The Traitor's Heir

by Anna Thayer

  Suddenly he was through the gates. Open fields, farms, groves, and the River lay before him. The land was beautiful but his thoughts were not on it; he turned in his saddle to look back at the city gates.

  “It will be nice to get out for a while, won’t it, Lord Goodman?” Anderas commented.

  “Yes,” Eamon answered uncertainly.

  Anderas laughed. “I don’t think I’ve been out on proper active service since I became a first lieutenant.”

  “When was that?”

  The captain pulled a face. “Too long ago, my lord, to be mentioned in civilized company!”

  Eamon laughed with him, but he felt faint. He had come to Dunthruik, months ago, with a heavy heart. Now, he was loath to leave it.

  CHAPTER XXII

  They were a large group and the movers strained to perform their task. They could not move men more than a certain distance. Even the Hands, too, had their limits.

  They were moved in groups of thirty and deposited about twenty miles from Pinewood. Eamon commanded that pickets be set around the area. He then watched in fascination as the second, third, and fourth group of men came. One moment there was nothing but the empty field, and the next it was filled with knights and infantry from Dunthruik. The other Hands from the East and West Quarters came on horseback in the last group, riding with enviable elegance.

  Not long after they arrived, the pickets reported the approach of the local units who were to join them. Eamon watched as groups of ensigns and officers came from the north, uniforms ragged and breath clearly visible in the cold air.

  “There aren’t many,” Lord Dehelt murmured. He and the movers had orders to wait with them until the local units arrived. Watching the slither of red coming towards them, the Lord of the North Quarter shook his head. “Not many at all.”

  Eamon tried to tally the arriving men; there seemed to be about seventy of them. “Every man who can be added to our number will be of help to us, my lord.”

  “That is true,” Dehelt nodded. He seemed much younger than the other Quarter Hands. “Though your task may be easy, Lord Goodman,” he added, “the force that you command might not be.”

  Eamon glanced at the Hands, knights, and Gauntlet, each from different quarters and regions. “They will recognize my command,” he said, more confidently than he felt.

  “You are young, Lord Goodman,” Dehelt answered. “You must hold your authority. Lord Cathair has, in public and in private, put much stock in you. Do not disappoint him.”

  A chill ran through him. “I will not, my lord.”

  “I wish you good work, Lord Goodman. His glory.”

  “His glory,” Eamon replied, bowing.

  Dehelt and the movers withdrew, leaving Eamon feeling shaken.

  “Lord Goodman.” Anderas bowed. Another man was with him – one of the local arrivals.

  Eamon took hold of himself. He would not be spooked like a horse. “Captain.”

  “This is Lieutenant Walden, the ranking officer from the Greypass groups.”

  “Good to have you with us, Mr Walden,” Eamon said, turning to the first lieutenant. “I understand that you and your men know this area well.”

  “Yes, my lord,” Walden answered. His scarred face was grim. “The snakes have been exercising against the Gauntlet here since the end of August, and kept it up even in the depths of the winter. They cut our garrison off from the other units in this area and took the town from us. First Lieutenant Bailiff gave the surrender,” he added bitterly. “My men and I were outside at the time, my lord – we made it to Stonemead. The snakes had taken that, too, and the stragglers who had escaped joined our company. We’ve been in the wild since then. We lost men to the cold, and in skirmishes. It has been a long, hard winter.” He looked up with a grizzled glint to his eye. “We will glorify the Master with our vengeance.”

  The man’s fury unnerved him. “I am sure you will,” Eamon told him. “I wish to congratulate you on the number of men which you bring to me today. To do so – in spite of the perils of snow and snakes – speaks highly of you. We have food, drink, and cloaks for your men,” he added. “Make sure that they all receive them.”

  The lieutenant bowed. “Thank you, my lord.”

  “Welcome to the company, Mr Walden,” Anderas added, and dismissed him.

  The man saluted sharply and, with a limping step, returned to the lines. Eamon wondered if each man was as determined – and grim – as Mr Walden, and how a convoy of Easters would fare against them.

