Escape
The money I spent greasing palms to free the elf prisoners came to eight hundred thousand thalers—more than ten years' pay for any respectable field-grade officer.
In truth, I needn't have spent a coin. Victoria was the one who had sent me here, and a single word from her—imperial princess, and the real power in the military—would have made the release of two prisoners a trifle. Had I asked her myself, she would almost certainly have granted it.
But instead of borrowing Victoria's power, I settled the matter with a judicious outlay of coin.
Hardly anyone knows what I'm actually doing.
Fewer than five people, myself included, understood what was befalling the elves of the Great Forest. This was simply not a world in which anyone could conceive of toppling a quasi-state with narcotics. Everyone else was only trudging along, halfheartedly, because the imperial house had ordered it.
Tell them, on top of that, to just let the prisoners go, and the resentment in the frontline units would only swell. So I merely furnished them with a modest reason to comply: a little something for the soldiers who had been wounded by the captives and shipped to the rear, condolence money for the families of the dead, and another little something for the commanding officer. Money I spent willingly, to keep the enterprise running smoothly.
The result.
"Human. Explain to me what this is...!"
Two prisoners sat before me, snarling—prisoners who would soon be released and sent home.
I could have returned them as they were. But I had spent money on this, elven money though it was, and I meant to recoup the principal. I intended to wring even these two for every last drop of use.
A taste of heroin, and then send them on their way?
Not impossible. But there's no real profit in it.
Prisoners coming home pickled in the drug would only stoke Marcella's fury further, and there was nothing to gain by feeding the hostility of a woman already caught in the trap. She might even do something rash. So I decided to send the prisoners home clean.
I would, however, do a little talking before I let them go.
"Stop glaring. I am not releasing you out of the goodness of my heart. Even as I went around making my requests, I found myself wondering what in the world I was doing."
"You're saying you got us released...?"
"Because the elders of Medellin swallowed their pride and begged for your freedom. An elder by the name of Escenia came with a sack of money and even bowed her head. She said she could not bear to watch young warriors, not yet a hundred and fifty, die in a human country."
"......"
"I wanted to refuse. Then your High Elder contacted me and asked a second time—a being, from our perspective, little different from a king. By that point even I could not bring myself to refuse. So I wore out my shoes, and I got you freed."
"And why are you telling us this?"
"Because I was genuinely moved by those elders' devotion. It also occurred to me that we had not struggled against the elves for nothing. I thought you ought to know."
At that, the prisoners stared straight at me. A subtle solemnity had settled over them, and yet I could feel, clear as anything, how proud they were. Of course they were. In imperial terms, it was as if the Emperor himself had stepped in to save a mere junior officer or sergeant. A lie I had invented, naturally.
"If you have any sense of shame, I should think it right to offer the elders your thanks. Not that it is any of my business."
"Correct, human. It is none of your concern."
They spoke coldly, and yet color was returning to their faces. I had them well fed, dressed in clean clothes, and escorted in good order all the way to the crossing into the Great Forest.
Given how vicious relations between the Empire and the Great Forest had been, it was an unusually generous reception. But it was necessary.
This is how the Elder Council's authority rises.
The junkie elders. That council—every last one of them, or most—suspected of having fallen to heroin. I was not elevating their standing out of boredom. There was a reason. Before long those elders would have to step forward as the leadership of the Great Forest, and of the elven race itself, and enter into "negotiations" with the Britannia Empire.
From here on, I have to prepare for that.
Pickling the elves in heroin and walking away would have been easy, but spreading the drug was not my only aim. To bring the Great Forest to its knees without gun or blade, and thereafter to erase the very possibility of war—that was the goal.
"Contact Her Highness Victoria. There is something I must discuss."
Barely three weeks had passed since I arrived in the border city with the heroin. Even I had not expected it to move this fast. But the season of the harvest was drawing near.
Wouldn't war have been better?
The thought rose in Marcella unbidden, the moment she understood she had walked into a trap. It was not the first time the idea had occurred to her.
She had thought it often enough in the days when she locked wills with the elders who opposed total war, and when she argued with elves who offered the maddening suggestion that there must surely be some way to coexist with humans. Never, though, had it felt this desperate.
"Marcella. How do you intend to answer for this matter?"
The High Elder's inquisition. His face was strangely bright, as if he believed that at last he could sweep the obstruction aside. Even now he fidgeted with his pipe, and the elders beside him seemed to be quietly sneering at her.
