Tulian Capital

  First Day of Spring

  Sara watched the farmer's building burn, a smile on her face. She and Hurlish were settled into their seats, leaning back to enjoy the show. Silhouetting the horizon were dozens of bck plumes of smoke, the vilges surrounding the capital lighting up one after the other.

  "I think he did a pretty good job on this one," Sara said, turning to Hurlish.

  "Yeah. The big steeple-thing at the top is stin' way longer than I thought it would."

  "Bit of a waste, but it does look pretty good."

  "Hey, it's his house. He built it, he gets to burn it."

  "Fair enough."

  The prevailing winds carried the farmstead's smoke away from the spectators, of which Sara and Hurlish were just two in a considerable crowd. As she'd promised and warned the vilgers settling nearest to Tulian, their homes were being burned to deny the coming enemy any form of war material. The timber that made their homes could easily become the beams of siege engines, a risk Sara couldn't tolerate.

  Seeing as they'd known it was part of the deal for accepting the free nd, and that the property would still be considered theirs after the war, the farmers of Tulian had surprised her.

  They'd built their homes to burn.

  Rather fabulously, too.

  This particur vilge had spent their freetime assembling literal tinder-stuffed bonfires atop their roofs, competing with one another to create the most spectacur bze. When one of Sara's staff had opened the letter inviting her to come watch homes burn, the man had been incredulous, but he'd also been working for Sara for a few weeks already. He dutifully passed it along, knowing she'd love it.

  She rexed back into the chair, enjoying the test bit of innovation put on dispy for the evening's event. At her direction, Tulian's carpenters had happily invented folding wn chairs, thin pnks of wood bolted to smooth metal swivels. They weren't quite strong enough for Sara to sit on Hurlish's p, like they would've preferred, but she couldn't compin. Either the chairs could be light enough to carry, or they could support near five hundred pounds of women. Not both.

  Five hundred pounds, huh?

  She looked over herself. She knew Hurlish was about three-twenty, being 7'1" of dense muscle, but was Sara herself really up to two hundred pounds?

  Probably, she decided. Levels may have meant strength could be disproportional to physical appearance, but only to a certain degree. If one compared themselves to someone of the same Css and Level, the size of muscles was a solid interpretation of retive strength. You only stayed skinny if you were weaker than average for your css, which Sara was not. Sara's training with Evie and Hurlish had slowly earned her the build of an olympic powerlifter, and at 5'10", that meant she'd put on a good bit of weight. Two hundred pounds didn't seem unreasonable, though a hundred and eighty or ninety was probably a safer bet.

  Of course, it's not like I can go get my exact weight measured, Sara mented. It was a testament to the sheer number of problems swirling through her head at all times that she was drawn to thoughts of weights and measures, which Tulian cked. Everyone "knew" by feel what a pound was, but only merchants kept scales, and only jewelers kept precise scales. As far as Sara could tell, those scales weren't calibrated to any standard, but simply were compared to one another, with the wealthier merchant generally assumed to have the more accurate scale. Simir problems abounded with measures of distance, which were already creating problems for surveying property lines, something that mattered quite a bit when the vilges were being actively burned down. Evie and Vesta had her properly fearing the arguments that would erupt when the vilges were reoccupied after the war.

  Hurlish gave her hand a squeeze, pulling her out of her thoughts. Sara mentally swatted herself, forcing herself to focus on the present.

  "Sorry," she mumbled, squeezing Hurlish back. Their hands dangled between the chairs, a poor repcement for the closeness they preferred. "I'll try and be good."

  "It's your st day to rex," Hurlish said severely. "You better be taking it."

  "Yes, mom," Sara said, drawing the word out sarcastically.

  "Not yet." Hurlish patted her baby bump, which was pinly visible, four months into the pregnancy. "Soon enough, though."

  Sara shivered. The thought of her, Hurlish, and Evie's upcoming child was a veritable Gordian knot of emotions in her gut. Most of the tangled threads were positive, but plenty were ced with anxiety. There was a war on, after all.

  "You're gonna be careful while we're gone, right?"

  "Gods, you're getting almost as bad as Evie," Hurlish said. Sara fshed her a look, and the orc rolled her eyes, relenting. "But yeah, I will. Promise. I'll even let the kids do some of the lifting, some of the time."

  Hurlish's 'kids', as she called them, were the collection of prospects she considered worth employing as trainees in her forge, and many were a fair bit older than Hurlish. That didn't matter at all to the master smith. When they were on the job she treated them all like were pre-teens, Sara included.

  "You'll help them lift all of the time," Sara corrected.

  "Most of the time."

  "All of the time."

  "Ugh. Fine."

  Sara ran her thumb in little circles over the back of Hurlish's palm, thankful for the admission. She and Evie absolutely hated leaving Hurlish in the city while they marched off to war, but not as much as they hated the thought of her anywhere near a battlefield.

  "I just wish Ignite would've stayed to guard you," Sara grumbled after a moment. "I'm sure the people he trained are good, but they're not Irregurs."

