Jodie did not know what more to say. “I cannot continue with this any longer, Wes. We both have spouses now and kingdoms to think of.”
“But my love for you-”
“Wesley,” Jodie interrupted, stepping back from him with a hand out, “please. We have never seen eye to eye on anything. Growing up, your only interest in me was the excitement of bedding me in secret. We had fun learning new things, exploring our bodies, sure. But you never attended court with me on my visits, never gave me a tour of Andervale, never got to know me or spent any genuine time with me. What we have has never been love, it was lust. It was always lust.”
“No, I love you.” He felt his innards shattering as he pleaded in desperation.
Jodie patted Wesley’s outstretched hand. “You may have loved me, but you cannot love me anymore. It is time for us to let go. I’m sorry, Wes.”
Jodie released Wesley’s hands and blew out the candlelight, sending the room into a state of darkness. She made her way over to the door.
Wesley became frozen, tears dripping down his face. He could feel the shattered pieces of his heart cutting deep into his chest like shards of glass.
“Please, Jodie! I will do anything!”
Jodie stopped and turned, looking just as upset as Wesley felt. Her eyes were red, and her lip was quivering.
She said nothing and exited the room, closing the door behind her.
Wesley stood alone.
He fell to his knees, sobbing. All he had ever wanted in his life had left him with nothing. He had waited so long, thought of every possible scenario to find a way to be with her. And this is what it had amounted to?
Wesley cried into the palms of his hands.
Every wrong decision he had ever made played through his mind. Every person he had hurt was cackling and pointing fingers at him. Every memory of being with Jodie was washed away by tears.
It was all a lie. All of it!
After a moment of weeping, he leapt up and hit his fists against the stone wall until his knuckles were bloody and bruised. Saliva ran from his open mouth as he wept.
Wesley called for Jodie, but she did not return.
Chapter 14 - Gleamrot
Tomas awoke with a fright. His entire body shuddered as he spasmed out of the nightmare, sweat pouring down his face. He felt ghostly hands holding him down and could hear the spine-chilling noise of the blade being sharpened.
Still panicking, Tomas clambered around in his bedroll, looking for a weapon.
“Woah, woah, Tomas, easy,” Rilan said gently. His friend rushed over, grabbing Tomas by the shoulders to keep him down.
Wide-eyed and scared, Tomas’s gaze darted around the campsite looking for danger that he was sure was there.
But there was none.
Only Rilan, Captain Gharland, the squire Landry, and several other strangers, gathered around a fire in the dark woods, staring at him.
He felt for the key around his neck on a thin chain of steel. It hung snuggly beneath his shirt where it always had. He breathed a sigh of relief.
The two brutes that Landry had warned them about, Ref and Styna, sat away from the rest of the group, cloaked in black hoods, snickering at Tomas’s outburst.
“That boy damn near pissed himself!” Ref cackled.
“What’s the matter, boy? ’fraid of the big, scary woods!”
The thugs began howling like wolves.
“Ignore them,” Rilan whispered, patting Tomas on the back.
Tomas’s heart settled. His muscles relaxed. There were no hands holding him down, no fingers strangling him.
It was only a nightmare.
Landry came over with a cup in his hand, his black hair scruffy from wearing his helmet all day. “Are you alright, Tomas?”
“I’m fine.”
“He gets night terrors sometimes,” Rilan said.
Tomas gave Rilan a quick look, as if to indicate he did not want others to know. His cheeks grew rosy.
Landry handed Tomas the cup. It was filled with warm, freshly brewed tea. “Found some wild tea leaves nearby. Doesn’t taste all that good, I’m afraid. But it might help make you feel better.”
“Thanks, Landry.”
Tomas sipped the bitter tea. Landry was right- it tasted like shit, but the warmth was a pleasant shield against the cool night.
Tomas gained his bearings as his mind cleared. They had been riding for several days with little sleep. The road through Gleamrot Forest had not been easy. The woods had an ominous breath to them, hundred-foot-tall pine trees swaying and groaning with each gust of wind. The road was treacherous, mostly deserted, and had a layer of thick mud from scattered rains.
