War of the Misread Augury: Book One of the Black Griffin Rising Trilogy

by D. S. Halyard

  A heavy-set middle aged woman gave a loud harrumph from the front row of a collection of two dozen or so tavern chairs, arranged so as to give the villagers audience, and since the courtroom proceedings offered all that there was to see for entertainment in Olden, most of the village adults were in attendance, some twenty-seven souls, not counting the two warders who were there to see justice done. The middle-aged woman was the widow Elevara Grinn, and it was her pie that had been poached.

  “And your honor, I can see from the gray in your hair that you are steeped in the wisdom of age, but I cannot but plead the scent of that pie to a starving man. In Greencrook we have pies, true enough, but none with such a pleasing aroma. And I know it was a crime, but when I smelled the pie, I was certain that there was cinna in it, and some hazelwood, too. It was sweetened with white honey or I am no judge of such things, and there was mingled with the tart green apples the fulsome aromic of heavy cream. The crust was layered and crisped with perhaps cider or possibly berry juice, although I know not of what kind.”

  “Whiteberry.” Elevara muttered, pleased and flattered despite herself.

  “Ah, then I am a fool.” The bound man said. “Whiteberry, of course. And never have I heard of such a practical and clever use of it. I saw the pie in the window, and miraculous sight gave reality to the fantasy concocted of scent and hunger.” He had tears in his eyes.

  “And I know that it is wrong to blame the victim in such a case, but I must plead also that to place such a pie in the front windowsill, where it might be seen and sensed by any poor soul on the king’s road and thus lead to his temptation and his downfall, why that is almost a crime of itself. The back window is the place to put such a miracle of confection, lest the Secret Gods themselves be tempted to their ruin, and in such a matter might a man not plead entrapment in his defense?”

  The judge shook his head with a frown while the widow Grinn stared in wonder at the bound man.

  “The court explains pride as the cause of my fall, but was it not pride that put the pie in the window? Aye, and pride well-warranted from a lifetime of perfecting the art of cookery, I deem.

  “And so the court has declared the gallows to be how such a failure of will should be rewarded, but I say to the court and to all of these fine people assembled, should not then every man face the gallows? For I vow that not one of you could have passed by such a pie in such a state of hunger as I was and not break faith with all principle and virtue.

  “And if I must hang, then hang I must, and a poor end to a bad beginning, I admit. But I plead of the complainant in the case, the good widow Grinn, that my hanging be offput until the morrow, so that she might grant my single last request. For had I but known that such a cook existed in all of the king’s realm, or even in all of the history of the hundred kingdoms that came before, I should have broken any vow to take her to wife, that I might have such a pie or other clever invention of hers on any day that I chose. But I cannot turn back time, my Lord. I must move forward, and it is to the gallows, as you say.”

  The widow Grinn was quietly weeping.

  “Might I then have another day of life, Your Honor, so that I might taste again the best apple pie in all of the Known Lands?”

  “Widow Grinn?” Inquired the court, but all she could do was to nod and wipe her eyes while the gathered villagers sat in stunned and tearful silence.

  One of the warders spoke up helpfully. “Your Honor, the letter? From yesterday?”

  The Lord Mayor looked at the warder uncomprehending, but then he remembered. His eyes brightened and he sent the farmer Newen, his bailiff on such occasions, to retrieve his ‘court box’ from behind the bar.

  “Judgment is pronounced as follows.” The Lord Mayor announced, after taking a moment to retrieve the letter and read it again. “The thief is to be hanged by the neck until dead. However, pursuant to the letter received by the Court of Lord Aelfric, acting infantry commander of the city of Walcox, ‘penalty for minor criminal acts of theft shall be remitted upon enrollment of the miscreant into one of the free companies, either the Red Tigers or the Hammers of Arker, and the court shall be rewarded one silver penny by way of finder’s fee.’ Accordingly, good sir, it appears you shall have your wish to do battle against the Auligs, for you may sign for duty this very day, and your sentence shall be remitted.

