Crusade

by Daniel M Ford

  “I am not telling you anything. Merely raising a question.”

  “I would rather be a plain knight errant, and throw over the title I already have, than to seek other, greater titles.”

  “What we would rather do is rarely of any consequence if we wish to make a better world, Arontis Innadan.”

  “Would you turn me away, then? When this is over, if I’ve proved myself in battle, and devoted myself to the Mother, would you turn me away from the Order?” Arontis came a step closer. “I have never wanted my father’s seat.”

  “Which is precisely why you should have it.” Allystaire let his words descend like a heavy curtain over Arontis. “Whether you should have more remains to be seen. But Arontis, if this land needs a king, you are uniquely positioned to give it one. Your father gave us a chance at peace, if we can win it. You,” he said, reaching out to poke the other man’s breastplate, “could make it last.”

  Allystaire stepped away, dropping his hand to his side. “Just think on it, my Lord Baron. Think on the fact that you could do more good from a seat, or a throne, than you could from the saddle of an itinerant knight.”

  He left the younger man speechless in his wake, and went to find Gideon and Torvul, scooping up the dwarf’s lantern as he went.

  He let his eyes close, focused on his memories of them, calling them forth to mind. Gideon, a serious and frightened voice in a dungeon, Torvul a gagged convict about to hang at a roadside. Almost instantly his sense of them intensified, where they were, how they felt—healthy, if tired—and a vague idea of what they were doing.

  In the darkness, guided by their presences in his mind, he walked straight to them.

  Gideon was leaning against his saddle and bags, legs stretched out before him. It was plain to see, even in the darkness broken only by the shuttered lantern, that the boy was bone tired, barely clinging to consciousness.

  Torvul sat next to him on a folding chair so small it seemed barely capable of holding the dwarf’s weight, drinking from a skin.

  He held it up wordlessly as Allystaire approached. He took it, drank a mouthful of strong dwarfish spirit, and handed it back.

  “What news from Idgen Marte?”

  Gideon took a deep breath. “Men are trickling in to Wind’s Jaw, where he is ‘assembling’ and ‘staging’ them. She thinks it’s clear that he doesn’t mean to move in time to take part in any serious fighting.”

  Allystaire clenched his teeth and tightened a fist. “What men? Did you see banners or hear names?”

  “Lord Harding,” Gideon said, “Naswyn.”

  “Coldbourne? Highgate?”

  The boy shook his head.

  Allystaire’s gauntlet creaked. “It is too late to send them a message that would matter, unless we were to fall back as far as the Oyrwyn border. And even then, asking them to move separately would be to start a war inside the Barony.”

  “As plans go,” Torvul said, “falling back doesn’t seem a bad one.”

  “If this were a typical enemy, another Baron’s host, I might agree with you,” Allystaire said. “But you know I cannot abandon the Varshynners to their fate. Even if Pinesward was beyond our power to help—”

  “It might be,” Torvul sharply put in.

  “I do not believe that. And even if I did, I have no guarantee that Symod would chase us.”

  “He would,” the alchemist insisted. “You’re what he’s after. I think he’d turn from the walls of Pinesward if it meant a chance at your head.”

  “Do you?” Allystaire tilted his head to one side.

  “Have you not listened to our prisoners?” Gideon sat up straighter, shook his head to chase away sleep. “That’s why he raised this Braechsworn host in the first place. To erase the ‘heresy.’ To destroy the Mother.” The boy leaned forward to emphasize his words. “To kill the paladin.”

  “Killing me does not destroy Her,” Allystaire said.

  “It’s near enough as makes no difference,” Torvul insisted. “If Braechsworn manage to bring you down, how strong do you think this little army remains? How long do Her people hold on?”

  “As long as you two, and Mol, and Idgen Marte keep up the fight,” Allystaire insisted.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Gideon said, “if Symod thinks that killing you destroys Her, that’s what does matter.”

  “Has it occurred to you, Allystaire, that you’re doing such a fine job destroyin’ his little supply expeditions that he doesn’t know we’re here,” Torvul said. “I bet if we got close to the walls and tweaked his nose, he might figure it out.”

