't let this happen again,” she told Dafed who had ridden up beside her when she'd finally thrown down her reins and stooped over the sixth house.

"What can we do to stop it?"

It was tempting to take responsibility. To believe that if she had only left things alone, this wouldn't have happened. Without her, Sergius would never have been crowned and the uneasy balance of power between the Dukes in the countryside and the bishop in the capital could have continued indefinitely.

Tempting, but wrong. She hadn't done this. Sergius hadn't done this. Sullivan and his allies had made choices and they'd chosen slaughter.

Maybe she would leave Sergius and his army afterwards, but she intended to see that Sullivan paid the price for this cold-blooded massacre.

They were still three days’ march from Dinan when they stopped for the night.

It was almost dark when Ellie reached camp but she rode directly to the large tent that had been set aside for Sergius.

A guard started to stop her when she yanked on the tent flap but another guard stopped him. “It's the princess, idiot. Are you that anxious to die?"

A reputation wasn't an altogether bad thing.

"We don't have enough food,” Sergius told her when she pushed her way into their tent. “Or enough wagons to carry it even if we had it. My uncle's plan is putting us in a difficult situation."

Arnold nodded grimly from where he sat at the king's side. Both had been stuffing their faces with a large roast of pork.

"I need you two to come with me."

"We've been riding all day.” Sergius wiped his face with a silk scarf, then tossed the bone he'd been gnawing on the ground. “We need to rest."

"I need you to see something. Now."

Arnold scowled, but he stood. “After the battle yesterday, if she says it's important, I'll take her word for it."

"Bah. And this is the first decent meal I've had since I broke free of the bishop.” The king struggled to his feet, belched, then strapped on a sword.

"Where to?"

"Not far.” She led them to the nearest farmhouse, still smoldering despite the hours since Sullivan's armies had retreated.

Arnold looked around. It was nearly pitch-black and the tiny moon only shed a fraction of the light Ellie was used to. “If you're leading us against some enemies, I wish we'd brought a few more men."

"This should be safe. For us, anyway. For them, it wasn't."

She used one of the matches from the survival kit she'd bought in the REI back when she'd been shopping the mall and lit the area.

"Magic?"

"It's just chemistry, Arnold. I don't want you paying attention to my match. I want you to look inside.

"Oh. Oh, shit. There've got to be ten corpses in here."

The king pushed his way past Arnold just as Ellie's match reached her fingers. She blew it out and lit another.

"I wondered about that fat pig just wandering around.” Arnold sounded pensive. “Even if they burned the crops, the peasants would herd their swine into the city."

"I don't understand why you're showing this to us,” Sergius said. “We knew Sullivan had brigands working for him. It is terrible that they would slaughter a farm household like this but it shouldn't be a surprise. After all, that is what bandits do."

"It isn't just this one farmhouse, Sergius. It's all of them. Every burned farmhouse we've passed has its victims. Sullivan didn't bring anyone back to Dinan. He probably didn't want to feed them if there's a siege. It was easier to kill them all."

"That's insane,” Arnold said. “Peasants are wealth. Without them, who will pay the taxes? Who will feed the cities? Who will provide labor for the roads and pikemen for the army?"

His was a fairly cold-blooded calculation, but he was right. Even leaving the moral aside, Sullivan had weakened the kingdom he claimed to want to rule for the sake of a short-run advantage. That wasn't the kind of King Ellie would want.

"I'll have Father Lawgrave read a mass for their souls.” Sergius's voice was puzzled. He still wasn't sure why Ellie had shown him these slaughtered peasants. After all, he hadn't killed them.

Ellie was happy to make that clear to him. “I want things like this to stop. No more warring on peasants."

"We haven't done anything like that,” Arnold reminded her.

"When you rode into that trap yesterday, you thought they were just peasants. That's why you were so confident."

"But we thought they were brigands."

By his definition, though, any peasant with arms was a brigand.

"According to Mark's scouts,” Ellie said, “Sullivan burned everything from here to Dinan. They tried to count the number of farmhouses but lost track after a few thousand. We're talking tens of thousands killed."

"We didn't kill them,” Sergius said.

It was a long shot, but Ellie thought she saw a hint of sorrow in his match-lit eyes. She decided to press her advantage. She wasn't after vengeance for her parents any more, but she had a new mission.

"What killed them was the system that defines nobles as the only people who matter. As King, who better to change the system?"

"I'm not exactly in a position to make Kingly commandments."

Fair enough. But if he won, he would be. “I want you to make me a promise,” Ellie said.

Surprise filled the King's eyes. “What?"

"Announce that you'll be King for the peasants and villagers. That you're going to dedicate your reign to controlling the abuses of the power of the nobility and the army. That you'll never allow this to happen again."

Arnold bristled.

Sergius looked at the baronet, then back at Ellie. He shook his head slowly. “I can't do that, Ellie. Right now, only about half of the barons are even staying neutral in this fight. The other half is divided among my uncles. If I make the war about them, I won't have any support at all."

"Darned right,” Arnold agreed.

"You'll have the peasants’ support,” Ellie reminded them.

Arnold laughed. “If this farmhouse represents what happened between here and Dinan, the peasants Sullivan slaughtered outnumbered his army ten to one or more. Yet I doubt they killed a dozen of his soldiers in the entire massacre. The nobility control the armies, Ellie. Sergius needs them. Can't you see that?"

Sergius didn't look happy. What King would like to hear that he had to depend on anyone? But he had been raised with the idea of a social ranking. The King and the nobles, along with a few superior priests, were the only people that mattered in the feudal society Ellie had found herself in.

"What I see is a petty squabble between privileged children of a dead King,” she said. “And this petty squabble has opened our country to invasion, killed tens of thousands of our citizens, and impoverished everyone. Unless we elevate the battle, make it one of the people against the usurpers and invaders, it can drag on indefinitely."

