A shadow of anger passed over Hamadrian’s face, his lips tightened, jaw quivered. A hush fell over the table and heads turned towards them. Arontis, standing behind his father’s seat, pressed his lips hard together and looked from paladin to Baron and back again.
Then the old man smiled, and raised a barely-shaking finger to point accusingly at the paladin. “I see what you’re doing, Allystaire,” he said, smiling. “And damn it all if you aren’t right,” he added. “It is those people who deserve praise more than me.” He considered his own cup, fingers twined around the stem. “The folk who would’ve done all the things you said are long since gone to the next world, I should think. Yet doubtless they had sons, and daughters. I will write out instructions to grant them a legacy.”
The table had relaxed enough to return to its conversations, though Allystaire felt more eyes than he would’ve liked lingering upon him, but the cluster of voices, coupled with the setting sun gleaming from Allystaire’s armor, had allowed Harlach’s delegation to come upon them more or less unawares, and Baron Unseldt announced his presence with the thunderous bombast that was his wont.
“Enough with your talk of wine and peasants,” the huge man thundered. “Ale is a man’s drink, and I love my folk as much as any other lord but it won’t do to go coddling them.”
As he heaved his bulk into a nearby chair and folded his huge bare arms across his armored chest, Allystaire noted the axe that had taken back its place upon his belt. Though an inlay of gold glittered upon the head, what he could see of the blade appeared sharp and deadly.
You sure I won’t have to kill him? Idgen Marte’s voice.
Trust me when I say that you will want him on your side against the Braechsworn, Allystaire answered her. And he is at least half bluster.
What is the other half?
Bear.
Harlach reached for and poured himself a generous cup of wine despite his dismissal of it, drained it at a gulp. Hamadrian eyed him with his lips pressed into a thin line, while Loaisa didn’t bother to hide the contempt in her eyes for his manners.
“We agreed,” she said coldly, “not to come armed to this table.”
“Paladin’s armed,” Unseldt said, nodding towards Allystaire as he reached for a pitcher. “So’s the wench behind him. No offense meant to your woman, Coldbourne,” he said, “but she doesn’t seem like she goes by m’lady.”
“Whatever compacts you agreed to regarding this table and what happens at it,” Allystaire said, his voice steadily rising, “I was no part of them. I do not care where it is set, how large it is, where anyone sits, how many retainers anyone brings, who drinks what, or what is discussed round it except what gets all of your signatures upon a declaration of peace.”
“Sir Stillbright is not wrong, as far as the protocol.” Cerisia spoke up, her voice soothing over the anger that was clear in Allystaire’s. While she spoke she glided around Hamadrian’s chair to face the entire gathered company, resplendent in her gold mask and silver-threaded white silks. “He did not agree to come unarmed to this table. You, Baron Harlach, did.”
“Aye, well, that I did, but his being here changes things. I don’t trust him and I’ll not go unarmed when Oyrwyn’s warlord is about and Oyrwyn isn’t. Without an Oyrwyn seal on this peace he wants, it doesn’t matter anyway,” Harlach said, waving a hand dismissively. “So we might as well all set off back home.”
“I am no longer Oyrwyn’s warlord,” Allystaire said, “as I have already said. Yet I do know where he is.”
When he paused, he felt all the eyes regarding him. Loaisa Damarind was the first to ask. “Where, then?”
Allystaire raised his hand and pointed to the spur of mountain to the northwest. “Camped along the trailhead just above the pass. Two, mayhap three hundreds of footmen immediately available, a dozen knights at least, a priest of Braech. Surely more camped within easy reach.”
“And are we simply to take your word for that, as for so many other things?” Ruprecht Machoryn had, after a couple cups of wine, found his voice. “This Braechsworn army, for instance.”
“My men have prisoners that we will present once Gilrayan Oyrwyn has joined us,” Allystaire said.
“And some folk they already attacked are in my camp,” Landen quickly added. “We came upon them on our way here. They will want to bear witness.”
“How do you know Oyrwyn is joining us?” Byron Telmawr spoke for the first time. “Unless you have planned with him.”
Allystaire’s jaw clenched till his teeth hurt, but he forced a cold smile upon his face. “I do not intend to give him a choice. Follow me. Please.”
He raised his arm again, pointing towards the mountains. The late afternoon sun blazed bright from his armor as he thought, Gideon, now.