  “If we get close enough to the walls, they can overrun us with sheer numbers,” Allystaire said.

  “Not if you don’t bring the whole army they can’t.”

  Allystaire frowned and set Torvul’s lantern down, crossed his arms over his chest. “Gideon, if need be, could you do something about the Gravekmir?”

  “Do you want them destroyed, dispersed, or disoriented?”

  Allystaire and Torvul shared a shadowed glance, then both looked back to Gideon. “Dispersed,” the paladin said, then went to one knee and dropped his voice to a hush.

  * * *

  Idgen Marte wandered the halls of Wind’s Jaw Keep, her hand wrapping and unwrapping from about the hilt of her sword. She didn’t bother flitting from shadow to shadow.

  In fact, she rather fancied a fight if one came along. The place was right for it, after all. Oyrwyn was not a Barony of cities or large towns like Delondeur or Innadan. The people were spread out, clustered here and there, guarded by well-placed keeps and towers instead of inside city walls. Wind’s Jaw was perhaps the best placed of them all, smack in the middle of the Barony where the moors and hills began to climb into the mountains. Any invader would have to reckon with it, whatever direction they came from, and there was but one approach that could accommodate a large body of men. That particular road passed by a pair of tall towers that offered views in all directions, and towered over the trails leading towards the keep.

  Idgen Marte felt, she had to admit, at least a moment of awe as she rode into the place and heard the mountain winds keening as they whipped past those towers. She found herself wondering how even a Concordat host would take this place.

  It was, for all its formidable defenses, an ugly pile of rock, though. There was no grace in it, no art, just a heap of stone and mortar raised like a shield over the Barony’s heartlands. It was meant to break armies, and it had. The great hall was decorated with the banners of lords and knights who’d spent themselves trying fruitlessly to gain its walls.

  Idgen Marte felt like she could break an army herself. The knights, the soldiers, even the servants avoided her almost instinctively, not that many were moving about with night deepening.

  To keep herself from wandering to the stables, saddling her courser, and riding away, she took herself to the kitchens. Only then, desiring privacy, did she slip into the shadow beneath a torch in a sconce on the wall, to another, then inside the kitchen. She snagged a heavy pewter mug from a shelf, slipped into the cold pantry—an effect achieved simply by leaving a large gap high up on the wall—and dipped it into an open keg. She took a sip and tried not to spit from the piney taste.

  What these people don’t know about making beer, she thought, could perhaps fit into the sea between Londray and Keersvast.

  With her mug, she slid into one of the smaller dining rooms, expecting it to be empty. Instead, she found that someone had her idea first, and slipped in for a quiet drink. Looming tall over the small, glowing remnants of a peat fire in a hearth on the far wall, Joeglan Naswyn sipped out of a twin to the mug she held.

  Briefly she wanted to dash the heavy pewter against the back of his skull, or slide up to him with a knife. She knew the thought was unworthy of her, even before a voice told her, Revenge is no way to honor Allystaire.

 
; Instead, she sidled up to him, forcing herself out of the shadows. “Lord Naswyn,” she rasped.

  She was not above smiling when he jumped, one hand falling to his swordbelt, the other pouring sour slop all over the stones of the hearth.

  “Cold, woman,” he said, his voice as somber and serious as always, “you could give an old man his death that way.”

  “You’re not that old, m’lord.” She forced a friendly tone into her voice, fixed a grin in place on her mouth.

  “Threescore and three is mighty old for an Oyrwyn man,” Joeglan said.

  “Is that so?”

  He shrugged. “Look around. Do you see any other old men? I think there is a servant roaming around here in the keep, polishes the silver, who’s older than me, but he is like to be the only one. I am the last of my time left.” He took a sip from his mug, and Idgen Marte noted the way his hand shook.

  Not Joeglan’s first mug of the evening, she thought.

  When he came up for air, he sighed heavily. “Ufferth, Anthelme, Ladislas, me, and Gerard. Squires together, then knights, lords and their Baron,” he droned, before he sighed again.

