SWORDPOINT DIPLOMACY PROLOGUE

SWORDPOINT DIPLOMACY  PROLOGUE


The twins took their first hard look at war from a flowering hilltop.

"It seems cruel," Etienne said in an undertone. In his discomfort he shifted, lowering his head. The sunlight glinted as it caught on the distinctive golden hair that their family was known for. "And it'll take a long time. There's no other way to do this?"

Rose grabbed his bicep and pulled him away. She didn't realize her intuition was screaming at her until after she'd done it.

A second later, an arrow thumped into the ground, passing through the air where her brother had been standing. Rose raised her shield to protect her face, squinting around it to find the archer.

She could barely make out human figures on the wall.

'We should have been out of archer range. What did I get wrong?'

Rose privately recalculated her army lines, trying to figure if it was a clever use of wind and angle or if her enemies had a better bow than her people did. After a few moments, her eye caught on one figure in particular.

'A better bow,' she decided, basing it off her intuition and the fact that only one person had shot at them. 'How charitable of them to tell me now.'

At this distance, she couldn't guess if it was a man or a woman. But there was a figure on the battlement who seemed to be looking straight at them. They didn't duck back behind the archer crenellations.

If they were in the heat of battle, she'd say it was thoughtlessness. But here and now, it seemed like a greeting. It was a potentially deadly one, mind. But that was someone who either knew the twins personally or knew of them well enough to know they'd be sent out together and be able to spot them on a crowded field.

Rose had the ostentatious armor, so she should have been the more tempting target to most archers.

Rose inclined her head at the archer in acknowledgement. Her intuition told her that that was her former fiance. He was known as a bowman and he'd have seen paintings of both of the twins. Did this count as a first meeting?

'Romance isn't dead yet,' she thought, privately amused at life's sick sense of humor. 'But give it a month and one of us probably will be.'

A bit late, she remembered that technically the engagement hadn't been cancelled yet. It was difficult to do that when lines of communication had been cut off.

'I could ask while I'm here, but I suspect he probably doesn't want to marry me anymore.'

"Oh, hello," Etienne said vaguely, ruffling his hair. He was looking at the same person. "That was a little forward, don't you think?"

"We should move a little further back, is what I think," she murmured to her brother. She put her hilariously doomed love life out of mind to focus on surviving. "I don't think they like you here."

"Me?" Etienne asked exaggeratedly, putting a hand to his chest. He looked between her and the arrow with a wounded mien, but he followed when she began to move down the crest of the hill, where they had cover but less visibility. "Is it really me they're mad at?"

Unspoken was the ugly burning thing no one could say- that their Father was the only one who wanted this war. He was also the only adult royal who wasn't going to bleed for it. His adult children, his sister, and her only son and heir were all out on the field while he kept the throne warm.

"Yes," she lied easily. No one was immune from the danger of publicly criticizing the king. "Everyone knows that you used to collect toads and kill them."

"I didn't know that they would die," he argued, as passionately as he had the first time she'd teased him for this 12 years ago. "I wrapped then up in leaves to keep them wet. I didn't know that they needed to stay in the river."

"River toads, Etienne," she said. She patted his shoulder as they reached the command tent. "It's in the name. Celestin, do we have the engineers?"

The older man inclined his head at her. "Not yet," he said. He had a very low, gravelly voice, as far back as she could remember. He couldn't raise his voice to shout, which was a serious inconvenience for a military commander. Her private theory was that it had something to do with the ugly scar on his neck.

"Let me know when they arrive," her brother said, switching flawlessly to the more dignified version of his self. "I saw Harrod's men. Still pretty far off, but did he send a messenger ahead?"

"Yes," Celestin reported. He grimaced. The expression pulled on his scars, drawing the pale tissue taut in between the brown of healthy wrinkled skin. "He sent more swords than expected. 800, about 300 of which are inexperienced."

Rose had to bite down a grimace herself. Numbers were good, numbers were needed. But feeding a siege army was very expensive. It was the crown's responsibility to provide for the troops, not each individual Lord who had sent them.

"If we can take the city in less than a month, we'll be in good shape."

Rose nodded with Celestin's assessment. It was a wishlist, really. Public sentiment about this war could go either way- patriotism and pride, or anger at wasted lives and resources.

It couldn't be helped. None of the Western kings had ever managed to conquer the South. Her Father had decided he was going to do what his grandfather and great grandmother had failed to do. This walled city 13 km past the border was the first step. If they succeeded, it would be a huge source of national pride and momentum. If they failed, her Father would be humiliated and furious. It simply wouldn't be possible to take the country without taking this fortification. If they marched past it, they'd be facing knights at their rear.

'I didn't want to get sent away, but trying to unify the Kingdoms by marrying in would have been a lot less wasteful of life.'

She wasn't the one who had changed her mind, Rose reminded herself. She couldn't have prevented this. She looked out bleakly into the future and the death it would cause, and she told herself that it wasn't her fault.