Excerpt

Chapter One

Arrows should have been silent compared to gunfire, Private First Class Sadiq Rashad thought, but there was no mistaking that bristly whistle as one whipped through the air just above his head and thwacked into someone's flak jacket behind him. Somehow it seemed to shatter the forest silence as effectively as any gunshot.

The entire squad ate dirt, and everyone checked their ammo. Rashad backed against a tree trunk and wondered how they'd gotten flanked, then realized how stupid a question that was: this was wood elf territory. They knew their own land more intimately than any human would, or even ever could.

Rashad was new to the squad, only a month in the Fleet, so he was still nervous. Every crack in the brush and shaken leaf had him jumpy. The squad had all been teasing him. Boot this and newb that. He knew he had to just keep eating it all up with a smile on his face, or at least keep his expression neutral.

But the most confusing thing about combat over here wasn't just the chaos of being under some kind of attack. It was the fact that the voices of everyone else in the squad were in his head and he wasn't used to it.

He'd thought magical forests would be unreal and full of ineffable beauty. Instead, he was missing the Badlands of North Dakota where he'd grown up.

Just because you read about this crap in books and thought it sounded amazing didn't mean living it was going to be fun. Everything in the forests kept shooting pointy objects and spells at them, the locals were inscrutable and dirty, and the squad spent most of its time hunkered down in a forward operating base eating MREs.

Rashad hadn't even had a single hearty stew yet.

Another arrow smacked into a nearby tree and Rashad, weighed down with seventy pounds of gear, tried to make himself as small as possible.

Staff Sergeant Raymond Cale lay low about five meters away. He could see that Rashad's face was pale and shaken, but Rashad had his rifle cradled and ready, looking for orders. Good. The newb had paid attention in training. He'd been a bit out of sorts since joining. He'd come in with an adventurer's excitement that hadn't been blunted by boot camp, but once he'd realized that life on the other side at a FOB was all guard duty, moving shit from one place to another and filling sandbags, he'd started to wallow in his own head a bit.

Cale had to be careful to shield that thought, as he didn't want his impressions of his people leaking out all over the place. Not good for morale. All their minds were linked up into one single group mind via the Spell of Tactician's Weave, but Cale had a commander's training on how to use STW.

The rest of the squad spread out. Lance Corporal Alden Diaz pulled an arrow out from his body armor and looked a bit chagrined. Not too far away, LCpl Robert Orley crawled intently through dirt.

"Got eyes on the woodie," Orley reported.

"Hold," Cale whispered.

This was the rendezvous point. The whole squad had cloaks draped over their regular gear that made them look like peasant travelers. So why the sudden hostility? Cale suspected they were going to have to ditch the robes that had let them camouflage themselves, and see if they could de-escalate before a simple hand-off turned into a cluster fuck.

Through Tactician's Weave, Cale could tell Orley really didn't want to do any de-escalation. He wanted to engage the wood elves. But even though some Marine certified to cast a spell on them back at the FOB had joined their minds together to make a more effective combat unit, only one person here was in charge.

And that was Cale.

"Ditch the cloaks," Cale ordered the thirteen other members of his platoon.

Diaz had a memory to share with the entire platoon. It was a story he had been told about a couple of African American Special Forces who stumbled in out of the night with bows and arrows. They were scouts setting out to blend into the local land, and on the way back in, they'd ended up getting shot by jumpy sentries who thought they were orcs.

The realization that some people would see black skin, bows, right away think orc, and go straight to trigger-pulling—it left a bad taste in everyone's mouths. A lot of the bad taste was Diaz's, leaking out into the whole platoon via the spell. Diaz was half black; he was often pointing out stuff like that to them with the mental equivalent of a sigh.

Teachable moment about making assumptions aside—and Diaz had laid plenty of those thanks to the forced intimacy of the Tactician's Weave spell—Orley got Diaz's point and took his energy to engage down a notch so that the whole squad wasn't quivering with an eagerness to shoot at anything.

Now everyone was synching with Cale's reasoning: the elves were probably seeing The Enemy, not US Marines, due to the cloaks.

