The Raike Box Set

by Jackson Lear

  The sails were hoisted up in a hurry, the ropes gnawing against the wooden pulleys. We glided forward in near silence. One sailor scooped up a lassoed length of rope and rested one foot on the bow, ready to throw the rope overboard. Two other sailors climbed to the side, their oars ready to push against the jetty to maneuver us into position.

  “Hold on,” said Torunn.

  He wasn’t kidding. I was expecting a slow deceleration. We instead thumped to a stop and most of us land-lovers slipped off balance. Then the waves bounced back, jostling us from side to side and catching anyone who was too quick to release their grip by surprise.

  Lieutenant Loken caught me, held on until I was able to grab onto something solid, and didn’t say a word. The boat settled. We disembarked.

  Towering trees surrounded us. The land rose in sharp banks and boulders. You wouldn’t want to jog down that side of the inlet.

  Alysia pulled the hood of her cloak free.

  “Not yet, my lady,” cautioned Loken.

  “I’m boiling in this thing.”

  “I apologize, but we are still in enemy territory.”

  “These are the people we came to see,” said Alysia.

  “But we still don’t know who betrayed us. Please, I need you to stay as hidden as possible until we reach Agnarr.”

  Alysia grumbled. Pulled her cloak up over her head. Murmured something about sweating like a pig.

  We helped the more severely wounded to the ground, chopped some of the branches and latticed them into stretchers. One of the sailors plodded off to trumpet our arrival. By the time we got Helga’s body off-loaded we were met by a uniquely short man. Eye-height with Alysia. He wore a dull gray knitted cap that was full of holes, a faded blue knitted top that was also full of holes, and tattered trousers caked in mud that themselves were the result of a terrible dye job. Even I was embarrassed about his hand-me-downs. Still, it was impressive that he wasn’t dying of pneumonia, given that I wore more in the summer hundreds of miles south of here than he seemed to wear with winter virtually upon us.

  He mumbled something that seemed like, “Is it true?”

  The first mate nodded, explained. Shorty took the news to heart. Perhaps it was the death of Agnarr’s son. Perhaps it was the loss of the captain. The first mate extended his arm out towards us, doing his best to give Alysia a solid introduction. “Eh, Torunn?”

  Torunn hurried to the side to help translate.

  Alysia smiled warmly. Extended both hands to shake Shorty’s. “It’s a pleasure.”

  More thick-accented questioning.

  “This is all of us,” said Alysia. “We lost some of ours while trying to escape the castle. Are we able to bring our injured into the village?”

  Shorty nodded a, ‘yeah, no problem’.

  Loken looked to Wilbur and Odalis, two members of the cavalry, to carry their dead companion.

  The first set of buildings we encountered did not fill us with much confidence. Small plumes of smoke rose from grassy mounds in the ground. A single rickety door held its place above a set of wonky stone steps. Nearby were another handful of homes built into the ground with A-frame points jutting out the top, all covered in grass or dirt, all with no light from the outside that we could see.

  “How far away are we from Faersrock?” asked Alysia.

  “This is it,” said Torunn, with a hesitant wave. “M-Mikael says it looks different in south but remember winters here kill people. You can’t build home like yours and live here in it all year. Half year, maybe, but when snow starts to fall you see all your windows and …” He trailed off, mumbling to the rest of the crew.

  “Atrium,” mumbled Mikael, from the stretcher.

  “Yes,” said Torunn. “Your atriums in south will kill you here if you built them.”

  We passed our first wooden building, the timber black enough that it might have survived a fire. Larger than the others and built with a couple of windows, but heavy duty shutters were locked in place, blocking out all of the light. No plume of smoke rose from this one.

  “Who lives there?” asked Alysia.

  “That’s church,” grunted Torunn.

  A call came from up ahead, three short words I didn’t understand, but the volume was clear enough. “Foreigners coming in!”

  After another hundred yards we found the lookout: a kid about eleven years old on a platform built between two trees. A rope ladder was pulled up next to him. He looked down at us, a bow in his hand and a careful squint in his eye.

