Paladin's Prize

by Gaelen Foley

  AGE OF HEROES, BOOK 1

  Paladin’s Prize

  GAELEN FOLEY

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Chapter 1. Kiss of Life

  Chapter 2. Sanctuary

  Chapter 3. Temptation

  Chapter 4. Grim Work

  Chapter 5. Glow

  Chapter 6. Wanted

  Chapter 7. Bonfire

  Chapter 8. Oracle

  Chapter 9. Vows Unto Death

  Chapter 10. Dungeon

  Chapter 11. Bard

  Chapter 12. Pagans

  Chapter 13. The Red Knight

  Chapter 14. Defiance

  Chapter 15. Uncloak

  Chapter 16. Citadel

  Chapter 17. Fidelis

  Chapter 18. Infernal

  Chapter 19. Temptress

  Chapter 20. Poison

  Chapter 21. Paladin

  Epilogue: Elysium

  About the Author

  Also by Gaelen Foley

  Credits & Copyright

  My good blade carves the casques of men,

  My tough lance thrusteth sure,

  My strength is as the strength of ten,

  Because my heart is pure.

  ~Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Sir Galahad”

  Chapter 1

  Kiss of Life

  The Golden Knight lay dying on the starlit field where he had made his stand alone against the bestial horde.

  He had wreaked mayhem on the enemy, but had paid a terrible price.

  Even now, the thirsty spring ground drank his noble blood like some dark pagan sacrifice to the old gods. Rainless rumbles from the dark sky, however, voiced the indignation of the deity under whose banner the paladin had won so many battles. Ilios, the Father of Lights, however, was not without other votaries in the area…

  From the moment she had heard the distant clamor of the melee, the young healer had understood her mission and obeyed.

  Shouldering her satchel of supplies, she had lifted the loose, wide hood of her gray gown, grasped her walking staff, and left her hermitage atop the mountain.

  Twilight had darkened to nightfall while she trekked down through the wind-rippled woods, her tiny fey familiar hovering by her shoulder.

  The lady Wrynne du Mere tried not to listen overmuch to the battle sounds echoing up from the farmer’s field below as she went. Shouts. Roars. Ugly porcine squeals. The clatter of weaponry.

  What would her parents say, she wondered, if they knew she was heading toward the danger rather than away from it? A small frisson of worry crept through her. For she knew what probably awaited her down there.

  Everyone in Mistwood knew all too well about the Urmugoths rampaging through the countryside this past fortnight.

  She was just glad the good-for-nothing king had finally yawned himself awake enough to send soldiers to deal with the beasts. Finally, somebody had bothered enough about their sleepy northern province to do something about the brutish raiders.

  Whatever was happening down there, it reached a fairly swift crescendo. She only paused when a flash of brilliance suddenly lit up the night.

  A thunderclap and a man’s lionlike roar shook the whole valley. Her fairy shrieked at the sound and dove into her satchel, but Wrynne’s very soul had gone quiet.

  The hairs on her nape tingled as she sensed divine power in the air.

  Of course. It could only be Sir Thaydor at the head of the king’s troops, she thought in relief, still holding her breath. His devotion to the Light was said to flood the paladin on occasion with supernatural fighting ability, much like her healing.

  And then he became practically invincible.

  Well, then. An embarrassing flutter of giddy schoolgirl eagerness flitted in her belly to see the famous knight. There was obviously nothing to worry about.

  “You can come out now,” she told Silvertwig. “Don’t worry, the king’s champion is still undefeated, last I heard.”

  The Urms would rue the day they’d ever come crashing through the North Gate of the kingdom once they found Sir Thaydor waiting to put a stop to their bloody rampage.

  Sure enough, the battle sounds had gone abruptly still.

  Victory as usual, Sir Thaydor? she thought with a slight smile. She did not have the highest opinion of knights, in general. Most seemed thickheaded brutes who only lived to kill people and break things, but a paladin was another matter.