"You're stepping close to treason,” Sergius said. “I am the rightful King. My uncles are traitors. That can hardly be called a petty squabble."

She shrugged. “You may be the rightful King—far be it from me to argue. Yet your great-grandfather usurped the throne. Until he won, he was the traitor. Once he won, the history books were rewritten and he became the champion. Can you think of any reason it will be different this time?"

"That is treason."

"It's the truth,” she lit another match. “I'll make you a deal."

Both Arnold and Sergius leaned forward. “What?"

"If we can win at Dinan, that'll solidify your support among the barons. Then you announce that you fought that battle to gain vengeance for the peasants here and that you're adopting a new government. One that includes a parliament for the common people as well as one for the nobility."

Mark had been telling her about English history and the Magna Carts. She figured that introducing the concept of a House of Commons was as close as she was going to get to a real democracy here.

"If we lose, we have nothing. If we win, we give everything away. Why would I agree to that deal?” Sergius looked puzzled, but also as if he was willing to do the deal if she could convince him.

"Do you really think you have a chance of winning without me and my magic? Without Mark and the way he is transforming the army?"

"You are the rightful King,” Arnold reminded him. “You don't have to agree to this insanity."

Arnold was young. If he was this inflexible, Ellie didn't want to think about how the older nobles would react. But she had one advantage over either of them. She knew that it had worked at least once before, in England. And she knew that attempts to cling to aristocratic privilege and autocratic power would eventually fail.

Sergius sat still, his cheeks puffing in and out as he considered his options.

Ellie didn't need her magic to detect when he'd made his decision. His eyes flicked to her, then to Arnold.

"You've got a bargain,” he announced. “When we take Dinan, I'll announce that Sullivan failed because of his great crime in slaughtering the innocent peasants. And I'll announce two courts of advisors. One from the nobles. A second from the lower classes."

He was lying, unfortunately. He would go back on that bargain as soon as he had the chance. But Ellie knew that rights, once granted, were hard to retract.

She reached for a sheaf of parchment. “We'll put it in writing, then."

High sandstone walls surrounded Dinan.

Only a few days before, the town had sprawled out past the walls.

No longer.

Sullivan or Rissel soldiers had leveled the homes and shops outside the walls, chopped every tree or bush that obscured the view. They'd created a killing field for a quarter of a mile around the walls.

Dozens of ugly cannons leaned over crenellated walls and the purple haze of magic hung over the city like a shroud.

Here and there, patches of still drying mortar showed that Sullivan had used the last week to shore up aging fortifications. If Sergius's army had any kind of artillery, though, they'd go through the stone wall like a power saw through silk. But they didn't. The only cannon they possessed was the one they'd captured from the fake bandits. And it was still days behind them.

Ellie and Mark studied the city looking for any obvious weaknesses.

The city walls formed a long ‘u’ shape protecting a harbor and the ships inside of it. At least four large ships, each flying the Gryphon of Rissel, were unloading.

"That's insane.” Ellie pointed to a spit of land that formed the south side of the harbor. It was outside the city walls. “We could put our cannon out there and bombard the harbor. I can't understand why they haven't guarded it."

Dafed could, though. He'd been stationed in Dinan years before. “It's swampland. You put a cannon there and it'll just sink into the ground. Never get a single shot off."

"Maybe we could shore it up."

"Swampland all the way down. The engineers tried to build a lighthouse out there once. Thirty feet tall of solid rock with another ten feet of foundation. The whole thing sunk into the ground and vanished. Only took a couple of weeks."

She shook her head. Scratch another plan.

"We can't starve them out with ships able to land.” Dafed didn't mind stating the obvious. “And they outnumber us, outgun us, and outmagic us. I think we're in trouble."

Ellie thought so too, but she was committed. If they failed, Sergius would become a footnote in history and his promises to create even the advisory parliament of commons would become a joke.

Ellie could do magic, but she hadn't really integrated magic into her thinking. Their attack on Dinan had depended on secrecy, on being able to move without being detected. But Sullivan would have been an idiot not to have his mages keep track of Sergius. When Sergius had begun to move toward Dinan, Sullivan had known. In retrospect, she should have done things differently. Now, though, they had to make the best of a bad situation and hope for a miracle.

In the meantime, they needed to survive and make sure that Sullivan didn't wipe them out. The first step was easy. Dafed and Mark laid out a fortified camp blocking the road into Dinan but out of range of the city's cannon. They couldn't do anything about the shipping but they didn't want to make it too easy for Sullivan.

To Ellie, the whole setup was suspicious. Sullivan had more soldiers inside the walls than Sergius had outside. He had to have some reason for failing to meet us in the field. Ellie suspected she'd discover that reason soon enough.

After their victory in the forest, the blacksmiths had redoubled their efforts in creating bayonets. Several wagons full of new bayonets, along with the repaired cannon, were on their way. But, while they could equip their musketeers, they didn't have enough muskets to equip all of their soldiers, didn't have enough money to pay them much longer.

While Mark and Dafed worked on the camp, Ellie and Lawgrave used their magic to find the few survivors of Sullivan's massacre and sent scouts out to rescue them.

The scouts also scoured what food they could find from the ruined farmhouses and barns. It helped but not much. Even if they found the money to pay the soldiers, they'd all starve to death soon.

She was dog-tired by sunset and collapsed on top of her sleeping bag.

About two minutes later, Sergius stomped into Ellie's tent, threw his helmet against the canvas wall, and dumped himself into one of the camp chairs their carpenters had been throwing together. “We're sunk."

She nodded. They'd won the only battle they'd fought but that didn't matter. Hannibal had won almost all of his battles and still managed to lose the war. Now, Sullivan had Sergius where he wanted him.