by Daniel Ford
“I’m going to need more answer than that, Coldbourne.”
“That is neither my home nor my name anymore. Allystaire will do.”
Lionel sat up straighter, the goatee at the end of his chin bristling a bit. “Oh, the writs announcing your exile reached the Dunes while I was in the field this summer, don’t doubt it. Yet the name suits you. Northern, simple, honest, and ugly.” He squinted faintly. “The years haven’t improved you on that score, I see. When is the last time we were face to face?”
“Innadan’s Tourney. Seven years ago now.”
“Ah, back when that runt Hamadrian had the idea of bringing us all together in the name of peace. Fool.” The baron turned and filled his goblet with wine, but held it without drinking. “That long though, eh?”
“In the years since, you had your chances to see me up close. I do not recall your being too eager, though,” Allystaire replied, and he couldn’t help the tiny trace of a smile that ghosted along the left side of his mouth.
The baron covered a sudden flush in his cheeks with a deep gulp of wine, then set down the cup and stood. “Too busy dealing with Innadan. I’d have given you a good thrashing eventually.” Before Allystaire could reply, he went on. “I still need a better answer. What are you doing in my barony?”
Allystaire remained silent a moment, thinking on his answer. “I would say the work of a Goddess, but you would not understand what I meant. Let me say, then, that I have been doing the work I ought to have been doing these twenty years and more, now. The work you ought to do.”
“Shattering the bones of my knights so badly they die when we peel off their armor? Rousing my rabble into froth? Building some temple out in a shit-step town in the Ash River valley? You presume to tell me what I ought to do?” Anger started to get the better of him now, and the baron pushed himself to his feet, slowly, though he stood blade-straight once he was up.
“Your knight was pressing your own people,” Allystaire countered. “And I gave him fair warning. The raising of a temple is only partly my doing, a very small part. And I do have to wonder, Lionel, how the men beside me think of hearing you call their kin your rabble.”
“You might do well to remember that I have a title,” Lionel shouted, taking a step toward Allystaire.
“I have not forgotten it,” Allystaire replied, voice calm, face unruffled. “I do not see a reason to use it until you remember what titles mean.” He felt and heard the guards at his sides and behind him shifting their weight, heard their gear clanking softly.
Delondeur was dead silent as he approached to within a step of Allystaire. The baron surpassed Allystaire in height; closing in forced the paladin to tilt his head.
“Having a title means that the people are not your rabble. It means that you are their baron. That difference is something all of us forgot long ago. Might be that we never understood it to begin with.”
“You’ve gone soft. The man I remember wasn’t afraid to torch a village or question a captive if need be.”
“I burned villages, aye,” Allystaire replied. “Though I always gave orders that houses, and not people, were to burn, I cannot be sure they were always followed. I put men to the question, though I always told myself it was for a greater end.” At this, he paused, shook his head and snorted slightly, lips curling in disgust. “These are pathetic excuses; I will pay every link of the cost of my sins. You will bear the cost of yours as well, Baron Delondeur,” he went on, twisting the title into something near a curse. “What will matter to you in the end is whether you will pay it willingly, or whether the Goddess wills that I take it from you.”
Lionel’s flushed cheeks turned to a bright, angry red, and he strode forward, his arm lifting to deliver a blow, but Allystaire’s left hand darted forward and caught the man’s arm by his thickly muscled wrist.
The guards exploded briefly into motion but were stilled with a quick wave from the baron’s free hand, though Bannerman-Sergeant Chaddin drew his sword and held it still and at guard, carefully watching Allystaire.
The baron was not a weak man, but Allystaire was near twenty years his junior, and heavier, if shorter. Slowly, tightening his left hand around Lionel’s right wrist, he was able to forcefully push the baron’s hand backwards. Hope it doesn’t show, Allystaire thought, as he bent the baron’s hand toward his forearm, working hard to keep the strain from his voice.
“I am not powerless rabble you can slap with impunity, Lionel,” Allystaire said, and he leaned forward, pressing harder on the baron’s wrist, so that the other man had no choice but to fall, hard, to one knee, or have his wrist snapped. “Now that I have your attention, I have a question for you.”
“To the Cold with you, Allystaire” Lionel grunted, teeth clenched in pain. “Guards, do nothing,” he spat. “I will deal with this landless exile myself.”
“Bend, Lionel. The man who had set himself up as a baron there. The slave trade, operating in your own barony.” Allystaire’s voice was rising with every word, till it resonated through the columns of the hall. “Your own people, chained, and sold. How much did you know of it?” As he asked, he pushed his senses into Lionel’s mind, forcing the truth out of him. It needed surprisingly little force, Allystaire noted.
