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ROWLE ALWAYS FELT THAT battle was a creative process. Like the upheaval of digging before planting. And if the battle wasn’t going entirely her way? Well, what were a few stones before the plow? She leaned on the balcony of her office enjoying the gentle wind blowing up. It carried a complex mix of churned up soil, folk sweat, and blood. And that odd smell that the wet burns from the dragon mouths caused. Sweet yet sickly. Apt somehow.
She liked this moment in wars. The eye of the storm. That chance between skirmishes for everyone to regroup. Of course, the tactician in her, probably from her father’s side, should have been taking more troops out right now while medical teams collected the groaning and the silent from the battlefield. But she wasn’t an animal. There were rules. Decorum. She hummed a little tune to herself and cleaned her claws.
A knock at her office door brought her back to herself. She waited. So did the messenger.
“What?” she shouted. More silence. “Come in, damn you.”
“Sorry... Your Eminence...”
“What? What is it?”
“There are reports from the battlefield, Your Eminence.”
“Good.” She waited. “And?”
“Casualty rates on both sides are high...”
“Excellent.”
“We are nearly finished collecting our fallen from the field.”
“Good. Let them finish too, before we sound another attack.”
“That is most generous, Your Eminence.”
“I know. There is something else?”
“Spies report some other activity on the field too.”
“Fighting, perhaps?”
“No, Your Eminence, now the fighting has stopped.”
“Oh?”
“There seem to be groups of folk from Gantrytown,”
“I thought they had agreed to stay noncombatant at the price of us not turning the dragon mouths on them?”
“Oh, they’re not fighting.”
“All right, you have my interest. What are they doing?”
“Building? We think.”
Rowle chuckled. “Building what?”
“We don’t know, exactly. They seem like, er...”
“Spit it out.”
“They seem like models of folk? Model folk made out of machine bits.”
“A weapon perhaps?”
“Maybe? We don’t know. Though there is no scent of anything alchemical or incendiary really.”
“Oh? What do they smell of?”
“Jasmine.”
“Humph. Are they a distraction then? A lure?”
“I have no idea, Your Eminence.”
“Thank you,” Rowle said. The messenger waited. “You’re dismissed.”
As the folk messenger bowed and scraped his way out of the door and it banged behind him, Rowle drifted back to the balcony. Now she listened. Even with her ears not being what they used to be, she could hear distant but clear clangs of metal on metal. Crunching and scraping. Again, the tactician in her leaped to her forebrain to say, “Attack now, swift and unexpected.” But she didn’t. She wanted to know how this would play out. There was no point in playing with a mouse once it was dead. Even if you had it, to flick between one paw and another, there was no joy in it if the life had gone.
But the life hadn’t gone out of the Under-folk yet. So lift a paw off the tail and see how far they scamper, until...
She extended her claws and lovingly cleaned them, one by one.