  The East Road was broad enough for many to walk abreast and be flanked by the knights. The knights cantered along with their heads held high and their armoured breasts resplendent in the crisp afternoon. To be counted among such men was an ancestral honour, and well they knew it. Only sometimes did they descend to relieve their beasts and walk beside them, carrying their saddles in their hands. Most of the militia, and not a few of the Gauntlet, reviled the knights for their wealth, privilege, and arrogance. But even the knights were subject to the Hands. The Master’s darkly clad servants interspersed the lines, flecks of black among lines of red and steel.

  More than once Eamon found himself gazing back over the column that followed him, marvelling that he should be among those in black. To have such a tide roll in his wake brought a swell of pride into his heart. That pride urged him to forget how untried he was in his new office.

  The road led towards mountains that formed the eastern borders of the River Realm; a great ditch sank at either side of its potted breadth. In the distance, Eamon saw the peaks of the Algorras capped with snow that would soon melt and join the tributaries that ran to the River. He found himself imagining the pinnacled cities of the Easters and the Land of the Seven Sons. The mountains had certainly kept the Easters out of the Master’s grip, just as the desert in the south had made passage to those regions impossible. Only the merchant states had given pledges to the Master. Most had sworn allegiance, albeit begrudging, many years ago, and all such states vied to be first among the Master’s allies. Few of the merchants had ever dared to openly resist Dunthruik, and those who had were well monitored by the Master’s servants. Were it not for the wayfarers’ impending action, the Master would likely have sent the Gauntlet north and west in force that spring, to fully quell trouble among his allies.

  Being a Hand did not assure Eamon a place in Dunthruik. What would happen if he were sent to the borders to fight the merchants? What would happen if he were sent against the King’s men?

  And if Hughan did succeed in bringing an army against Dunthruik, and the Master fell in torrents of ash and smoke… what would become of him, the man who had betrayed the King? Perhaps, if he had truly been the First Knight, something might have been left to him. He might have been able to stand with honour at Hughan’s side. But he could not hope in that. Had he not renounced that office when he had permitted them to cinch black robes about him? The Master had spoken rightly: his blood had been claimed long ago, and was bound in ways that he could not escape.

  “Lord Goodman, are you well?”

  Anderas’s voice broke his thought. The captain rode beside him and looked at him with concern. For the briefest of moments, Eamon thought of Mathaiah.

  He gripped his horse’s reins more tightly and offered the captain a smile. “A little pensive,” he answered.

  “Something that befalls the best of us,” Anderas agreed sagely, then laughed. “Forgive me if I speak too informally, Lord Goodman.”

  “It is no trouble, captain.”

  “I’m afraid that I still think of you as a Gauntlet man,” Anderas explained. “The black has yet to blot out the red. I shall henceforth better my tone.” He tried to force a sombre look, failed, and laughed again.

  “I am still growing accustomed to the black myself,” Eamon replied, touched. It seemed unfair to him that he should outrank Captain Anderas. Surely it was clear who was the worthier?

  “How are you faring with it?” Anderas asked. “The black, I mean?” />
  “The cloak’s a bit scratchy round the neck,” Eamon answered confidentially, “but they have so far let me wear a comfortable shirt underneath.”

  “So I have been saved from a terrible fate!” Gauntlet officers that were promoted to draybant or beyond were never then made Hands, whatever their skills or triumphs; they were kept for the Gauntlet. “Besides,” Anderas added, “I’m told that red suits me.”

  “It does,” Eamon replied, and he meant it. Anderas was everything that red should have been.

  “That must be why they sent me along on this expedition,” Anderas mused.

  “Oh?” He understood the logic in first lieutenants or draybants being sent on such a mission, but not a Dunthruik quarter captain.

  Anderas looked up with a wry smile. “Lord Ashway wanted a high-ranking East Quarter officer to go with his men. We haven’t appointed a new draybant yet,” Anderas added, “so it was decided that rather than send First Lieutenant Greenwood, I should go.”