  Shorty waved a point towards him.

  “His son,” said Torunn.

  “How far until we meet Agnarr?” asked Alysia.

  “One mile,” said Torunn.

  Loken glanced back at me. “Everyone keep going. Raike? I need a word.” Loken came to a stop. I did the same. Alysia slowed and remained ten yards away. Zara too. The troops trudged forward, following the exhausted crew. None of them dared to look me or Loken in the eye. When we were relatively alone, Loken turned to me. “You disobeyed a direct order from Miss Kasera Lavarta and from me as well. You forced us into conflict and as a result we had to leave one of our own behind. This is unacceptable.”

  “We came to depose Draegor.”

  “We had a plan and you deviated from it.”

  “Our plan went to shit the moment we were ambushed.”

  “Yes, and you were there when we came up with a new one, weren’t you?”

  He had me there. “Given what was happening at the time I made a decision that ended up saving Alysia’s life. We can now return to our original plan.”

  “You don’t seem to grasp what this conversation is about.”

  “Deposing Draegor.”

  “No. The team.” Loken seemed to bore into my soul. “I gave you a chance in that dungeon to prove yourself. You know what you did? You escaped and left us there.”

  “You knew the way out.”

  “That mercenary queen of yours? She helped you out. You didn’t help us. How does it look when one of the most experienced people among us just walks off? You spent weeks training us for exactly this kind of situation but you care so little about the team that you abandoned us the first chance you got. How is anyone supposed to trust an honorless thug who leaves his own people to take care of a personal vendetta?”

  Credit where credit is due, he did actually get my pulse going with that one.

  Loken was far from done. “I need to know: when push comes to shove are you going to be there for us or for yourself?”

  “I can toe the line.”

  Loken squinted back at me. “From now on you’re going to obey Miss Kasera Lavarta’s orders exactly. If she’s not here then you follow my orders. You will not pick and choose what part of these orders to follow when it suits you. When we return to Erast you and I will be talking to General Kasera about your behavior up here. Do you understand?”

  “I do.”

  “Good. Don’t put us in jeopardy again.” Loken turned away. Walked off.

  Alysia and Zara remained.

  “My lady?”

  “Thank you, Lieutenant. Zara will escort me from here.”

  With one final glare coming my way, Loken went after the rest of the vanguard.

  I approached Alysia with some degree of caution. “I like him.”

  “Really?”

  “Not at this very moment, no, but he’s good at his job and handles personality conflicts in private, so for that … yeah.”

  “He’s right,” said Alysia.

  “I know. But two weeks of training together does not create a well-oiled team.”

  “Auron told me that even after months at the fort you were still very much a loner.”

  Zara cleared her throat to encourage us get a move on. Alysia waved her hand along the pathway. “I need your advice.”

  I must’ve given her one hell of a surprised look.

  “You were expecting me to chew you out?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Well,
I spent all of last night going back and forth with every argument I could come up with about why it was wrong to kill Draegor. It wasn’t until I started talking it over with Auron this morning that something dawned on me.”

  “The same Auron who is still in Anglaterra?”

  “Trust me, I wasn’t saying anything out loud and there was no ghost involved. He said if my father came here to depose a king and found an opportunity, he might’ve done the same thing as you.” She continued staring at the ground, being careful not to slip in any of the mud. “I thought I knew soldiers pretty well. I’ve been surrounded by them my whole life. I thought I knew senators and lawyers and governors well, too. Yet just when I think I know how to do my job like an experienced professional – who to trust, what they mean, who to avoid, when to push for something and when to back down – something comes along and slaps me in the face. I go back to being convinced that I don’t know anything about what I’m doing, that I should know more and that I should be better. I didn’t realize it until I heard my own husband’s voice in my head but I grew up surrounded by soldiers and senators and the like while they were not doing their job. They were certainly dressed for it and they would tell me enough stories so that I thought I knew what to expect, but hearing about it and actually doing it … I had this whole trip planned. Everything was under control. I even had a plan for what to do if we were ambushed by Draegor.”

