The Shining Wyrm

10.2

Jewel had always read in the histories that the great armies “offered battle”. And she had thought she understood what that meant.

That it was an honorable discourse between combatants to set the field.

She had read of days of generals offering and refusing battle between them.

Jewel had imagined these events as two wise lords meeting together between their armies and discussing it under vows of truce and brotherhood of nobles where and when their battles would be fought most fairly.

That had turned out to be quite far from what the reality actually was.

Much of the offering of battle was tied up in the simple requirements of how slow it was to simply get the thousands upon thousands and thousands of men to simply move and stand in formation at the appointed spot.

It took nearly three hours to march and arrange the army of Viznove in position upon the ridge.

They began the work just past breakfast.

And most of the army was marching to the chosen grounds and moving to their appointed place before she and the rest of the center even left.

And with the center being the last of the army to get into position, it was indeed just shy of noon sun when finally they had taken up position. The generals had chosen good ground as she understood it.

Their vantage of the valley was encompassing. Jewel could see the cut down fields, the scattering of houses for the more far flung households and then the close little cluster of homes, temple and a smithy in the middle of the valley.

All of it felt so much like Rochford.

It was perhaps a bit larger of a manor than her home, but even the fortress looked somewhat similar.

Tall where her home had been wide perhaps? Nestled into stone cliffs at one side of the valley where hers perched upon a hillock near the very center of it.

But it was stone work with familiar lines. Weathered to a familiar degree.

The High Forest Fortress might as well have been her own fortress home’s brother for how similar they were.

And just around it bristled tents of the enemy army.

Filling the space and fields just as Viznove’s had in Rochford during the muster.

But where they had simply occupied the fields available back home? Here they had dug and torn them up all around the fortress. Great trenches and spikes of wood and stone encircled the camp. They had been erected in staggered gouges over the landscape. Shreds that dug up what should have been fields and pasture.

Deep trenches bristling with signs of sharpened stakes and raised hills of earth and rock surrounding the tents on all sides.

Enclosing the entire space of a camp that, if Jewel would guess, was easily twice the acres of their own.

She could see the army teeming behind those barriers and men moving on the walls of the fortress.

They were also lined up behind the trenches and atop the tall earthworks that even from here had the look of freshly overturned and then packed dirt.

It was not as regimented a line but the enemy seemed ready for them besides.

Filling out troops and knights and more all along. But none were outside those barriers.

Thurzó’s men were not idle as Jewel had seen the Viznove army act when at rest.

They were bristling just like her own side’s lines.

The Viznove Army’s chosen grounds were set upon the ridge so that their chargers could come down and any attackers had to climb to meet them.

It was a good position for them.

It would have favored them in the offered battle.

Jewel could see the fields both fallow and recently cut that would afford good charges by their horse.

Whatever the name of this village they had actually stripped the wheat to the root instead of leaving the stalks standing as she was used to. It made the grounds flatter than she thought they should be with the smell of recently reaped wheat in the air.

A glance up into the air saw Father and Count Fiebron making sweeping arcs obviously in menace from one end of the army to the other.

Banners of the baronies of Viznove and Zekhedge were raised with each troop of levy and footmen.

Every knight had their own house banner raised in turn to make obvious their muster and the might they represented.

Kraok had taken up his just this year woven banner and waved it high himself.

They were ready and offering battle.

But none was yet coming.

The sun was just reaching its zenith in the sky and Jewel did not yet see any sign Thurzó’s army was going to march. The only movement was the wheeling shapes of ten Gryphons in the air over it. Only Gryphons though, no sign of another Wyrm as Jewel had feared might be the case.

Jewel could smell sweat building under the clothes of the men around her as the welcoming sun covered them all in its joy.

Their own flyers made wider and wider sweeps away from the army. Moving closer and closer to sail over where the earthworks had been raised. Scooping out portions of sky over the valley towards the fortress and signs of Thurzo’s camp with the circling of foes in the air.

