The Shield of Daqan

by David Guymer

  It was a strange thing, to harbor such hatred towards a woman he had never met. Hate was a strong word, and it was one that Trenloe did not lightly ascribe to himself, but he hated Blood Sister Ne’Krul. She had been the author of the battle that had resulted in the massacre of his Companions, and who had commanded the destruction of Nordgard Castle and with it the death of his best and oldest friend. Every cruelty he had witnessed on his northward trek in pursuit of her had been afflicted with her blessing. He hated her, and yet despite every real injury that she had done him he was not entirely convinced it was vengeance that drove him now. Perhaps it was his unfamiliarity with the feeling. But he wasn’t sure. All he knew was that Ne’Krul needed to be stopped.

  “I wanted to thank you,” said S’yarr, softly.

  “For what?”

  “For never asking if you could trust me.”

  “It never occurred to me.”

  S’yarr smiled suddenly. “How far away from home are you?”

  “A long way.”

  “What’s it like?”

  Trenloe thought. “Warmer. Greener. Flatter. Trast is all fields and farmland, from Summersong to Brightvale, up to where the Lorim’s Gate Mountains strike up out of the flats. And not a bit like the Dunwarr. The Lorim’s Gate are gentle-sloped and clad in trees all the way to their crests.”

  “It sounds beautiful.”

  “It is.”

  “Why aren’t you there?”

  Trenloe shrugged and bent to pick up the cart. S’yarr took up her spear.

  Someone had to be here.

  And if not Trenloe the Strong, then who?

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Kurt

  The Forest Road, East Kell

  The woodland frayed like an old coat, giving out to hill country, gray and still and with a thin tatter of mist at the sleeves even at noon. He knew they called the south the breadbasket of Kell. He’d always assumed it to be a tasteless joke.

  Now he’d seen the north.

  He looked left, which had to be west, and then right. Nothing in either direction. Just road. It was wide and well paved, with hexagonal stones, a raised curb for passing wagons and a ditch for drainage. Here and there, creeping buttercup and dandelion stalks poked through gaps in the paving. For the most part though it was well laid and well kept. That was a good sign. Had to be.

  He turned left again, west, and ran a short way down the road. He stopped when he ran out of breath.

  Still nothing.

  “This is it,” he muttered to himself. “Got to be.”

  They’d lost Andira’s trail almost at once after they’d left the Greyfox’s glade, and never got it back. Hamma talked a good fight, but it very soon became obvious that the old knight had no idea at all where the hero had gone and was simply using Kurt for the ride. He still wasn’t sure why he hadn’t dumped the miserable old man and gone without him, except, maybe, to prove to himself, and to Elben, which of them was the better man. Not that it had yet dawned on the boy that they had a new travelling companion. He slept most of the time, wandering in and out of consciousness, stirring only for increasingly brief and desperate spells to scream that it hurt and to beg Kurt for his mother. He was asleep now. Kurt hated himself for being glad.

  “This is the road to Castle Kellar,” he said, louder, as if that made him surer. “If we follow it from here then we can still catch up to Andira.”

  “Damned Andira.”

  Kurt turned to look back as Hamma slid himself off Listred’s back. He managed a few tottering paces before collapsing in an embittered heap on the grassy verge. He lay on his back and didn’t move.

  “Damned Andira…”

  Torn between cajoling the knight back onto the horse one more time or finally leaving him to rot at the last step, Kurt swore and started back.

  “You need to get up.”

  “You need to leave me alone.”

  “You’re going to just lie there and die on a bit of road in Nowhere County, Kell?”

  Hamma looked as though he wanted to laugh, but hadn’t the strength for it. The wound in his chest was still bubbling air every so often and his breath was rattling. He bared his teeth at the scudding clouds as though he knew something they didn’t and was enjoying holding it over the aloof fools in their precious sky. He closed his eyes. “I like it here. Better than the forest. Better than a lot of places I’ve seen men die in.”

  “Is that it then? I thought you were tough.”

  “The toughest you’ll ever run into.” He opened his eyes, and for a brief moment they shone like steel. “Roth’s Vale. The Mistlands. Tanglewood. Sudanya. Anyone else would have given up and died years ago. But not me…” He growled and closed his eyes. “I gave up everything for her, you know. Everything. I gave my lands to the temple of Kellos and my own children disowned me. But I believed in her cause. She was so… righteous. I thought we were going to save the world from the demon king.” He coughed, face marred with pain. “Damned Andira. This is what comes of following a hero. Even for a man like me.”

  “Shut up,” said Kurt. “Sarb isn’t you. Don’t you dare try and make me feel pity for you now.”

  “East,” Hamma whispered.

  “What?”

  The knight’s eyes were still closed, but with his hand he was patting the surface of the road. “East. Coming.”

  Kurt looked up and glanced right. He couldn’t see anything. An odd twinkle in the mist perhaps, or a faint murmur on the wind.

  “I’m sorry…” Hamma sighed. “About your son.”

  “You don’t know he’s dead.”

  The knight made a vague gesture that he didn’t elaborate on. “I was… not kind to mine.”

  “You did what you thought was right at the time.”

