Chapter 25: The Feast Before Storm
The morning air in the courtyard was a physical slap, so cold it felt brittle, carrying the scent of pine and the distant, sulfurous tang of the geothermal vents. The auroras had faded to a dull green smear behind thick cloud, a lid clamped over the world. Perfect artillery weather.
Mary and I moved through the lines of guns, our breath pluming in synchronized clouds. The 155mm howitzers were massive, brute things of olive-drab steel and rubberized tires, their long barrels angled skyward like sleeping giants. Crews in heavy white parkas moved around them with a quiet efficiency, loading shells etched with stenciled warnings. The rounds were as long as my forearm.
“Check the traverses on Battery Two,” I said, my voice carrying on the still air. “The hydraulic fluid looked sluggish yesterday.”
“On it,” Mary said, veering off. She placed a hand on the cold barrel of a howitzer as she passed, a gesture almost like patting the neck of a warhorse.
I moved to the 75mm anti-tank guns. These were my favorites. Sleek, direct, vicious. Their wheels were packed with dense snow, but the barrels were clean, the breeches oiled and open. I ran a hand along a sabot round, its sleek, dart-like projectile designed to pierce a foot of steel. It was ludicrous overkill for anything this world could produce. That was the point.
“A message from the forge-mistress,” a young soldier said, appearing at my elbow and handing me a slate. “The sled modifications for the 75s are complete. They’re rigged for the ice-troll teams.”
I nodded, scanning the report. The practicality of it was a balm. Calculations, weights, traction estimates. This was a language that made sense.
That’s when I felt them.
I turned. Ellie and Nancy stood at the top of the courtyard steps, wrapped in heavy furs over their silk. They looked like visions from a different story, something about hearths and harvests, not artillery and kill zones. The wind caught their hair—Ellie’s long blonde strands, Nancy’s dark curls—whipping them across faces that were pale and set.
They picked their way down the icy steps, holding onto each other, their movements careful with the weight they carried. The army, hundreds of men and women checking gear and loading sleds, fell silent. The only sounds were the creak of harnesses and the constant, low moan of the wind.
Ellie stopped in front of me. Her eyes, usually so warm, were chips of glacial ice. She looked from me to Mary, who had returned to my side.
“You’re really doing it,” Ellie said. Her voice was low, but it carried in the quiet.
“The plan is sound,” Mary said, her own voice firm, though I saw her throat work as she swallowed.
“I don’t care about the soundness of the plan!” The words burst from Nancy, sharp and sudden. A few soldiers flinched. “I care about you! Both of you! Out there!”
Ellie reached out and grabbed my parka, her fist clenching in the thick material. She didn’t shake me. She held on, as if I were already drifting away. “You listen to me. Both of you.”
The courtyard was utterly still now. Every soldier frozen, pretending not to listen.
“If one of you has so much as a cut on your body,” Ellie began, her voice trembling with the force she was using to keep it level. She stopped, took a ragged breath. “You know what? Fuck that. Screw that entire sentence.”
Nancy stepped forward, her eyes blazing. “If one of you has even a scratch,” she said, enunciating each word with terrifying clarity, “a bruise, a hangnail from this… this demonstration…”
Ellie found her voice again, and it rose, clear and ringing off the icy marble walls. “You will have to face our combined wrath. Our anger. And you both know exactly how bad that is.”
It wasn’t a queen’s decree. It was a lover’s threat, a mother’s desperate ultimatum. It was about shared baths and tangled sheets and the terrifying, intimate knowledge of how to break each other’s hearts. It was about the time Nancy’s quiet disappointment had made Mary sleep in the workshop for a week, and the time Ellie’s cold silence had driven me to recalibrate every pressure gauge in the citadel just to have something to do.
They were telling us, in front of everyone, that we belonged to them. That our bodies were not just tools of war, but were theirs. And they would not accept them back damaged.
The silence in the courtyard was absolute. Then a soldier near a howitzer coughed, and the spell broke. The army slowly went back to work, the sounds of preparation returning, louder now, as if to cover the profound intimacy they’d just witnessed.
Ellie’s grip on my parka loosened. She smoothed the material, her hand lingering over my heart. Her eyes were wet.
“Come home,” she whispered, the words for me alone.
Nancy pulled Mary into a fierce hug, burying her face in her sister’s neck. “You idiot,” she murmured into Mary’s skin. “My brilliant, beautiful idiot.”
We didn’t kiss them goodbye. Not here. That would have been too much, too soft a thing after their hard words. Instead, we touched our foreheads to theirs, a brief, fierce press of contact. A promise.
I turned to the army. To the guns. To the waiting sleds and the patient, snorting ice-trolls with their shaggy pelts and intelligent eyes.
“Move out!” My voice echoed, flat and final. “Column formation. Scouts ahead. Artillery batteries at intervals. You know the drill.”
The column began to churn into motion, a river of fur, steel, and determined breath. Mary fell into step beside me, her rifle slung over her shoulder. We didn’t look back as we passed through the towering, rune-carved gates of the citadel.
