Crusade

by Daniel M Ford

  “Men live north of Harlach?”

  “Aye,” Allystaire said. “Most of them are running or hiding from something, but there are simply those who are born there and know nothing else, do what they can to eke a living from what arable land is left beyond the borders the White Bear cares to keep. Warbands spend quite a bit of time there, coming south when there is work, moving north to defend, or prey upon, the folk there. There are only a few proper towns that far north, and desolate places they are, I am sure. If we can deal with this army of Braechsworn…” He sighed, letting his words trail off.

  Gideon rested a hand on his shoulder, the plates of the armor shifting beneath the boy’s touch. “We cannot minister to everyone in the world, all at once. Do what we can, until we do what we must, aye? Well, Symod’s threat is the must.”

  “I know, son,” Allystaire muttered. “I know.” He squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, then opened them to the parchment. He moved his fingertip over a place where two of the Oyrwyn trails intersected. “Here. There is enough space to stage a small force, it is close enough to Oyrwyn’s towers to stay in contact and it could easily be supplied, as it connects straight to the road that leads up to Wind’s Jaw.”

  For a moment, the paladin’s finger lingered over the very tip of the trail. In his mind he had a brief glimpse of a tower, a hidden parapet, the grass, and the flowers growing upon it, but he pushed the thought away. “If Oyrwyn is here, that is where I would start looking.”

  “Anything in particular I should look for?”

  “If you have the time and can see close enough, count the tents. That will give us some rough idea of the men he has. The colors they wear, any badges. I will know them.”

  “As you say,” Gideon said. “I will start now, if you like. And Cerisia will be here in a few moments to speak with you.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I can feel the laws of chance bend around the potential of Fortune’s Gift expressed through her will,” Gideon said. “It is not a great power as we might account it, but we have seen her use it to good effect. Go outside and meet her so she does not see me, please.”

  With that, the boy went back to his cot, and stretched out. Allystaire watched for a moment as his prone form relaxed, his breathing slowed. To the casual observer, Gideon appeared lifeless. He went outside to find Norbert standing a few paces away, leaning casually on a spear.

  Allystaire clapped him on the shoulder, leaned close, and muttered, “Stay near this tent. Until Gideon comes out, the only folk you let in are me, Torvul, or Idgen Marte. Understood?”

  Norbert stood up straighter and nodded sharply. Allystaire returned the nod, then looked up to see Cerisia’s golden mask approaching him. He stepped away from Norbert and greeted her with a shallow bow. The Archioness extended her hand, which he briefly took, but did not kiss.

  “Sir Stillbright.” Her voice was, as always, a bit muffled by the mask she wore, and yet he thought he could hear worry in it. “Would you take a brief walk with me?”

  He nodded and bent his elbow. Laughing lightly, she rested her hand upon his armor. Allystaire found himself wishing that he hadn’t left his gauntlets upon the table in his tent.

  * * *

  Gideon was hardly surprised to find Oyrwyn men precisely where Allystaire had said they would be.

  He hovered above their encampment, which was cunningly hidden from sightlines along the mountainside, by the means of scrubby bushes dragged into paths, piles of dead wood or rocks that appeared to have fallen.

  Quickly, he gave up on counting the tents. There were many—far more than any of the Barons below had gathered with them—and he felt certain there were other camps nearby. But this seemed the primary staging area, for at its center sat a large silken pavilion, grey, shot through with strands of silver thread, with black mountains embroidered upon it. Though it bore no pennant, the plate-armored knights standing before its entrance assured Gideon that he knew who occupied it.

  He did manage to study the men moving about. Not the knights, whose heraldry was too varied, and of whom there were at least a dozen, but the men-at-arms. Most seemed to be lightly armored, and wearing a dark grey similar to the pattern on the pavilion, though the device on their chest wasn’t a simple black mountain: a coil of grey wound around the mountain itself. Behind the mountain, in red, were implements he didn’t recognize, one that looked like a three-pronged hook, and one a thin-bladed axe.

