The Wrath of Gods Blows from Every Direction

Sir Danielle Longbow waited by the armoured door with a dry mouth. Queen Lilena Redwing, the first harpy, awaited.

“Relax.” Lupita touched Danielle’s hand.

Danielle forced a smile for her wife. “I’ve bet heavily on this.”

“We both did,” said Lupita, brown hand resting on her medic’s bag.

Metallic clangs reverberated as the door was unlocked from the inside. Two grey acolytes who stood on either side of the door lifted an enormous steel bar from hooks. Danielle had checked that they were armed with silver knives.

“How are you feeling, Jill?” Lupita asked the bent-backed woman they’d brought to the harpy.

“Nervous of course,” Jill answered, straining to look up at the knight and the witch.

The well-oiled door scraped gently as it swung open to let the trio from Crann into Lilena’s home.

Yellow eyes in the darkness were the first thing anyone saw of Lilena. A world-weary smile sent shivers down Danielle’s spine.

“Welcome, mortals. What have you brought for me? Another cushioned chair? More books? Did I forget a skull?” Danielle’s eyes drifted to the skulls of Lilena’s sisters, stacked and labelled on the shelves to the right, then the books on the left.

“Your first new sister. We hope.” Lupita took Jill’s trembling hand and walked her closer to the pillowed armchair given to Lilena when she agreed to imprisonment. “This is Jill.”

“Jill.” The harpy stood, forever youthful from a time before the first kingdom arose. “You know what I am?”

“I dae.” Jill’s stuttering head nodded, then turned to look at the open door closing behind them. Two guards inside wore the same grey robes. They locked the door again from the inside. A heavy thud meant the bar across the door had been replaced on the other side.

“What is so terrible in your life that you would give it to me?” She picked at a brown robe stitched with red wings.

“I cough blood. Ma back aches. Ma eyes fail me. Breathing hurts. I’ll die soon. I ken that. I’m no afraid tae die.”

“What are you afraid of?”

“Saying goodbye tae ma girl, her bairns. They’re so beautiful. A baby, one of ‘em. An angel in the flesh. I want-” Jill coughed.

“Time. You want more time. You want the pain to end.” Jill nodded, coughing spots of red into her grey hand. “My bite might kill you.”

“Ma next breath might kill me, Queen. I’ll chance ‘at.” Jill struggled to look into the yellow eyes.

“You would be a monster. Hungry for blood.” Lilena stood and grew the red feathered wings harpies were known for. Her fingers turned to claws. “Do you want to look like this?”

“If I can watch that babe grow up and have bairns of his ain. Aye. I’m ald enough te find hope in others. Can ye give me that?”

Danielle Longbow’s fist clenched as Lilena stepped forward. Pointed knuckles tipped with silver on her gauntlets were tiny blades if the monster did anything she wasn’t supposed to.

“Will you give your mind to me? Share thoughts?”

“Aye.” Jill took Lilena’s offered hand, which was human again.

“This is going to hurt, Jill.” Lilena wrapped the crone in a hug and pierced the papery skin of her grey neck with needle teeth.

“Most things ‘urt. That wisnae so bad.” Jill touched the bite on her neck. “Whit now?”

“You either live or die.” Lilena sat back in her chair. “Leave her with me. The guards in here should leave. Bring us some chickens. If she doesn’t drink it will be harder for her.”

“Chickens?”

“They’re not bad. Not good either, but not bad.” Yellow eyes, framed by black hair, glittered as they looked at Danielle. “No thoughts, knight?” 

Doubts? Danielle thought. Always. Blackened skeletons wreathed in fire charged across the battlefield in her mind. Long dead soldiers of a broken empire screamed on the point of her sword. Friends and foes buried. Always. Remembering battle sent her hand to the comfort of her sword’s pommel.

“She’s more a thinker than a talker,” Lupita said, looping her arm through Danielle’s.

“What does that make you?” Lilena asked, looking down her aquiline nose.