  “Your other option is to take your chances on the gallows tomorrow, although I doubt the rope will break. In no event will you be able to avoid eating another of the Widow Grinns’ pies, however. It appears that shall be inflicted upon you regardless.”

  Anbarius’ farm was doing well and he was making money. The early wheat was just turning, and the harvest looked promising. He stared dully at the reaping tools hanging from hooks on the wall. His oldest daughter Brythe could handle the threshing, he supposed, touching the flail with his calloused farmer’s fingers. Jenna could manage the winnowing basket and he and his wife Henna could handle the scythes. He’d sold all of the early corn and the apples had paid well, too. Whatever losses the folk in Walcox had suffered, it seemed they still had silver enough, and the army paid well.

  “But what’s the point?” He sighed aloud, shaking his head. The Secret Gods had given him three strong sons, and together with the boys he had plowed and harrowed the ground, sown the seeds and reaped the harvest for six years, and always they had done well. Mayhap never so good as this year, at least money-wise, but always they’d had a good harvest and a feast on every one of the King’s Days. They had never known hunger.

  Now his oldest boy Barred lay certain dead in a field near to Northcraven, Luthim was probably dead up Walcox way, for he’d gone to the Nevermind muster, and Teoll was with a free company in Northcraven Town, either dead or locked up in a castle under siege. The Cthochi had come across the Redwater with a vengeance, and all the other bands with them, leaving dead Mortentian boys from the Duke’s city all the way to Walcox, and in a broad band in between.

  And it wasn’t like they hadn’t been treated well, either. There had been a long and peaceful truce, and when the hunting was bad on the other side of the river, hadn’t Anbarius himself taken on Aulig hirelings for the summer? Feeding them and housing them and giving them coin and food to take back to the bands? Nearly every farmer around the town of Redwater had done the same, helping them through bad winters and hot, dry summers.

  The Secret Gods said to be merciful to the downtrodden and the poor, and when the Cthochi had a bad time of it, the farmers of Redwater had done it. They’d done it with love, too, just like Srari said, even if the stupid Tolrissan priests said Srari wasn’t a goddess any more but an angel.

  What was the farmers’ reward? The Cthochi burned Walcox town to the ground. They weren’t satisfied with that, though. They came across at night and killed the farmers and burned farms, and they killed children, too. They ran off with any woman old enough to breed and left grammas and grandads dead on the ground. The Order of the Spade didn’t even have enough gravediggers to put them all in the ground, and they’d had to burn some.

  Anbarius had been barely a man of fifteen when the last big war happened, but he remembered enough to know that it hadn’t been like this. The Cthochi had fought the soldiers of Mortentia all the way to Maslit before general Hambar stopped them, but Anbarius on his farm hardly knew it. The farms weren’t burned and the common people weren’t molested, at least not much. That had been warrior against soldier; spear against sword. It was nothing like this butchery the Auligs were engaging in now.

  There had always been a kind of understanding between ordinary folk like him and the Auligs. Ordinary folk, people who had been freemen of the hundred kingdoms before the Tolrissans came, had more in common with the Auligs than they did with their new rulers. Anbarius knew Cthochi that he’d thought of as friends.

  And now this. The Auligs had turned on the folk of the hundred kingdoms, and they were butchering and slaughtering and enslaving them like a bunch of Thimenian berserkers. Three sons gone a
nd nothing but the women left on his farm.

  When the news came down from Walcox that some fellow with the ridiculous name of the Privy Lord had killed some forty-thousand of the Auligs, it was the first time Anbarius had been happy to see other men killed, and he was a little bit ashamed. Ashamed, but proud at the same time, for it had been the common folk of the free companies that did the killing, not the Tolrissan knights and lords and such.

  He looked around the barn. In a month, maybe two, or maybe tomorrow the Cthochi would come here. All of these tools that he or his father had made by hand would burn or be stolen, and so would the barn and the house and all of his stock. His wife and daughters might very well wind up on the other side of the Redwater, slaves to the Cthochi. And his neighbors, if any were left, would look at what was left and say, “That fool Anbarius held on too long.”