  "But I am," Hurlish reminded her, "and I'll be fine, Ignite or not. Besides, with everything he's got going on, you really want him around me?"

  Sara mumbled something nonsensical. Ignite, who would have been guarding Hurlish in Sara and Evie's absence, had begged to be posted to a ship in Nora's navy. After being betrayed by the Carrion girl he'd secretly been keeping out of sight, he'd lost what little remained of his shattered pride. A thorough interrogation of both Pupils and Ignite had Sara convinced he'd genuinely known nothing, but the man was inconsoble. He wanted a position like his old one, a marine sergeant on a ship, and he didn't think he was worth any higher station, no matter what Sara said.

  "I guess not," Sara eventually admitted. "At least he'll still be doing good for us, out on the sea."

  "Hate to be the poor bastard on the wrong end of him working out whatever the hells he's got goin' on," Hurlish said with a dark chuckle. "Hells, I'm still gd he didn't wade in to the fight when we found him the first time. He'da beat our ass."

  "Yeah. Though I bet I could take him, now. Maybe."

  "Probably not a good time to try, though."

  "Probably not, no."

  The conversation slipped into a comfortable lull. Sara listened to the vilgers buzzing around her, partying and drinking while their homes burned. The genuine jubition throughout the entire event felt bizarre to her, but it made sense. It took a certain kind of person to accept nd that they knew was going to be burned down in half a year's time, and now she was seeing exactly who that criteria selected for.

  Hearing it, too. As always, Senses of Amarat kept her perfectly appraised of each individual conversation, and she was certain the party's atmosphere was genuine. Half the farmers were viciously delighted to see the shoddy buildings up in fme; they'd barely put an effort into building them, and they'd been terribly uncomfortable. Those that weren't drunk to insensibility were already discussing how they'd use Sara's promised compensation stipend to build a far better house, and as the evening had worn on, those dreams were growing dubiously grand.

  Sara turned an eye beyond the fires, tracking the road that weaved around the vilge. Ox-drawn carts were passing the bonfires by, supplies and farmers sitting tiredly on the back. When word had spread that the Sporaton army was really on the march, nearly every surviving person in Tulian had begun colpsing in on the capital, everything they owned of value in tow.

  Sara's edict had been simple: every farm within a day's ride of the capital would be burned, and every farm within two days ride would be abandoned. What crops that could be harvested were, those that couldn't were torn up and ruined. Evacuation wasn't quite an order for those three day's ride and beyond, but it was heavily suggested. Some vilges had decided to stay, forming militias from their able-bodied that they hoped would be enough to ward off any far-ranging Sporaton scavenging parties. Sara had wished them luck in her letters, but expined in no uncertain terms that she would be able to offer nothing to defend them, should they come under attack. Many had stayed anyway.

  The Sporaton army had weeks of walking yet before their arrival, but organizing the influx of refugees into the mostly-abandoned city would be a hell of a task, so they'd begun the process early. It was actually what Evie was helping Vesta with at that very moment. She hadn't come along to the vilge burning, considering it too morbid to be entertaining. Conveniently, even with the vast bulk of Tulian's current popution sheltering behind the city's walls, they weren't overcrowded. At its height the capital had held, depending on who you asked, eighty to a hundred thousand people, supported by over a million nearby farmers. There had been a number of other major cities within the Tulian kingdom as well, totaling a multi-million popution before the storms.

  Now the entirety of the nation numbered at most a hundred thousand. The powerful Kingdom, then second only in Continental influence to Sporatos, had become a middling city-state.

  Sara waved to one of the ox-driven carts, the farmers sitting atop their bags of grain seeming to have recognized her. The farmers excitedly waved back, turning to one another as the ox trudged inexorably on. They, like everyone else Sara could see, had pced their lives in her hands. The thought had her shuddering.

  Hurlish squeezed her hand again, and Sara blew out a quiet curse.

  "Sorry," she said again, "I just can't get out of my head. Too much shit going on."

  "I don't bme you, babe," Hurlish said, lowering her voice. "Gd I don't have to deal with that kind of shit, to be honest."

  Rather than whinge about her own circumstances, which Hurlish already knew well, Sara gnced at her technically-not-wife. "Really? Seems like managing the forge and all that gets pretty stressful."

  "Eh, I guess. No lives on the line, though." She chuckled. "Just limbs. Damn kids either seem to think they're made of straw, or fireproof. Can't tell you how many times I watched someone drop a piece of glowing iron and try and catch it with their bare hands. Dumbasses."

  Sara smirked. "I wish I could make fun of 'em, but I've done some pretty stupid shit myself, back when I was learning."

  "Yeah?" Hurlish asked, raising an eyebrow. "Like what?"

  "Oh, gods," Sara groaned, thumping her head onto the back of her wooden chair. "Too many to count, really. Chop shops don't exactly follow OSHA safety regs for their training regimens."

  "Oh, now I gotta hear."

