by Joy Demorra
The siege at Bhalein—to use what Vlad believed to be the technical military terminology—had been an unmitigated clusterfuck. Vlad had read the reports, horrified by the numbers lost. It was far too easy to think of them as statistics rather than people. And that, he knew, was part of the problem. It was widely known that the military might of the Nevrondian Empire was built upon the strength of the supernatural populace. What was less openly acknowledged was that this lent itself to a somewhat cavalier approach to the value of those lives by those in charge. Vlad could somewhat relate to that. The supernaturally alive might not be subject to the same mistrust and outright animosity as the living dead, but it was close.
“He went back in,” Howlzein said into the silence, cutting through Vlad’s thoughts. “The trench they were in was shelled, and Nath—Captain Northland went back in looking for survivors. He was carrying people from the ruins when a sniper got him.”
“How very heroic,” Vlad murmured. Across the table, Howlzein bristled, and Vlad winced as he realized how insincere that must have sounded. He leaned back further in his chair, sliding into a contemplative slouch as he tapped idly on the length of one fang.
The sensible thing to do would be to say no. The Count would go utterly batshit at the prospect of having a werewolf around the castle as would a lot of high-ranking members of Eyrie society. And therein lay precisely the appeal of it. It was an immature and profoundly foolish impulse, but there would always be a part of Vlad that wanted to kick the hornets’ nest just to see what would happen.
But there was something else there too. Some deeper sense of solidarity in the making that pinged at his brain, urging him to say yes.
The Eyrie Guard was not technically under his control. Eyrie was considered too small to have their own guard. The outpost was manned instead by a small posting of the Imperial Militia. True, he oversaw their facility and dealt with the day-to-day reports of island life, but Howlzein didn’t have to ask him for anything. He could have gone above Vlad’s head and gotten someone else to sign the paperwork. Which meant Howlzein was either doing this out of courtesy toward Vlad, or he didn’t think the request would be granted if he went higher up the chain.
“I still fail to see the personal connection.” His gaze drifted back to Howlzein, who was watching him with that same air of intensity.
“I trained him.”
“You’ve had a long and venerated career. You’ve trained lots of people, I’m sure.”
Howlzein sighed, lowering his gaze to the table. “If you must know, I watched him grow up. I used to give him rides on my back when he was a boy. And I sent him there. To Bhalein. It was me that recommended him for the posting.”
Vlad winced again. Yes, he could see how that would sit heavily on the other man’s conscience. “Northland,” he said aloud, turning his gaze back to the letter and the seal. “It’s not the Northlands, is it?”
Howlzein inclined his head. “The very same. He’s Lord Northland’s second son, though I doubt he put that in his letter.”
“He did not.” Vlad turned the letter over in his hands and reread the introduction with renewed interest. Oh, what the hell. “My, my, a venerated war hero and the son of the Wolf Lord. How lucky we will be to have him.”
Howlzein sat up so quickly Vlad could almost fancy he saw the other man’s ears prick up. “You’ll do it, then?”
“If you truly believe him capable—”
“I do.”
Fastidiously unscrewing the lid of his fountain pen, Vlad said, “Then I have one stipulation.”
“You want support for your new build,” Howlzein guessed.
“Come now, General.” Vlad gave him a pained, weary smile. “That might be how my father does business, but I would hope by now, you’d know me better than that. If I have your vote, I want it because you believe in it. Not because you owe me a favor.”
“What then?” Howlzein frowned.
Vlad allowed himself a rare open grin, the nib of his pen hovering over the dotted line of the application. “If the Count ever asks, this conversation never happened. I signed nothing, and this is all your fault.”
Howlzein’s answering grin was just as sharp and accompanied by a harsh bark of laughter. Shaking his head, he offered his hand for Vlad to take, giving it a brutish squeeze that made Vlad’s bones grind together. “Done.”
Shaking out his hand absently, Vlad signed the document with his other. It was probably foolish, and he’d likely regret it, but Vlad supposed if it all went pear-shaped, he could always send Northland packing.
