by David Keck
A mule-faced man—either Grugan or Tosti—smiled. “Me? I’m happy to work for my passage with the wilds full of bandits and Banished spirits. Numbers are safety, milord.” The man shook his head at Durand as together they put their cheeks against the cart and heaved. “I never thought to see a duke’s champion work so hard for a tinker.”
Durand smiled. Here he was, mucking in with laborers when he was meant to be commanding the defense of Acconel. Here, even a tinker’s cart wouldn’t obey him. He snorted a laugh and, together with his new comrades, threw the tinker’s cart onto its wheels to a smattering of applause from the vanguard. Even young Almora managed to get a look.
The tinker was already back at the reins, urging his mule onward. And so the duke’s column followed a tinker’s clattering cart as it wobbled up the Banderol.
They had been lucky so far.
* * *
THE THREE PEAKS Durand had first sighted from the valley of the Banderol soon towered above them, but the road opened up for a time and lay broad and stony before them. Fractured hills loomed all around, bristling with resinous pine trees.
Durand led the vanguard up a broken ridge under the vast sweep of the haunted mountains. Brand tossed his big boxy head. At nearly the same time, one of the packhorses let out a screaming whinny.
Durand shortened his grip on the reins.
“Smoke again, I think,” said Ailric. “Pitch and something wet—half-rotten.”
“That’ll be thatch and rafters,” said Durand. Thin curtains passed across the tunnel of branches ahead, and Almora’s horse pranced skittishly at the touch of the strange scent.
Durand heard a chiming tone: a bell tolling somewhere.
And so the pair pelted back to the column where Durand saw no choice but to speak with Coensar. The duke’s whole party pricked up their ears.
“We’ve got smoke,” said Durand. “House or barn on fire, like as not.”
Abravanal peered at Coensar and Durand.
Finally, Coensar spoke. “It’s a raid then? We’re halfway up the mountains.”
“Smells of pitched timber and old thatch,” said Durand.
Vadir’s man, red-headed Sir Raimer, was there. “There is a town, Broklambe, on the road to the pass. There’s something of a plateau, I understand. Not far. I don’t know how anyone could have got here from Yrlac ahead of us.”
“You’ve a generous opinion of our pace, Sir Raimer, and I expect you’ll find that there are more crossing places than the White Bridge,” said Coensar. “We’ll advance as a body. If there are raiders, let them tackle the whole lot of us. See how they like it.”
Men unshipped their weapons and the company rode until the pine wood gave way. The track forded the Banderol at the side of a big stone mill. Beyond it, a village was scattered along the stream, every building burning. Crags and pine woods ringed the plow lands. There was no sign of a torch party, but Coensar had sense enough to be wary.
“All right,” commanded Coensar. “Break out anything that’ll hold water. Let’s see what we can do but, by the Host Below, keep your eyes open!” With a few orders, he cut forty or fifty men from the column. The rest made ready to protect the duke.
Coensar, glancing over the remainder, noted Durand sitting behind the duke’s household. Their eyes locked for a moment. “Sir Durand,” he said, “I will need you to watch over this lot till I get back.”
And the knights cantered into Broklambe, Coensar and a full squadron riding over a Banderole that exploded under their hooves.
Thus the first part of Abravanal’s guard charged away.
Ailric and Durand kept near Almora, Deorwen, and the duke.
Ailric steadied his borrowed mount. “Most of Broklambe is ablaze,” he said. “Scattered houses. Outbuildings that lie far from the rest.”
Durand scowled. Only human hands could carry fire so far. “This will be part payment for Penseval,” Durand said. He wondered, if he’d handled Euric differently, whether Broklambe would have been left in peace. Now, the fires blazed high enough that Durand guessed the raiders hadn’t been gone more than an hour. “We’d best keep a sharp eye out. I’d wager they’re closer than we’d like.”
He saw no riders but Coensar’s. After a moment, though, he spotted blotches of color moving over the plow lands. A large group had broken cover.
Ailric raised his hand. “Not soldiers,” he said.