“Both I suppose.” Lupita took a bandage roll from the leather satchel hanging from her shoulder. She kneeled and wrapped the bandage around Jill’s neck tenderly. Giving the old woman her best reassuring smile she stood. “You’re going to be alright, Jill. You’ll see that baby grow up.”

“Don’t give her false certainty. Ugly truth is kinder than beautiful lies.” Lilena frowned, leg up on the chair she treated as a throne. “Especially when it hurts.”

“Hope aids recovery,” Lupita said with an undertone of anger.

Lilena made a noise in her throat that was part dismissal and part concession.

“No silver?” Danielle asked.

“Of course not. Unless she wants to be stuck halfway like your assassin and her friends.” Lilena bent her neck until it cracked and sighed with relief.”Leave us. Mortals won’t be safe around her when she starts to change.”

Danielle looked at the grey acolytes by the door. “She’s right. You should be outside with the other two, let us out.”

Keen eyes watched the first harpy as the locks were undone. Opening the bean slot in the heavy door, one acolyte of the Church of Red Knives told those outside to unbar the door.

When the heavy door closed behind them the sounds of Lilena using the inner locks put Danielle’s mind at ease. A grey acolyte passed on the word to bring chickens. “Will I regret this? What if Jill is just food to her?”

“Queen Redwing surrendered to us. She wants a solution to her problem. She let us lock her in a vault beneath the ground.”

“So that we could deliver her meals?”

“Ever the sceptic. We found a compromise. Jill will die before she transforms or becomes a harpy able to serve the Church of Red Knives. They’ll keep an eye on her. If she gets out of hand your Nameless Knights can hunt her down.”

Everything is a compromise. If only we could kill Lilena. She said she wants that. Now we bring her chickens for blood. Only male. Could chickens turn into harpies?

“You’re doing it again,” Lupita said, sitting in the saddle by Danielle’s side.

“When did we start riding?” Danielle asked.

“Half an hour ago.” Farmland rolled by behind Lupita. Carraig City shrank behind them. Conifers lining the feet of the mountains formed a wall before them. “When you block everything out like that it worries me.”

“I’m fine. A lot on my mind, that’s all.”

“I was talking to you and you were just staring off into the distance.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It could be dangerous, Danielle.”

“I said I’m sorry,” Danielle growled the words, tired of the conversation already.

“The nightmares I understand. You’ve been through a lot, but this-”

“I’m fine. When we know Jill made it or didn’t, I’ll be better.” Spurring her horse on Danielle let Lupita catch up as they broke through the treeline. Ducking under branches was a good excuse for both to hold their tongues. Up they went, wanting to cross the mountains and return to their kingdom before darkness fell. The pass between Sliabh and Crann was treacherous in the dark, even in milder weather.

I need to see my granddaughter. That girl is a miracle. I never would have imagined Nettle as such a good mother.

The sun stretched its arms, ready to lay down for the night. Yawning red rays reached across the sky. Knight and witch galloped down the path across the mountains before they lost the light. Stopping to wait for the moonlight they exchanged glances.

The horses snorted, tied up at a tree trunk. Blue light peeked between clouds as the crescent moon took the reigns from the sun. Lupita’s ever-warm hands cupped Danielle’s cheeks. A kiss was Danielle’s apology. Foreheads touching, they exchanged breath.

When the moon emerged they mounted their horses again and rode.

At the highest point of the pass a tent stirred. “Who’s that?” Asked a Sliabh warrior, pulling a pistol from his belt. Another emerged from the animal hide shelter which wasn’t there that morning.

“Sir Danielle Longbow and Lupita Smith,” Danielle answered the man who had the Sliabh King’s crest over his boiled leather armour.

“What’s a Cranner knight doing here?” asked the second man, who had a nasal voice and a straggly beard divided by a scarred chin.

“Going home.”

“And before that?”

“Is our business and the business of the Church of Red Knives.” Lupita reigned in her horse beside Danielle’s.

“You shouldn’t be here. This isn’t your land.”

“We know that.”

“And it never will be.”

“We know that as well.”

“Really? We hear stories that you Cranners think you’ll be the new empire. Conquer everything us like you did with Afon.”