The group had passed through a dense layer of fog before coming across the burned remains of a homestead only the previous day. Smoke still rose from the glowing embers of the skeletonised house.
Gharland noted that Akurai raiders were probably responsible. Nothing remained but the charred ashes of timber and wood.
Tomas had wondered, who had lived there? Where were they now?
He had gotten his answer sooner than expected.
Around the next bend, they found the hanging corpses of a family high up over the road. It looked to be two adults and a small child.
The young boy was what bothered Tomas the most.
He had been stripped before being hung, his clothes strewn in the filth at his feet. The only cover he had left was the insects crawling over his bloated, blackened skin.
His lips had peeled back from his teeth in a horrific smile of death. A ‘rotting man’s sneer’, Gharland called it.
The man’s abdomen had burst, with liquefying entrails hanging out for the carrion. He was the most wounded of them all, probably went down fighting to save his family.
A handwritten sign was nailed to a tree, written in a foreign language that Tomas could not read. He guessed it was Avarwythian, the native tongue of the Akurai Imperials.
Tomas had to avert his eyes at the sight after a moment. Rilan had nearly thrown up his breakfast.
The smell was horrifying yet oddly sweet, reminding him of the shallow graves his father used to dig when throwing away the unusable remains of the lambs he would slaughter. It made his stomach twist.
“Should we cut them down?” Landry had asked Gharland.
“We don’t have the time,” the Captain replied coldly, riding past them as if they weren’t even there. “This is war. Expect to see a lot more of this. Keep moving.”
Tomas remembered that the group had stopped for the night, under Gharland’s orders. They were sleeping rough in a wooded grove, surrounded by the looming silhouettes of trees.
Groups of rainbow flowers were blooming within the green grass. Tomas had spotted some golden Lion lilies, shaped with petals like a lion’s mane. Pink and blue king’s nestle bushels sprouted between patches of vegetation, and even some glowing moonlight mushrooms helped illuminate the serene grove. Some creeping vines were growing up a boulder outcrop like spindly snakes.
In the distance, a pine owl was cooing. An ever-watchful sentinel.
Tomas gazed up, breathing in the fresh air.
The stars appeared brighter overhead than normal. The two moons, Rea and Ixo, weren’t out tonight. One of the stars looked strange- a red light, brighter than all the others.
Tomas had never quite noticed it before, but as he thought about it, he realised he’d spotted it over the past several nights as well.
A cool breeze blew leaves gently around the grassy grove and made the campfire dance.
Rilan, Tomas, Landry, and most of the soldiers had their bedrolls around the campfire. Gharland was the only one with a tent, which was set up a few feet away and shut. Britus slept on a bedroll beside the Captain’s tent, like a loyal guard dog.
Ref and Styna sat on a log at their own little fire on the edge of the grove, hidden by shadow.
“Do you wanna talk about it?” Rilan asked, pulling him back into the moment.
&nbs
p; “Same dream as always,” Tomas said, sipping his tea.
Rilan nodded. He knew what that meant, and he knew not to push it any further. Rilan sat back down on his bedroll next to Landry.
Landry was picking at some dry jerky and offered some pieces to Tomas and Rilan. Rilan took up the offer eagerly, but Tomas politely refused.
“Thanks, but I don’t eat meat,” Tomas explained.
Landry looked confused. “You don’t eat meat?”
“Long story, but I just can’t stomach it. Haven’t eaten it since I was young.”
“Really?” Landry was stunned. He had not heard of such a thing. “I don’t understand?”
Tomas decided to explain; Landry seemed nice enough to have an answer. “My father was a butcher, you see. So, I was forced to… watch what he did for a living. Eventually he also taught me how to slaughter animals. That was enough to turn me off meat for good.”
Landry nodded. “Fair enough. But that’s a shame. I could not live without jerky… or bacon, come to think of it.” He was nearly salivating at the thought.