None of the Barons moved but to turn to look where he pointed, shading their eyes with raised arms.
Then a huge voice rolled over the gathered camps like sudden thunder, rattling the cups and pitchers upon the table and causing some to clap their hands over their ears. The very earth beneath their feet seemed to rumble; a few voices raised in fear
“GILRAYAN OYRWYN,” it said, “I GIVE YOU THIS ONCE CHANCE. COME FORWARD PEACEFULLY AND ALONE AND NEITHER YOU NOR YOUR MEN WILL BE HARMED. YOU CANNOT HIDE FROM ME, FOR I AM THE WILL OF THE MOTHER, AND YOU DO NOT WISH TO FACE MY WRATH.”
Almost as one, the Barons stood, rushing past Allystaire and Idgen Marte, their attending heirs, knights, and advisors swept up in their wake.
Allystaire took a deep breath as they moved past him; even Hamadrian was up and out of his seat more quickly than seemed likely, though Arontis was by his side in a flash. “A horse,” the Baron yelled, as he hobbled out of sight.
Cerisia remained behind, fixing Allystaire with her pale green eyes. “What will he do?” she whispered.
“What he can, and then what he must,” Allystaire replied. He took a mouthful of wine, decided he could savor it as he walked. As he turned, Idgen Marte stepped around him, into the shadow he cast from the sun to the west, and blinked from sight.
Allystaire walked off with Cerisia, leaving only Torvul. The dwarf sighed, started stumping off, stopped and came back to the table, snatched up a pitcher of wine, and hurried to catch up.
* * *
The mountain air was cool and pleasant in the large silk pavilion where Gilrayan Oyrwyn sat, carefully cleaning a sword with oil and rag. The blade was just shy of a yard long, double-edged, with enough room on the hilt for both hands, if one were inclined, yet it wasn’t quite long or heavy enough to demand it. The hilt was wrapped in silver wire, and the pommel was a thick chunk of silver worked into the Oyrwyn Mountain.
The blade, though, was unornamented, sharp, and had the patina of careful regard over long use.
“An excellent blade, of course,” the Baron Oyrwyn said, “but my father had no sense of style.”
The Baron wore a grey silk surcoat, shot with threads of silver, over a quilted arming jacket, embroidered with black peaks, and a silver circlet with four thin, square-cut emeralds spaced along its length and a sculpted silver mountain that was the match of his blade’s pommel.
He stood above a table, and around it were gathered the other four men in the pavilion, three of whom nodded and laughed mirthful agreement. One was a young, bull-necked priest of Braech with a thick black beard, who eschewed his robes for scale armor enameled in rich sea-blue, a heavy flanged mace at his belt. The others wore surcoats of varying colors and device; there was a thickset balding man in dark yellow, with a faded sprig of green leaves and three red berries worked upon it; a younger man, thin-cheeked, grey-eyed and dark-headed, whose surcoat was a plain green.
And towering above all of them, not nodding, was a thin, sinewy man, bald but for a fringe of tightly cropped grey, brown-eyed above a hawk’s-beak nose and sharp cheeks. He wore a surcoat of lighter grey than the Baron’s
; the device upon it was a round tower with the huge, curved horns of a massive bullock sprouting from its battlements.
The Baron himself was the tallest but for this older man, and when Gilrayan looked up at him with some disdain upon his young and handsome face, as if there was some effrontery in one of his lords being taller than he was.
“You do not agree, Lord Naswyn?”
“Your father would have said that style is for dead men,” the taller, older man answered.
“Without style, how is the other man supposed to know that you are his better, Joeglan?”
The younger men shared another round of mirthful laughter before Lord Naswyn of the Horned Towers answered, in a voice that had the dry creak of leather about it, “When you defeat him.”
Anger flashed across Gilrayan’s finely-cut features, for a moment, till it was overtaken by a smile that did not reach his eyes.
“All the easier when you break his spirit first.”
“As you say, m’lord.” Joeglan Naswyn’s voice was flat and even, but the words were the proper form of the thing so the Baron merely nodded and turned back to his more appreciative audience.
“So,” the young Baron said. “The coward shows his face and it is time to make our play.”
“If I may be bold, m’lord,” Joeglan spoke again. “No man who knew Allystaire ever had cause to call him coward.”
“Is that so, Lord Naswyn?”
