The door stayed closed.
???
The sky was clear and bright when Venick woke.
He was sore. There was a welt on his wrist from the shackle, a tight pain in his back from falling asleep in a chair. His head ached, and his lips were cracked and dry. He washed himself in the water basin. He rubbed the grime out of his skin, scrubbing until he was pink and raw.
A click at the door. The lock.
It wasn’t her.
“You have a knack for getting yourself imprisoned,” Dourin said as he strode into the room. He had traded his legion armor for silken tunic and trousers. A shortsword was belted to his hip in place of the standard legion-length broadsword. He caught sight of the downed curtain rod and lifted a brow. “Inventive.”
“Where’s Ellina?”
“Handling the backlash of your arrival, I am sure. Your presence here is not, shall we say,celebrated.”
“I need to speak with her.”
Dourin rolled his eyes. “Of course you do.”
“It’s important.”
“More important than your impending execution? If I were you, human, I would be most worried aboutthat.”
Venick looked out the window. A breeze whined against the tower. “You think I’m lying about the army, too.”
Dourin crossed to the writing desk and pulled out the chair. He sat gracefully, arms and legs folding. “What I believe is irrelevant.”
“If an elf had come with my message, you would be preparing. You wouldn’t be wasting time.”
“Oh, I am not so sure about that,” Dourin said. “Elves have not fought a true war since the purge. We have all but forgotten how. Where would we even begin?”
Venick shook his head. “It’s not that hard to figure out.”
“Says a human. Your race is made for battle.”
“Elves train to fight, too.”
“Not in the same way. We fight each other one-on-one, yes, but we know little about planning battles.”
Which Venick knew already. Still. “It’s beside the point,” he said. “You can’t donothing. You should be recruiting soldiers, calling on the rest of the legion, preparing your arms. Evov might be a hidden fortress—”
“It letyouin.”
“—but there are cities to the south and east that would easily be crushed by the army I saw.”
“And how, oh great warrior, would you suggest saving them?”
Venick hesitated. Dourin’s tone was dry, but his eyes were steady, curious, in a way that suggested he might truly want the answer.
“I would start by slowing the southerner’s progress.” Venick moved to the desk where Dourin sat, rummaging for parchment and ink. “Part of an army’s strength comes from its ability to move swiftly.” He drew a rough sketch of the elflands. Forests to the south, mountains to the north, a tundra between them. “If the southerners reach the tundra, you will be disadvantaged. They have the numbers. They will be able to overwhelm an inexperienced army, especially if that army is smaller. But,” Venick drew a circle around the mountains, then the forests, “if you pin them where they can’t move, you’ll have the advantage. The legion’s strengths lie in small contingents, troops like yours of six or ten. You could perform targeted strikes. Take out their supply wagons, assassinate their leaders. Cut the legs off the beast and you stop it in its tracks.”
“And if we cannot stop it? As you so studiously noted, the legion is small, and our troops are currently scattered around the elflands. What if the army reaches the tundra anyway?”
“Recruit more soldiers. Train them, arm them with green glass. Station them in the mountain pass. Don’t meet the southern army in open battle on the tundra—lure them to you. You will need to evacuate exposed cities, but your soldiers will still have the advantage. The pass will bottleneck an army. You can pick the southerners off bit by bit.”
Dourin looked skeptical. “Let us say,hypothetically, we did what you suggest. There is still the problem of gathering and training these soldiers.”