  A paladin had a purpose and a code.

  Reassured that he had matters well in hand, Wrynne told Silvertwig to hold on and banged her enchanted staff lightly on the ground, using a hasten spell to teleport the rest of the way down the mountain. There was no time to lose if she was to aid any of his men who’d been wounded in the battle.

  Moments later, she stepped out of the woods onto the edge of her neighbor’s pasture. It was now quite dark, but a few dropped torches burned here and there, and she shuddered at the carnage revealed by their eerie, flickering glow.

  Dead Urmugoths everywhere. But where were the knights? Archers? Soldiers? Anyone?

  Heart pounding, she scanned the field in confusion until the realization slowly sank in. It was not a troop of soldiers that had done this.

  It was one man.

  She stared across the battlefield, awestruck.

  She had seen many things in her twenty-three years of life, but never so much death, and never such mad courage.

  The Golden Knight had come alone.

  Then she drew in her breath, for she saw that he had fallen—the hero of the kingdom, the favorite of the gods.

  He was unmistakable in his bright armor, the silver steel of his breastplate, as well as his tattered white surcoat adorned with the sun symbol of Ilios in gold. By his position on a slight rise, surrounded as he was by the slumped, hulking bodies of Urmugoth warriors, she realized that Thaydor had not permitted himself to drop to his knees until every last foul thing sent against their people had been slain.

  She started rushing out across the field, but unfortunately, some of the raiders were still clinging to life. She could sense the presence of evil ahead—or rather, brute malice, in their case.

  A monstrous race of semi-primitive, nomadic barbarians, Urmugoths roamed the wastelands beyond the kingdom’s northern border. Seven feet tall on average, clad in spiked armor, they adorned themselves with the bones of past enemies and wielded giant maces, clubs, and poleaxes. The stump tusks they sported on their lower jaws proved they were indeed descended from ogres, just like the nursery tales warned—to say nothing of their cannibalistic tendencies.

  How a raiding party of some twenty Urms had got through the North Gates in the first place was the great mystery of the day, along with why the king failed to send troops to destroy them.

  All Wrynne knew was that after somehow breaching the border, the Urms had raged across the countryside from farm to farm and village to village, plundering and killing, ripping the peasants apart, until, thank Ilios, justice had caught up to them this night.

  Sir Thaydor had clearly lured them here, away from the people in the nearby hamlet and the people there, to fight them in this field.

  Now all twenty of the hideous brutes were either dead or dying. Wrynne shook her head in wonder as she proceeded past them at a more guarded pace, just in case any of the beasts were still capable of attacking her.

  As she walked by, she looked around at the litter of bodies and was still profoundly shocked at Sir Thaydor’s obvious ferocity. He was known back in her hometown, the capital city of Pleiburg, as a decidedly gentle soul. Enemies might quake at his name, but at festivals after his victory parades, she had personally seen little children climb on him as if he were a great, tall, affable golden tree.

  And now this bloodbath.

  Well, she
thought with a nervous shrug, the bards said the Paladin of Ilios could do this sort of thing when the power of the Light flooded him with a blinding, holy wrath and his famous blade, Hallowsmite, began to glow—but who believed bards?

  It seemed they had been telling the truth for once.

  Go to him. Hurry. He needs you, said the voice of the Light, deep within her heart.

  Before going any closer to the dying Urms, Wrynne closed her eyes to the bloody scene before her and summoned forth the trancelike state of indomitable bliss that she would have to draw upon to heal whatever wounds the paladin had sustained.

  That she do so was obviously the will of the god they both served in their two different, confraternal orders—he as the first of the Sons of Might, she as one of the Daughters of the Rose.

  Ilios clearly wanted him alive, and no wonder. The man was a walking, talking force for good upon the earth, and she had a feeling in her bones that he was important to their country in ways yet to be revealed.