“It is so, my lord,” he replied. As he spoke, as he faced the angry glare of the volatile young man before him, Joeglan Naswyn did not move, other than to breathe. He did not fidget with his armor or surcoat, adjust his swordbelt, move his arms, or shuffle his feet. He was simply present in an impressively immovable way, like a fact of the landscape: a barren, nearly leafless tree, exposed to the wind, but too deep in the soil to fear it.
“Then explain why he ran off, Joeglan. Explain why he tried to disappear.”
“I don’t pretend to know what he was thinking,” Joeglan said. “But it was never in him to give in to fear.”
Gilrayan smiled, and there was something of the raptor in the way his face contorted when he did. It didn’t wear well on him. “It is in every man to give in to fear, Joeglan. Surely you heard my father say as much, aye?” He didn’t wait for the Lord of the Horned Towers to nod his assent, only turned back to face his other attendant lords.
“Regardless, he is here, and the prize is before us. Six Barons, lightly defended, and our own exile. Too ripe a prize to let it slip past us.”
Joeglan Naswyn felt the effort of biting back his words. You were invited here peaceably, he wanted to say. Your father would have come openly and at least heard his peers out. If he didn’t, at the least he would’ve replied to the pigeons, said that he did not mean to attend. He would not come like a thief in the night, he thought, but did not say, as Gilrayan expounded on the possibilities of capture, ransom, execution, and kingship that awaited him in the valley below.
“We haven’t the men to fight down on open grass,” Joeglan finally said, the words coming out in a rasp. Everyone turned to stare at him. Gilrayan’s hand tightened on the ostentatious hilt of the still-naked sword. “We don’t,” he insisted. “Mountaineers with small crossbows and handaxes? Deadly up here. No man in his right mind wants to try and approach Wind’s Jaw with them watching his path. Down there, with bad range on the bows, horsemen and archers in the camp, they’ll be cut down and scattered.”
The words started rushing out of him, his voice growing hoarser as he spoke, but he was never to be sure if anyone in the tent heard him, for the world rumbled, at that moment, with the power of some other, greater voice.
“GILRAYAN OYRWYN,” it said, “I GIVE YOU THIS ONE CHANCE. COME FORWARD PEACEFULLY AND ALONE AND NEITHER YOU NOR YOUR MEN WILL BE HARMED. YOU CANNOT HIDE FROM ME, FOR I AM THE WILL OF THE MOTHER, AND YOU DO NOT WISH TO FACE MY WRATH.”
There was something in that voice that made Lord Joeglan Naswyn want to throw himself to the ground and huddle in a ball, hoping to be passed over. Gilrayan Oyrwyn was so shocked he dropped his pretty sword, forgot about it as he cast his eyes about, mad and wide, looking for an exit.
Two of the other men in the tent, the plain green surcoat and the older man with the branch and berries, bolted for the exit.
Naswyn drew his sword, and without a word, scooped the Baron’s blade from the ground and pressed it into the younger man’s trembling hands.
“STEEL WILL NOT AVAIL YOU,” the voice thundered, as if it could see them filling their hands. The walls of the pavilion began rattling as if a winter gale suddenly pulled at them. Then as one the ropes holding it taut snapped and the entire thing was torn upwards and tossed into the air, flapping off like a pennant torn loose from a lance.
A giant loomed over the circle the tent had described in the dirt. A giant, but not any kind of Gravek, for Joeglan had fought them in his youth and knew that the tallest Gravekmir would be dwarfed by the huge, luminous thing that stood above them now. Shaped like a man, but seemingly made of soft golden light, the color of a summer sunset, Joeglan almost thought he could see the mountains through this huge monster’s chest.
He wanted to scream, to run and flee, but Joeglan Naswyn had learned all his life that the one thing a man could never do was let his fear master him. He turned his fear into a wordless scream, and charged at the giant’s descending hand, his sword drawn back over his head in a two handed grip, then describing an arc that would see it cut straight through the giant’s fingers, if they could be cut.
For a moment it seemed that Gilrayan Oyrwyn and the priest who’d stayed by his side would stand rooted in place, dumb with fear, but both found weapons in their hands and followed his lead, the priest shouting prayers to the Sea Dragon as he came on.
