Queens & Liars-Sequel to Three Broken Kingdoms (Completed)

Chapter Forty-Nine: The Army

They took back the Hawk Mountains, the Kallians having long gone. There was no sense of victory about it. The fortress had cost far more than it should have, far more than they could afford. Although they and gained a great asset, they had still lost. Rose and a thousand others were lost for this. It was a lacklustre victory, rather than a triumphant return home. The morale boost they had expected—and relied on—had faded.

Despite most of their host setting up in the Bird of Prey Mountains or in Topaz, Myra and the other leaders stayed in Azul, now the makeshift capital of the entire rebel movement. It was well protected, north enough to ensure they had prior warning of attack, defended by mountains on two sides and river and snow on another. The only place it was vulnerable was to the east, but they would know an attack was coming a week before it arrived if the Kallians took the sea route.

They had begun to train the valkyrie citizens. Although Nala and Talia might have been sceptical on the numbers they'd get, nearly every valkyrie physically capable had joined up and those who couldn't fight occupied themselves with other, menial jobs. Keepers had come from the four cities and the countless small towns and villages, each swearing to defend their country's art and knowledge as fiercely as they had once nurtured it. Each and every one had some trace of war-gift, some weak enough to make them almost human, but others so strong that they had barely missed cut-off for training as warriors. But best of all were the ex-warriors and City Guard who had managed to escape notice. They were all strongly war-gifted, and almost as good as the warriors of old. Soon thousands bolstered their ranks.

Of course, all of this was quite irrelevant if they couldn't teach them to fight. So they had sent MindWeaved Kallians and true rebels alike to defend the border and buy time to train their citizens. They would have months at best to turn a bunch of volunteer fighters into an army. Naturally, Myra had been tasked with the job.

"Faster!" She called out to the volunteers. "Slowest person gets an extra lap!" The first thing they had to do was work on fitness. Endurance. Naturally, their war-gifts made these things easier than it would have been for humans, but they still needed work. Those she had deemed best had moved onto weapons training, learning the basics of archery as quickly as possible as well as developing the strengths of their animal forms. Myra called over some of the fastest-many of them previously mine-workers-and told them to join the rest of the new archers, who Gemma was examining with her remaining—and rather sceptical—green eye. Once those were deemed to have progressed enough they moved to a more advanced stage with harder bows. Those who had no potential in archery would try melee weapons and those who had no potential at all were assigned to menial jobs that kept the army running, such as food distribution or supply driving.

This was the third day of training. Each day was very much the same. Everyone in the army-including those already trained-got up at dawn to run. Afterwards they would split up into different categories—elf, valkyrie, Tarua Teris and MindWeaved Kallians—and into further categories still. Elves would train with those with the same or similar abilities. Valkyries were split into groups with roughly equal training and war-gift. Tarua Teris split into different forms of fighting—assassins, archers and melee amongst them. The MindWeaved who wanted to convert to their side went through loyalty tests first and then trained separately from the less compliant ones.

Myra spent most of her time with valkyrie citizens whilst Gemma usually took on the more advanced classes. The warrior was a far better teacher than she, even with only one eye to watch her students. The only class she couldn't manage was, of course, use of animal forms. Nala managed all forms of the Tarua Teris training, with masterful displays of wall-climbing, advanced archery and bashing-people-with-spiked-club skills. Talia trained with the MindWeavers, who made up a large portion of the elves given the Silver Court and Guard.