  With a deep breath, Wrynne flicked her eyes open, ready to proceed. Her tranquil stare fixed on him, she set out across the battlefield, pulling more deeply into the peace within herself with every stride. He had used his gift to protect her and everyone who lived here; now she would wield hers to save him.

  Time seemed to slow all around her. Ignoring the stench and severed limbs, the gore of spilt entrails, the low animal groans rising up here and there, and the baleful yellow eyes that watched her pass, she focused on the Light spreading through her body. The radiant path was the way of love and beauty…

  The ugliness receded. The healing power unfolded within her like a flower, and at each spot where her bare feet trod the bloodstained ground, the crushed and trampled grass began to rise again, the delicate shoots of clover unbending.

  The hem of her pewter-gray gown was edged with crimson by the time she knelt down beside him. “Sir Thaydor?”

  No response.

  She glanced at the arrow in his side, which had somehow found one small, vulnerable chink in his armor between his back and breast plates. She laid her hand gently on his chest and gazed at him in sorrow. Wrynne was a compassionate but not a sentimental woman. No healer could afford to be. One had to learn to steel oneself in order to work calmly and swiftly in the midst of human suffering.

  But even she was shaken by the sight of the kingdom’s greatest warrior lying defenseless on the ground, no one here to protect him now but her. She glanced around uneasily to make sure no more enemies were coming.

  Strange. She could not shake the feeling that something was still out there that wanted him dead.

  If they came back to finish him off, what could she do? She was no warrior.

  I have to get him out of here.

  With her tiny winged companion whispering anxiously in her ear, Wrynne took the rolled-up Aladdin stretcher out of her satchel. A rare and very expensive item, it had been a gift from her proud parents upon the completion of her healing studies. All the way from the exotic bazaars of Arabia, the magical floating stretcher had been made by djinn weavers from the strands of a flying carpet.

  “Let’s get him onto this,” she murmured.

  Silvertwig assisted as Wrynne hurried to unfurl the thick, tapestry-like cloth. Without it, she had no hope of transporting the warrior off the battlefield. His armor weighed a good four stone, and that did not include the solid muscle of the tall, broad-shouldered body underneath.

  Oh, and they could not leave Hallowsmite behind. The longsword was heavy, too. She was a little afraid to touch it, just in case it had another thunderbolt stored in there somewhere, waiting to fly out.

  Don’t be silly, she thought. The power came from him, not from the sword itself.

  Once the stretcher was unrolled, Wrynne used the golden strap of the hand-loop to make it rest on the ground.

  Whether or not he could hear her, she gave her patient fair warning of the movement to come. “I’ll try not to hurt you.” It seemed an odd thing for a petite woman to say to a large man who had slain dragons, but she got to work anyway, quickly tucking it under the length of him.

  Silvertwig fluttered her wings with all her might, helping Wrynne to budge his inert body upward on one side to get him onto the stretcher.

  Unconscious, the heavy, powerful knight lay like a dead weight. Wrynne winced as the slight motion made the blood seep faster from around the arrow sticking out of his side.

  Meanwhile, half a dozen of Silvertwig’s tiny fey kinfolk had come flying out of the forest and gathered around to see what was happening. Even the fairies had been frightened of the Urmugoths, but now that they were dead, the curious little pranksters came out to gawk.

  They twinkled like fireflies, hovering around the Golden Knight. Wrynne did not chase them off. Their colorful glow would help provide light for her next task.

  Once she got Sir Thaydor onto the stretcher and ready to be evacuated to safety, it was time to assess his condition more fully.

  Bracing herself, she took hold of his helmet. She could already see blood on the visor and a dent on the crown. If this was as bad as it looked, he might already be dead in there, but he did have divine protection, so…

  “Shh,” she whispered in surprise when he stirred a little, his metal-gauntleted hand reaching slowly but automatically for his dagger. “It’s all right, Sir Thaydor. I’ve come to help you.”

  He groaned and dropped his hand back into the mud.

