The Invasion of the Tearling (The Queen of the Tearling) by Erika Johansen

Author:Erika Johansen [Johansen, Erika]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2015-06-08T22:00:00+00:00

The next evening, after dinner, Kelsea was in the middle of her daily argument with Arliss when a messenger arrived, bearing the news she’d been dreading: six days ago, the Mort had broken through on the border. Having been frustrated in several attacks by the line of archers in the trees, Ducarte had finally taken the most direct method and simply set the entire hillside on fire. Hall had had the good sense to withdraw his battalion back toward the Almont and avoid direct battle, but nearly all of his archers had been caught in the fire, burning to death in their treetop nests. By now the Mort would be transporting their heavy equipment over the hillside, and the bulk of their infantry would already have moved down into the Almont. On Bermond’s orders, the Tear army had pulled back to the Caddell. Fire still raged across the Border Hills; if it didn’t rain soon, thousands of acres of good timber would be destroyed.

Kelsea had thought herself prepared for this news; after all, it had been inevitable from the start. But still it hit her hard, the idea of Mort soldiers on Tear land. For the last two weeks a separate wing of the Mort army had been besieging the Argive Pass, just as Bermond had warned her; the Mort Road was a much more convenient route by which to move supplies from Demesne than the rough ground of the Border Hills. But so far the Argive had held, and while the Mort had been pinned inside their own territory, the invasion had seemed somehow less real. The Mort would find no reward in the Almont; the eastern half of the kingdom was nearly emptied now, but for a few isolated farming villages on the extreme northern and southern outskirts whose occupants had chosen to remain where they were. There was nothing for the Mort to pillage, but still Kelsea hated the idea of them out there, moving like a slow dark tide across her land. She crumpled the message in one fist, feeling a new cut open on the inside of her thigh. The cuts kept her anger inside her, kept it from spilling out all over everyone surrounding, but it had grown frustrating, always having to hold back. Kelsea longed for a real target, someone she could actually injure, and this longing then led her to cut herself more deeply, to relish the pain even while she bled. The cuts healed themselves at an incredible rate, sometimes even before a day had elapsed, and so they were fairly easy to hide from everyone . . . everyone except Andalie, who dealt with Kelsea’s laundry. Andalie remained silent, but Kelsea knew that she was concerned. Despite the heat of the summer, Kelsea had taken to wearing nothing but thick black dresses with long sleeves, and this only served to deepen her kinship with Lily Mayhew, who had so many things to hide. Kelsea spent long periods of time trying

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