by David Guymer
Fredric closed his eyes, tilting his head back until it touched stone, wishing he had lived through just about any time in history but this. “I cannot, in good conscience, arm men and women to serve me only to reward them with starvation. I cannot.”
“How can we be sure that our years of famine were not themselves the work of the Uthuk and their warlocks?” asked Salter, raising one prickly white eyebrow.
“Then send to Greyhaven for runemasters to find the bedevilment and cast it out,” Fredric cried, suddenly angry, for they had argued this before and would again. “Send to Vynelvale and the Cathedral of Kellos that the Disciples of the Living Flame might cleanse our fields, and from there to the Weeping Basin for the priests of Aris to bless the ashes with fecundity.” He bit his tongue, fighting down the bitterness of knowing that he and others had attempted all these courses and more. The land refused to yield. If it was sorcery that blighted them, as Beren feared, then it was something greater than the ability of the Uthuk to work, and of a similar order beyond the powers of mortal magi to undo.
It was as though the world itself rejected them.
Fredric slumped.
“Then what?” asked Urban, softly.
“I cannot pull my people from their lands. But perhaps I could take a detachment of soldiers and ride out in person.”
Salter looked mortified. “I would ardently recommend against that, my lord.”
“And I,” Trevin added. “Albeit in plainer words.”
“It would not be the first time I have led an army,” Fredric countered, a little too hotly.
“But if anything were to happen to you. With your daughter still so young…”
Fredric’s mouth twitched in frustration, but as Trevin had no doubt been expecting, knowing him as well as his own wife if not better, the appeal to his family found its mark.
“It is a bold suggestion,” said Trevin, in a mollifying tone. “But I fear it would do little good in any case. Take too few men and you would be a target for every would-be usurper that’s crawled out of the hills and dubbed themselves lord. Too many and they would melt away as though they were never there. And worse, you would be leaving Kellar looking very tempting indeed.”
“It would take an army,” said Urban. “A big one and probably more than one.” He produced another growl-sound that was as close as the lord-commander could come to acknowledging impotence, recognizing the fact that they were arguing one another round in circles. “Which we haven’t the manpower or the provision for. I know, I know.”
“I might advise sending Litiana Renata away with young Grace,” Salter murmured, whispering as though such defeatist talk might be heard above the tramping and bugling from the bailey beneath them. “I fear that things will only worsen before they improve. Whether through a peasant rebellion or, gods help us, an invasion from the Ru, I see no quick solution that does not end with Kellar besieged. Baroness Magrit would gladly take them in, I am sure, and her castle at Dhernas is but a short ride over still reasonable country. Or better yet convince the baroness to return to her family’s estates in Alben for a spell. Grace is an inquisitive girl: I am sure she would not resent the opportunity to board a galleon and visit her mother’s homelands, particularly if you frame it to her as an adventure. And would the Queen not herself be overjoyed at the chance to meet her granddaughter? Pleased enough to worry for the lands and title she is due to inherit through her father’s side?”
Fredric managed a smile. “Sly.”
“I live to be useful, my lord.”
“And you are. I understand you have already sent your own family to your half-brother in Highmont.” The chamberlain stammered for a moment before Fredric interrupted her. “I don’t hold it against you. I would do it myself in a heartbeat, but…” He hung his head and sighed. “If I were to pack away my household and send them west what message would that send? I would be saying that Kellar is unsafe even for my own family.”
He stared across the battlement. For a long while no one spoke.
There was precious little left to be said.
“Where then does that leave us?” said Brant, ill-tempered at any decision that counselled inaction.
“What do we do…?” Fredric whispered to himself. Then he lifted his gaze and spoke louder. “We send to our neighbors, and to the Citadel; we send to the dwarves at Thelgrim. We ask them again, no, we beg them for their aid.”
“They will say no,” said Salter. “They will say that a little banditry is Kell’s own affair. So long as it doesn’t cross their borders.”
“Then I will remind them what happened two hundred years ago in Otrim in the winter of 1662, the last time the barons made that argument.”
Salter smiled, clearly pleased that her tutelage in the histories had not gone entirely to waste.
Trevin shook his head. “They will still say no. They always say no.”
“Send the messages anyway,” said Fredric. “Maybe things will have got worse by the time they get there.”
Chapter Five
Trenloe the Strong
Hernfar Isle, the Borderlands
“Smell that?” said Dremmin as the Companions of Trenloe and their civilian train rumbled from the barbican tunnel and into Nordgard Castle. The dwarf took a deep breath and beat on her broad chest. “Smells like money.”
The courtyard about them was mud, scattered with straw, rutted by the wheels of heavy wagons and busy with sunken hoof prints. Thoroughfares had arisen that allowed them to wind their way around stacked crates and heaps of dung that had been in place for so long as to become permanent landmarks. Mangy-looking birds hopped from one leg to the other, eyeing the soldiers passing by on their horses like nobles turned out to watch the long walk of the condemned to the gallows.
“It doesn’t smell like that to me,” said Trenloe.
