Page 4 of The Summer War
Before heading back to the front, Father took a chunk of Lady Farria’s dowry, bought himself a shield and a banner with a red fox on them, and paid one of the best songwrights in Prosper to write a romantic song calling him Veris the Fox, the poor and clever hedgeborn knight who had fallen in love with his lord’s beautiful daughter and had been determined to win her hand, and had outwitted the summerlings and become a hero of the realm to do it.
It was wildly popular, and as soon as the summerlings heard it on the border, they immediately forgave Father all his unspeakable crimes against them.
Over the rest of that summer, he proceeded to carry out an utterly ruthless campaign full of every lie, cheat, and trick he could invent, winning one battle after another.
The summerlings sent him the gifts and honors they only bestowed on worthy enemies, and he grew rapidly in popularity on the mortal side of the war as well.
The common folk of Prosper perhaps disagreed with their king about just how acceptable the annual losses were.
The next summer, the king gave Father the command of the aptly named Fort Resignation, a six-tower castle on the leading edge of the border that had been sacked by the summerlings more than twenty times over the course of the war, and granted him another thousand men, which would have been more generous if the castle hadn’t needed at bare minimum a garrison twice as large.
Father promptly sent song-spinners out to ten different summerling lords on the border nearby to sing them a song about how the single most valiant summer lord would be the one who took Fort Resignation from Veris the Fox.
The instant the mists opened, all of them made straight for the castle.
When they were a few days out, Father held a parley with each of them and said apologetically that of course he welcomed their challenge, but he’d already accepted a challenge from the next one over, and couldn’t face anyone else until that one was defeated.
The summer lords proceeded to spend half the summer fighting one another savagely for the right to face Father, who meanwhile spent the same time building a much more secure inner fortification out of just one of the towers, and undermining the rest of the walls and turning the courtyard into a bog of quicksand.
When the last three surviving summer lords finally worked out that they’d been tricked and agreed to join forces to besiege and take the castle, Father waited for a summer thunderstorm, then collapsed the walls outward onto them, killing half their force.
Then he immediately hailed them with a blizzard of small pebbles: he’d recruited boys from all the villages nearby to come with their slingshots, and they were lining every nook and cranny of the inner walls.
Half blinded with rain and hailing pebbles, the summerlings charged over the fallen walls and straight into the quicksand, where many of them drowned in the mud struggling to get out, and the rest became easy targets for arrows and spears.
When the skies cleared, the much-reduced remnant of the summerling force besieged the inner tower, seething.
Father wasn’t there anymore. He’d slipped out through a tunnel during the thunderstorm along with most of his men, leaving only a small garrison to hold the tower.
He snuck along to the next border keep, which was also under siege, and fired an arrow over the walls with a song for the men inside to sing, about how Veris the Fox had tricked the summerling lords who now didn’t have enough men to take him out of his tower.
The summerlings besieging that keep all rode off to join the siege on what was left of Father’s castle, and Father rode in and told the knight commanding the keep to come join him.
He did the same to another three keeps, then rode back to his castle with a total of five thousand men, quietly encircled the large summerling camp around the tower, and waited until the summerlings launched their next assault, hundreds of them all launching themselves valiantly up the extremely tall walls and over the top.
Inside the tower, his remaining men took down the bracing that was holding up those walls and fled out through the tunnel as the tower came crumbling down, and in the confusion, Father attacked and slaughtered the entire summerling force.
He then marched his men—they were all firmly his men by then—to the next besieged border keep, killed the summerlings there, absorbed the garrison into his force, and kept going.
By the end of the summer, he’d lifted the sieges on seventeen keeps and had killed tens of thousands of summerlings.
The king grimly made him an earl in his own right, gave him still more lands in the north, and sent him home to rule them before he could become too powerful.
Argent was a healthy and promising one-year-old boy by then, toddling around.
Lady Farria died along with a stillborn girl the next year, but Father didn’t mourn very long.
Shortly afterwards, her father the earl and his only son both died in a slightly questionable accident.
Father promptly claimed the earl’s lands in Argent’s name, doubling the size of his estate, and started negotiating to marry the sole heiress of another earldom next to his, which would have made him the greatest landowner in the north and a significant power in the realm.
That was when his mistress got pregnant.
Mistress Perilla was just a common-born song-spinner that he’d picked precisely because she could be quietly packed off without offending anyone as soon as he could make a match with another noblewoman.
Father still had no intention of marrying her, but when the local soothsayer came for the usual visit and put his hands on her belly, instead of just delivering the pro forma prophecy of good fortune and an easy birth, the man’s eyes went all white and he told Father that she would bear him a son who would be useful to his other children, and hold the door open for power to come flowing into his house.
Another man might have tried to stick to his plan anyway, but Father was too sensible not to respect a prophecy. He married her at once.
There hadn’t been any summer attacks during those two years, but not long after the wedding, the summerlings appeared for the next season in massive force, united under the direct command of Summer Prince Elithyon himself.
Instead of besieging the border forts, he brought them all across the Green Bridge, smashed through the defenses there, and took the royal road straight for the capital of Prosper.
He didn’t even let his lords and knights sack the castles and towns and villages on the way, unless someone offered them battle, which very few people did.
The current royal palace—it had been built after the start of the summer war—was almost as far away from the border as you could get and still be in the heartlands of Prosper, but it looked very much like he was still going to make it there before autumn.
King Morthimer decided that, on reflection, he preferred having a dangerously powerful lord at his back to being slowly roasted alive on a spit or sliced into a thousand pieces one at a time with thin sharp wires—the summerlings grew very elaborate when they caught anyone of high rank to kill, as a gesture of respect, and they’d never yet had the chance to kill a king of Prosper—and yelled for help.
Father rode down from the north at breakneck speed to assume command of the army, and then proceeded not to do anything with it except wait.
He did send men down the royal road to burn all the bridges and fill all the fords with caltrops to slow down the summerling advance, and also sent Elithyon several cartloads of sparkling wine and sugar candy as a token of respect, which delayed him by almost another week—the summerlings hadn’t had much of either during the war, and they immediately stopped to have a very enthusiastic feast—but otherwise Father just stayed camped right outside the capital until the summer army arrived, three solid weeks before the weather would turn at the earliest. The king was feeling extremely anxious by then, but he also didn’t have any better options.
Father met the summerlings on open ground right before the capital, at the head of a gloriously arrayed force—knights in full plate, flags and banners waving, horns blowing, presenting exactly the sort of dream of battle that every summer knight and lord longed to fight in—and marched straight towards them, with his own flags, emblazoned with red foxes, streaming at the front.
Knowing who he was facing, the Summer Prince immediately split up his forces and sent companies into the woods on either side, trying futilely to find the extra men that Father had surely hidden somewhere, and backed away over the field until his army had almost reached the previous ford, putting themselves on much worse ground than they’d had and disordering their ranks.