  He stepped away from the reaping tools with disgust. If he could make a scythe he could make a spear. He’d take his girls and his wife up Walcox way, and enough silver in their pockets to see them settled in Pulflover, which everyone said ‘Pulver,’ even though he had his letters and knew it should be said the other way.

  He was going to stay in Walcox and find him a place in the free companies.

  Anbarius fetched a long pole made of ash-wood from the threshing shed and some charcoal for his little smithy. The charcoal was white hot and he was straightening the iron sickle to a spear point when Henna came in, her face serious. She saw what he was doing, then she looked away for a long moment. Finally she spoke.

  “You’re going to need a sword, too.” She said, and her chin was firm and her voice was hard and sad at the same time. “Use the scythe blade.”

  He looked at her a long time, thinking what a treasure she was.

  “I’ll come back.” He promised, but she shook her head.

  “We’ll be in Pulflover, Anbarius. Come find us there after you’ve killed them all.”

  The Blackboots, Ajin’s Band and the other mercenary companies were disbanded after the Battle of Walcox, for without commanders, there was no one holding contracts with the Royal Army, and without contracts, there was no pay. Aelfric asked his new clerk, a man named Edwell who seemed to know his way around an accounts ledger, to pay what those men were owed out of the plunder taken from the Aulig forest camp. The gold and silver had been gathered from that camp, from the bodies of the dead all around the battlefield, and from the burned out remains of Walcox, and put into a large pool. With Edwell’s assistance, the majority of it had been given over to the Lord Mayor to help the refugees of Walcox to rebuild their town, but a substantial sum remained, enough to pay off the mercenaries for their prior service and enough so that the Red Tigers and the Hammers of Arker could take on new soldiers and pay them at least until midwinter.

  Of course, that was maintaining their current troop levels, and neither Aelfric nor Commander Faithborn had any intention of doing that. Day after day would-be soldiers came into Walcox, and the Fyrdmen attempted to find places for them all, and to train them. The part of Walcox that had been the market square had been cleared away and transformed into a drilling yard, and farmers drilled side-by-side with parolees and craftsmen, fallen nobles and tradesmen. Aelfric set the limit for the Red Tigers at a thousand, but he was considering increasing that number as more and more recruits trickled in.

  His recruiting was complicated by politics, of course, for he couldn’t take so many men into his free company that he rivaled the king’s army or the duke’s army, either. On the other hand, there were very few of such people left, aside from the five hundred or so lancers, many of whom had lost their horses. The men coming to Walcox did not want to join the king’s army, they wanted to join the army of the Privy Lord.

  These men weren’t coming for adventure. Most of them were coming because he had destroyed the Sons of the Bear, and they wanted to kill Auligs, too. Many were coming because their farms had been destroyed or their towns, even. Reports came to the camp of towns and villages being destroyed all along the northern coast, for bands of Auligs he’d never even heard of had answered whatever call Ghaill Earthspeaker had issued. Reports of atrocities piled up until they no longer even shocked him much. Or maybe he was just burying his reaction beneath layers of this awful tedium that was the management of a battle’s aftermath.

  His father had taught him many things about battles and wars, but he’d never told him what a colossal mess a battle left behind. Just disposing of the bodies of the slain was a monumental task, and the Order of the Spade had to deputize survivors and refugees to dig the mass graves needed. A tent hospital had been erected for the many wounded, and they needed bandages and clean water and needles and thread and clean knives and a thousand other things. Lists and requisitions and letters to local lords and other piles of paperwork went on endlessly, and Aelfric had little time for anything else. The clerk Edwell, who had apparently been some sort of servant to the Duke of Dunwater, was a godsend, and Aelfric looked thankfully at the man at his little field desk, scribbling away in his well-trained script.