The dwarf tapped her forehead with one well-chewed finger. “That’s because I’m not sure there’s anyone entirely at home up there. Look around here. This is the only good crossing between Terrinoth and the Ru. There should be five times as many soldiers as there are.” She leant towards Trenloe and lowered her voice. “We could charge Dame Ragthorn twice what she’s promised.”
“We won’t, though.”
“Oh, won’t we?”
“No.”
Dremmin scowled. “She’d pay it. You’d better believe she’d pay it. We’d turn around and march right on back to Trast, thank you very much.”
“Dremmin…”
But the dwarf wasn’t listening. Her eyes were glittering and distant, her mind dreaming about gold. “Or maybe we’d just take the castle for ourselves, what do you think?”
“Dremmin!”
Trenloe was never sure if the dwarf was entirely serious when she made these sorts of suggestions, or if she just enjoyed teasing him.
“I’m not saying we’d keep it.” The dwarf’s attention snapped back, her manner becoming suddenly defensive. “Who’d want to live with their back ends hanging out over the Ru? We could ransom it or something.”
Trenloe sighed. “We’re not taking Dame Ragthorn’s castle.”
“Helka’s Eyes,” Dremmin muttered, fixing her eyes forward. “I should’ve left you in the army.”
“Smells like dung anyway,” said Bethan, the corporal trotting up from behind to join them.
Dremmin turned in her saddle. “Who asked you?”
Bethan shrugged. “It does smell like dung.”
“It’s a dungy country,” Dremmin agreed. “What do you expect?”
Looking back over their journey thus far, and as much as Trenloe might have wanted to argue the place’s unappreciated virtues, it was difficult to disagree. The downs had been desperately bleak with their endlessly rolling hills and scab-like heath, but the isles of Hernfar were somehow worse. The sun was a vague suggestion of something better be
yond the clammy mists, and the ground was so squalid it was possible to lose a horse up to its fetlocks if you were incautious. Hernfar was a boggy eyot, caught in the middle of the Lothan, its fords the fairest crossing between the baronies of Terrinoth to the west and the Ru Steppes to the east. It felt sometimes as though they had crossed some invisible boundary to pass out of Kell and arrive in a strange realm not entirely of the mortal plane at all. It was like one of the weirder songs that Bethan claimed to have learned from a drunken Latari about how the first elves had been tricked across the bridge of the Aenlong and into Mennara. Mist and mud had muted the clop of their horses’ hooves on the trail, and yet every step deeper had been shadowed by the sawing of insects, the belching of toads, and the crowing of wading birds.
Despite old Maeve’s assertions it had taken them three days.
With better kept roads, and without the refugees’ wagons to escort to safety, it was possible they might have made it in the one that had been promised, but Trenloe was uncertain even of that. He’d spent too much of the time looking over his shoulder. Dremmin had spent most of it complaining, and she had not been the only one. Even the Gwellan townsfolk seemed to have found the sight of Nordgard’s mist-wreathed battlements and crumbling walls a disheartening end to a long journey.
“Aren’t you from somewhere around here?” asked Bethan, wearing a bright smile and quite alone in her rugged good humor. “I know you’re not originally from Trast.”
“Thelgrim is far to the north of here and high in the Dunwarr,” Dremmin grunted, as though divulging some great secret of her people which all in earshot ought consider themselves greatly esteemed by the dwarves for having heard. “Compared to this dung pile it might as well be in Ghom.”
Trenloe raised a hand and clicked his tongue for a halt as soldiers in the purple and gold of Kell emerged like wraiths from the mist to greet them. They walked with the peculiar gait of people who had had nothing to do yesterday and did not expect to have anything more important to do tomorrow. At their unhurried direction the wagons ground past the idling mercenaries and away into the mist.
“I’m glad this lot are on our side,” Dremmin muttered.
“They just need a song.” said Bethan.
Trenloe turned away from them, not exactly keen to hear more, as Maeve rolled by in her wagon. The old woman leant from her raised seat in the front. “Thank you, Trenloe, for everything you have done for us. I only wish I could have persuaded more to join us. I fear for what will become of them if the Greyfox is not stopped.”
“I’ll see that she is,” said Trenloe.
Maeve’s face creased into a warm smile. “You are a true hero, Trenloe. If ever you have the need, or the time, come seek us out in the castle. We of Gwellan will be at your service.”
“Promise her nothing,” Dremmin muttered once she had driven out of earshot. “We’re lucky to be finally rid of those beggars.”
“It would be nice to be paid once in a while,” Bethan mused.
“We helped her folk because it was on our way regardless, and kindness costs us nothing,” said Trenloe. “And because it was the right thing to do.”
“And who’s to judge what’s right and what isn’t?” said Dremmin.
Trenloe frowned.
The dwarf’s question sounded like one of those clever riddles that were meant to seem complicated when you first heard them but were actually fiendishly simple once you thought about them for a little bit.
“Everyone,” he said.
Dremmin looked nonplussed by that answer. Then she started to laugh. Trenloe was not sure why.
“Are… are you Trenloe the Strong?”
