23: No going back

As the sea breeze drifted through Hohenburg Castle’s throne room, it carried with it relief not just from the heat of the long summer day, but the tedium of administrative work.

“Uhh…” The Crown Princess groaned as she got up and twisted her back, stiff from sitting on the large golden throne for too long. Hours of petitions about tax exemptions and courtiers yapping about inconsequential things had ground down her patience, but she managed to not snap. Did they truly expect her to attend the nameday of their every child?

No wonder her father looked older beyond his years. She would be too if she had to endure such torture every day. As much as she wanted to ease his burden, Laira would be happy to see him seated on the throne for a few more decades.

“What are we having for lunch?” she asked Reshma on their way to the dining hall.

“Your favorite, butter pheasant. Yum,” the tall dusky rascal winked, her anklets chiming.

“You didn’t experiment with it this time, did you?” Laira asked, with a clear warning in her voice. Reshma loved to try out new flavors, but had the cooking skills of a seven year old.

“Nope. Didn’t touch it at all.”

“Good,” she replied in relief, while worry about her father gnawed at her from the inside. His convoy ought to have reached the capital by now or at least be back inside Nanon’s territory, but there had been no news at all. No carrier pigeon, no messenger. The negotiations with Sindhu weren’t suppose to take this long.

“Any news of the convoy?” she asked hopefully.

“No,” Reshma replied glumly.

Laira felt some hope when Sir Arnulf approached her with purposeful steps, his polished Royal Guard armor clinking and gleaming in the sunlight. He looked like he’d stepped out of one of her father’s tales. Her relief and musings evaporated the moment she noticed the expression on his face, etched with pity and sympathy for someone bereaved.

Refusing to look her in the eyes, he promptly knelt before her with his head bowed.

“Sir Arnulf?” she asked, breath stuck in her chest.

“I’m very sorry, Your Highness. His Majesty and the Prince… they...”

“They what?” she snapped, with dread and anger rising within her.

“They’ve left the mortal coil to join God, Your Highness. There was an ambush on the Royal convoy in Sindhu; we don’t know by whom. His Majesty’s body is being brought to the capital as we speak. The Prince’s body wasn’t found.”

Laira felt as if the ground underneath her feet had disappeared, but Reshma was soon behind her, firm hands helping her stay upright.

“No. This can not be happening…” she said in disbelief. “They cannot– I’m, I’m all that is left?”

She turned to look back at the throne and hated herself for ever wanting it. Her life had just turned upside down, with no way to go back.

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Our first encounter with the Nanoans as an independent people had come as a surprise, but I did not want to be caught off guard like that ever again. Death had a bad habit of lingering close to such events, and I wanted to keep it at bay at all costs.

So I declared a state of emergency and put everyone who could hold a tool to work. More miners in the iron pits and more woodcutters feeding the charcoal burners. The furnaces roared day and night, belching smoke and sparks, as we kept them fed at all times. Under Kovar’s watchful eye, the iron turned into steel and steel turned to weapons. Bleary eyed and covered in soot, the craftsmen and new apprentices worked day and night until each soldier was carrying a magazine-fed crossbow of his own.

I wasn’t getting much sleep either, as I pushed the civilians to raise fortifications at East Gate and West Point, and build a wagon worthy path to Bog Watch. All those preparations would be meaningless if the enemy just sailed into the bay, so we had the Frogmen practice how to fight from boats and scout the coast. In the process, we found that route was highly unlikely and why this valley had been uninhabited for so long.

The mountain range at West Point had at one point extended further into the ocean, but winds and the tide had eroded them over time, forming a spit and smaller outcroppings that bordered our coastline. This barrier of land, barely peeking above the ocean, had turned the coast into an invisible minefield. Only boats with a shallow draft could get inside the natural harbor that was our coastline.

The craftsmen grumbled about me pushing them hard every waking hour, but finished two more trebuchets all the same. The first one of them was sent to the Bog Watch to join its sisters, while the second one was installed at West Point.

While the soldiers trained and the craftsmen built, the rest of the people brought in the bountiful harvest we were blessed with. It was larger than we had expected, so much that I had to pull some craftsmen to build an extra silo to store all the grain. It should’ve been a celebration, instead we just wished we would live long enough to eat it all.

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The moment we were waiting for eventually arrived, when one day I was informed the Frogmen had spied a large force of soldiers crossing the Bog.

“Get inside the castle!” a guard screamed at the laggard civilians to get behind the palisade, as our military prepared to deploy.

“Come back alive. I will pray for your victory,” Aprilia whispered, as she gave me a kiss.

“I will,” I reassured her and watched her walk back to the safety of our walls.

I saluted the men stationed atop the palisade, which was beginning to look like a proper castle, the skirt of stone wall already a story tall. Resolute, we went to face the Nanoans to protect all that we had built.

“Hey Lothar, why are you still single? I’ve noticed you staring at our attractive girls, and many of them are not exactly shy about showing their interest,” I asked him on the way, to keep up our spirits.

“I can’t. Not right now,” he said, in a tone that made it clear that things would get tense between us if I pursued it any further. It was a rather odd hill to die upon, but his secrets were his to keep. I was getting a little frustrated with how many he kept though.

“All right. Keep your secrets,” I said, shelving the topic for the moment.