  “You did?”

  “Of course. My father refused to hand over the vanguard until he was sure that I had a plan for what to do if the worst happened. I had a plan for what to do if someone else got to us, if we were intercepted by another imperial army who refused to let us past … I spent months working on this. On the morning we left my father told me that he had sent Auron the authorization to bring you along with us. ‘Just in case,’ he said. So yeah, I’m going to assume that he knows you well enough to know that if everything went wrong and you saw a chance to make this whole thing still succeed you would take it.” She spied me carefully. “This does not mean you’re in the clear. Loken is still right.”

  “I understand. You said something about needing my advice?”

  “Yeah.” She uttered a heavy sigh. “Like it or not, the senate is now going to find out about our incursion into the north and I will face a summons. Coming here without permission is manageable. So is explaining our ambush by Draegor’s people. I can even justify our fairly spectacular escape from the castle. The problem is the coup. All it takes is for one senator to believe that we caused the coup ourselves and an inquiry will be launched. Those things take years to resolve and are known to bankrupt families and end careers. Senators love them. They can’t get enough of all the exposed secrets their rivals thought they had hidden away. And trust me – out of six hundred senators there are quite a few of them who don’t like the Kaseras so an inquiry is definitely going to happen.”

  “Don’t high-born families do this sort of thing all the time?”

  “They do. And most of them get away with it because they are already members of the senate. We’re not. If this goes well for us it will certainly put us higher on that list for when one of them dies and leaves an empty seat. If it goes badly, General Kasera might be bumped down to Commander Kasera or forced into early retirement. These are his troops after all, and I’m speaking to northern kings and nobles with my family’s authority.”

  “You want me to tell you how to clean this up?”

  “And how to do so within the next mile.”

  “It sounds like your only hope is to go with overwhelming victory.”

  “Even though it’s been nothing but a disaster?”

  “Man, you really need a swift talker on your side. You weren’t ambushed by Draegor’s people, they were the ones you were supposed to meet up with. You couldn’t get any messages to Draegor himself so you went through Agnarr and he passed them along on your behalf. You were not a prisoner but a well received guest. You were given your own stateroom and your escorts were well looked after, kept warm, and fed. You learned that the alliance with the vampires was not what Draegor wanted but was one he had been forced into by a sizeable number of nobles after years of underwhelming harvests and starvation. They wanted to reclaim Galinnia but couldn’t do it without the vampires help. Razoz and his people would keep our armies busy while the warlords of the north claimed victory over their former lands. You offered an olive branch to Draegor. You made him see that the only reason his nobles had grown so powerful was because of Ispar’s trade quarantine, but if that was lifted then his nobles would no longer be able to legally raid our lands – legal by their laws, not ours.

  “Unfortunately, the nobles in question saw you as a threat. They harassed you for bearing your father’s name and their anger could not be contained. We all know their berserker temper is legendary, right? During a wild confrontation their treachery was exposed. Most troubling of all was their lack of foresight. They were convinced that Ispar would run with their tail between their legs but we know otherwise. We would retake Galinnia and then crush the invaders. There would be no stopping us. Draegor would see his kingdom destroyed. He couldn’t let that happen. He also couldn’t let a lady of Ispar die while staying as a guest in his own home. With the utmost bravery he got us all out of the castle. The last thing we saw of Draegor was half a dozen nobles stabbing him to death and turning against us. We ran, losing two in the process but doing what we could to get you to safety.”

  Alysia nodded weakly. “So why are we now in Faersrock meeting with Agnarr?”

  “Because with Draegor gone you saw an opportunity to put a pro-Ispar noble on the throne. It was too good of a chance to pass up.”

  “You’re saying that Draegor and Agnarr were allies?”

  “Draegor didn’t have many, but Agnarr was among his most trusted.”

  “Even though Draegor had Agnarr’s son thrown off the top of the castle.”