  “Here’s what I’ve come up with, milord.” Edwell said, his tone almost servile in his deference, as though Aelfric might have him flogged at any moment. His prior service had been with the Duke of Dunwater, so maybe the attitude should be expected, but Aelfric still found it uncomfortable. “We cannot use the royal army tabards for our own, despite having so many of them, because the king’s men wore crimson, what they call royal red, and ours are what the dyers call robicund, or rust red. The crimson is made from powdered oak beetles and the robicund comes of autumn maple leaves, but it’s only high summer, and despite my inquiries, there are none to be found. The dyer has a stock of woad leaves, however, and when they are steeped in drunkard’s urine they will fix a nice blue on a white cloth. But he believes that if we take the royal red tabards and soak them in woad blue dye, the result will be a reddish-purple tabard that isn’t far from robicund. The main thing is that it must not be royal red, for fear of the king’s displeasure.”

  Aelfric’s back and legs were sore from sitting too long at his own field desk, and he felt the need to get up and drill, or walk or take a bath or something. Anything other than answering the endless questions that came to him from all sides. “All right. I suppose purple-red is fine, so long as the eagle is removed and the tiger embroidered on them. We certainly have no lack of drunkards. Are there any more like you hanging around Walcox?” He asked Edwell.

  “More like me?” The man was tidy, small and balding, and probably one of the most valuable men in camp.

  “More clerks to handle all of this paperwork.”

  “Certainly, lord. Would you like for me to find them?”

  “You think you can?”

  “Yes, I believe so. Several of the mercenary companies that have been disbanded employed clerks. Some of them surely survived the battle. Let me see what I can do. In the meantime, I can sort our incoming letters in such manner that only the most important ones are brought to you.”

  “That would be a tremendous relief, Edwell. We are stuck here in Walcox until the king’s eye returns with orders. I would like to have this army ready to move fast. I’ve been thinking of some ways we can quicken our march time, and …”

  And so it went. For fifteen days the army grew, as if a muster had been called in Walcox, and every day men appeared on the road, looking for the Privy Lord.

  “He kills Auligs.” One old farmer man with a homemade sword and spear said when he arrived at the camp. “I want to help however I can.” When they discovered that he could make and repair weapons, he went into the supply chain, which may have disappointed him.

  “I wish folks would stop calling me that.” He said to Haim one morning while getting dressed in his tent. Haim was busy getting ready to drill his fyrde of spearmen.

  “The Privy Lord?” Haim said. “Well, it’s memorable. Makes folks think about what you done for them in the battle, too. They could call you worse.”


  Faithborn and Busker O’Hiam were waiting for Aelfric, and overheard. “It doesn’t sound so bad if you translate it into Tolrissan.” The Hammers’ commander said drily. “I believe the literal translation would be ‘shithouse laird.’”

  “It would be ‘Ghaill o’the Craphouse’ in Aulig.” Laughed Haim.

  “He’d be ‘Cap’n Poopdeck’ on a boat.” Busker O’Hiam chortled.

  “I think the reavers would call him ‘Thane of the Jakes.’” Faithborn rejoined.

  “Did you three spend a lot of time on those? Get back to work!” Aelfric hollered over their gales of laughter.

  “Aye Aye, Cap’n Poopdeck!” Said Haim.

  Chapter 53: Lanae in Mortentia City

  Sentinel balked at landing, but Lanae urged him with her thighs, despite the dread that lay heavy on her heart. This was the third time she had circled the eagle’s tower that rose like a thick finger above the great city called the King’s Town by most, but officially called Mortentia City, the very heart of the Regency. Sentinel balked for good reason.

  The sky was the color of dirty wool, a heavy sky as thick with moisture as the fetid drafts above Zoric, although cleaner, and the city beneath her looked gray and grim. Tiny people walked the streets below, their heads already hooded against the coming rain. It was neither the people who gave her pause nor was it the occasional flash of lightning as the summer storm made its ponderous way across the Regency toward the city.

  The great tower, called the eyrie by most, or the eagles’ spire, was fully fifty paces wide at its base and forty at the top, with twenty-five great openings, like windows to the sky regularly spaced along its length. At the top was a circular platform, a hundred paces above the street and open to the sky, and on that platform was a pile of burned timbers, invisible from below. Mixed among the timbers were many bones, long hollow bones blackened by fire, and some large and pointed beaks as well. Lanae could not tell how many carcasses of great eagles had been disposed of in the fire, but she could tell that it was more than three or four. Something terrible had happened here.