  "Ugh. Fine." Sara shuffled in her chair, reaching over with the hand that wasn't holding Hurlish's to awkwardly draw her welding dagger. She pointed at her leg, and whispered her illusory spell's activation phrase, the poorly-chosen "ta-da."

  Light shifted and glimmered across her left thigh, repcing the bck of her Azarketi-nylon pants with a simucrum of her old Earthly body's leg.

  A two-inch scar, tissue thick and distended above the skin, marred the center of her upper thigh. It was a wound she'd known well, and even when depicted as it had looked years after the injury, you could've been forgiven for thinking it was fresh.

  "Remember how I told you about the time I accidentally welded my leg?" Sara asked.

  Hurlish whistled, impressed, leaning closer. "That it?"

  "Yeah. And here's what it looked like right when I did it."

  The illusion shifted and warped, fragments of jagged light rearranging at Sara's direction. The scar deepened and bckened, surrounded by still-smoldering blue jeans. The flesh was ragged around the wound, bckened in an instant by the acetylene heat, and now that she was looking at it without the distraction of unbearable pain, she could see it was even deeper than she'd remembered.

  "Shit, girl."

  "I know, right?"

  "How'd you fuck up that bad? I've seen you use the dagger, and it seems like it'd be pretty hard to get your own leg."

  "If you're doing it right, sure. But I was staying te, trying to finish up after most of my coworkers had left, and I just couldn't get the right angle on this one part. So, being the dumbass sixteen year old I was, I pinned into the wall with my knee and bent over it, trying to hold it in pce."

  "Oh, gods." Hurlish put a hand to her forehead. "I know where this is going."

  "Yeah, not hard. I ended up spending too long on one spot, blew right through the metal, and bam, dug into my thigh. Dropped my whole rig, metal went everywhere, the works. I wanted to scream my head off, but I also didn't want to get in trouble, so I half-dragged myself to my truck and drove myself to the hospital. That was stupid, too. Could barely see through the tears."

  Hurlish shook her head. "You're right, babe. That was stupid as all hell."

  "I know, right?"

  Sara sighed, letting the spell dissipate as she rexed back onto her chair. Rather than awkwardly sheath her dagger again, she id it across her p, returning her attention to the fire. A comfortable silence passed as they rexed, hand-in-hand, until Sara lifted a finger to point at the house.

  "Looks like the steeple-thing's about to go."

  "Looks like it," Hurlish agreed.

  As they watched, the fmes that had licked their way up to the top of the wooden structure began to properly eat in inward, devouring the core timbers that held the ponderous pyramid structure in pce. The vilgers had noticed what she had, and all waited with bated breath, excited.

  Suddenly, a lone timber cracked, and that was the end of it. The entire tower toppled to the right, trailing a ball of fme as it fell, smashing through what remained of the roof in a great explosion of sparks and smoke. Cheers went up all around, including from Sara and Hurlish, who appuded the violence of the destruction. Fatally wounded, the entire house began colpsing in on itself, and soon it was no more than an unidentifiable pile of burning scrap.

  "Time to move," Sara said, standing with a grunt.

  "Wonder how the next one'll do," Hurlish said, also standing. They didn't release their hands.

  "Don't know. I heard that this dy built her roof extra tough, trying to see how long it would st while it burned. Probably not as cool-looking, but if it works well, might be worth imitating."

  "Huh. Let's go see."

  They picked up their chairs and folded them under their arms, following the flowing crowd to the next house, where the woman who owned it was standing on the thatch roof, flicking sparks down onto the dry material. With a startling rush, the fmes took. The owner bunched her dress up and sprinted to a waiting dder, the fmes chasing after her.

  They sat their chairs back down, joining the crowd to watch. It was a damn strange thing, partying while a vilge burned, but Sara couldn't say she disliked it. Better this than some somber, dreaded procession, the vilgers trading tearful gnces as they watched their homes turn to ash while they regretfully marched away.

  Sara scooted her wnchair to the side, pressing its arm to Hurlish's, and leaned up to rest her head against her not-wife's shoulder. It was an uncomfortable, awkward position, but worth it. There were only a few houses left to burn, and when they were done, Sara would return to the city outskirts, joining her army. She didn't know how long it would be until she felt Hurlish's skin against her cheek.

  King Sporatos almost certainly expected her army to make its stand in Tulian proper, where her defenses were strongest, at the base of her supply and power. It was the sensible, textbook py, the safest way to ensure a smaller force could stand against a rger.

  So it was only natural that Sara's army was mustering beyond the walls, readying to march north. The Royal Army was powerful, but they'd given her too long to prepare. She'd thrown every st part of herself into the preparations, and that had turned out to be a whole hell of a lot. Sara felt the heat intensify against her skin as fmes licked their way down the farmhouse walls, and knew her expression was twisting. A grin, a scowl, and everything besides. She didn't know what it was, but if she'd had only a single guess, she'd wager it wasn't something that King Sporatos would have enjoyed seeing.