  No one in the camp seemed to recognize him or see him moving about above them, though there was one priest of Braech at least, judging by the sea-blue pavilion near the grey one. He felt no music of power from it, no note of the will, no tang of salt air.

  Still, Allystaire’s suspicions were confirmed and could be reported.

  With a flicker of will that, if anyone else could have perceived it, would’ve looked like a raptor beating its wings to ascend, Gideon did just that. Standing Guard Pass, the camp, and the congress going on within it all receded from his view, and he looked out over a green and living map of the western Baronies.

  He strained his senses. It would not be true to say he heard, or tasted, or saw, yet it was somehow all of these things at once, that brought him the knowledge he sought.

  The Will of the Mother strained to know the presence of other powers, little flickers of magic. As though he were, with his hands, which were hundreds or thousands of paces below his will, peeling wet pieces of parchment away from one another, he peeled away layers of perception, until he viewed the world as a space featureless but for beacons of power.

  There was his own self, but that was easy to ignore. Beneath him were Allystaire, Idgen Marte, Torvul, Cerisia, another minor priest or two scattered throughout the encampment, he thought.

  He could see the bright blue vibrancy that was Thornhurst. Perhaps it was Mol; perhaps, when in Thornhurst, the place and the Voice were one and the same.

  Distantly, so distantly he was not sure of its physical location, there was something almost overwhelming. Something of primal, a roaring font of power. Yet it was bottled, contained.

  Gideon decided he preferred it that way, and sent his senses further. Beyond it, a presence and a power he knew, a sickly and bilious green cloud.

  The Eldest.

  Almost, he sent a tendril of his consciousness towards that hateful blot. Yet he held back, thinking on what Torvul might say about surprise.

  Then he thought on what Allystaire would do, and he reached out anyway.

  The contact was brief; he did not want the sorcerer to know his true strength, where he was, or what he could do.

  When he pulled his senses together near the Eldest, he knew the being to be on a ship, at sea. There were other powers traveling with him, more Dragon Scales. Dozens of them, all of them carrying the same power he had taken from the two in the village.

  Gideon wanted to smash the boat they rode on to splinters, to pluck it from the waves and hurl it into the air, letting it, and those on it, fall where they may.

  Yet there was a crew upon it as well, tending to it, keeping it moving; the Eldest and the Dragon Scales would have no part of such mundane work. So he settled for drawing forth a ray of sun into the cloud of darkness that surrounded the Eldest in the largest cabin on the boat.

  He touched the sorcerer’s mind for the briefest of moments.

  There is nowhere you can go, he said, where the Sun will not lead me to you. So continue sailing towards me, Eldest. Towards the Negation, and your death. It will be easier for both of us.

  Gideon only felt the merest flicker of the sorcerer’s rage, and he outraced easily whatever power the Eldest hurled at him as his Will carried him back to his body, hundreds of miles away.

  * * *

  No one who was alive at that moment could have seen the bird that was Gideon’s will in its speed-of-thought travel. The only few who could have
perceived it and known what they were seeing lurked in covens and coteries in distant lands, fearing and fretting over the stirrings of tremendous power they had felt in the past weeks.

  Yet as he flickered across the Baronies, here and there, in city, town or village, children—a dozen, maybe a score at most, and all young—suddenly looked towards the sky and then the east, not knowing why.

  One infant’s tears turned suddenly to laughter as his eyes followed the track of the Will, not comprehending it. Another woke from mid-afternoon sleep crying as something she wanted pulled inexorably away from her, though she could not understand what it was.

  A boy just old enough to help with the spring planting, barefoot, carrying a sack nearly as big as himself over one shoulder, let a handful of seeds fall in a pile to the ground as he stared at the sky.

  As he darted past, even the Will of the Mother did not quite notice the stares of these children, or the tiny, tiny sparks that were flickering in them even now.

  * * *

  “You have to go and see Hamadrian, in privacy,” Cerisia said urgently as soon as she and Allystaire were out of Norbert’s earshot.

