Kings of the Wyld

by Nicholas Eames

  Clay spat out a mouthful of leaf and mud. “Thanks.”

  “That was … intense,” said Matrick. He was smiling, but his voice quavered, and his hands were visibly trembling. How long had it been, Clay wondered, since the king of Agria had killed a man with those hands?

  Clay was about to voice his agreement when movement behind the king drew his eye.

  The archer, he realized, angling for another shot.

  “Matty, down!” he shouted, and the king dropped to his belly. Clay scrambled to his feet as the bowman drew, surged forward behind Blackheart as the arrow left the string in a blur. He felt the iron tip jolt his shield and was already reaching for it, yanking it out, spinning it round in his fingers. He found a grip, saw the bowman’s eyes widen as his arm whipped out and he hurled the arrow as hard as he could.

  In almost every circumstance, Clay knew, throwing an arrow was an awful idea. He’d tried doing so only once before, years and years ago, but it hadn’t gone well—and so no one was more surprised than Clay when it sank halfway to the fletching in the archer’s throat.

  Well, no one but the archer. The archer was almost certainly more surprised than Clay.

  He tried giving voice to his disbelief, but blood flooded his mouth, and he slumped to the earth, dead.

  Matrick whistled from where he lay from the ground. “Did you just—”

  “Stop!” they heard Gabriel cry. He was still chasing the second bowman, who had circled back toward the site of the ambush. As the gap closed between them, the mercenary abandoned his bow and wheeled on Gabe, drawing a curved Phantran cutlass from a sash at his waist.

  “Stay back!” he wailed, brandishing the sword with both hands. “Stay back, or I’ll have your guts out!” He addressed the pair that had attacked Matrick earlier. “Get up, you feckless curs! I ain’t paying you to lay around whinging!”

  The merc hamstrung by Matrick rose unsteadily and limped over to his boss, but the woman remained where she was. “Go fuck yourself,” she spat. “You ain’t paying me to get knifed up neither!”

  The clown-faced man Clay had knocked out earlier had come round as well. He lurched groggily to his leader’s side, and the three men stood side by side, grunting and growling like cornered animals.

  Gabe slowed, stopped, and raised his empty hands. “Listen, you don’t …” he squinted. “Wait. I know you from somewhere.”

  The cutlass bearer flinched, averting his eyes. He was a round man—as round as Matrick—with a slick wisp of hair plastered across his otherwise bald head. Clay guessed that his features had originally been painted to resemble some sort of hunting cat, but sweat or rain had turned the black and orange stripes into a slick brown mess. Beneath that, however …

  “Vail’s Rotten Breath, Raff Lackey!? Is that you?” Clay took a step toward him, careful not to trip over the giant’s out-flung arm. Startled, the merc whirled, waving his sword like a child swatting at stalks of grass. “Woah, hey, Raff! It’s me, Clay Cooper.”

  The merc scowled. “I know who the fuck you are, Slowhand. You look just the same as you always did, ’cept older.”

  “And you look …” Clay found himself at a loss for words. It had been several decades since he’d laid eyes on Raff Lackey, who looked as though every one of those years had roughed him up something fierce. “You look older, too.”

  Raff snorted, but said nothing.

  “Hold up,” said Matrick. “If you knew who we were, why did you attack us?”

  The old merc risked a quick glance at Gabriel. “Well … ya see …”

  “The bounty,” Clay said.

  Moog leapt to his feet, holding what looked like a silver flute. “Finally! Wait, what bounty?”

  Old Raff looked abashedly from Clay to Gabriel. “Kallorek put a price on the two of you. Ten marks apiece, twenty-five for the pair.”

  Ten lousy courtmarks, Clay thought dismally. He’d owned cloaks that had cost more than ten marks. “How did you find us?” he asked.

  Raff shrugged. “Kal said you were headed to Fivecourt, but you can’t claim a bounty inside the city, so we just sort of ranged around hoping to get lucky.”

  “Well, you got lucky,” said Matrick. The woman on the ground moaned piteously and he frowned down at her. “In a manner of speaking.”

  Gabriel shifted, lowering his hands. “So you’re hunting people now, Raff? What’s wrong, monsters too scary for you? Surely there’s a few rot-ridden goblins somewhere you could put out of their misery.”

