Chapter 674: War Orphans
Standing to the side as Ashlynn organized the impromptu tribunal, Tiernan tugged on Isabell’s sleeve before nodding in the direction of the edge of camp and gesturing for her to follow so they could speak in relative privacy.
"You were much closer to her than I ever was," the thickly muscled iron monger said once they stood on the edge of the dancing golden light cast by the bonfire at the center of the camp. "It’s really her? She seems... She seems very different from how I remember her from the few times we’ve met. It hasn’t been that long for someone to change that much, has it?" Tiernan asked in hushed tones, barely speaking above a whisper.
"You’ve known too much peace in your life, my friend," Isabell said, resting a hand on Tiernan’s muscular forearm and speaking without taking her eyes off Ashlynn. "You’ve never met a war-orphan, have you? Someone who had their entire world shattered in blood and fire when they were too young and too powerless to do anything about it," she said as the reflection of the bonfire danced across her eyes.
"Lady Ashlynn reminds me a bit of the young women who tried to join the prince’s army after his uncle’s men burned their villages to the ground and set fire to their fields to prevent the prince from collecting their crops to feed his army," the woman once known as the Engineer of Destruction said as her gaze grew distant. After all, she’d left behind more than a few war-orphans of her own during that bitter, bloody war.
"They wanted to fight?" Tiernan said, shocked at the notion of women who had been through something so horrific trying to turn themselves into soldiers in a war. "Wouldn’t it be better to flee somewhere safe? Somewhere far away from the war?" he asked, trying to imagine what his wife would do, or his children, if anything ever happened to Blackwell City.
Hopefully, they would all escape long before a war could ever threaten them, but if they couldn’t, and if the worst came to pass, he hoped that they could at least find safety afterwards. In his mind, even though he wasn’t a soldier, he was a strong man, and he wouldn’t hesitate to stand in the way of anything that tried to harm his family. So long as they could escape, it would be worth laying down his own life so they could keep theirs. As a husband and a father, he couldn’t accept anything less of himself, but the idea that his wife or daughters would then come back to fight... It was too horrifying for words.
"You don’t understand," Isabell said, shaking her head. "They didn’t want to fight, they wanted to kill. Half of them didn’t even care if they survived so long as they could take a few of the men responsible for their suffering with them when they died," she said, pursing her lips as she watched the man Ashlynn had called ’Constable Daithi’ and the one named Eamon as they dragged a sodden and stumbling Daithi back to the light of the camp.