“We didn’t conquer Afon,” Danielle said, anger rising at the comparison to the fallen empire.

“Horseshit. You killed who was there and took it. What else do you call that? Hard haggling?” The man with the long beard’s cackle told Danielle he smoked a pipe too much.

“We’re going home now. Do you mean to bar our way?”

“Nah. Happy to see that back of you. Piss off.”

“You know there won’t be war, don’t you? The Church of Red Knives has seen to that. We can’t invade you. And you can’t invade us.”

“Why would we trust those killers?” Asks the first man, who had a fishhook nose red from the cold.

“They were here first,” Lupita said, nodding back towards the capital.

“Just piss off back north eh. Don’t come back.”

Lupita’s eyebrows shrugged to Danielle. They rode on.

“I’ll have to ask the acolytes how Jill fared by the sound of that.” Danielle clenched her hands against the cold. “Can we trust them?”

“Enough, I’d say. They’ll want your help if Lilena gets out of hand. Assassins and healers. They’re an odd church. We live in interesting times.” White clouds jetted from Lupita’s mouth, painted blue by moonlight.

“I lie awake racked with doubt in these interesting times.” Danielle sighed. “Years ego it was easy to feel righteous. Defending ourselves from the Empire of the Holy Proclamation. We knew our borders. We defended them. Now the lines on the map are moving. Can we blame Sliabh if it fears Crann’s ambition? Our border marched further north than most of us can imagine, west into Afon. I don’t want to fight soldiers in their own city. I don’t want my people torching homes as the red legions did across Crann.”

“You’ll never be asked to do that.”

“How can you be sure? If they ask it of me I’ll be a traitor again. I won’t be on the wrong side of my conscience.”

“I know, Danielle. But don’t say that aloud in Leonor.”

“Do you think Jill will survive?”

“Time will tell.”

Curaduile trees welcomed the pair back across the border between their kingdom and Sliabh. Those deciduous marvels knew the knight and her witch. Danielle’s heart lightened as her steed trod on the ground of her homeland.

Not far now. Moonlight on Serpent’s Tail River gave the snake dancing scales of black and blue. Fisher’s Gasp loch was comfort and pain as the horses clip-clopped towards the single-track bridge. Stone walls rose where the thatch and wood of her childhood village had burned.

“Sir Longbow,” called the guard at the gate. “Welcome home.”

“That you Elija?” Danielle called up.

“Aye, Sir.”

“You’ve good eyes. Quiet night?”

“Aye sir,” said the armoured teen atop a wall barely twice Danielle’s height.

“Long may it continue.” They rode to the stable at the heart of Fisher’s Gasp, home of the Nameless Knights.

“Lord Castel awaits ye in yer house, Sir.”

“It’s been a while,” Lupita smiled. “Too long.”

The two-storey granite house had painted iron shutters on every window and a steel front door. “Home,” Danielle said. Her lip curved in a scimitar smile.

Well-oiled hinges welcomed the travelling duo quietly. In their entrance hall hung Danielle’s banner, a red-horned unicorn on a blue field.

Bed called her but candlelight flickering in the dining hall summoned her through the doorway beneath the stairs.

“Lord Castel. I almost called you Sir.”

“I forget it myself.” New crows' feet creased around Fabian’s eyes. “Come, we have work to do.”

“Urgently?”

He nodded. His hair had new white amongst it since Danielle had last seen him. He gestured to a map across the table that could have been a bed sheet. 

“In the south some call it an empire.”

“I won’t begrudge them that.”

Figures carved from pine like the table were spread out across the map.

“A little old to play with wooden knights aren’t you? I always wanted toys like these when I was a girl.” Danielle picked up a knight dyed Crann green. Putting it back, she picked up one with her heraldry on its tiny shield. “Not exactly a good likeness of me.”

“Each knight is a hundred of our soldiers,” said Fabien, taking the knight from her and placing it back over the words Fisher’s Gasp. “Nameless Knights number three hundred?”

“Roughly.”

