Page 3 of The Summer War

The summer war had gone for a hundred years before Father had finally won it.

There hadn’t been endless fighting all of that time; the summerlings only ever attacked during summer, and sometimes they forgot about the war and didn’t turn up for years at a time, and all the king’s men just sat in the border keeps along the Meanwhile River, bored and drinking and sweltering in summer heat.

But Prosper still had to have an army ready every year, because every so often the summerlings did remember about the Betrayal, and as soon as they did, they all blazed up with rage and came storming across the border, swords out for every man, woman, and child in Prosper.

The summerlings had been something like their friends before the war.

For as long as anyone had lived in Prosper—or at least as long as anyone knew about—each year the summerlings had come across the Green Bridge to trade “silk and leather and wine and cake for beautiful things of summer make,” as it went in the song.

Summerlings couldn’t be bothered to grow crops or tend animals, but they made things no mortal could: enchanted glass as clear as water, arms of hardened gold and silver, jewels that glowed with cool light.

They’d fought together against the shadowlords, and after Witch-Queen Selina and the Summer King had died winning the final battle against them, Summer Prince Elithyon had given his sister in marriage to Selina’s son Sherdan, the new king of Prosper.

But the summerlings weren’t mortal. They lived in the simplicity of grand towering stories filled with magic and endless high beauty, and for them pride and love were tangled so close together that they couldn’t pry them apart.

During the wedding feast, Princess Eislaing saw King Sherdan look at song-spinner Minata as she sang, and she instantly realized that not only hadn’t her new husband fallen in desperate love with her on first sight the way he should have, he was in love with someone else—an ordinary mortal woman, who wasn’t radiantly beautiful and didn’t even sing perfectly on-key.

So as soon as the feast ended, Eislaing went straight up to the highest tower of the royal castle and threw herself off.

Her story had gone all wrong, and she couldn’t see anything else to do.

Prince Elithyon and all the summerlings had loved their princess as the greatest treasure of their realm.

To them, King Sherdan and the horrible people of Prosper, who hadn’t appreciated the impossibly glorious gift they’d been given, had driven her to a hideous death.

The only possible response was to avenge her.

And as far as Elithyon was concerned, that was going to take the blood of everyone in the entire kingdom.

So he’d started the summer war, and for a long time, no one had been able to end it.

Prosper couldn’t invade them in return. If an army of mortal men marched into the Summer Lands, half of the soldiers wandered out again the next day, fifty years older, and the other half wandered out again ten years later not having aged a day and having forgotten who they were.

The lords and generals came out gibbering mad.

Only heroes and song-spinners could go into the Summer Lands, and half of those didn’t come back either—some because they’d died heroically, and some because a summerling had seduced them and persuaded them to stay.

Summer lords didn’t seem to find anything odd about welcoming individual knights from Prosper into their halls as honored guests, even if they would have slaughtered them without mercy on the other side.

But even on the three occasions when the summerlings had broken through the wall of border keeps and started rampaging through Prosper, razing every town and slaughtering every person in their path, they’d only kept going until autumn.

When the leaves started turning colors and falling from the trees, their magic and immortality started fading along with them, and they all panicked and fled pell-mell back to the Summer Lands in terror, abandoning all the ground they’d taken.

And then they completely forgot all about autumn until the next time it happened.

So it seemed as though the summer war would just keep going forever and ever, and everyone in Prosper was just doomed to live under the threat of bursts of slaughter, until Father arrived on the border and changed everything, because he started winning.

Father always knew the right thing to do.

He was born the son of a poor landless knight from the backwater of Prosper, the northern mountain country, all the way on the other side from the Summer Lands.

His only inheritance was some patchy armor, a badly sized sword, a thin horse, and a lowly position with the local earl.

But when the king sent one of his periodic demands for soldiers for the summer war, Father asked the earl to let him have the command.

The request was granted with alacrity; no one lucky enough to live in the north wanted to be sent down to the summer war.

The strategy that Prosper had relied on for more than a hundred years by then was simple.

The king maintained a ring of stone-walled forts all along the border.

The forts were hideously uncomfortable, each one built of a few winter towers, naked with no autumn halls or shady summer gardens outside, and joined together by stone walls with almost no openings, except for one entrance just big enough to ride a single horse through at a time.

They were oven-hot when the sun was out, full of greenish mold and mosquitoes when the summer rains fell, and often both at the same time.

But they were hard to take without siege equipment, which the summerlings almost never managed to finish building.

The men hunkered miserably down inside the forts and the commanders sent out their most gifted knights and well-arrayed companies to offer the summerlings individual challenges and small battles, just often enough to keep them from getting bored and organizing a more concerted advance.

It worked reasonably well. Usually only two or three forts got overrun each season, and at worst only a few villages and towns got butchered before autumn came: acceptable losses.

Father’s assigned fort was an especially uncomfortable one: only three towers, all too stubby to risk a window bigger than an arrow-slit even on the topmost floors, and the stone walls were uneasily low and thin.

The previous summer’s defenders had prudently dug a ditch around the whole thing to make a bit more of an obstacle, which was already filling up with water as the rains began, and stank to high heaven, since all the castle’s waste got thrown over the back wall and fell right into it.

But Father didn’t sit there waiting to be besieged.

Instead, he scouted out the nearest ford over the river, and when the spring mists began to clear, he took his men out and hid halfway along the way.

When a small company of summer knights rode by on their way to besiege him—ashining troop in their armor of hardened silver, singing in clear voices about the joy of death in battle—he and his men threw muck and shit and small rocks at them from cover, shouting insults.

The summerlings charged after them at once and fell straight into a prepared pit trap, where Father had them ignominiously butchered by a crew of peasants he’d rounded up from the nearest villages, who stood on the edge and stabbed them with spears from a safe distance.

The rest of the summerlings were horrified and outraged, and all the more so when Father sent the nearest summerling lord an insulting message bragging of his victory over them, written crudely on dirty paper.

The summer lord immediately gathered a large force of knights to take Father’s small and unimportant fort and slaughter everyone in it.

The summerlings arrived, overwhelmed the handful of defenders on the gate, stormed into the fort, and were bewildered to find it completely empty.

Outside, Father and the rest of his men came out of their hiding places in the nearby brush and threw torches over the walls into the courtyard, which had been drenched with oil and smeared with tar.

Nearly four hundred summer knights and a summer lord died, and Father lost less than twenty men.

The king made Father a baron after that, granting him his own lands and a thousand men to command.

It wasn’t a sincere gesture of appreciation; King Morthimer—Sherdan’s great-great-grandson—wasn’t pleased to have a hedgeborn knight from the hinterlands showing him up to the common folk, and for that matter mucking around with his tried-and-true strategy.

But all the summerlings were going to be out for Father’s blood now, so he didn’t have long to live, and the king wanted to look generous.

That was made easier because Father humbly asked for a modest grant of lands neighboring his old backwater home.

Father also asked for a short leave, went back to his former lord, and made his first match: he asked for the hand of the earl’s daughter Farria in marriage.

The earl was privately indignant at such a request coming from his jumped-up former servant, but he grudgingly agreed, and to a hasty wedding—since, after all, everyone knew Father wasn’t going to survive to the autumn, and then his daughter would inherit the conveniently nearby lands.