Renegade's Magic (Page 11)
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My delicately raised girl cousin had struck in a way that I, a trained soldier son, had never even imagined. And she had succeeded, at least for now, in halting the progress of the King’s Road builders.
But as I was smiling at her success, my grin suddenly stiffened into a sort of rictus. This road, cutting through the mountains and to the sea beyond them, was my king’s great project.
With that road, my king hoped to restore Gernia to greatness. And I looked on its delay and destruction with pleasure. Who was I?
I watched the men toiling below. The sounds of their cursing and shouted commands could not reach me here. But I could smell the smoke of last night’s fire and see the steady procession of wagons and teams and road crews as they toiled like ants mending a nest. How long would it take them to fix the broken culvert and patch the road? A few days, if they were industrious. How long to build new wagons and scrapers, how long to build new sheds? A few weeks at most. And then the work would press on. The magical fear that the Specks had created still oozed down from the forest to deter the workers and sap their wills. But, fool that I was, I’d given the commander the means to overcome even that. I’d been the one to suggest that men half drunk on liquor or drugged with laudanum would not feel the fear as keenly and could work despite it. I’d even heard that some of the penal workers now craved the intoxicants so much that they clamored to be on the work details at the road’s end. The drugged and desensitized men would push the road on into the forest. I’d enabled that. It had almost earned me a promotion.
I recognized uncomfortably that my heart was turning more and more toward a forest way of thinking. The divide in me ran deep now. I was still a Gernian, but that was no longer sufficient reason to believe that the King’s Road must be pushed through at all costs. I glanced back toward Tree Woman’s stump. No. The cost to me alone was too high. It had to be stopped.
I stood for a long time as the afternoon waned, watching the men and teams flailing away at their tasks. Even at this distance, I could see that the workers were impaired. No one moved briskly and mishaps abounded. A wagon trying to turn too tightly with a load of rock tipped over and dumped its cargo. An hour later, another wagon mired, and a third driver, trying to get past the mired wagon, drove his team into the ditch and overset his load there.
Yet for all that, the work was progressing. It might be tomorrow before they had replaced the culverts, and perhaps even another day before they had a drivable surface on the road there. But eventually, like patient insects, they would get it done. And then they would push on once more, cutting inexorably into the forest. Did it matter to me if they cut down her tree next week or three years from now? I needed to stop them.
When I asked if the road could not go around the kaembra trees, he pointed out that engineers had mapped out the best route, and it went past Gettys and through the mountain pass that traders had once used. For years, the resources of Gernia had been committed to building the road on that route. An alternate path had once been considered, one that would have gone past Mendy and the Fort to cut through the Barrier Mountains there. But to redirect the road-building effort to that route would mean adding years to the King’s project, not to mention absorbing the waste of all that had gone into pushing the road as far as Gettys and beyond it. No. Nothing so trivial as a stand of ancestral trees would halt the King of Gernia’s grand vision.
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