“Thank you,” Howlzein said, accepting the signed letter back, already standing, ready to leave. “And for what it’s worth, Blutstein? I believe your goal has merit. I just don’t think you’ll ever get it past this lot.”
Vlad shrugged mildly. “Ah, well, I suppose that’s where I have the advantage. I simply have to wait for the next bunch.”
Howlzein snorted at him, his eyes creasing with something dangerously close to genuine camaraderie.
When he was gone, Vlad sat back in his chair again and reread the original letter. Every I was dotted, and every T was crossed, the words and letters spaced out meticulously with a careful even hand. It was painfully disciplined compared to his own illegible scrawl.
How charmingly regimented.
“Well then, Captain Nathaniel James Northland,” Vlad said, folding the letter up and tucking it inside his breast pocket for safekeeping. “Welcome to the Eyrie.”
CHAPTER SIX
Later Spring, 1888
Comprised of buffeted heaths and jagged rock spires, the Isle of Eyrie rose out of the sea like a teacup in a maelstrom. At its westernmost point, the port town of Eyrie scaled its way above sea level, winding along the black rock incline of a now extinct volcano, which loomed over the crashing waves below. Overhead, an impending storm made itself known with an ominous rumble of thunder. But it was nothing compared to the ill mood brewing inside the local guardhouse.
“New Cap’n will be here soon,” Corporal Irian said, tipping their chair back against the wall. Technically they were still on duty, but their only concession to this was that they were still wearing their boots. “Any day now, if the sea lets up.”
“Then let it squall.” Lieutenant Octavius Humperdinck Fiddildy adjusted his cards, his gray mustache twitching in annoyance. “I still can’t believe they’re sending us a bloody werewolf.”
“What’s wrong with werewolves, again?” Corporal Hobbes asked as he drew a card from the top of the deck before throwing a toothpick into the pot. Between them, Lieutenant Paola Cameron snored on, her hand of cards forgotten on the table as she dozed through the remnants of the morning.
“What’s wrong with them? What’s wrong with them?” Fiddildy parroted derisively. “Be quicker to ask what’s right with them. You can spot ‘em a mile off if you know where to look. Barely human, all said and done.”
“Cameron says he’s a war hero,” Irian said, raising their voice to be heard over the hail now battering the tin roof overhead as the impending storm came ashore. “Says he’s got honorable mentionables.”
“Oh, I’ll just bet he does,” Fiddildy muttered. “You’ll see, he’ll come in here, thinking he’s in charge…”
“But he is in charge,” Hobbes countered reasonably while keeping a careful eye on Fiddildy’s arthritic fingers as the lieutenant drew another card from the deck and placed it into his hand. “He’s the new captain.”
Selecting a toothpick from his pile to chew on, Fiddildy carried on, “They’re all the same. You mark my words, he’ll stroll in here thinking he can change the way of things, shake things up and the like. They all do.”
“What, werewolves?” Hobbes asked.
“Officers, lad,” Fiddildy corrected him patiently as though the young corporal were of simple thinking. “And officers with medals is always worse. Thinking they know better than the likes of us. They always do. Just look at Captain Hammond,” he said, referring to their previous c
ommander. “Started changing things. Getting ideas. Then he goes mad. Starts writing Jibberish, no offense to the Jibbers. And then he runs off, leaving us to clean up his mess.” Not like they’d actually cleaned up anything—their lone holding cell was still filled with potatoes, for instance—but the sentiment still stood.
Outside, a bolt of lightning struck dangerously close to the castle spires. The caged hounds let out a cacophony of yowls, growls, and howls. Completely used to the hounds’ antics, Irian banged the heel of their boot lazily against the door and yelled for them to be quiet. It was entirely ineffective.
“So, what does that have to do with him being a werewolf?” Hobbes pursued doggedly as he set his cards carefully facedown when the kettle on the stove behind him spluttered and wheezed its way to boiling.
Taking the opportunity to look at the sleeping Cameron’s hand before Hobbes could turn back around, Fiddildy drawled, “Weeeell, sort of goes without saying, really. But mark my words, it’ll be trouble for us. You’ll see.”