The frozen landscape opened before us, a vast, white wound. The wind picked up, biting at any exposed skin. The only sounds were the crunch of packed snow under boots, the groan of sled runners, and the occasional metallic clink of gear.
After an 5 minutes of walking, Mary spoke, her voice barely audible over the wind.
“They were really pissed.”
I glanced at her. A small, grim smile touched her lips.
“Yeah,” I said, adjusting the strap of my own rifle. The weight was familiar, comforting. “Good.”
Ahead, the scout signaled. The Gorge was a day’s march away. Beyond it, a kingdom that had called us weak. Behind us, a home held by two furious, loving women who had just drawn a line in the ice.
We walked on, into the white. The first snowflakes of a new storm began to fall.
The first snowflakes of a new storm began to fall. They landed on the wool of my hood with a faint, dry ticking sound, a prelude to the whiteout I knew was coming. We had maybe three hours of decent visibility.
“We need to finalize the command split at the Gorge,” I said, my voice low so it wouldn’t carry far. “I’m taking the forward observation point on the eastern ridge. Direct fire control for the 75s.”
Mary chewed her lip, her eyes scanning the trudging column beside us. “That puts you a kilometer ahead of the main gun line. Exposed.”
“It gives me a direct sightline to the pass mouth. I can paint targets for the discsards. Maximum efficiency.” I nudged a chunk of ice with my boot. “You’re better with the simultaneous computation for the howitzers anyway. Managing three batteries, coordinating time-fuzed airbursts… that’s your brain, not mine.”
She was quiet for fifty paces, the only sound our boots breaking the crust. “I hate it when you use logic,” she finally grumbled. “Fine. You get the risky ridge. I’ll run the orchestra of hell from the rear.” She shot me a sidelong glance, a flicker of her old competitiveness cutting through the grim atmosphere. “Though it means I’ll be denied the… intimate satisfaction. Seeing their faces.”
“You’ll see the results. On the seismic charts.” I smiled, a thin, hard thing. “We could make it interesting. A tally.”
Her eyebrows rose. “A tally? Of what? You’ll be sniping officers with the .308. I’ll be erasing grid squares. The metrics aren’t comparable.”
“Sure they are. One kill, one point. My rifle. Your guns. We count what’s confirmed by scouts after.” I kept my tone casual, a game to pass the march. “Loser has to… I don’t know. Explain the concept of high-explosive shell casting to Ellie and Nancy over dinner.”
Mary actually snorted, a short, surprised laugh that steamed in the air. “God, they’d glaze over in thirty seconds. You’re on. But my kills will be in the hundreds. You’ll be counting on your fingers.”
“Arrogance,” I said, shaking my head. “A single, well-placed discarding sabot round through a commander’s pavilion counts for ten. Psychological multiplier.”
“Fine, ten! But my first battery salvo is six shells, minimum fifty souls per, that’s three hundred points in the first three seconds, you miserably optimistic—”
Our bickering was cut by a sound that wasn’t the wind.
It was a voice, but it wasn’t carried on the air. It was in the air, woven through the falling snow itself, vibrating in the crystals that landed on our skin. It was Ellie’s voice, magnified and tangled with Nancy’s, a stereo scream of utter exasperation that halted the entire column in its tracks.
“YOU TWO BITCHES BETTER NOT BE MAKING ANY STUPID BETS OUT THERE!”
The words hung, crystalline and absolute, in the sudden silence. A soldier near us dropped his canteen. The lead ice-troll shook its massive head, snorting in confusion.
Mary and I froze. We looked at each other. The same, undeniable realization passed between us. The runes on the courtyard stones. Ellie must have linked them to some amplification matrix, a trick of resonant ice she’d been tinkering with for festivals. She’d turned the entire realm into a conduit for her maternal fury.
A beat of stunned silence passed. Then, fainter but no less clear, Nancy’s voice added, shimmering with righteous annoyance, “WE CAN HEAR YOU MUMBLING! NO BETS!”
I felt my face grow hot beneath the fur rim of my hood. Every soldier was now studiously looking anywhere but at us, shoulders shaking with barely-contained laughter. The profound, terrifying send-off was now officially undercut by being scolded like children caught scheming after bedtime.
Mary slowly closed her eyes. “The rune-work on the gate lintel,” she whispered, a engineer’s horrified appreciation in her tone. “She tuned it to a specific vocal frequency. Probably ours.”
I cleared my throat, addressing the frozen, amused air. “Message received!” I called out, feeling utterly ridiculous.
Only the sighing wind answered. The connection had severed.
Mary leaned closer to me, her voice a bare murmur. “Do you think they can still hear us?”
“I am not testing that theory,” I muttered back. I turned to the gawking army, clapping my gloved hands together once. The sharp sound made everyone jump. “You heard the Queens! No frivolous wagers! Only professional, focused slaughter! Now move!”
The column lurched back into motion, the tension broken into something stranger, lighter. We walked on, the shared secret humming between us, their love a palpable, audible force field that had just stretched over fifty miles to swat us on the ear.
The bet was off. The stakes, however, had just been raised immeasurably.