Tomas instead took out some bread from his satchel bag and smeared some red jam onto it with his finger from a small pot he had picked up back in Barrowtown.
He could hear Ref and Styna chuckling and snorting to themselves, probably at the comments he had just made. Whatever it was, they were laughing at Tomas’s expense by the sound of it.
Nearby sat another group of soldiers from the company. Tomas had learned some of their names on the journey, though they did not seem to talk much. It was tough to get to know the men. Most did not want to be there and would make an effort to avoid the younger men.
One soldier the others called ‘Smiling John’, on account of the scars across his mouth. Smiling John claimed he had received them while fighting off a group of highwaymen and was stabbed in the mouth, but Tomas had overheard some of the others whispering that he had been tortured as a child by his parents.
He was not game enough to ask John for the truth.
There was an older, balding soldier too, who Tomas had had a single conversation with named Hemish. He was a man-at-arms in the king’s army, rather than a conscript, and had spent the last several years training fresh recruits in Shadowshore.
Hemish did not want to be there anymore than Tomas or Rilan.
Tomas had noticed how stiff the man’s body was, every time he got on and off his horse. He was too old for this sort of work anymore, but the looming threat of foreign invasion seemed to make his old age void.
After chowing down the salty yet firm jerky, Rilan looked at his bandaged hand, stained with red and black dried liquids from his injured stump. He grimaced at the pain but attempted not to vocalise it.
Tomas, however, noticed. “Want me to have another look at it?”
“What, and suffer another burn at your hands? No, thank you!” Rilan said.
“What happened, if you don’t mind me asking?” Landry said.
“Lost a finger in the battle at Barrowtown.”
“A… a finger?” Landry went pale. “Like, the entire finger?”
“The entire thing. Tomas here cleaned it up for me. Burnt the wound and everything. Still hurts like shit, though.”
“I bet it does.”
Rilan shrugged. “I’ve had worse.”
“What could be worse than losing a finger?” Tomas said sarcastically.
“That beating I got from pa when I stole his mead that one time when we were, what, twelve years old?”
Tomas chuckled at the memory. “Thirteen, I think. Snuck off and drank the whole thing.”
“Left me with a black eye and a broken rib. I don’t know what hurt worse though, the beating or the hangover!” Rilan laughed.
Landry smiled awkwardly, unsure of how to react. But Rilan and Tomas were quietly chuckling to themselves, and he couldn’t help but smile along with them. Rilan, in particular, had quite a distinctive, hoarse laugh that made it difficult not to join in.
“I got flung from my horse while practicing jousting with Ser Carsten the Mighty in Shadowshore a few years ago,” Landry chimed in. He lifted his tunic, revealing a scar on his side, easily several inches long.
“Ouch,” Tomas said, wincing.
“Fell onto a wooden post, snapped and went straight through me. Took all day for the physician to get the wood out, but luckily nothing major was pierced otherwise I would have died then and there.”
“Alright, you win,” Rilan smirked. “What about you, Tommy? What’s the most painful thing you felt?”
“Probably watching you fight the other day. Was like watching a toddler on stilts.” Tomas said. Landry burst out with laughter.
Rilan’s expression turned to a scowl at the joke, but he couldn’t hold his grumpy expression for long. He let out a cackle as the three snickered to themselves. It felt good to let out some of the tension from the past few days in a healthy way. Tomas could feel his stress already beginning to lift.
Rilan’s face turned a little sour. Something had come up on his mind. “I keep thinking about the battle,” he spoke. “I can’t stop asking myself, why?”
“Why what?” Tomas said.
Rilan kept his voice down to keep the conversation private. “The vanguard at Barrowtown. We were not at all prepared for what was to come. None of us had any training. Few of us had proper weapons or armour. But Gharland’s army did have trained soldiers in it, as well as the cavalry on standby.”
Tomas nodded. He hadn’t thought about it much until now. In fact, he was trying very hard to forget the whole affair.
“So why were we put in the vanguard? Why was the vanguard made up of untrained, ill-equipped peasants?”