A group of soldiers approached. All wore purple surcoats over gilt-edged breastplates, steel vambraces gleaming wetly from their arms. The livery was dirty and blotched with mold. The steel could do with an armorer’s polish. But Trenloe was impressed all the same. There was a prominent school of military thought in Trast that a soldier really ought to carry a weapon, and so Baron Rault tended to provide his enlistees with at least a spear, but they were lucky to have armor unless they happened to have been wearing it when they joined. The leader of the group, as declared by the golden epaulette on his puffed gambeson sleeve and by the fact that he was the one who had spoken, carried his helmet in his hand, smoothing his hair back with the other hand as though nervous in front of a lady.
“You’re talking to a six and a half-foot-tall man riding on a farmhorse,” said Dremmin. “Of course he’s Trenloe the Strong.”
The soldier stammered for a moment, then pulled his helmet back on over his head. That seemed to steady him.
“Follow me then, sir. If you please.”
Civilization had withdrawn from Nordgard. That much was obvious wherever Trenloe and his Companions looked as they were escorted further into the castle. Something had driven it back. The bustle of the gatehouse, however muted and coarse it might have been, dwindled quickly and soon became entirely absent. The odd apparition shuffled through the cloying fog like a ghoul in search of bones to gnaw. Soldiers? Civilian laborers? They never drew close enough to the column of riders for Trenloe to be sure. Mist concealed everything beyond the occasional clang of a smithy’s hammer or the squeal of a grindstone wheel. He had never been blessed with a tremendous sense of direction and very soon after losing sight of the gatehouse Trenloe was thoroughly and irredeemably lost.
Fortunately Marns, as the sergeant assigned to be their escort had introduced himself, turned out to be an affable guide. As their horses clopped mutedly from one dilapidated pile of dark granite to the next he would point out a flicker of firelight where breakfast could be found, where the latrines were, how to find them and (almost as importantly) how to avoid them when the fog came in thick. From him, they soon learned where and how the castle laundress could be hired, from whom luxuries like beer, bedding, and new socks could be bartered in exchange for silver and, lastly in the minds of all, where the armorers and smithies were.
Trenloe did not expect to be able to retrace his steps to find any of these locations again, but Dremmin had an innate directional sense that he had trusted his life to more than once.
“And here we are,” said Marns with a flourish having led them on a tour of the outer wards for about forty minutes. “Your new home.”
Trenloe squinted into the steadily thickening fog. Large, blockish shapes squatted in the murk like river trolls.
“Stables,” Dremmin gruffed, barely even bothering to look up.
Marns dismounted from his horse. Trenloe and the Companions followed suit, passing over their reins to hostlers who came trotting in from the still half-recognizable stable yards to take them. Trenloe looked around, slowly closing and reopening his eyes in the vain hope of making the buildings out, as Rusticar was led away with the promise of food and bedding.
Bethan reached into a pocket for a silver coin embossed with Fortuna’s sign and clutched it tightly in her hand. “Is this what the world is like in the Charg’r Wastes, once you go far enough into the great east and the world disappears into the nothing of Syraskil’s scales?”
Dremmin gave a bark of laughter. “No.”
Irritation displaced the young corporal’s superstitious fears. “How would you know?”
“Terrinoth is a young country. It’s no secret that my own culture hails from far out to the east. As did yours. Or so I’ve read.”
“What have you read?” Bethan pressed, as avid a reader as she was a hoarder of stories and a singer of songs, but at that the dwarf became tight-lipped and would say no more.
“How long have you been here?” Trenloe asked Marns.
“A year and a half. I think.” He pointed to the sky. Trenloe looked up. The fog was so thick it could have been a gray day or a brightly mooned night. The farmer’s son in Trenloe shivered at being so divorced from the cycles of the day. “You lose track.
”
“How do you bear it without going insane?” said Bethan.
The soldier grinned at her. “Are you sure we do?”
“You shouldn’t joke about such things,” Bethan shivered.
The man laughed. “But how then would we keep from going insane?”
“Where is everyone?” Trenloe asked, turning back from his fruitless survey of their surrounds.
“Sent home.” Marns shrugged. “We don’t complain. The garrison at Nordgard Castle has fared better than most. Or so I hear.”
“Why is that?”
“Strategic importance.” The solider leant conspiratorially in. “Most of those that serve in Hernfar didn’t exactly choose to be here. If you catch my meaning.”
Trenloe straightened.
He disapproved of penal service on principle. A garrison of murderers, sheep rustlers and thieves might have had the wits to choose the baron’s colors over the noose but they weren’t folk that Trenloe would willingly entrust with a sword.
Oblivious to his thinking, Marns stepped away to beckon for another soldier.
At the sight of Trenloe the newcomer stumbled, looking up and managing a cursory salute.
“This is Bannit,” said Marns. “He’ll show you where you’re to be barracked.”
“Go with him,” Dremmin grunted at Bethan. “And don’t take the first leaky old hovel they shove you in. There’s hardly a shortage of space around here.”
The Kellar soldier and the corporal hurried off together, hunching as though the mist bore some great weight or portent of menace that would press down on them the further they went. Marns turned back to Trenloe.
“For you, sir, if I may. Dame Ragthorn extends an invitation for you to dine with her at the keep. As soon as your company is settled and your affairs here are in order.”