  Clay winced. Goblins would be a sore spot for the weathered mercenary. Raff Lackey’s old band, Viscera, had soared to fame when they’d managed to take down a firbolg within sight of Fivecourt’s walls. They were the muse of many bards for a time, but their fall from grace happened almost as swiftly.

  Compelled by their newfound celebrity to take on more dangerous contracts, Viscera, whose victory against the firbolg had been more luck than skill, found themselves hopelessly outmatched. Tragan, Raff’s brother and bandmate, fell off a cliff while running from a direwolf, and their wizard was boiled alive by ogres. Rock bottom came shortly after, when Raff was taken prisoner by a clan of goblins he’d been hired to exterminate. The goblins stripped him, flayed him bloody, and marched him through the village of Rednettle in bizarre mockery of a tour parade.

  “Go fuck yourself, Gabe.” Raff made a show of summoning a mouthful of phlegm and lobbing it in Gabriel’s general direction. “You’re looking a little tarnished yourself these days, golden boy.” An ugly smile crept onto his face. “Say, when you stopped in on Kallorek did you happen to meet his wife? She’s a rare beauty, I’m told, though a bit old for my tastes. Heard she’s got a real pretty daughter, though. And one with daddy issues, no less. Those are my favourite.”

  Gabriel went rigid. His jaw bunched and his eyes flared like a horse scared shitless. Raff was trying to goad him, and doing a damn fine job of it. Clay himself supressed an urge to throttle the old merc senseless, even as his mind scrabbled for a way to steer their course clear of further violence. He’d come on this fool’s quest to rescue Rose, after all—not to murder men in the woods outside Fivecourt.

  They outnumbered Raff and his remaining companions, but those three were armed, and if there was any lesson to be learned from Raff Lackey’s rise and fall, it was that even a shit fighter got lucky from time to time.

  “Leave off, Raff,” said Clay. “You’ve got injured need seeing to. Dead to bury. Let us go our way, and we’ll put this whole bloody business behind us.”

  “A brilliant idea!” said not-Glif from her place on the ground. The limping man looked hopeful as well. Whatever Clown-face was thinking was a mystery to Clay, since that crimson smile was a permanent fixture.

  Their boss chuckled darkly. “An offer of mercy from Clay Cooper? You’ll forgive me if I doubt your sincerity, Slowhand. As my brother used to say: If it sounds like a sheep but looks like a lion, it’s probably a lion.”

  “A real sage, your brother,” quipped Matrick. “Ran himself off a cliff, didn’t he?”

  Raff sneered. “Laugh it up, Your Highness. I’m claiming that bounty, no doubt about it. You’ve spared me having to split it six ways, at least, so I’ll thank you for that.” He shifted his grip on the cutlass, and Clay could sense he was growing restless. “You lot aren’t as soft as I’d hoped you’d be, but I still count three swords to none.”

  What Clay mistook for the mating cry of some forest creature turned out to be Moog’s quiet cackle. “I think not,” he said cryptically, and brought the silver flute to his lips. The instrument emitted an eerie hiss, a sound like a distant kettle boiling. Raff looked suddenly panicked, fearful of whatever magic the wizard had unleashed upon them. Gabriel took a careful step back, and Clay hefted Blackheart, bracing himself for whatever came next.

  What came next was the sigh of the wind through the trees, the song of birds warbling to one another, the whisper of a snake gliding over fallen leaves, and the snap of a twig as Matrick shifted une
asily from foot to foot.

  Essentially, nothing happened.

  Moog tried again, but the result was the same. Raff shared a perplexed look with his two companions. The wizard turned the flute around and tried blowing on the other end. He blew until he was red in the face.

  Still nothing.

  “Uh, Moog?” Clay ventured.

  “Gods of Goblinkind!” the wizard cursed, causing Raff to twitch compulsively. “I bought this off a peddler in Conthas who swore by the Summer Lord’s beard it would turn swords into snakes. Or was it spears?” he wondered. “Shit, he might have said spears.” Moog scratched his bare scalp with a spindly finger, which drew Clay’s attention to the massive python descending from a branch just above the wizard’s head.

