Blades Of Illusion: Crown Service #2 by Terah Edun Read Free Book Online Page A

with weary eyes, hoping to pierce the shroud of mist and rain of the bog that surround her. When she thought of war, she thought of blades slicing clean through flesh, knives piercing stomachs, and blood spraying through the air. She didn’t think of mud up to her knees, nor air so wet and humid that it blanketed them all in a layer of sweat, nor even imagined the putrid smell of sulfur and decay. She doubted this was what any of the mercenaries who surrounded her had thought of when they came to war. The ones who had succumbed to the heat and humidity had stripped themselves down to the bare essentials, throwing their bog-rusted, slime-covered armor onto empty supply carts. After those were filled and abandoned, armor was simply tossed into whatever muddy hole they happened to be standing next to. Few continued to carry the metal plates through the heavy, thick mud, and fewer still wore their armor on their person. Sara was one of those few.
    It had been thirteen days and four hours since they had left the confines of the forest that lay next to the battlefield where she and her division and had encountered their first enemy. She had been obsessive about counting the time that passed, especially when she thought they were lost. She didn’t know how it would help in any case, but information was power and this was the only information she could broker.
    ‘Encountered’ being a relative term, since they had really been ambushed, outmatched and outfought, all without the single presence or death of a living Kade soldier. Sara chuckled under her breath. The books at the academy hadn’t taught them that.
    “They told us about being brave on the front lines, showing strength in leadership, and how to kill an enemy forty different ways,” she said bitterly, “But they never taught us how to deal with an enemy that was a ghost. An enemy that stayed hidden and let their magic and bombardments do their work for them. How do you fight an enemy whose blood you cannot shed?”

Chapter 6
    A s she shook her head, Sara tried to shake the dark thoughts going through her mind as she stared at the comrades who marched beside her. They had left the forest with over two hundred and seventy-five mercenaries in the prime of their lives. Mercenaries with laughter in their throats, hearty muscles underneath their tunics, and the gaze of warriors assured of their victory. They had expected a few days’ march and had been mentally prepared for such. Physically, they had been neither prepared for nor cognizant of what a trek through a poisonous bog like this would do to them. The supplies they had on hand were only enough to keep them alive. But they would not keep them healthy, and certainly not battle ready. Most of those supplies needed to keep them in top-notch shape, like the nutrient mixtures from the healers, supplements from the herbalists, as well as the good ole butchered meat preserved with the heat of fire and spices, had been either in the supplies of the main group or they had been hunted or salvaged from farmland and woodland along the road. But they couldn’t salvage what they couldn’t hunt. How do you find a twelve-point stag in a swamp?
    “The answer? You don’t,” said Sara disdainfully as she pushed a thick vine out of the way and hoped a snake didn’t fall on her head for the second time. The first experience had been more than enough. They were slimy and large here, as well as vicious. Unlike the small garden or sand serpents at home, she had had to cut this foe up into four pieces before it stopped trying to constrict around her.
    Besides the snakes, vermin, and some vicious solitary predators, they found nothing else in this swamp. Stags and boars and elk and anything else that could be expected to fill the bellies of several red-blooded men and women a piece were not native to swampy terrain. And so now Sara Fairchild and, she was sure, Captain Barthis Simon, were faced with the haggard faces of the marching