“I TOLD YOU STEEL WOULD NOT AVAIL YOU,” the giant boomed, shaking Joeglan’s chest and rattling the campaign furniture that stood around them. Instantly, the giant’s hand was wreathed in bright blue flame. It threw no heat that he could feel, yet suddenly the sword he grasped had heated through, the center channel of the blade turning a dark, burnt orange. Without gauntlets, the heat of it traveled into his hands before he could knew it, and he tossed his weapon sizzling to the ground. The priest did the same.
“I WILL HAVE YOUR ANSWER, BARON OYRWYN.” The giant’s hand closed around Gilrayan, who pushed futilely against its grasp. Joeglan charged to his Baron’s aid, only to be flicked away with the giant’s other hand.
Joeglan had the sense that the being could have crushed him if it wished, such was the power of it when it touched him. Yet instead of throwing him away like a clod of dirt, to be broken upon the ground, the touch was just enough to send him stumbling away. If he could have credited it, Joeglan might have said that the giant was being careful.
“WATCH WELL, GILRAYAN OYRWYN,” the giant boomed, as he lifted the struggling Baron from the ground, dozens of paces into the air. It stepped away from the tent, picking its way through the encampment almost delicately, till it reached the face of a mountainside. “YOU HAVE ONE TURN TO DISMISS ALL BUT TWO-SCORE AND TEN OF YOUR MEN OUT OF SIGHT OF STANDING GUARD PASS AND TO PRESENT YOURSELF, YOUR RETINUE, AND ADVISORS TO THE CAMP BELOW.”
The Wind’s Jaw Mountaineers that made up the bulk of the forces camped there were professional, hardened veterans. Joeglan silently blessed whatever Bannerman or Sergeant-Major already had them forming a line and raising their crossbows for a volley.
He heard a rough voice bellow “LOOSE” and a bare moment after a couple of dozen bolts went into the air, the sound of the strings twanging in chorus reached him.
The giant swung a hand dismissively, and all the bolts sank straight to the ground. “I WISH NO ONE IN THIS CAMP ILL, BUT IF YOU FORCE MY HAND MY WRATH WILL BE TERRIBLE,” the giant roared. “YOU HAVE ONE TURN, BARON OYRWYN. AND THEN?”
The giant reached into the side of the moun
tain and lifted a boulder the size of a manor house from it, high into the air, as effortlessly as a man might have lifted a rock he meant to skip across a pond. “I WILL BRING THE MOUNTAINS DOWN UPON ANY ARMED MEN WHO REMAIN HERE TO THREATEN THE PEACE CONGRESS BELOW. ONE. TURN.”
Then, carefully, almost solicitously, the giant set Gilrayan Oywryn down, turned about, and vanished.
* * *
Allystaire, Idgen Marte, and Torvul ranged along behind the throng of Barons, knights, and soldiers who rushed to the edge of the trail leading down from the northern face of the mountains. Many were breathing hard, Ruprecht Machoryn especially. A few had thought to grab horses on their way and had gone far afield from the rest of them.
Everyone could hear the booming words Gideon projected across the entire pass. All of them craned their necks when the glowing golden hand of a massive giant appeared along the trail above them, holding aloft a gigantic hunk of rock as it threatened to crush the Oyrwyn encampment.
Allystaire heard gasps of shock and fear, though none became full, fearful wails. Instead of watching the display of power, he studied faces. He found Cerisia eyeing him, could feel the disapproval even through her mask. Loaisa Damarind’s face was nearly as serene as it always was, but when he looked close he saw her teeth digging lightly into her bottom lip. Unseldt Harlach was gripping his axe with two hands so hard Allystaire feared for the haft, while Byron Telmawr looked to Hamadrian and tried to copy his air of careful detachment.
It is done. I expect he will come down in the alloted time. Gideon’s voice was faint and weak in Allystaire’s mind. If not faster.
Good. Rest. Tell Harrys and Tibult to bring the prisoners now, please.
By then, Cerisia had glided to his side. “Is he truly capable of that?” Her voice was a quiet hiss, pitched only for him to hear.
He didn’t have time to answer, for by then the rest of the Barons had turned to him, Idgen Marte, and Torvul. Landen, Hamadrian, and Loaisa showed no fear, with the latter appraising him cooly with slightly lifted chin. Unseldt was glowering, but the fires of his rage were banked and dimmed, though he still held his axe. Ruprecht had gone even whiter in the face, but it was Byronn Telmawr who, unexpectedly, stepped forward.
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