The three sat silently, pondering over the question. Tomas thought back to the angry mob who had attacked Gharland at the war camp the night after the battle, claiming he had purposefully led most of the army to their death, simply to set a trap for the invaders.
Tomas could not conceive such a thing. Could somebody really put hundreds of men to death, just for a better chance at victory?
“You were used as bait,” Landry whispered. “For the cavalry.”
Tomas and Rilan’s fears appeared to be correct.
“I knew it,” Rilan said, shaking his head in frustration. “I fuckin’ knew it. We were fodder.”
“It matters not, now,” Tomas said, trying to calm Rilan down.
“We were expendable,” Rilan said. An expression of sorrow covered his face. “That’s what we are to him.”
“Rilan, you and Tomas survived. We are here, we are away from the war.”
“Aye, but we are still under his command.”
Tomas was uncertain of what to say. Rilan was right- Gharland was a dangerous man, possibly the most dangerous one there. He clearly had no issue in sacrificing the lives of lesser men in order to achieve victory.
What does that say about a man? Can such a thing be justified?
“What scares me was that battlefield,” Landry said, looking deep into the firepit with his leaf-green eyes.
Tomas recalled the empty battlefield when they had left Barrowtown. Blood-soaked, muddied earth, devoid of any corpses.
“What happened to those bodies?” Rilan asked rhetorically.
The three boys remained silent. None had the answer. Every conceivable possibility had been disproven. The Barrowtown war camp had not removed the bodies, the Imperial Akurai army had fled the area and could not have done it.
Where did the bodies go?
As the night grew darker, most of the company had fallen asleep. Conversations simmered to quiet whispers, mixing with the cracks and sizzles of the fires.
Tomas was picking at the dirt under his nails with a rusted dagger. Rilan and Landry stared into the glowing flames.
“So, Landry, why did you become a squire?” Rilan asked abruptly, cutting through the silence.
“I want to be a knight someday, and a lord after that. After my father dies, I will be Lo
rd Heradin. Father says it is expected of me to be chivalrous, noble, brave, and above all, experienced.” Landry paused. “I don’t want to disappoint my father. ‘Being a squire is a good place to start for that learning’, he says.”
“Pardon me for asking, but how does cleaning the Captain’s breeches and brushing his horse teach you to become a lord?” Rilan asked.
Tomas couldn’t tell if he was joking or being sincere.
Landry thought about it for a moment. “It teaches me how to take orders. ‘A leader cannot lead without learning how to listen, first.’ That’s what father always says. And, I guess, it teaches me to be patient, work hard, and have respect for the chain of command.”
“If I were ever that man’s squire, I’d probably take a piss in his soup before serving it to him,” Rilan said, making sure to keep his voice down. “Man’s a cunt.”
Landry couldn’t help but crack a smile. “And that’s why you’d never be a squire.”
“Speaking of piss, I’m gonna go take one,” Rilan said, standing up awkwardly to keep his legs together. Rilan crept out of the grove and into the woods.
Tomas leant in closer to Landry. “Sorry about him.”
“Oh, it’s fine. He’s a character, that’s for sure.”
“He means no offence. He just… has no filter, sometimes.”
Landry laughed. “No need to worry.”
“We arrive at Winterglade tomorrow. Ever been?” Tomas asked.
“No, I haven’t. To be honest, before the invasion I had rarely ever left Shadowshore. Father is always very cautious when it came to my whereabouts. It’s good to be away from him, though. I feel like I’m finally accomplishing something.”
Tomas nodded. He realised that Landry, despite being highborn and coming from a noble family, was much more like he and Rilan than he had first realised.
All three had come from different places, with different backgrounds. But they shared one common thing. The world was brand new to all of them, and they had been eager to leave the confines of their homes before realising what it truly meant.
“Rilan and I went passed by Winterglade with our battalion on our way to Barrowtown. Didn’t get a chance to stop there, but it was quite the sight. Lots to see. Biggest place we’ve ever been to, so many people all living together in one place!”
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