And then when they were halfway into the valley there was finally a response.

Gryphons sweeping out towards them. Driving a retreat of Zephyrvam and the juniors towards the Viznove line.

But the enemy flyers did not press further than that.

A call went out from Smokespear as she bore Fiebron in a sweeping glide just a dozen yards over the front lines, the wake of the Formel buffeting the men, but they were already braced. Banner cloth was thrown about in the wind as two long Gryphon cries and then a short chirrup went out. The call was repeated thrice more as the Count gave his signal up and down the line of the army.

With a smell like fresh spilled blood Jaksa the Red once more appeared.

But along with him also came the sudden chill wind and a cyclone of red and yellow leaves to declare the presence of Euewyn the Autumn Weird.

Jewel’s angle was not good enough to say for certain but she suspected interspersed up and down the army’s line the other Wizards were also arriving in their appointed places.

She did not need to suspect for long, as Bromthil took up his captain’s horn and blew the three short and one long signal that his Sorcererous force had arrived.

She heard its counterparts pierce the tension in the air up and down the lines.

As Fiebron flew low over the army, the signal was repeated by the captains on his approach. And only after he confirmed with a second sweep did the Count of Zekhedge set his steed to climb.

Taking position at the very center, just above and ahead of Jewel. She could follow Cloudspear pushing herself high enough to make a counter dive to an attacking flier.

It was a position Father often had taken against Jewel herself in training.

Around Euewyn and Jaksa the Red there was a building tension thicker than elsewhere. The silent whisper of sorcery building. The sense of the world’s own flame rising to meet the entreaties of Wizards echoing back and forth around Jewel.

She could feel the faint sense of similar rising from her left and right.

And then there was a single piercing cry from above them all. Booming and sharp. The carrying cry of Gryphons meant to be heard for leagues.

To echo off the mountains.

And before Bromthil could even echo the command as “Wizard Fire!” the attack was commencing.

Each Sorcerer took to the act with their own means. Their own version of truth, as Jewel had come to understand Urul and Tsulogothulan often called it.

For Jaksa the Red the truth was obviously blood, it was the pumping heat of a heart and muscle. The flame she smelled in the bodies of a man running hard. The way that a brow burned in fever.

It was the heat of labor and passion and rage against all the world that might deny it.

It was the desperate fire of man’s flesh that winter’s cold sought to snuff out.

It was the heat that burned in every chest.

It was the fire of blood.

And it rose into the air a sizzling, tumultuous and sickly thought. A body’s heat driven harsher and crueler and fiercer than any fever. It was a heat and a sickness that took up blood and flesh and would burn it to cinders from within.

It was a fire that would erupt from a heart like a black smith’s furnace in a pile of tinder.

And in its heat was anger and rage and refusal to bend to any other.

The world and the air answered all of this and fed that flame.

It drew from not just Jaksa but the blood of the men around him. Sapping the summer heat from their veins and then going onward. Pooling the fire in the blood of one band of men to the next, from man and beast alike. Drawing on all but Jewel herself.

Even the summer grasses and the leaves of the trees seemed to give of their blood heat to his sorcery.

Euewyn in absolute distinction from Jaksa touched not a speck of flesh with her own working. Instead the sun and the leaves of the forest aged to autumn all around her. The woods losing all their summer flush and turning crimson, orange and red. And then that was spreading out along the army as well. Sapping summer from the land in an upwelling of Autumn that spoke of the imminent chill of winter.

The fire that was coaxed into being was the fire of hearths, of wood, of the preparation and mustering of dried timbre in tall piles and stacks.

Of the works of men among the trees claiming the long dried brush of fallen branches and kindling and the felling of long burning heart wood. And then the leaves began to fall from the branches around them and were carried on the dry chilly wind so out of season for summer. The riot of color drew together in their seeming flame of red and orange and gold. A Spear of them whirled over Euewyn, with the promise of dry thatch caught aflame by inattentive families.