  “Lord Ashway did not approve of Lord Cathair entrusting this mission to me.”

  “They have their disagreements on such matters, I understand,” Anderas told him. “On this occasion, their disagreement has had an agreeable outcome for me. I am sure that Lord Cathair’s trust in you is well placed – but I haven’t been out of the city for a while, so when Lord Ashway told me that I was to accompany this mission I did not question his command. Though I did not say as much to him,” he added with a grin, “I am very pleased to be riding in such illustrious company.”

  “I hope that you will not find yourself disappointed, captain.”

  “By you, my lord?” Anderas shook his head. “You do not seem the kind of man who disappoints – except, perhaps, Lord Ashway.”

  Eamon smiled.

  They followed the road all day. The terrain varied between hills and woods and, especially north of the road, relatively flat expanses. It was much the same story to the south, though as they drew farther east the woods filled with thick pines that led back to the embrace of the distant mountains. Clouds gathered over them like dense eyries.

  They passed by several small villages and some farmland. Often people stopped to watch them and crowded onto the road to catch a glimpse of the Hands, who rose like spectres from the stony road.

  But the road also bore unpleasant tidings. More often than Eamon would have expected, corpses lay abandoned at its edge. Sometimes they passed the remains of overturned carts with broken axles, their bodies shattered, their cargoes emptied and their drivers left for carrion fowl. More than once they passed gatherings of hastily dug shallow graves, bearing the remains of red uniforms fastened down with heavy stones. Sometimes there were no graves; instead a copse of trees was adorned with hanging bodies that twisted and turned on their nooses in the wind. These Eamon ordered to be cut down. The whole road groaned with the detritus of battles between the Gauntlet and the wayfarers. It was clear that the Gauntlet, cut off by the winter and hemmed in by their enemies, had often fared the worse.

  They reached Pinewood as night drew in. The clouds over the mountains cleared, leaving a dark sky and a cold wind. The wind swept down from the bitterest reaches of the north, the sky alight with stars as bright as the fiery palms had been at the majesty.

  Eamon called for camp to be made. The day had been long, and strength would be needed the next day to begin work on the roadblock. The village was deserted, as Anderas had guessed, and the men settled themselves into the hollow behind it, risking small fires. Eamon allowed it, knowing that they were sheltered by both hollow and ruined buildings. He posted a far-reaching net of sentries. Most of the men were in good spirits – their wayfarer foes would be little more than peasants with oxen and would be easily crushed. They joked while partaking lightly of the provisions that they had with them.

  As night grew deeper Eamon climbed the hollow to the village and went to walk among the ruined buildings. Stones and timbers lay everywhere, driven down by the winter’s crushing malice. Halting near the road, he turned his gaze down its moonlit glint. The ditches on either side of it were muddy, filled with rainwater and melted snow. Both would present problems the following day, especially if ice formed during the night. From what he had glimpsed in the gathering dark it seemed that the plan he and Anderas had proposed to Lord Cathair was viable. They would have the whole of the next day to block the road and, if Giles had been correct, the convoy should pass the day after. It seemed both interminably far and terribly close. He wondered where the convoy was that night, and whether wayfarers’ eyes gazed back at him across the distant dark.

  Anderas approached. He carried a tin mug in each gloved hand. They steamed in the cold air.

  He offered one to Eamon. “Something to warm you up a little, my lord.”

  “Did Lord Ashway send me with the East Quarter captain or a butler?” Eamon answered, gratefully accepting. He pressed his hands hard about the mug, waiting for the warmth to reach through his gloves and spread into his hands.

  “Do not be fooled, my lord, by my fine jacket,” the captain told him, starlight shadowing his breath. “From my earliest ensign days, I knew that I was destined for that rare form of butlery which composes a Gauntlet captaincy. It is a privilege, my lord,” he added.

  Perhaps it should not be; Eamon doubted that he was worthy of the man’s service. “You seem to forget,” he told him gently, “that you are a captain, captain. You need not address me as though you were a draybant, or as though I were a Quarter Hand – you are far more than the one, and I am far less than the other.”