  “Moog—” Clay repeated, but then something brushed against his boot and Clay, looking down, saw that the forest floor had become a carpet of writhing snakes.

  At which point several things happened at once: Not-Glif screamed as the jaws of a bright green viper clamped down on her leg, Moog squealed as the python sprang like a bolt of scaled lightning to envelop his torso, and Matty ran to the wizard’s defense, hacking at the monstrous snake with both knives in an effort to free him.

  Everyone else tried to kill one another.

  Vail the limper went down first. Gabriel rushed him, caught his wrist when he tried to swing, grasped a handful of greasy hair, and pulled the man’s face into a rising knee.

  Clown-face, eager to revenge himself upon Clay, yelled and rushed forward. The ground between them was a hazard of coiling reptiles; every stick and fallen branch was now slithering underfoot. The merc stumbled over a rising cobra and went down. The offended serpent flared its hood, staring the prone man in the face, and if he’d remained still the merc might have emerged unscathed. Instead, Clown-face began shouting, triggering a series of rapid-fire attacks that left him bloody faced and gasping for air.

  Clay moved gingerly around his fallen aggressor, careful to avoid stepping on serpentine backs. He scanned the ground for a weapon, but the giant had collapsed on his nail-studded club, and Clown-face’s sword was still clutched in his flailing hand.

  Sensing an opening, Raff raised his cutlass overhead and charged.

  Clay acted on instinct. Afterward he would curse himself for a fool—and worse—but for the time being he stooped and snatched up the nearest weapon to hand. When his enemy’s sword came down Clay brought his shield across to knock it aside, then lunged in and thrust his arm forward. The snake in his fist lashed out, sinking venomous fangs into Raff Lackey’s exposed throat.

  For a moment he and Raff were face-to-face. The reptile’s sinuous body was coiled tightly around Clay’s arm, and he could feel its jaws working, pumping deadly poison directly into Raff’s neck, which was already swelling, darkening from pink, to red, to sickening purple. Clay’s ears were filled with an awful clatter, produced, he realized numbly, by the rattle quivering on the serpent’s tail.

  Raff gasped for a final breath, and used it to utter words that floated across the abysmal inches between him and Clay. “I’ll be waiting for ya, Cooper,” he gurgled, “along with all the rest.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Fivecourt

  Of Raff’s motley crew there were but two survivors: not-Glif and the man with the wood-brown teeth whom Gabe had knocked out earlier. The woman was deathly pale and delirious; Clay figured it was an even wager on whether the venomous snakebite on her leg or the festering wound in her gut killed her first, though he’d have put his money (had Jain left him any) on the bite. The man was in slightly better shape, though half his teeth were missing and he would no doubt walk with a limp for the rest of his life. The two of them staggered off in the direction of Fivecourt while Clay and the others saw to the corpses of their companions.

  They cleared away the snakes—an arduous task, since Moog had turned every stick suitable for doing so into a snake—and then set about burying the dead. Raff, despite having made himself their enemy, had been a good man once, and deserved a proper rest. Moog performed the Rites of Glif, sprinkling water over each of the graves and invoking the Spring Maiden’s Mercy. Matrick spoke a few words as well, commending the souls of the fallen to the Summer Lord.

  “Judge them for what they wished to be,” he begged the Father of Gods, “not what the world made of them.”

  The afternoon sun had burned away the lingering clouds by then, punching through the forest canopy in bright, shifting spears, but Matrick’s words cast a cold shadow over Clay’s thoughts.

  He was remembering the man he’d been upon returning to Coverdale after Saga disbanded—a man not altogether different from the boy who’d struck out with Gabriel a decade earlier, except that he was moderately rich and much more famous.

  The money went fast, but the fame lasted a fair bit longer.

  Mostly it got him into fights. There were plenty of wannabe mercs eager to test their mettle against the notorious Slowhand, and Clay had been more than happy to show them just how meagre their mettle was by breaking a chair over their heads, or dragging them face-first down the length of the bar. After ten years of fighting he’d found himself restless, constantly seeking provocation to upend the stew of his simmering rage over some fool’s head.