  “I certainly need to speak to him, but right now?”

  “No,” the priestess said, her hand clutching hard at his forearm. “You have to heal him. He is dying, Allystaire. It is nearly a miracle that he has lasted so long. The spring air helps, certainly, but his lungs are giving out on him. Every breath is a struggle.”

  Allystaire paused and lowered his head, only for a moment. He lifted it back up, straightened his shoulders, and said quietly, “Is he with the other Barons?”

  “I convinced them to agree to two turn’s respite. He will be in his tent.”

  “Take me to him.”

  They passed the distance in silence. Red-surcoated guards and knights simply nodded as they passed, with the Archioness serving as Allystaire’s pass through any challenge. When they finally reached a great silk pavilion, green vines crawling over its red walls, with the Vined Great Helm fluttering lightly atop it, the two knights outside stepped together to block the entrance.

  One, a man a few years younger than Allystaire, with a sandy beard beneath his open helm, gestured to the hammer on the paladin’s belt.

  “Not armed in the Baron’s presence,” he said stiffly.

  “The Baron has nothing to fear from me,” Allystaire replied mildly.

  “Is this truly necessary, Sir Gladden?” Cerisia took a half-step towards the knight who barred their way, her voice quiet beneath the mask.

  Allystaire sighed, but reached for his hammer and had it halfway from its loop when the tent flaps parted and another red-surcoated knight appeared. Unlike the pair in front of the pavilion, the surcoat over his mail was not quartered with any other symbol. It displayed only the Vined Helm.

  “Do not bar the paladin’s way, Gladden.” Arontis’s voice was sure and steady, Allystaire thought, confident in his orders. Addressing the man familiar, without his title, yet it hardly seems an insult. Allystaire spared a glance for the guard, who seemed stung, but not angry, acknowledging his orders with a simple nod, and stepping away.

  The Innadan heir’s back was straight, his shoulders wide, and his face worked to betray nothing. But there were bags under his eyes and he couldn’t decide whether to look at Allystaire or Cerisia.

  “Come in, paladin,” Arontis said, a bit more stiffly than he’d ordered the guard.

  The passage from under the afternoon sun into the silk pavilion threatened to dim the world’s light. The silken walls held within them a miasma of illness, and far more heat than should’ve been necessary. In a large central bed, Hamadrian Innadan lay a shivering, wasted form beneath a pile of blankets. Braziers, lit and tended by a pair of liveried valets, made a semi-circle around his resting place.

  In a chair by his side sat a man dressed in a long black robe with his sleeves rolled up to the elbow, a large leather case at his feet. He stood up and stepped away from the bed, bowing deeply in Allystaire’s direction. The valets did likewise.

  Allystaire couldn’t keep the frown from his face, though he regretted it when he saw one of the valets take half a step backwards and sink to one knee.

  “You need not kneel to me,” he muttered. “Any of you. If there is anyone in this camp deserving of your homage, it is the man lying here,” he added as he crossed to Hamadrian’s bedside with two quick steps.

  The chirurgeon’s chair was there, and he could’ve pulled it closer, sunk into it.

  Instead, grimacing as the joint took the weight, Allystaire sank to a knee before Hamadrian Innadan and reached out to take his hand.

  The skin of the old Baron’s left hand was thin, clammy. The pulse beneath it was faint and slow. Allystaire let his senses drift, searched for memories of Innadan. The Baron as a younger, heartier man, in one of Allystaire’s first battles outside Aldacren Keep, never hesitant, never cowardly, but always slightly sickened by what he saw. The first attempt at a peace congress outside his own halls seven years ago, vainly, almost plaintively going from Baron to Baron and lord to lord, trying to get them to end their revels, their jousting and gaming and drinking, and talk seriously of peace.

  Allystaire found the spark of life within the old, tired, dying man whose hand he grasped. He felt the weakness of the lungs, the disease that attacked them.

