68 THE ARMY
They were nearly to the portal when the
spider, toward the rear, turned around with its pedipalps waving.
“What is it?” Christian asked, standing
beside it. Narodnaya’s nostrils flared as she turned around, too, with her wild
hair drifting behind her.
Someone
is coming after us.
The accountant stroked the spider’s
abdomen nervously. “Someone bad?”
I
do not think so. Listen. They want us to wait for them.
At first he heard nothing. Then shouts
reached him from the direction of the clearing, someone—several
someones—hallooing and crashing through the undergrowth, cursing as they
tripped over each other, fell, scrambled to their feet, and kept running.
The spider skittered away as Tirion and
Morrow squeezed their way to the back of the group. Liza appeared in the wagon
doorway with folded arms. “Please tell me we’re stopping for a good reason this time.”
“Someone’s trying to catch up with us,”
Christian told her. “Narodnaya thinks they’re alright.”
The wood-elf and the Rover king looked
at each other.
“We’re only a few minutes from the
portal,” Tirion said. “It won’t hurt us to wait.”
“You say,” Liza muttered, but she
remained in the doorway, chewing on her tongue and staring into the forest.
They listened as the distant shouts and
crashes grew louder and nearer, until an assortment of perhaps twenty
circus-folk and animals burst through the trees. Their leader was disheveled
but familiar to everyone.
“Why, it’s Finn!” Rowan cried.
Her sister’s blue coat was missing, her
white shirt and blue tights muddy, her brassy curls, like Rowan’s, lank for
want of brushing. Even so, she bowed to the group as beautifully as if they had
come to see her show.
“My dear Morrow,” Finn said. Her monocle
swung by its chain like a pendulum; she caught it and put it in her eye. “How
wonderful to see you. Absolutely smashing. And Liza and Mr. Abernathy as well.”
She strode up to the wagon, grasped Liza’s
hand, and pumped it up and down, coaxing a smile from the balloon-artist’s wife.
“We unfortunately did not hear your
speeches, being more the sort to sleep in than to waken early and buckle down,
but the whole camp was laughing about it when we did get up—I don’t mean laughing, of course, but they were
certainly talking about it, and when I heard it was dear Morrow asking for
help—well, naturally I gathered my people as quick as I could and ran the whole
way here,” she finished. “We’re coming with you. All of us.”
Christian looked past her to the ragtag
bunch of lions, tigers, dancing bears, and circus-freaks that had joined
Rowan’s troupe. Among them were a bearded lady and a hunchback, a strong man
and three people clad in the leotards of trapeze artists. They were armed with
pots and pans, tent poles, iron chains, and sticks. It was not what he had been
hoping for.
Tirion looked the circus-folk up and
down with an eyebrow raised.
“This is our army?” he muttered to
Morrow. The Rover shrugged and walked up to one of the tigers, which shrank
back from him with its hackles raised. Finn put a hand on the animal’s head.
“Don’t mind her,” she said. “They’re all
a bit skittish since the attack, that’s all.”
Morrow crouched in front of the tiger and
let it smell his hand. When it was satisfied he stood up again.
“Let me ask,” he said to the
circus-folk. “Are you prepared to fight for us, knowing we may be struck down
on the field of battle, to the last man?”
“Or bear,” one of the dancing bears’
trainers called.
“Or bear,” Morrow agreed. “It’s not that
I doubt your sincerity, but if you haven’t seen battle before then you may not
realize what you’re getting yourselves into.”
“Who do you think followed your father
into battle the last time this happened?” Finn asked. “It may have been a century
or two, but we’ve seen battle before, haven’t we, lads?”
There was a resounding cheer from the
circus-folk. Morrow turned back to Tirion with a grim smile.
“This is our army,” he said.
Liza crossed her arms. “Good. Then let’s
get a move-on already.”
Rowan and Finn chortled to themselves as
she disappeared into the wagon, but each stopped when she noticed the other
laughing too. Morrow shook his head with a chuckle of his own.
“Come on,” he said, and the group took off running
again.
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