Hobbes opened his mouth, probably to protest that Fiddildy hadn’t actually told him anything useful at all, then paused, frowning. “Do you hear that?”
“Hear what?” All Fiddildy heard was the raging storm.
“No.” Hobbes picked up his truncheon and headed to the door. “Me neither.”
With an annoyed glance toward their abandoned game, Fiddildy rolled his eyes and got up to follow the boy. They didn’t get very far.
Out in the courtyard, a lone figure crouched in front of the largest pen. They were talking in quiet tones to Mariska, the Count’s prize hunting hound. The hound in question sat back on her haunches, head tilting curiously from side to side as she regarded the newcomer with glowing red eyes.
“Excuse me,” Hobbes began hesitantly.
But he was abruptly drowned out by Fiddildy shouting over the top of him, “Here! What the hell do you think you’re doing? Get away from there!”
Most people, when shouted at, tended to react in one of three ways: fight, flight, or freeze. The stranger did none of them. Instead, he rose slowly to his feet and pushed back the hood of his dripping rain cloak. The word ‘large’ came to the forefront of Fiddildy’s mind, helpfully followed by several other descriptive adjectives, including ‘broad,’ ‘powerful,’ and a few other choice words he couldn’t repeat in front of his mother.
“They need to be let out; those cages are much too small for them,” the man said by way of greeting, reaching up to brush damp curls out of his face. He looked to be in his mid-thirties with strong, chiseled features and a prominent nose that had been broken one too many times.
“Let out, are you insane?” Fiddildy shoved Hobbes out the way as he gestured wildly toward the pens. “Those are death hounds, boy! They’ll take your bleeding arm off!”
“They seem pretty friendly to me,” the stranger replied. He tilted his head to look at Mariska again, and the hound wagged her stub of a tail in agreement.
Fiddildy, not used to being met with such quiet calm, blinked incredulously at him and tried again. “Did you not hear me with those big ears of yours? Them’s death hounds, boyo, only the Master can control them.”
“How did you get them to do that?” Hobbes asked.
The man turned toward them and shrugged lopsidedly, his smile easy and sure. “I’m good with dogs.”
“Good with dogs?!” Fiddildy sputtered, his tone somehow jumping another octave. “Good with dogs? They ate their last handler!”
“Well, they can’t have been very good with dogs, then.”
Aware now that Hobbes had scurried back to the relative safety of the guardhouse door, Fiddildy gave up and retreated to safer mental ground, blustering for all he was worth. “Listen you, I don’t have time for this today. We’ve got enough going on with a bloody werewolf showing up without some bloody fool losing his bloody hand ‘cause he didn’t have the bloody sense not to stick it where it don’t bloody belong. So, unless you’ve got a bloody crime to report, Mister Bloody-Good-With-Dogs, let’s bloody hear it. If not?” He gestured rudely toward the street with a jerk of his thumb. “Piss off.”
The man’s smile didn’t falter, but there was a subtle shift to his mannerism that made the hair rise on the back of Fiddildy’s neck. He watched as the man tilted his head to the side in an eerily familiar gesture, giving Fiddildy a blatant once-over. His expression clearly conveyed that he’d come up short of whatever it was he’d been looking for, though Fiddildy couldn’t imagine anyone who didn’t come up short on him. Master Vlad up at the castle perhaps, but even then, only by a hair.
“My apologies, gentlemen,” the man said, the brogue in his voice deepening as he walked toward them at a slow, steady pace that could very nearly have been considered a prowl. When he smiled, Fiddildy couldn’t help but notice that his teeth were a mite too sharp to be entirely human. “My name is Captain Northland, and from the sounds of it, you’re expecting me. Now, shall we try that again?”
*
Nathan stood in the common room of the guardhouse, watching the chaos unfold around him. Hobbes and Irian had been dispatched to clear out the former captain’s office armed with a dustpan and broom. In hindsight, a shovel and a match may have been better suited to the task. To say that the place was in a bit of a shambles would not only have been an understatement but an insult to shambles everywhere. Nathan dragged a finger along the mantle over the stove and tsked softly when it carved an inch-deep path through the accumulated soot.
