1 Chapter 1

Gather to your fairy piper

When he pipes his magic tune:

Merry, merry,

Take a cherry;

Mine are sounder,

Mine are rounder,

Mine are sweeter

For the eater…

—Robert Graves, “Cherry-Time”

Mud. Mud and rain. Mud and rain and tree roots, Eoan amended, having just stumbled over the fifth one in as many minutes. No decent roads.

Of course no decent roads existed. Too much fighting. Too few men left to care about smooth tracks for village cart-wheels.

He put one foot in front of the other, in the rain.

He’d liked the country, briefly. It’d been green. It had reminded him of the gentle mists and jewel-green rolling hills of his foggy island home.

Countrywas a misnomer, of course. The present war had split the region into brittle pieces; he wasn’t even sure where the most recent map-lines’d been drawn. He might’ve walked through one country, or three, or more: Erdély, Dobruja, Tisza, so many others. The once-strong Osmanii Empire splintering apart. Wars of independence. Wars of the human against the inhuman, or so the rumors ran. In those rumors the supernatural, the inhuman, the fae and vampires and garwolves, always fought on the side of evil, naturally. Which side that was depended on the storyteller.

Eoan sighed, and nudged a rock with his boot. The rock bounced, but not very far, and into a puddle. This seemed fair.

Eoan himself remained personally ambivalent on the subject of the fairy-kind. Half of his Northern Isles mercenary company’d sworn up and down that their sergeant-at-arms could turn into a wolf and rip a man’s throat out; this might’ve been true, given the man’s disposition, but remained unwitnessed. Eoan had never seen any of the otherfolk, and he tended not to believe in unseen visions.

Not these days. Not after what he hadseen.

He didbelieve in having the freedom to choose. The freedom from oppression. The freedom to live. That was more or less why he was here. Why he’d beenhere.

The rain unhelpfully slid down the back of his neck and found a home between his skin and his shirt, under leather which pretended to be a coat and did no good at all. He sighed again. The rain shrugged and kept going.

Maybe he should just stop walking. Maybe he should sit down here, on a fallen tree in the green-grey haze of forest, and never move again.

The faces came back and haunted him. Friends. Fallen. Flames.

He’d signed on as a mercenary because he’d thought that’d offer answers to a few looming problems, and maybe also help some people both personal and close to home, and hypothetical, as yet unmet. He wasn’t a bad fighter; he’d figured out his own height and weight and broad shoulders with minimal youthful awkwardness, and he’d learned everything he could from older passing soldiers, visiting companies, his retired-sergeant father before the sickness and the solemn funeral. He’d never been much good at anything else—not quick and clever like his sister, not charming and eloquent like his brother, only solid and big and protective. But he could put that largeness and that protectiveness to use. And he could send most of his pay back home to his mother and his siblings, to the sprawling ó Flannagáin family inn at the emerald island’s southernmost tip, the inn which brought in steady customers but required upkeep.

And he’d wanted to do some good. Of the causes in the world, getting a poor region out from under the crumbling but cruel grip of the Empire had to be a worthwhile one, he’d thought.

Maybe it had been. At first.

He’d been barely old enough to join up. Nobody’d asked his age, though he’d wondered whether they might. The company captain’d looked at his build, noted his father’s name, and waved him in.

Three years later, he found another rock to poke with his boot. This rock bounced ahead of him and vanished down the road.

Three years, and they felt like a lifetime. Like he’d grown old, bent under knowledge he couldn’t set down.

In mockery of this line of thought, the rain blossomed into a full-blown storm. Thunder and all.

“Right,” Eoan muttered, “thanks,” and tried to wipe some of it off his face, an endeavor doomed to absolute failure.

One foot in front of the other. Enough feet, and he could find a coast and a ship and a way home.

And maybe in the inn’s light the faces of the dead would go away. The exhaustion, he thought, never would. Lead in his bones. Scars, not the visible kind, though he had a few of those, too.

He hadn’t even been fully paid. He understood why. He’d known when he’d severed those ties. He’d dropped his company insignia in the mud on the way out.