  Hamma smiled. “Damned… Andira…”

  He breathed out.

  The smile stayed fixed. His eyes stared unblinking at the sky.

  Kurt gave the knight a nudge.

  He hung his head over the one man in all of Terrinoth he would never have pictured himself grieving for. The Turning put everything on its head, it seemed.

  With a sniff he stood and walked quickly back to Elben and Listred. His son was still asleep. He lay forward with his face in the horse’s mane, his arms hanging either side of his neck. His son’s entire shoulder was black and sweet-smelling. A solitary fly buzzed over it, disturbing Listred even if it did not seem to trouble Elben in the least, the big horse periodically twitching its ears to try to shoo it.

  “Elben?” Kurt gave him a gentle shake.

  The boy swayed limply, side to side. His skin was soft, cool.

  Kurt pulled his hand away.

  He blinked, ashamed that he had no tears left for his son. But his heart was empty. It had been raided and ransacked for grief too many times and now, when he wanted it most, there was nothing.

  With one hand on Listred’s back he glanced west. He could probably still make it to Kellar, but he couldn’t see what the point of that would be now. Katrin gone. Elben gone. Sibhard gone. The bow left on the battlefield surely proved that even if he’d found no body, and Hamma, who surely knew better than anyone, had clearly thought so. He didn’t know what he could take from Andira Runehand now except the satisfaction of punching her in her heroic mouth. The thought did not enthuse him. He couldn’t move himself even that much.

  As though dragged by a counterweight, he turned back east.

  There was definitely something there now as Hamma had seen. A clear twinkle. More than a murmur.

  He drew Hamma’s heavy sword.

  The old knight was right. Nothing good ever came from chasing off after heroes. And this really was as good a place to die as any.

  Chapter Forty

  Andira Runehand

  Castle Kellar, North Kell

 
Some scholars believed that when a person slept, their thoughts travelled abroad of their bodies to the Empryean and touched the Sphere of Dreams. Andira did not know if that was true, but she was certain it was not where her mind walked then. Her dreams were of terror and of torment, and for once the pain she felt on waking was less than that she had experienced while asleep. She came to with a groan, her eyelids fluttering, and felt for a weapon that was not there amidst the crumpled bedsheets that lay over her. It felt as though a beast of fire and brass was standing on her hand, grinding its heel into her palm.

  A hand touched her shoulder. A voice spoke her name.

  “Lady Runehand…”

  She looked up.

  An old woman stood over her, with the frail elderly look of seafront glass. Her long silvery hair was threaded with a handful of fine jewels, a brocade gown with a high collar drawn up to her chin as though to keep out a chill. Only then did Andira realize that on top of everything else she felt cold. She turned her head against a flat pillow. A sliver of light entered through a tall slit window. The walls were stone, and bare of all but dew. Thyme and rosemary had been tied in bunches and scattered across the floor to ward off sickly odors, though they gave off little smell of their own in the cold, while the door had been thrown open to better air the convalescent chamber. More restorative by far, Andira felt, were the sounds of bustle rattling from the corridor beyond, armored soldiers and servants in the baron’s purple livery hurrying to and fro past her door.

  “The healers told me you were well enough to be woken,” the old woman said.

  Andira turned from the door. “You know my name?”

  “Your followers told us.”

  “They live?”

  “Some. Many fell in the battle with the Uthuk.”

  Andira nodded absently. “Their victory will outlive us all.”

  “Your elven jester survived.”

  Andira smiled. “I never doubted it. Surviving, I think, is her special gift.”

  “Then you know who she is?”

  “Does that upset you?”

  The woman looked uncomfortable. “No. Not really. I don’t think you could do anything to upset anyone around here for a while. Rest assured that the Greyfox is being looked after. As for the rest of your following, most of them have been conscripted by General Brant for the rebuilding, but that is a conversation for later. You have been asleep for days. You must be famished. Allow me to summon you some breakfast before taking you to see the baron.” She reached for the small bell that sat on the bedside table.

  “Days?” said Andira, sitting up painfully. She looked down, into the palm of her hand. The lines of the rune throbbed. Cold and blue. It had never looked so listless, so tired. Not even after her battle with Prutorn. The draconic emblem, the sword and shield that she believed the lines to represent, were only slightly more vivid in her flesh than the bluish threads of the veins that surrounded them. Saving this castle had cost her so much, and in time not least of all. “Take me to the baron now.”

  “Ordinarily the baron would be supervising the reconstruction efforts, but at this time of the morning he would be–”

  “Now. Please.”

  “Even heroes need to eat.”

  Andira narrowed her eyes on the woman. “Who are you, exactly?”

  The old woman gave a nervous cough. “Forgive my manners. I have been at or by your bedside this whole time and spoken with all your companions so I feel almost as though I know you well. I am Lady Salter. Lady-Chamberlain of Castle Kellar. As the hero of the day, it would be appropriate for you to call me Beren, should you wish to be informal.”

  Andira dipped her head to indicate that she just might.

  “Do you feel strong enough for a walk?”

  “I can fight.”