“I knew all. Collected gold from that Windspar fool. Ships need oar-hands and we’ve too many mouths to feed as it is. I mean to shut it down when the war is done.”
Allystaire leaned forward with anger flooding his veins, and he thought, of a certainty, that he was going to kill Lionel Delondeur, today, right now, this moment, in the seat of his own power.
The thought fueled his anger as he shouted. “When the war is done? When will it ever be done?” He meant to snap the baron’s arm, for a start, and see where his mood led him from there, but suddenly his grip was pulled free and his arms were slammed against his sides by an unearthly force, immeasurably stronger even than the gravekling he had wrestled against.
“When the assistance I provide leads to its end,” said a new voice Allystaire didn’t recognize. “And I needed many of the captives. Useless, hungry mouths who would not help win this war, petty though it be.” From behind one of the columns strode a figure, robed and hooded, his extended hand glowing dark red at the tips of his fingers.
Allystaire looked down and saw bands of pulsating red energy encircling his hands; he tried pressing against them and found moving his hands as likely as shoving over a castle wall.
The sorcerer stepped closer to Allystaire until the paladin could see into the depths of his hood: a pale-skinned, unlined face, with thin red lines of energy pulsing through the whites of his eyes like fiery veins. “Just as I told him to bring you here so that I could see you face to face. We have a lot of work to do.”
A tiny bolt of energy flew from the sorcerer’s hand into Allystaire’s chest, as if his armor weren’t there. He was suddenly wracked with a pain that was everywhere in his body—his bones, his skin, his muscles, his vitals. Just as soon as it had come upon him, it was gone. His feet were pulled an inch from the ground, and his ankles constricted as his wrists were bound together.
Under his hood, the sorcerer frowned; his lips were thin and almost yellowish, and even in a frown they parted to reveal small, pale teeth. “That is unusual. There is much I have to know.”
The Baron Delondeur rose to his feet and massaged his right wrist with his left. He offered Allystaire an angry, but triumphant smile. “You see the Black Horse of Tarynth over there, Coldbourne?” He raised his left hand, pointing to one of the trophies hung on the columns lining the hall. Rent and stained dark brown on one corner, it had once been a deep purple and featured a rearing black horse. “It is the last one in the world. I paid a bounty to find and burn the rest of them, to drive them from the world, as I did to the family that once flew them. All that remains of them are scattered across my southern plains.”
Lionel dropped his
hand and simply enjoyed the scene of Allystaire held motionless and impotent in the air before him. “Before I pass this seat onto whichever son proves his worth, Innadan and Harlach, Varshyne and Telmawr will join it. Oyrwyn, last, if the Young Baron doesn’t simply bend his knee. There will be a king again, and it’ll be a Delondeur. This country will be mine.”
Delondeur turned, waving dismissively. “Take him. Do what you must to learn what you need. But he does not die unless I am there to see it.”
Allystaire felt himself lifted further into the air as more red clouds flowed from the fingers of the sorcerer, and he heard the guards fall in beside him as he was carried backwards out of the hall. “You made your choice, Lionel,” Allystaire bellowed, taking brief solace in the fact that he could still speak. “Remember it when the Goddess’s justice finds you, Li—”
His mouth suddenly slammed shut, and the breath was driven out of his lungs. Mute and powerless, Allystaire turned his thoughts inward as he was carried through the halls. This, he thought, with sinking certainty, is going to hurt.
The End of Book 1 of the Paladin Trilogy
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Andrew for taking a chance on me and my fantasy superhero origin story. Thanks to Rion for pointing me to SFWP. Thanks to all my beta readers; Jacob, Stephanie, Josh, Andy, Jason, Yeager, Caren, and Sarah. This is a much better book than it would otherwise have been because of you. Thanks to my mom for having wondered, loudly and often, why I wanted to study fairy tales and write poems at graduate school, but never trying to stop me. Thanks to Westley and Hector for being editor cats. Thanks to Karen and Kyle for their dedicated work on the book. And last but never, ever least, Lara; for putting up with day after day of me talking about the book, complaining about the book, whining about the book, disappearing every night to work on the book, for believing in the book when I wouldn’t. This book wouldn’t exist without you. I wouldn’t have had a reason to write it.
About the author
Daniel M. Ford was born and raised near Baltimore, Maryland. He holds an M.A. in Irish Literature from Boston College and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing, concentrating in Poetry, from George Mason University. As a poet, his work has appeared most recently in Soundings Review, as well as Phoebe, Floorboard Review, The Cossack, and Vending Machine Press. He teaches English at a college prep high school in the northeastern corner of Maryland. Ordination is his first novel.
Santa Fe Writers Project
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