  Anderas laughed. “How right you are! My apologies, Lord Goodman.”

  “You also do yourself wrong to equate your captaincy with butlery… Is butlery even a word?”

  Anderas grinned. “What do you say, Lord Goodman?”

  Eamon was suddenly, painfully, reminded of Overbrook. “I think that you invented it.”

  Anderas inclined his head a little. “Then, Lord Goodman, invented it is; but I wish to claim full responsibility for its invention when they next compile one of those lexical nonsenses.”

  Eamon looked at him in surprise. “You would call it invented, simply because I said it was?”

  “You may not be a Quarter Hand, Lord Goodman, but you are a Hand,” Anderas answered more seriously. “As such you will find that there are few who will gainsay you, even in jest.”

  Eamon stared speechlessly. The captain took a sip of his drink, and gave a short gasp as he found it too hot.

  “I know that I have just seen it being taken from the fire,” he mused, “but somehow I am, as always, surprised by how hot it is.”

  Eamon laughed. “Be comforted by this, captain: I shall learn from your misfortune.” He blew at his before trying it.

  They fell silent and looked, by one accord, back to the road. Eamon sighed.

  “We did this, didn’t we?”

  “‘This’, Lord Goodman?”

  “The war; the skirmishes; the Gauntlet, and so us.” Eamon looked at the village’s broken walls, wondering what had happened to its people. Of those who had escaped he did not know. Those who had stayed, or had allied themselves either to the Gauntlet or the wayfarers, would have become more bodies, hanging on ropes or rotting on the brittle earth. “We did this.”

  “It may not appear so in Dunthruik,” Anderas told him, “but we have an enemy with whom, openly or not, we are at war.”

  There was little more to say. They stood silently, sipping their drinks, in the starlight. After a long time, Eamon returned his mug to Anderas with thanks, and went to join the other Hands.

  The morning dawned clear. Chill shadows lay across the men.

  Eamon was among the first to rise, frozen and unrested.

  It took them the best part of the day to erect the blockade. Using the tools they had brought and some others they found in the ruined village, they felled trees across the road and poured rubble from the desecrated village into the gaps. The men worked hard and the Hand
s oversaw them, occasionally helping to lift trunks of wood or masses of stone. The knights did little but ride their horses about the plain.

  “Their lordlinesses can’t bear to dirty their delicate white hands,” one of the other Hands, Febian, commented as they worked. He said it just loudly enough that the nearest of the knights heard it. The knight returned with a look that could have curdled milk. Eamon almost laughed, but thought it better to advise Febian – also a West Quarter Hand – to mind his tongue instead.

  The day ended. They returned to the hollow and Eamon again posted sentries, concentrating many of them eastward along the road to watch for the convoy. He imagined that they would hear it long before it appeared; nonetheless, he ordered the fires to be reduced that night. Bar a couple of minor injuries – cuts, scrapes, or falls – obtained during the day’s work, there had been no real problems. It filled him with deep satisfaction as he watched the camp settling down to wait.

  As the stars turned in the sky he strolled to the road. Anderas went with him.

  “How are the men?” Eamon asked.

  The captain stood burning himself on another warm drink. “They’re making the usual jokes, the usual threats of vengeance and usual promises to kill the Serpent with their own hands. The men from Greypass and Stonemead are taking things a little more seriously, but that is hardly surprising.”

  He paused, drinking. Eamon wondered how many battles the captain had seen. The next day’s operation was to be simple. Its ease was one of the reasons the mission had been granted him: it was a chance to show that he merited his promotion, and Cathair’s faith in him, without expending too much effort.

  What if he should fail the test?

  Anderas glanced at him, interrupting his worried thought. “So much for the men. How is the commander?”

  “Nervous,” Eamon confided. He liked Anderas; something about the man’s manner inspired his trust. That, he realized, was because Anderas reminded him strongly of someone else.