  “How did they go?” Keep him talking, she told herself. See what slips out.

  He made a deep chuckling sound as he went back for another pull at his mug. “We all of us die in battle, Shadow. Some of us are just too stubborn to realize it for some time. Ufferth, he died quick of it, a Delondeur arrow in the throat, with Garth no more than a boy just learning to walk. Anthelme took a wound in the leg his last campaign, and the damned thing just would not heal, and old Michar was with the Baron in Harlach.”

  He paused for another swallow. Idgen Marte dared a sip of her own, fostering a hope that it would grow on her.

  It didn’t. She set it down on the hearthstones. Perhaps it’s better warm, she thought, while she waited for Joeglan to pick up the threads again.

  “Now, Gerard. Gerard had just taken too many wounds. How Michar even kept him alive through some of them, I’ll never know. Dwarfish medicine is a powerful thing, but even Michar died, and then Gerard’s wounds just flamed up and took him, slowly and painfully. Ladislas, we lost in the winter and just learned of it now. Trying to break a new mount for the spring campaigning, the old fool. Got thrown and broke his neck. Me? If we ever Freezing march west I am probably too slow and too weak to be of much use against Islandmen anymore.”

  “What do you mean, if we ever march?”

  Joegaln emptied his mug with one last pull and set it down by his foot, moving with the exaggerated care of a drunk. “Gilrayan’s not his father’s son in the ways that matter. He’s cunning and he can plot with the best of them, or the worst, just like Gerard could. But he’s not got the same dash. If Gerard said he’d do a thing, by the Cold, he did it. This one needs to wait till it’s the moment of most advantage to himself.”

  He suddenly peered down at Idgen Marte, furrowing his brow under his mostly bald head. “I shouldn’t be telling you any of this. Treading close to treason.”

  “Nonsense,” Idgen Marte said. “Every man has the right t’talk rot about his liege lord now and then, so long as no one important is around to hear it.” She bent down to pick up her nearly untouched mug and his, carefully pouring from one into the other before holding it out to him.

  “Then let me tell you this,” Joeglan rumbled, as he stared contemplatively at the beer before him. “You’d best get the Cold out of here and get back to give Allystaire whatever aid you can. Gilrayan will never, ever come riding to join him, no matter what parchment he signed and sealed. He’ll wait till Allystaire’s dead, or overrun, or till the Braechsworn come much closer to threatening Oyrwyn. He hates that man, hated him since Allystaire trained him, hated him for being everything he never was. I’ve never seen more hate, or more fear, in a man’s eyes than when Allystaire did everything but challenge him to a duel when he walked out of Wind’s Jaw. What, has it only been two-thirds of a year now?” Another heavy sip. “I shouldn’t be telling you any of this. Gilrayan Oyrwyn is still my Baron. Yet if you can help Allystaire, go to him now. Warn him for me. I owe him that, anyway.”

  Anger welled up in Idgen Marte and curled her hands into fists. She envisioned smacking the heel of her hand into the mug he lifted to his mouth and smashing it into his teeth. Lips pressed tightly to her teeth, she nearly growled.

  “Seems to me you owe him more than that.”

  “Aye, but that is all the weight I have to pay with.”

  Idgen Marte turned on her heel and was a mere moment from stepping into shadow when she paused and turned back. “He’ll never ask, Lord Naswyn. Never. But he’s my friend, so I will. Why’d you refuse?”

  He drew himself up to his full height with careful precision. “Refuse what? The dowry?”

  “The same,” Idgen Marte hissed. “Maybe it would’ve made no difference. Flux could’ve carried her off the same. But they’d have had something.”

  He was silent a long moment, till finally he said, “It was Gerard Oyrwyn’s command, not my choice.”

  Idgen Marte’s eyes widened. All she could manage was a whispered, “What?”

  “I loved my daughter,” he said, “no matter the circumstances of her birth. And I would’ve welcomed her marriage to the Allystaire Coldbourne I knew. Gerard, though? He did not want Allystaire distracted.”