Of desolation that brought chilly starvation and death.

Into the spears of these truths both were gathered into flames of their own.

One liquid, sopping, steam and sweat mixed with burning hearts.

The other brittle and simultaneously cold and burning, the tongues of its flames made by foliage and yet somehow no less fire.

And Jewel could hear more vaguely, up and down the line other such workings were being made.

And then they were let loose. Seven of them from all along the line of the army.

Each its own arrow, each longer than Jewel by twice again.

Every one of them a sorcerous wroth unlike any she had seen before.

All of them somehow fire.

Even when one was clearly gold leaf and crimson ink illustration of flames somehow manifested in the world free of parchment.

Sailing through the sky towards the encampment of the enemy.

And then when it was halfway across the valley.

Just as it had been with the Gryphons

Thurzó’s army made their reply.

And the sky tore open in fury, light and violence.

It went on in a roaring cacophony that reminded Jewel of the fiercest thunderstorms.

And when all had settled and the echoing violence of sound had faded Jewel looked down in the valley.

There was smoke obscuring much of the camp and its fortifications.

Of what Jewel saw, the earthen works of their opposing army were mostly untouched.

But amidst what had once been a village and farmland so much like her home. Was only shredded ruin and torn earth.

The only standing structure of the main village was half of the temple. The rest of the building was slumped inward from the fury that had fallen upon it.

Of the houses and even the blacksmith and granaries?

Nothing but scattered detritus and tumbled earth.

It was like some great giant of a farmer had simply ploughed over an entire town for a spring planting.

Jewel’s scales quivered and shook in waves up and down her coils. No one said a word, what could they even say?

If this had been Rochford that would have been the entirety of the village gone in a moment's breath.

Levy and Footmen were silent.

Bromthil and Kraok had nothing to say.

Jewel could only stare.

For close to an hour they stood there. Conversation weakly filtered back in as hushed whispers between the men. All of them were yet braced for a proper reprisal from the obviously present Wizards of the enemy.

The smell of what the sorcery had already wrought drifted up to them slowly.

The stink of burnt bog and scorched sweat and fever, the familiar whiffs of petrichor and sulfurous ash. A hint of something that smelled like cooked pork belly over an open fire charred and salted brought unwanted moisture to Jewel’s mouth.

As they waited, Jewel watched and breathed in the fumes and smoke from the first exchange.

Braced and ready. Even as others found time to mutter and even try to joke around her she was silent and watching.

As were the two wizards with her.

Not even Jaksa seemed willing to dare turn his gaze from the valley.

As the smoke finally cleared entirely, Jewel could see that there were indeed some signs of actual damage amongst the enemy camp.

Some of the earthworks had been torn up at their highest points and a few trenches sunk into themselves were now useless.

Stone spikes along the walls had been shattered or split, wood spikes burnt. Bodies were already being pulled away or set aside with blankets over them. Captains scurrying to rally panicked levy.

Some men seemed to have broken under the wizard fire and tried to flee and were being beaten down by knights.

But there was no further action taken by the enemy wizards.

It was four hours past noon by Jewel’s judgment when the Generals called off the battle and they began the laborious march back to camp.

Tomorrow they would make another test of the enemy.

Jewel saw that Jaksa did not move from his position even as the army marched around him. His eyes kept on the fortress and where his sorcerous opponents must be lurking.

Neither did the Gryphons leave their place in the skies over the original battle lines.

All that is except Zephyrvam who was making a circuit over Jewel and then back to the original center of the line.

It took until Smithson was removing her harness for Jewel to realize her hide was still trembling up and down her coils with the shock of what she had seen. But she could not answer when her squire asked why that was.

Jewel could barely recall what was discussed by the Generals over supper by the time she felt herself collapsing in her tent.

It was the same stew of traveler’s bread, bits of meat, bone broth and milk anyway.