“My vanguard at Serpent’s Crook number two hundred, a hundred more in Leonor. One hundred war witches at Leonor Castle. A thousand Leonor city guards. Two hundred in the garrison at Worm’s Mount Castle. Four hundred garrisoned in the castles at Afon Fos. Five hundred city guards there. 

We’ve another three hundred scattered about the north.” Fabian waved a hand at smaller figures placed at larger villages in the lands taken from the Empire of the Holy Proclamation after its collapse. “Two thousand, seven hundred in all.”

Danielle finally realised what the gold boats on the ocean south of Sliabh were. There were fifty. Ten red legionaries stood on the north-western border. All of her blood drained from her face and hands into her toes as she realised what the map was telling her.

“They’ve coordinated an attack.” Fabian swept the boats towards the new port north of Worm’s Mount Castle. He pulled the red legionaries down through the farmlands further north.

“Pigeons brought the word from the north this morning. We’ve known about the fleet for a week but it was finally spotted south of Sliabh yesterday. All of our forces are marching to meet them. Your knights need to be ready within the hour.”

“The gods piss on us. And to be grateful we call it rain.” Lupita stood behind them with a grim expression on her face. “It won’t just be soldiers the old empire sends out will it? Those things.”

“The burning skeletons,” Danielle remembered the sounds of her comrades screaming as their armour was melted to their flesh. Infernoste were the soul-scorched remnants of people burnt in dragon fire, caught between life and death, forever burning until silver freed them from their skulls. “I’ve planned for those.”

“Good. Your knights have been called. I wanted to show you the lay of the land before we depart. The Queen orders that the Nameless Knights face the infernoste with reinforcements from the Leonor City Guard and north-western garrisons that have fled south. My knights will meet the Qin Shi to the east with the War Witches.”

Danielle turned to stone.

“Our witches and warlocks to face theirs,” said Lupita. “Elegant.”

“You should be with me,” Danielle said, her voice breaking on the last word.

Lupita kissed her, on her tiptoes. Danielle wrapped an arm around her wife’s waist. Those moments never lasted long enough.

“We need to leave,” said Fabian.

“We should say farewell to Nettle.”

“No time. Don’t worry her now,” said Sir Castel.

“I was supposed to be looking after Jill,” Danielle said hanging her head.

“We have a kingdom to guard.” Fabian touched the hilt of his sword.

“How many riflemen will I have?” Danielle asked.

“A third, two hundred.”

“Not enough.”

Lupita’s hand pulled Danielle towards the doorway.

Nameless Knights were armed and saddled for war in the courtyard. Sir Anne Hyland, Danielle’s second in command, held a silver-tipped spear in hand. “Lovely day for a ride north isn’t it?” said the grey-haired woman.

“I need you to go with Lupita, Sir Hyland, to look after her.”

“I can look after myself,” said Lupita sharply.

“I know. I didn’t mean that. I want someone watching your back.”

“The entire coven will be watching my back.”

“All the same, please. Fabian will be leading the battle. I want someone I know by your side.”

“I should be by your side,” Anne said.

“I know, but please.”

Anne pulled her horse alongside Lupita.

“We should all be riding the curaogine, Anne.” Danielle said, meaning the seven creatures hybrids of fiery undead horses, dragon scales, and curaduile trees. Raising her voice to her troops Danielle issued orders, “Take every curaduile arrow and a bow each. I want all of you to have a silver dust pouch tied to your belt.

Do you have red arrows, Sir Castel?”

“More than my archers could ever use,” Fabian nodded.

“Use them and we might just make it through this.”

Six of the seven pearlescent curaogine padded through the knights, towering over all. As well as hints of purple there was the green of fresh would in their muscles and the tendrils like vine that the clever curaogine used to hold their riders in place.

Fabian rode Claidheam, the tallest of the curaogine. Anne’s, Muirn, was the smallest. Lupita claimed Djeither was the fastest but Danielle’s Shalakhir disagreed.

“I love you,” Danielle told Lupita.

“I love you,” Lupita said and stirred Djeither to a haste only the wind could match. Anne and Fabian followed. Danielle could only watch them shrink into specs as her knights hastily prepared for battle.