The elders did not wound her anew. They did, however, scour away what little lingering affection remained. The elf who hurt her was someone else.
"Marcella! Why did you start this mess without even looking into it properly? Now my own position is impossible! I... I only followed along, knowing nothing, and now I'm to be treated as your accomplice. And not only me—the other elves as well...!"
Because now even elves who were not addicts were striking at her.
The price of mobilizing hundreds of elves to pressure the Elder Council had been greater than she expected—great enough to cast the finest warrior of the Great Forest down into the pit.
How did it come to this?
Marcella blinked and retraced the missteps that had brought her here. She could hardly believe that merits piled up over so long had, all at once, been rendered meaningless. And yet, once she began to retrace them, a great deal snagged at her conscience.
Could all of this really have been my doing?
A bitter smile rose as she swept her eyes over the elders, and she spoke in a complicated voice.
"I should never have drunk that lemon tea."
"What?"
"No. Thinking on it, I should have accepted when that human, Allan Madoff, offered to assign me a taster. Surely even Allan Madoff would not have wished to feed heroin to one of his own kind... ah. That man would have done it readily enough."
"Marcella. What nonsense is this...!"
The old ones scowled, but Marcella paid them no mind.
"Nor was it that I had no chance afterward. Had I destroyed every grain of the heroin the moment something felt wrong, that bitch Lurde would never have stolen it from me. And none of you would have touched heroin and lost your minds."
"Enough."
"I truly cannot fathom why I acted as I did."
Looking back now, they were decisions she could hardly comprehend. At the time Marcella herself had been half out of her mind, wracked by withdrawal. But that was no excuse. Had she fought through it with everything she had, she might have avoided the wrong choices, and she would never have been driven into a corner like this.
My weakness called down the catastrophe.
She could not escape the responsibility. Even so, there was something she had to say. From this point on, she might not even be given the chance to speak.
"But this one thing, I would have you understand. I only came to know it recently myself, but we are unmistakably under invasion. I could dress it in finer words, but invasion is the one that fits."
Invasion. Turn it over as she might, there was no more exact word.
"All of you. Once heroin has you in its thrall, you will want nothing but heroin. You will tell yourselves that you can quit whenever you set your minds to it. You will not. In the end, you will grant without judgment whatever the one who gives you the heroin demands."
Whatever that demand might be.
To press the appeal home, Marcella nearly added that the day would come when they would gladly surrender Mother World Tree herself if they were told to—and then she simply let it go.
Because even she found the image too extreme?
No. Because she realized there was scarcely an elf left who was listening to her.
It felt like the formal chance to speak granted to a condemned criminal. She did not feel wronged. That she had done wrong was, in itself, the truth: the crime of failing to stop the heroin, and the crime of letting her zeal to stop it run so far ahead that she failed to see through the human's trap. If that, too, was a crime, then it was a crime.
Marcella chewed on the bitterness, then addressed the High Elder.
"High Elder. I will accept, willingly, whatever judgment you pass for this matter. I have learned that to fight from within is impossible. I do have one request."
"What is it?"
She left it at that—short—and turned on her heel. The elves parted to either side.
Quite a few looked on her with pity. Not a single elf took her part. Most merely edged aside, afraid even of meeting her eyes, and Marcella fought to keep her composure as she left the place.
Naturally, no elf followed her.
The judgment on Marcella came several days later, after the prisoners—freed through the elders' devoted efforts—arrived in Medellin.
They were clean, and bore no mark of torture. The moment they arrived they even sought out the elders and thanked them through tears. It was achievement enough to raise the elders' authority high, and an elf who had intimidated such elders could not simply be left as she was.
At the end of their council, the elders proclaimed their judgment.
The office of Grand Warrior is hereby stripped from Marcella Udrina.
She shall confine herself in the Hohen District and reflect upon her conduct, for a term without limit.
Dismissal from office. And confinement.
The Hohen District, on the outskirts of Medellin, was not precisely a place of exile. It was simply where elves in the twilight of their years passed what life remained to them—elves whose blood was not fine enough for the eldership, and who had no wish to leave Medellin, whiling away the hours in comfort among their flowers. It was no place for Marcella, a youth of barely one hundred and ninety.
She did not rise against them.
Instead she took a single sword and quietly escaped Medellin.
She could not give up. Not like this.