  Beren shook her head and gave a fragile laugh. “Heroes. You’re all the same, whatever the age. You have fought and won enough already to earn yourself the freedom of Kellar thrice over. Even for your half-elf friend. Walking will be perfectly adequate for the time being. However…” She cleared her throat, raised her eyebrows, and nodded diffidently towards Andira’s bedsheets. Andira peeled them off and looked down at herself. She was dressed only in her underclothes, a padded arming jacket, and a pair of grimy white socks of Aymhelin silk, unchanged since Frest. She had presumably been removed from her armor while she slept. She owned little else by way of attire.

  “I need to see him now,” she said, and folded her legs defiantly out of the bed.

  Beren colored slightly and managed to stammer “Very well,” before being ushered out of the door and into the passageway. A surcoated servant swerved smartly to avoid her, as though accustomed to such obstacles appearing suddenly in his path. A pair of chatting maids carrying soiled linens parted in turn to admit him through, curtseying neatly to the lady-chamberlain and her guest, before carrying on with their burdens, and their conversation, further down the corridor. “The castle has become a little… crowded since the rest of the city was destroyed.”

  “I had heard the baron was generous.”

  “He is.”

  Beren gestured down the corridor with a courtly flourish.

  Andira strode on.

  “Look at them,” she said in disbelief, as servants of all ranks and duties buffeted them in both directions. Soldiers stood guard over every door. “They act as though the world has suddenly returned to normal.”

  “A victory has been won here.”

  “The first sortie has been challenged,” Andira corrected her. “That is all that has been done so far. These people should be girding themselves for the nightmare that is going to follow it. Not… laundering linens.”

  The chamberlain looked ahead and ventured nothing more.

  They came to the door a few minutes later.

  Heavily armed knights stood to either side of the stout wooden frame. The elaborate plates of their armor had been etched with gold and engraved to appear as though feathered, the pauldrons flared into the wings of yeron in flight. Fluted helmets, lengthened in facsimile of the face of a golden horse, turned to look down the corridor as the two women strode towards them. If they were at all perturbed by Andira’s uncourtly attire, their discipline did not allow them to show it, unlike the third sentry at the door who stood so sharply she knocked over the stool she had been sitting on and almost drew the sword from its scabbard. Her mail was overlain by a heavy tabard bearing heraldry marking her as one of the baron’s personal heralds. A small trumpet lay in a leather pouch on the opposite hip to her sword.

  The chamberlain walked towards the herald, whispered a few quick words in her ear, and then turned back to Andira.

  “Is Lady your official title, or an honorific?”

  Andira shrugged. “I do not know.”

  Beren regarded her quizzically, then turned to the herald and shrugged too.

  The younger woman puffed her cheeks, as though worse things happened in wartime, and pushed open the doors. The Knights of the Yeron bowed their heads as Beren and Andira swept between them.

  “The Lady Andira Runehand, Dragonslayer of Kell, and the Lady Chamberlain Beren Salter,” the herald announced, dropping to one knee and scraping the floor with an elaborate bow.

  The chamber might have been a larger version of the one in which Andira had awoken. It was better furnished, but not greatly so, a small cupboard and a dresser against one wall and a set of tapestries that came as a pair, but the majority of the space was taken by the large four-poster bed and the grave-looking crowd gathered around it.

  Baron Fredric she recognized immediately. He looked older than she had imagined. From his benevolent reputation, she had expected something other than the worn-out campaigner in his middle forties who sat despondently in his state robes before her now. The burns to his face had mended a little over the intervening days, the skin peeled and beard
less where they had been. A girl of similarly dark complexion sat on the chair beside him. She was dressed in a child’s armor, padded felt and bright gold heraldry with purple hose, and a face full of cares that she seemed also to have inherited from her father. This, Andira guessed, was the young heir apparent, Grace, the daughter of Baron Fredric and the Alben princess Litiana Renata.

  An older, grayer, harder man sat nearby but not too near. His hair was a frizz of steel gray, a pair of bushy sideburns framing a battered face. He was still in his breastplate. The Owl of Kell had been almost entirely scuffed away. A drawn sword, an uncompromising length of edged metal, sat on the chair between himself and his baron as if reserving it for a better man. General Brant, Andira assumed.

  The rest of the crowd had the distracted look of healers with news they did not wish to be the bearers of. Instead, they muttered to one another about light, humors, and beneficial lunar phases, busying themselves with herbal titers or arguing over the opened pages of Loriman or Ghomish treatises on natural medicine.

  The baron looked up. His eyes ghosted over Andira’s state of partial undress, then appeared to blink it out of mind. “Your followers say you are a healer.”

  “When the circumstances demand it of me,” said Andira.

  “My doctors say that Litiana is well, but she will not wake. Furthermore her legs were broken under the dragon’s fall and, they warn me, are beyond the power of human medicine to restore.” Grace squeezed her father’s hand. “If she was never to walk again I would not grieve: I would thank all the gods and commission a temple to Aris here in Castle Kellar that she lived, but… can you do more and heal her, Lady Runehand?”

  “I am still weary…” Andira began.

  One of the healers, their senior judging by his wispy white beard and supercilious manner, muttered something disparaging about faith healers and charlatans to his apprentice.