And sure enough, Durand made out a woman with hiked skirts and several men racing as fast as tilled muck would let them. Durand took it for a sign that the raiders had cleared off. Here were survivors eager to save what they could. Maybe they’d been in the field and run for shelter.
“Some of these villagers will know something useful: seen a blazon, heard a name. We might learn which of Leovere’s people likes fire so much,” Durand said. “Maybe we can hold someone to account for this.”
Almora shifted uneasily in her saddle. No one liked standing by, and Durand’s rumblings about justice did little to comfort her. “It is awful,” she said. “Where will they live? They’ll have nothing.” Durand had no answer.
Meanwhile, the villagers reached their town. They did not stop at the first sheds and outbuildings. And soon they passed the blazing cottages themselves, never stopping to douse a fire. Not once.
“Where are they going?” wondered Durand aloud.
There was a large building ahead. It had a bell tower—almost a keep—and narrow windows; mere arrow slits. The whole building was ablaze, and the bell rang on. Again and again. Villagers tried to reach the doors, but the fires drove them back.
“It’s the sanctuary,” declared Ailric.
Durand watched uneasily as the villagers rushed to the blazing doors.
“There are bales of straw heaped against that door,” said Ailric.
“Durand,” breathed Deorwen, “the bell. Host of Heaven!”
Now, apprehension dawned upon the whole astonished household of the duke. If the sanctuary was burning from wall to wall, and the bell was still ringing.… Almora caught her breath, realizing. “There must be someone inside to ring it!”
Raimer, Baron Vadir’s man, spoke next. “We cannot stand by! We must ride! With me, whoever will come!” And what could Durand say? In a few moments of chaos, everyone rushed away, leaving the duke and his immediate household behind with a half dozen workmen. Even the mendicants were driving their donkeys downhill. Durand had his fist in Almora’s reins.
Almora’s face was taut; Durand imagined he saw a little hate there.
“I’m sure Coensar and the others will save them,” Deorwen said.
The last of Abravanal’s guard reeled into the smoke and flames. Snatches of smoke blowing through the village blinded them to the action at the sanctuary. They could only hear the bell over the millwheel and the stream. The dozen or so of them might have been alone in Creation.
“It is terrible,” said Almora.
“Coensar and the rest will do what they can,” said Abravanal. “The door of a village sanctuary will not stop armed men for long.”
Deorwen spoke out. “I’m not sure why we’ve hung back.”
“The men who set the fires might yet be near,” Durand said. He would be damned if he led Almora and her father charging into a blazing village when Leovere’s horsemen had hardly finished with the place. Over Deorwen’s head, Durand saw signs that one of the raiders had managed to loft a torch onto the mill’s thatch not too long ago—and it was a good throw in Durand’s judgment: two or more fathoms. They could not have gone far.
“Folk will need tending to,” said Deorwen. “We’ll have to see what shelter can be arranged. Water will be needed, and I’m sure we’ll need more clean linen than so small a village will have at hand.”
Abravanal was nodding. “As soon as Coensar sees these people safe, I will cause riders to bring help from the villages and steadings nearby.” Durand feared that those riders would be galloping through the night. It was hard, upland country. “Coensar
will know whose holding this is. Their lord may have resources to draw upon as well.”
Durand squinted into the smoke, wondering if the bell had faltered. At any moment, he expected to see some knight or other hauling one of the villagers into the clear air. And, more than once, a trick of the twisting smoke had him certain that a wracked plowman or a stumbling child was about to step free.
With all of these things to draw his eye, he did not see the moment when fifty horsemen broke from the pines behind them. And, as those horsemen tore across the open acres, the clatter of the millwheel drowned the thunder of their approach.
Only at the last did Durand feel the shaking of the ground. “That is not the mill,” he said, and turned.
He had been a fool. The whoreson bastards had peeled away the duke’s defenses, piece by piece.
Durand roared out, “A trap, Your Grace! Ride!”
Durand snarled and spurred his red cob close enough to swat the rump of Almora’s little palfrey—but one of the workmen jostled close. “Not so quick,” the man said, and there was the one called Morcar, sneering broadly. There was Grugan, and who knew how many others. Men who had helped him right the tinker’s cart, all sneering. Durand could not fight fifty men—and now half the workmen and hangers-on. Not in the open.