  Carefully, Wrynne removed his helmet. Then she stared at him, ignoring the chiseled male beauty of his face in shock at the severity of his head wound.

  Silvertwig sobbed and turned away.

  He’d taken a chop from a poleaxe to the skull. It must have been a glancing blow, or it would have taken a chunk of his head clean off. Instead, he was left with a gaping skull fracture.

  Wrynne took one look and felt slightly queasy. Oh, she could heal it, but it would take everything she had, and then what about the rest of him?

  As her gaze moved over the fallen knight’s imposing form, she felt her throat close when she saw the condition of his breastplate. The left side bore the dents of at least two full-force blows he had taken to the chest, possibly from a mace. Perhaps the blood running into his eyes from the head wound had blinded him before he could block them.

  She let out a trembling exhalation. This is so much worse than I thought. Broken ribs and a collapsed lung would be the least of his worries. It was not just the blunt, shattering force of such massive blows themselves, but being encased in metal that made these types of injuries so devastating.

  A great resounding blow on plate armor reechoed through the body with concussive force strong enough to rupture organs. Thus, if the head wound didn’t kill him, the body blows would.

  Sick with fear, she debated how to use her limited skills. She could choose one major wound or the other to heal immediately—the head wound probably being the more dire—but, unfortunately, then she would be spent, her magic depleted with nothing left to give him for at least an hour.

  An hour Sir Thaydor didn’t have.

  That didn’t even begin to address his lesser wounds, all of which were awful, starting with the arrow. The man was a mess.

  Inspecting him, she also found his left leg broken below the knee, probably from a hideous side blow from a war hammer. Black streaks charred his left gauntlet and the vambrace protecting his forearm, where one of the Urmugoths must have clubbed him with a torch.

  Wrynne found herself feeling slightly dizzy. Glancing up at the stars, she took a breath to steady herself. Oh, Ilios, I fear you’ve picked the wrong healer.

  She had never dealt with such grievous battle wounds before. In her two-year tenure as local healer in this quarter of the province, she had stitched up many limbs from accidents with wagons and farming implements, made gallons of medicine, delivered dozens of babies, lanced boils, pulled teeth, performed a couple of sickening amputations, and even cured ten cases of the plague.

 
; But nothing like this.

  “He’s a dead man,” Silvertwig opined in the peculiar, chiming language of her people, like the jingle of tiny bells.

  “No,” Wrynne whispered, straightening her spine. “Not yet. Not if I can help it.”

  There was still one way to save him…

  Heal all his wounds at once in a single, massive discharge of the most sacred and powerful magic she had ever learned at the Bastion.

  But it would require a sacrifice on her part that she had not realized she’d be called upon to make this night.

  The Kiss of Life was based on empath magic and was such a potent spell that a healer could only work it once in a lifetime. It was said to forge a deep bond of some sort between the two people involved, whether they liked it or not, and of course, there was always a price to pay when using magic.

  It would leave her gift for healing others fully intact, but if memory served, it would strip her of her magical ability to heal herself quickly whenever she was sick or injured.

  If she did this, she’d be vulnerable in the world in a way she had never been before. It was a frightening prospect.

  Knowing she could cure herself at any time had ensured she never stopped to think twice about going in to help a fever-ridden village, for example. After this, she’d still have to go, only now, she might catch it like everybody else and there’d be no one to heal her. For a fleeting moment, she wrestled with herself—with a twinge of selfishness.

  Maybe there was some other way. And what if he was already too far gone for even the mighty Kiss of Life to work? She’d end up sacrificing her self-healing power for no reason. That was hardly worth it.

  “Sir Thaydor?” She touched his lips and still felt weak puffs of breath rising up to warm her hand. His skin was clammy but not yet cold unto death as she laid her hand on his cheek.

  He startled her just then by opening his eyes.

  Stark, brilliant blue eyes stared out at her from his blood- and grime- and sweat-streaked face. Eyes glazed with suffering, but keenly intelligent and aware.