  The paladin thought on how he’d ignored Hamadrian’s pleas for peace those years ago, and he gathered in his left hand as much of the Mother’s Gift, as much compassion, as much regretful sorrow as he could, and he poured it through his hand and into the Baron’s body.

  Hamadrian sat up in his bed and cried out sharply. The chirurgeon rushed to the bedside, loomed over Allystaire’s shoulder. Allystaire held tightly to the Baron’s hand, listened carefully as the old man drew in a deep breath.

  It rattled in his chest and he coughed, the spasm of it racking his chest beneath the dressing gown he wore. The paladin reached out with his gift again, pushing the warm healing music of the Mother into Hamadrian’s lungs.

  Not every affliction will fall to this gift.

  Allystaire heard the words as if for the first time, weighted heavily with sorrow, but he knew that he had heard them before, kneeling beside an oak tree before the Mother on his ride out of Bend.

  He let go of Hamadrian’s hand, and looked up, meeting one sharp eye and one clouded and milk white.

  “What’d you do, lad? Stung like the Cold inside my lungs,” Hamadrian rasped, tapping his chest.

  “I tried to heal you, my Lord Baron,” Allystaire replied.

  “What do you mean tried? I feel ready to ride, fight, feast and fu—” He stopped, cleared his throat, eyes having flitted briefly towards Cerisia, then back to the paladin who knelt before him. “I feel better.”

  “What do you mean tried?” The Archioness’s words were only a few moments on the heels of the Baron’s, and Allystaire thought he could hear a trace of panic in them.

  “I do not doubt that you feel better, my lord,” Allystaire said. “For I have…” He paused, clenching his right hand into a fist as he searched for a word. “Fanned the flames of life that still burn within you. For a few turns, perhaps a day, I do not doubt that your wind will be as good as any man your age.”

  “And when those turns or days are done?”

  “Then your disease will return,” Allystaire said, meeting Hamadrian’s eyes steadily with his own. “The same as it was. Perhaps worse for what I have done.”

  “Your Goddess hasn’t taught you how to soften a blow, has She?” Hamadrian swung his legs over the edge of his bed and stood, holding himself straighter and easier than when Allystaire had seen him leaning on Cerisia’s arm half a turn earlier.

  “I believe in looking straight at the things we must confront, Hamadrian, no matter how much they frighten us.”

  “Then sta
nd up and look straight at me already. Cold, the years you’ve spent at war your knees can’t take all that nonsense.”

  “Not yet, Baron Innadan,” Allystaire said, then swallowed hard. “Not until I offer you my apology.”

  “You told the Bear you didn’t intend to apologize to Barons, only to people.”

  “Baron Harlach never tried to arrange a peace congress before. Never hosted all the western Barons and their lords at his own home, in open welcome. Never despaired while we drank, wenched, broke lances, and mocked him. I do not know if I could have persuaded Gerard Oyrwyn to see the value in what you wanted. I do know that I did not try—and that is a sin against your people, and my own, but also against you. Amongst all of us, Hamadrian, all the lords and great men of the west,” Allystaire said, his tone twisting those words to a bitter curse, “you alone had the courage to grasp at peace. You had the courage to be thought weak, to be thought a coward, in the pursuit of something better than glory, and none of us, me least of all, did aught to help to you.”

  The paladin took a deep breath, and lowered his head. “I will not ask your forgiveness. I only want you to know that I understand, now, what a mistake we all made. How petty we all were. I thank the Goddess for leading me to help you in this task now.”

  Hamadrian Innadan, his hand steady, reached down to the pauldrons of Allystaire’s shoulder and urged him back to his feet. Both settled their hands back at their sides.

  “You thought I was a coward?” Hamadrian cocked his head to one side, lips twisted in a faint grimace.

  “No,” Allystaire said, “a fool, mayhap. Weak, even. I knew better than to think you craven, even blind as I was.”

  Hamadrian nodded. “You might do to offer an apology to the knights you humiliated in the lists that fortnight, you know.”