Read The Sacred Band: Book Three of the Acacia Trilogy for Free Online Page A

with Perrin. They sat opposite each other, reclining in soft chairs near the small stove that heated the room. They sipped a liqueur made from yellow plums. Despite the warmth caged within the metal stove, a chill crept around the edges of the chamber through chinks in the woodwork. The portholes had begun to rim with ice.
    Perrin propped his shiny leather boots on a footstool and set a hand on his abdomen, patting his stomach. “I’m going to miss meals like that. No matter how well we think we’ve provisioned, such bounty won’t last long. I had to laugh at how much the troops complained when we didn’t accept the casks of wine the league offered us. They acted like we were spoiling their planned holiday.”
    “When the league comes bearing gifts, beware.” Melio had said those exact words before. Saying it herself, she heard his voice.
    “Too right, Your Highness. The stuff wouldn’t have lasted long in any event. I know this from experience.”
    “You trained on the Mein Plateau.”
    Perrin nodded. His shoulder-length hair swayed with the motion. “Two years based in Cathgergen. Rather boring, really, considering that there weren’t actually any Meins to be worrying about anymore.”
    “Did you see much of the plateau?”
    “It’s mostly much of the same. Snow and trees and ice. Snow and trees and ice. Oh, there’s a mountain!” He feigned surprise. “That sort of thing. I went west as far as Scatevith. Wintered for three months in Hardith. Saw Mein Tahalian in the height of summer.”
    “What was it like?”
    “You’ve never been?”
    Mena shook her head.
    “In summer it was a misery of mosquitoes and biting flies. Place was deadly with them—we were bitten and the air was so thick with them, we could not help but breathe them in and choke. It wasn’t the winters that made the Meins so cranky. It was the summer wildlife.”
    “Is what they say of Haleeven Mein true?”
    “That he camps outside Mein Tahalian? Yes. That he is insane from grief and shame? That, too, perhaps. I think I saw him once, but he was so covered in furs that it was impossible to tell for sure. Not much of a life for a man who could have been chieftain of the Mein. I almost feel for him.”
    Perrin drew back his legs to let a nervous servant through to the stove. The boy fed the fire with the thin shavings of hardwood. Watching him, the young officer continued, “Tahalian itself I saw only from outside. It was sealed shut by then. It huddled against the ground, pretending to be dead, waiting for you to come too close. Don’t laugh at me, but I used to dream that the Tahalian you could see—the wood beams and buttresses of it—was the headgear of a buried giant. I woke up sweating in my bedroll more than once to the image of the head rising, eyes opening, and the whole thing clawing up from the tundra. Am I embarrassing myself here?”
    Just the opposite, Mena thought. He was diverting, pleasant to look at and to listen to. Rare to find a man so at home in his body, so easy with life and able to talk without self-importance or hidden meanings. Knowing well the conspiratorial world of court life on Acacia, Mena found this apparent naïveté refreshing.
    “Did you ever see the route from Tahalian to Port Grace?” she asked.
    “No. It’s a well-established road, though. The ascent from the coast is gradual, wide. A fortnight’s march, if the weather isn’t troublesome.”
    Mena glanced at the portholes again, even more rimmed with delicate lacings of frost now. The wind had picked up, gusting and setting up a sporadic clanking from the rigging. “Let me ask you something. Do you think we’ll survive a winter camped here?”
    “Many will die, Princess Mena. Not even the Scav stay out here. Not exposed this way. We could travel inland a bit, find a sheltered spot along the pass, but still … it will be along, hard winter. Ice will lock us in. In a month we’ll be trapped here until the spring. And we’ll need