As one, they shrugged off the cloaks, displaying their standard Marine Corps digi-cammies and gear. Each of the three fire teams was clustered around a different tree, a corporal with an eagle eye making sure they had zones of fire in all directions for each team, and that they were ready for anything to happen next.

A bird whistle from the tree canopy pierced the air. More whistles came from all around the squad. The elves had marked the squad from the get-go, Cale realized. The arrow had been an exploratory shot to make sure they were actually Marines in disguise, not the start of a firefight.

Just because the folk out in the woods here were using arrows didn't mean they were stupid, and it certainly didn't mean they had no grasp of the differences in technology and force levels.

Cale felt Rashad grasp at a thought that several of the other Marines sent rattling at him. There was a grinning visage looking down the bark of the tree from over Rashad. It was a wood elf. Half the squad poked Rashad with rote lessons about high ground. The boot needed to clear up and down, not just in the two-dimensional plane. The elf had gotten the damn drop on him.

"Cheshire!" Cale shouted.

"Alice," came the reply in a purr from the wood elf above Rashad.

Good to go.

"Hello the shooters!" Cale shouted. "First Battalion, Ninth Marines." He never gave their correct unit, and changed it every time he talked to any locals. 1/9 had a fearsome reputation, though, thanks to the Battle of the Low Gorge Keep. "You're expecting us? We're here as escort for the Lady Wíela."

Silence stretched on for a bit. Cale worried that maybe the translation spell every soldier on this side of the portal had been hit with as they came through had failed.

Rashad fidgeted, glancing away from the wood elf crouched on the tree above him and off into the foliage. More of the elves' child-like forms melted out from the shadows, their small bows slung on their backs and their hands resting on the hilts of knives. They were skeletal and lean, chiseled teeth glinting as they looked the squad over with cold eyes.

"I'm Achur. I have protected the Lady this far. Do you have the writ?" the elf above Rashad finally said, dropping nimbly from the tree and approaching Cale.

Cale held up the papyrus that he pulled from one of the many pockets at his thigh. The symbols on it glittered, and then blazed, as the elf's gaze passed over them.

Achur swallowed and nodded. "We turn the Lady over to your care."

And just like that, the elves melted back away. All that remained was a young woman in a cloak as black as the shadows, her green eyes peeking out from under the hood.

Lady Wíela.

Diaz and Orley bowed deeply toward her, as they'd been taught by battalion S-3 and the cultural liaison gurus. Cale was about to do so as well when the squad radio crackled. It was First Squad—Stormcrow—laid out five kilometers farther into enemy territory.

"You've got three trolls, Longshanks," they reported. "Headed your way like they know something's up."

Cale looked reflexively down at his watch. Eight hours before sunrise, a long way to go. He hadn't heard anything like trolls approaching. But the whole squad had been focused on the attacking wood elves and could have easily missed the distant popcorn sound of gunfire or trembling ground.

"Engage and slow them down, we have the package," Cale whispered into the handset, then strained to hear their reply.

"They're already past us, Longshanks," First Squad reported. "I've got two dead. I've already called for a casevac and we might be pinned down. I'd be calling you for help if—"

A brief burst of static cut off any further words.

"Stormcrow?"

Nothing. First Squad was dead or moving, and Cale needed to focus on what his people needed to do now.

Over the eerie feel of Tactician's Weave, Cale felt that Orley thought he could hear the sound of wood cracking. Diaz was sure he could feel a distant thudding.

Hell, Cale was half convinced he could as well.

"The night is young." Lady Wíela spoke up, her voice high and fair. "We'd better start running, unless any of your machines can hurt a troll."

"Trolls," Rashad repeated, and Cale felt him trying to remember his all-too-brief training before he'd suited up and come through the breach to this world.

"They'll be weak in the daylight. We just have to make it through the night," Lady Wíela said, as if reassuring them. Or maybe she was trying to convince herself. It was hard to say: her face was buried deep in the shadows of her cowl. No one in the squad found it easy to get a good look at her features. Their gazes just sort of slid away from the shadows hidden away there. Some kind of magical veil, or a glamour, made it hard to perceive her properly.

And Cale didn't have time to worry about it right now.

"Right," Cale said. "Get them to daylight."

But the whole squad, linked mind to mind, had the exact same thought: It will be a miracle if we make it through the night.