  “That was the doing of his treacherous nobles – forcing Draegor to toe the line by killing the son of his closest friend.”

  Alysia shook her head. “I doubt that will hold up to senate scrutiny.”

  “It might if Agnarr goes along with it. And if we ever find Elizandria again we can pay her to back you up. Mercenaries are notoriously flexible when it comes to – you know – honor.”

  We were almost upon the town of Faersrock.

  “Regardless of whatever happens up here, you tell your senators that you succeeded beyond expectations. In the meantime I’ll see what I can do to tie up loose ends. Mostly: who betrayed us.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Brilskeep wasn’t much of a city. Faersrock wasn’t much of a town. But it was nicer. No grime lining the wooden homes, no fog as thick as an old lady’s matted muff. There was mud, though. Hard mud. Soft mud. Slick mud. Sloshy mud. Black mud. Gray mud. Even some red mud. Our guide was pointing out the local landmarks, giving us something of a verbose lecture on the subject while Torunn kept his translations discreet. “Don’t go that way,” was his favorite.

  “Why not?” asked Alysia.

  “Mud.”

  “Special mud?”

  “It’s pretty much quick sand,” muttered Mikael. “Goopy as hell. You think the shore is over there but it’s wherever it wants to be. One wrong step and you better shout loud enough for someone to come and rescue you.”

  Torunn turned to his cousin. “What’s ‘goopy?’”

  Mikael translated.

  Torunn peered back at him. “This is common word?”

  “Not really.”

  Torunn gave him a look of, ‘then why the hell would I need to know that?’

  Mikael winced as the soldiers carrying him slipped an inch. “Do we have any more blood wine?”

  “You drank the last of it,” I told him.

  Most of the buildings on the outer-edge of town were wooden with a thick layer of grass over the roof. Clusters of buildings were clumped together, then a great absence of structures, then a few houses a
nd more clusters crammed one next to the other. A tavern-looking building used an up-turned longboat as its roof. Elsewhere, a structure of slats and fabric billowed with heat as a couple of haggard men sat bare-assed inside, dripping in sweat before coming out to bask in the ball-tingling northern morning.

  It seemed as though our arrival was not supposed to be public knowledge until we actually arrived. Shouts of alarm rang out. Men of old and young intercepted us with axes, knives, and bows, while the sailors and our guide barked at them like ferocious dogs. “Go back inside you stupid bastards! They’re with us!” That kind of thing.

  More outrage followed us from one woman. “Who the hell are they?”

  “They’re here to see Agnarr, love, not you.”

  “They not northerners. They … are they from Ispar?”

  “What’s it to ya? Stop being so nosy and go back home.”

  Or so I presumed, given the many levels of indignation and back and forth swearing. I did learn a popular word. Korla. Good for shouting at someone as well as muttering under your breath.

  We were followed by at least a hundred people, all ready to be heroes of their people by killing Kasera’s favorite daughter. Loken packed us in a little tighter, keeping Alysia in the middle. Cavalry at the front and back, infantry on the sides, mages and archers in the middle. Full show of force with swords and wounds on display.

  Youngsters ran forth, desperate to be the first to tell Agnarr of our arrival. Our guide called out to several of the locals up ahead. They pointed this way and that. We followed their directions. I kept an eye out for any kind of grand home, a castle in the making or even just something that didn’t scream ‘fisherman’. For the life of me I couldn’t tell where Agnarr bedded down.

  Our guide stopped. Held up one hand in the universal gesture of ‘stay here’. The gaggle of kids had run down to the far end of a wooden jetty, tugging on the clothes of a middle-aged man. He turned, studying us. Bearded. Knitted cap. Simple clothes. Our chances of having pulled off a coup dropped drastically. It’s not to say that the clothes make the man. They don’t. But one look at Alysia and you know she comes from refinement. Loken is an officer from the frontier forts; locking in on all the potential threats and making a note of it. Saskia has problems looking people in the eye. Bren has the problem of lingering stares and following the ladies as they walk by. Mikael talks too much to ever be a trusted advisor.