  He’d done many a good deed during the years he’d toured with Saga, but he’d done bad things, too, and had seen too many bards die in too many ways to sleep well at night. He was tormented by his dreams, and even awake he was haunted by his violent past. He mistook every galloping horse for a charging centaur, every ring of a blacksmith’s hammer for a distant clash of arms. Wherever there was smoke, Clay Cooper saw fire.

  And then he’d met Ginny. She was the daughter of Giles Locke, chief groomsman of the stables behind the King’s Head, and Clay fell for her like an anchor tossed overboard. It wasn’t just that she’d been beautiful (though she was), or dauntingly intelligent (she was that, too), but because she perceived in him what few others did—the quiet kindness beneath the warrior’s façade—and she evoked in Clay something he hadn’t felt since quitting the band and parting ways with the only friends he’d ever known: the need, fierce and bone deep, to protect someone.

  Clay Cooper had seen a dragon roused in anger. He’d faced down a legion of shrieking grimlocks and matched gazes with the cold fury of undead kings. Despite all this, asking Ginny to marry him had been the most harrowing moment of his life. She’d said yes, and soon after they moved into their place near the marsh. Things had been good for a time, but one evening, shortly before the wedding, he came limping through the tavern door after a skirmish with Whitewood poachers, and someone made the terrible mistake of remarking how much Clay resembled his father.

  The man who’d said so was taken by wagon to the clinic in Oddsford, where he slept for three months before waking up unable to recognize his own children.

  Ginny called off the wedding, and Clay began seriously contemplating a standing offer from Kallorek to embark on a solo career. He’d gone to the house to gather his things, but Ginny stopped him at the door and gave voice to the question he’d been asking himself ever since returning to Coverdale.

  Which are you, the monster or the man?

  It wasn’t the words that had moved him. It was the look in her eyes, green as the sunlit sea. She was offering him absolution, the defining choice of a lifetime balanced on a blade’s edge. The truth, he knew, was that the world needed his kind of monster. It was a brutal place. It was unfair. And Clay Cooper, such as he was, was quite simply the right kind of wrong.

  But Ginny wanted the man. The man, Clay knew, that his mother had been trying to raise—not the monster her killer had made of him.

  The man, he’d said.

  Yeah? she’d asked, looking hopeful.

  Yeah. The world has enough monsters, I think.

  His answer had made her smile, and so he’d known it was right. But this morning, with the lives of his friends at stake, Clay had felt that old anger resu
rface inside him like blood fouling a clear spring. He’d seen, reflected in Raff’s dying gaze, the monster staring back at him.

  They cleared the forest shortly before nightfall. On the plain below, the uncountable lights of Grandual’s greatest city glowed beneath the darkening sky like a bed of windblown embers.

  Moog raised his arms in triumph. “Fivecourt at last! The beating heart of civilization! It’s been far too long, gentlemen! Far too long!”

  Gabriel, whose sullen mood had returned over the past few hours, gazed down at the immensity of the circle-shaped city, while Matrick raked a hand through his thinning hair and sighed.

  “I sure could use a drink,” he said. “And a hot meal. And a warm bath. And a soft bed.” He rolled his shoulders, wincing at some nagging ache. “Gods, a woman might be nice. Do you think if I tell them I’m a king …?”

  Clay ignored him, staring down upon Fivecourt’s majesty with the same overwhelming awe he normally reserved for the sweep of stars overhead. Even at the height of Saga’s celebrity, coming to Fivecourt had always made him feel small. How could it not, he wondered, when the lives of half a million souls were unfolding all around? In Coverdale he’d been a big fish in a small pond, but here …

  You’re still a big fish, he told himself. But Fivecourt’s an ocean.

  There was a commotion at the city gate. An eight-wheeled argosy with The Screaming Eagles painted on the side in sloppy blue letters was blocking the road. Clay could hear loud music within, poorly played. A stream of pipe smoke and women’s laughter issued steadily from the open door. A young man was sitting on a set of fold-down steps that led into the massive wagon’s dark interior. He was shirtless and scrawny, his pale torso marred by crude but colourful tattoos. His long hair was dyed platinum white, and he swept it from his face as Clay and the others passed by.

  “The fuck you looking at?” he asked Clay.

  “The fuck you looking at?” Clay countered, moving on before the younger man found the wit to respond.