If they were smart, the Nanoans would have arrived on boats in the middle of the night and landed close to us, for which I had crude searchlights built from a brass reflector, but none of it turned out to be necessary, as a force of almost six hundred came trundling toward us from the Bog. A mix of peasants, foot soldiers and a few knights.

Once the head of their column was within the range of our bows, Lothar addressed the force.

“Halt! You are approaching the border of the Republic of Chadom. Identify yourself and state your business or you will be treated as trespassers!”

A stocky man wearing high quality plate armor rode forward on his large black warhorse, turning me green with envy. A perpetual sneered twisted his face, as if we were servants who had displeased him. My eyes almost popped out of their sockets when I realized who he was.

Count Zock. Jack's father.

“I am Count Zock Nobart! Some criminals stole something of great value from a convoy on our lands and we want the item back. I was told that you people killed them and took it,” he bellowed back in his gruff voice.

Lothar just stared back at him.

“General?” I shouted at him.

He shook himself out of his shock and addressed the Count. “We guarantee safe conduct to a delegation of five people.”

Count Zock came forward with four escorts and was presented the scroll, placed within an ornate wooden box.

“We could not make heads or tails of this document, so your secrets are safe, my lord.” Lothar told him amiably, which did not change the Count’s sour expression.

I was in so much shock that Lord Ox was none other than Jack's father, I didn't hide myself. His gaze fell upon me and his eyes narrowed in recognition, despite a cloth mask hiding half my face.

“Boy! Is that you?” he bellowed.

Shit.

This one blunder could cost us everything.

“Come out you coward. Do you plan on running away from everything in your life? I know it is you!”

I didn’t know how, but he somehow knew it was me. I could tell it from his voice. Seeing no other path available, I took a long breath and stepped forward. “Yes, father?”

He looked me up and down, disgust flashing in his eyes. “I thought you died. There were reports of a single man fighting off the soldiers, helping that scum Cha escape, before he crumpled.”

“Sorry to disappoint you, but I survived.”

“So this is where you and those Cha ran off to, and joined this Republic of Chadom?”

“Yes.”

We stared at each other for a while, then he turned and went back to his army. He talked briefly with his men, had an argument, bullied his way through, then turned back to face me.

“Tell me boy, there is no Republic of Chadom, is there?” he bellowed. “It's just you and your Cha friends, and some weapons you got your hands on,” he said as a statement, not as a question. “I’m guessing the brigands had a hidden cache here, eh?”

This was dangerous. Jack was fairly smart himself, so his father could safely presume he had figured out the contents of the letter. The Nanoan soldiers began fanning out, assuming battle formations.

“This is not a wise course of action, father. I don't want to commit patricide,” I warned him.

“You are no son of mine,” he spat, “siding with this scum and working against our realm’s interests.”

That riled me up.

“Yes. I'm the real traitor here, aren't I, Lord Ox?”

This was it, then. He would not change his mind. My heart sank as I accepted that we were truly at war with the Nanon Kingdom.

His face went red with rage. “What do you know about our interests? Foolish boy!” He growled, as he brought a stretched arm down, signaling his soldiers to attack.

Looking him straight in the eyes, I blew two long notes on my signal whistle. While the enemy soldiers charged toward us, the three trebuchets hidden in the forest answered in kind. There was a long whine of rope and fire and soon the sky above us was filled with burning peat and rocks, coming down like meteors. They landed right on top of the unsuspecting Nanoan soldiers, like a god’s wrath.

Before the shocked enemy troops could reorganize, our crossbowmen began their barrage of flying bolts, killing the poor sods by dozens each second. The repeating crossbows weren’t particularly accurate, but they didn’t have to be. The thwip thwip thwip of bow strings losing bolts and arrows filled the air, followed by the screams of their unfortunate targets.

In all the carnage, the Frogmen, hidden in the Bog, began taking out the enemy archers from behind. The Nanoan soldiers lucky enough to escape the arrows and rocks tried to rush us, only to fall upon the traps hidden throughout the border. Feet were punctured by punji sticks and men stumbled into pitfall traps.

Their cavalry tried to charge us, but the Hunters with their rapid fire Legolas bows took out the easy targets that their horses were. Some knights were crushed under the weight of their mounts, while some managed to dodge. The few that survived ran toward us, but were taken care of by me and a few other especially strong soldiers with our large draw crossbows. The Bog gave us plenty of time to riddle them with multiple bolts.

One of the knights managed to get quite close to me while I was still reloading my crossbow. I was about to ditch it and draw my sword, when two soldiers struck him with their goedendags. He tried to grab one of them, but slipped in the process and fell face down. The two men didn’t let the opportunity escape and bludgeoned his helmet with all their might until it was heavily dented, the man inside definitely dead.

“Good work, lads,” I congratulated the soldiers with ragged breath, while the battle raged all around us.

The second volley of burning peat and rocks from trebuchets destroyed whatever morale the Nanoans had left, who began fleeing. Not that I was looking around, as I saw Jack's father die to a rock from the trebuchets.

One moment he was screaming at his subordinates, the next a boulder blew his head apart like a pumpkin. His lifeless body slumped down onto the mud, as his horse reared and ran toward us in panic. I just stared in shock as the air shook with the screams of Nanoan soldiers and conscripts suffering, dying and burning alive.

Any chance of peace with Nanon was gone. There was no going back now.