  “Distracted?”

  “Even then he saw the potential in the man, knew he would be the next Castellan, after Ufferth. He wanted Allystaire focused on making knights and winning wars and nothing else. Said that marriage would be fine and well for him in a few years, to someone of better prospect than Dorinne.” He peered at her face, somehow read the disbelief there, even in the dark, and shook his head. “Did I not say he was a cunning man, full of plots?”

  “And you took that order?” Idgen Marte was too astonished to keep up her anger, too surprised to respond to his second question.

  “I serve the Baron Oyrwyn. I swore an oath more than fifty years ago, I have not broken it yet, and I do not mean to.”

  “Not every oath is worth keeping,” she said almost sadly.

  “Well, go and tell him what you will. But go, if you mean to do him any good at all.”

  “Is there nothing that will move Gilrayan to the battle?”

  “Word that Allystaire is dead or taken, or Oyrwyn under threat. Those are the only levers that will chisel him out of his seat, as far as I know the man.”

  Idgen Marte shook her head. “Deep down, Joeglan Naswyn, only a coward chooses a man they serve over a child they love. Think on that.”

  Before he could respond, she had taken two quick steps and disappeared.

  This time, she headed straight for the stables.

  CHAPTER 47

  Interlude

  Evolyn chafed at hiding.

  She hated not wearing her robes, or her armor over them, and hiding her dragon amulet beneath a useless dress she’d been forced to waste silver on. She hated seeing the plundered remnants of the Temple that had once been the greatest shrine to the Sea Dragon in this part of the world.

  She seethed when she passed near the walls of the Dunes and saw the bodies of her fellow servants moldering on its walls.

  My place, she would tell herself every night as she went to confront the sorcerer, is at Symod’s right hand. I ought to be in the battle with him, directing the Braechsworn, leading these Dragon Scales where they belong.

  She knew that what she felt must be the minor of what the berzerkers did. They had sated themselves with drinking and minor mischief so far, but she’d heard tell of one or two unusual tavern killings and knew if she did not move them soon, the city could turn into a bloodbath.

  The Marynth Evolyn rehearsed these things every night, as she had for days now, when late at night she crept into the empty Temple, and begged forgiveness where a beautiful statue h
ad hung above the first altar, open to the lashing of the sea beneath it.

  Winter might have given way to spring, but in those halls that rocked like a ship, the wind was still cold, the salt spray stung, and her heart raged for the heresy that had been done. Evolyn drew on the anger that burned in her like a seaside signal fire; she drew on the faith that roared like the ocean in a storm and resolved, each night, to tell the Eldest that she was done, she was leaving with the Dragon Scales.

  We are going to face our enemy the way Braech calls us to face them, she would say, strength against strength, resolve against resolve, and we will let the wind and the storm carry us to victory.

  And every night she would find the sorcerer, a haze of green light flowing from his body, standing near the statue that still stood in what had been the most sacred and secret place in the Temple, and her resolve and her strength would turn to ice-water in her bowels. The huge plinth towered in the darkness of the abandoned Temple, shadows thrown by the sorcerer’s sinister light across the drawn-up wings of the dragon that stood atop it.

  Since they had made port in Londray, the Eldest had grown somehow more intense, more threatening, and yet also less present. Cracks seemed to open up all along him, showing through whatever tattered robes he covered himself in. No longer did the sickly green light emanate merely from his mouth, his eyes, or his fingers. It surrounded him with a nimbus of nauseating, fearful power that she could smell, taste, and feel as easily as see.

  “Why do you come, Marynth Evolyn?”

  Come. Evolyn.

  The words reverberated around her, hollow and cracked and dry.

  She cleared her throat and stiffened her shoulders, but found herself cut off before she could speak.

  “Do you think your intent is not clear to the Eldest of the Knowing?”

  Intent. Eldest. Knowing.

  “You will demand we move. Demand that I let you leave. I will not, for I need you near in order to speak to Symod.” Speak. Symod.

  “You didn’t before,” she said, the words rushing quickly out of her.