“Maybe His Grace would be safer with us,” said Morcar.
But Durand saw the mill. There was a fire struggling in the thatch, but the rest looked sound.
Ailric was quick and handy with his fists: before Morcar could finish his leer, the shield-bearer had struck the devil across the temple, and Durand had pulled Almora free.
“For the mill! The mill!”
They rode, leaping down in time for Durand to bundle the duke and his family around the building where the millwheel pounded and a strong door opened. Durand had a momentary glimpse of the pale Herald still sitting his horse, sacrosanct and irrelevant. He had not followed. Fifty horseman stormed around him as if he were a fence post.
Durand drove them on. “Inside! Inside!” But he stopped Ailric before the man could dismount. “Ailric. We’ll need the steward and anyone who can follow!”
Durand had no time to watch. The raiders leapt down, intending to sweep Durand aside, but there was only a narrow ledge between the door and the river—no place for numbers to tell—and Durand braced himself as the two fools came on. The first he dashed into the stony bed of the stream—and the churning millwheel. The second, he brained between his flail and the mill’s doorframe.
Though Durand bellowed, the rest came quick.
Deorwen was screaming at him to get inside, but the mass of men was on him before he could move. They had him like a bear in a pit, but he fought, savaging them, ripping shields aside, breaking bones, and catching their clubbing blows on his mailed arms and shoulders. Bruises stabbed through iron links and padding. Deorwen was still screaming. And he knew that he must go.
After his initial ferocity, Durand suddenly gave way, pitching back to get himself behind the heavy door. They all wrestled a massive bar into its iron brackets.
Durand staggered back from the door. The mill’s cogwheels drowned out the sounds of fighting. They should have been safe.
“We haven’t long,” said Deorwen.
It was then that Durand noticed the smoke. He glanced up and found, to his horror, that the fire he had seen struggling on the roof had taken firm root in the dry rafters. Already, the fire roiled in the hairy underbelly of the thatch. Heavy beams twisted like candle wicks. The refuge he’d meant to offer them would be their pyre.
“Ailric rode to get them back,” said Durand. And he might just have got away.
A sharp report sounded from the door. And, already, Durand saw the square gleam of a felling-axe flash through the wood. They’d hardly had a moment. He whipped the spiked head of his flail around on its chain.
“Hide yourselves,” he said.
As the others scrambled back, the axe flashed. Durand set his feet, swallowing against a dry mouth as he squared himself to the door. He must hold it as long as he could. They were already choking behind him. Durand brought his cloak to his face.
Then the door gave way.
In an instant, the blank oblong of a shield flashed in Durand’s face, driven by the weight of a soldier. Durand crashed onto his back, with his attacker sprawling over him. The door was already lost. From the floor, he punched and pummeled with the hardwood haft of the flail. Something struck his shin. A fist hammered a cloud of blood into his head, the follow-up mule-kicking his ear. But Durand had not been made the Champion of Acconel for nothing. In fury, he wrenched himself from the floorboards, catching at men with hooked fingers, and flinging them like dolls and straw men. Smoke and embers stormed. Blades and cudgels hailed down, but he could not relent.
The room seemed full of spinning mill shafts and toothed hardwood gears. Durand’s back struck the supports of the clattering wheels. Smoke bit his eyes and snatched the air from his lungs. He ducked a half-seen axe and collapsed some man’s helm. A gawky creature with a flat nose charged, but found only the sudden violence of the mill’s spinning teeth—whose first touch spattered the rafters with blood.
In bright rectangle of the doorway, someone was barking orders. “Get hold of the bastard! There’s only one of him.” Blind figures stumbled through the stinging smoke, choking—wavering. “At him! Cowards! At him!” It was Morcar’s voice. The man stood in the doorway.
Durand moved first. Taking advantage of the darkness, he broke for the door. In a heartbeat, his hand came out of the smoke, his fingers hooked in the surprised commander’s collar. With a fierce twist, he got one of the whoreson’s arms and put the man’s own sword at his throat, jerking him backward into the mill.