“Lieutenant Fiddildy,” he said, painfully aware of the man hovering nervously in his peripheral vision, “when was the last time a full inspection was carried out?”
Fiddildy, striving to look as helpfully busy as possible as he rummaged through the cupboards for something vaguely resembling sustenance, turned to face Nathan with a contrived facsimile of a smile that hovered somewhere along the border of existential dread and manic hopefulness. “Er, that depends, sir,” he said. The apprehension rolled off him in waves as he sidled up to Nathan and offered him a cup of tea and a plate of biscuits that had been arranged into a surprisingly artful spiral.
“Depends on what?” Nathan prompted, accepting the tea and biscuits politely. He discretely slipped the chocolate digestives to one side; ever since his injury his werewolf-inherited intolerance to the sweet had grown progressively worse.
“Er, on what exactly you mean by ‘full,’ sir, and er, ‘inspection,’ sir…”
Oh dear. Nathan resisted the urge to rub the back of his neck. He’d already been battling a headache all day. Somehow, he didn’t think it was about to get any better. “What about a log of events?” he asked. “I trust someone has been keeping those up to date?”
“Well… that depends on what you mean by ‘up to date,’ sir.” Fiddildy cleared his throat awkwardly.
Nathan suppressed a groan. There would need to be some seriously attractive benefits to this position coming forthwith, or Nathan was going to turn tail and run.
You can do this, he reminded himself as he gave into temptation and rubbed the back of his neck. He winced a moment later when the injury in his shoulder sent a painful shower of sparks ricocheting up his spine, making him wish he hadn’t forgone the sling. Willing the moment to pass, he told himself he’d endured far worse. He’d helped run the training camps out at Fortdrüben for over two decades and held down a fort in Steocidell for nearly eight years during a revolution. He could damn well manage a civilian outpost where the keys to the gaol cell were kept next to the tea caddy, and where the aforementioned cell was filled with sacks of what appeared to be potatoes. Or possibly turnips. Some sort of root vegetable, at any rate.
When the pain was back to manageable levels, Nathan said, “I see. And was this the norm under Captain Hammond?”
“Er, yes… and no, sir.” Fiddildy’s brow knit together in a frown as he stood nervously to attention—or a reasonable imitation of it, considering he was still holding the plate of biscuits—while Nathan pulled out
a seat and sat down at the card-strewn table. “Permission to speak honestly, sir?”
Intrigued but wary, Nathan nodded.
“Well, y’see, sir, things was a bit of a mess for a while there. Cap’n Hammond was a good sort, sir, a right good sort… Until he took to the drink.”
Nathan surveyed the surrounding mess with a clearer degree of clarity. There was a definite sour undertone to the place that had nothing to do with the smell of old socks or the cell privy. He’d already spied numerous empty bottles hidden around the place—and calling them hidden was generous, considering several of them were being used to hold candles.
“And we tried to keep on top of things at first, we really did, sir. Kept an eye on him and the like. But after he left, sir, just up and left! Without so much as a by-your-leave!” Fiddildy started to bite his lip then stopped. “Well… it all sort of… fell apart.”
“I see.” Nathan maintained a carefully neutral tone. They both glanced up at an ominous thud from the floor above. The sound of muffled swearing and a cascade of dust from the rafters followed. Nathan absently reached up and brushed some crumbling plaster from his shoulder. “And did Lieutenant Cameron feel this was… acceptable?”
Fiddildy shook his head, giving Nathan a sidelong look as he finally set aside the plate of biscuits he’d been awkwardly holding and began picking up the mess left on the table instead. “Begging your pardon, sir, but Paola couldn’t organize her way out of a wet paper bag. More bark than bite, so to speak, if you’ll pardon the expression. Don’t get me wrong, she’s nice enough, but she’s wossname… green behind the ears. No proper experience to speak of, as it were. I tried giving her the weekly reports, and she just kept putting them on the captain’s desk. Said they’d keep. Said it wasn’t her place to overstep. The only reason we got our wages was ‘cause we drew straws every week to see who would go up to the castle and ask for ‘em.”
“Good grief,” Nathan muttered. “I can see we will have to make some changes around here.”