With the pinioned man as a shield, Durand snarled, “Get out! I’ll slit this bastard’s gullet! I swear it! I’ll fling him into the works.” Then he was seized with a coughing fit that nearly cut Morcar’s throat for him.
The whole pack of raiders was bent and peering through the smoke, every eye on Durand. He had never cut a man’s throat in cold blood, but he doubted the raiders would guess that. The roof timbers spoke in clicks and groans under eight tons of flaming thatch. One grizzled soldier’s hands rose in the fist-and-splayed-fingers sign of Heaven’s Eye. No one else moved.
“Here,” said Morcar, “you’d best humor our champion. Go along while we work this out.” And soon enough, every one of the devils had backed out of the door.
“Here, we’re only after the duke and his kin. Getting him to safety, like. We’ve been watching out for you lot. Now you’ve thrown them all in a bonfire. Have some sense.”
“Not sure I’m known for my good sense, friend,” Durand said.
He gave the man’s arms an extra wrench and muscled him to the doorway to get a view of the raiders outside. A ring of fifty men watched—knights, shield-bearers, and common sergeants. There was no sign of Coensar or the rest.
Behind Durand, the others were choking while the beams cracked and popped over their heads. Durand called into the smoke, “Come to the doorway, all of you. Close as you can.” Abravanal and the others ducked and squinted their way to the air. Abravanal himself would have pushed straight into the clean air beyond the threshold. Every eye streamed.
Durand cursed the stone mill. In the lowlands, he’d have been able to kick through a wall, as likely as not. But in Broklambe, stone was cheap.
Across the stream, most of Morcar’s men wore armor. One hardened-looking bastard—a whoreson with a boar’s-bristle mustache—was matter-of-factly winding a crossbow with a hook and pulley rig. The weapon looked heavier than a miner’s pick.
Durand ducked back into the boiling smoke. Already, Abravanal had buckled to the floor. Deorwen was bent over him. They would not live long, and Morcar was busy hissing the fact in Durand’s ear. “The duke is not well served by this, Sir Durand.” Durand felt like slitting the man’s throat then and there.
“Then tell those whoreso
ns to clear off!”
“And leave me here with you? You might lose your bloody temper, friend. I’m protecting you from yourself, aren’t I?”
The smoke had Durand blind, or nearly so. He couldn’t breathe, and it was damned awkward to hold a sword at a man’s throat in a doorway. “Tell them.”
The roof groaned like a dying thing.
And there were new hoofbeats outside. Durand could see nothing anymore. Smoke and tears snatched everything away.
“Let me go,” Morcar grunted. “Mine or yours, we’ll be dead before they get here!” He coughed.
Smoke billowed around Durand. Almora and the others cowered. Every breath caught in his throat. Soon he would have no choice but to burst out into the air.
“Let me run and do what you like!” Either it was Coensar’s men or more of the raiders. There was no way to know. A devilish groan came from the rafters. All that thatch was coming down. Durand had to get the others out of the fire. With Morcar running, they could breathe.
Morcar broke free. There’d been no more bargain than a twitch of Durand’s hand. Hands free, he caught hold of Almora. Of Deorwen. Abravanal was straggling after. And they all leapt into the Banderol as the tons of flame and timber and reed came thundering down in a welter of foundry heat and searing smoke. The water was a slashing winter cold.
Durand fetched up against the millwheel just as the twenty-foot monster was wrenched from the water by the meshing of gears and shafts and spindles. He could not find Deorwen or the others. Beyond reach, he saw Morcar stumbling toward his men. And Coensar and his knights charging in beyond the ford, his sword flashing. As Morcar reached his line of Yrlaci renegades and the flood tide of Coensar’s knights swept round the walls of the mill, Durand cast about, desperate for Deorwen—for any of them.
Ailric dove into the stream, getting hold of Almora.
And there were men in the water all around. Hands caught hold of Durand, hauling him from the water, but he fought them when he saw a tumbling shape he knew: Deorwen, alive but stunned. He rolled her onto the green bank, nearly sobbing for air.