A Legend is Crafted
Allystaire and Idgen Marte sat before a fire in the inn, a flagon of the best wine Timmar could come up with at Allystaire’s elbow, listening to the sound of rain drumming on the roof. The place was fuller than usual at lunchtime, with few out in the rain to work. The village folk gave them space, engaged in their own conversations and stories and snatches of song, so that the two of them could more or less speak alone behind a buzz of noise.
“It is not an altogether unpleasant sound, is it,” Allystaire mused.
“What, rain?” Idgen Marte toyed her mug and shrugged. “I suppose, though in parts of the Concordat there are rainstorms that will last for a month or more.”
“A month? I would go mad.”
She shrugged again. “It’s what you know when you’re born there. Not the part where I’m from, mind, but we could get a good week long soaking now and again. Hate how cooped up it makes me feel. No going out-of-doors. I’m not the domestic type,” she said, twisting her lips in distaste before pouring a long swallow of wine down her throat. “Not one for staying put,” she added, almost an afterthought.
“You are doing well enough with it here,” Allystaire pointed out.
“D’ya recall that we thought we wouldn’t? We hung about waiting for a sign, then left for the road and were glad to be quit of the place. Don’t lie, you were just as happy to be moving again as I was. Should’ve taken Rede with us, though, kept an eye on him.”
“I think we will see him again, for good or ill,” Allystaire replied absently, picking up his cup and stroking its rim with a thumb. “Anyway, you are right—I was glad to be moving again. Then Thornhurst started to feel like home.”
“That’s a bit sentimental for a knight and warlord,” Idgen Marte chided.
“Not how I meant it. I meant it has the same responsibilities, the same claims on my attention, the same preoccupying space. Home, as a lord of a place—at least, as one who takes it seriously—is a job of work as much as it is anything else.” Allystaire started to raise his cup, and caught Idgen Marte’s glare. “Not as much work as for the peat cutters or the farmers, I know. I would not claim otherwise. Still, home, when it was not a tent and a cot, meant a good deal of parchment moving across a desk and endless hearings and councils. Even being at home amongst an army was constant work, of a similar kind. Like being the headman of a large town, only one that is constantly on the move and cannot feed itself.”
“And that,” Idgen Marte said, “is why I prefer staying on the move by myself. If no one knows where you are, no one can pin any responsibilities on you.”
Allystaire chuckled, finished his wine, then reached for the flagon. The clatter of the door swinging open and then shut, rain and wind howling in, and boots dragged against the scrapers cut through the background noise of the common room, followed by the stumping, powerful steps that could only be Torvul’s.
The dwarf stopped at the entrance and cast his eyes about, settling on Allystaire and Idgen Marte. Then he waved, and called to them in a voice that cut across all the noise.
“C’mon, hero. I’ve got the process ready. I want ya t’see it.”
Allystaire set down cup and flagon and stood, wincing just a bit. The advent of the rain the previous day had woken old aches in his left shoulder, and he felt them as he pushed against the table.
“Hear that,” Torvul said, pointing a longer finger up at the roof, and, presumably, the rain driving against it. “That’s dwarfish work, that is.”
“So long as it stops at some point,” Allystaire said. “We do not want to drown the, ah, cabbages.” He paused. “Can cabbages drown?”
“Mother help us all if we ever need to turn your hands to farming. And nothin’ll drown. My work is precise. The rain will tail off over the night. The ground is dry enough that it’ll soak it all up, and we should be more or less back to normal. Now,” the dwarf said, throwing open the door, “out into it. They gave me the use of a little house, on account of the fumes. Come now. It’ll be a quick walk, but a sodden one.”
* * *
Torvul checked and re-checked his table of instruments and the three glass vials of liquid, each stored in a separate rack. Around his bald head he’d tied a silk band that held dark lenses inside wooden frames, resting on his forehead. Allystaire had never seen them before, and couldn’t imagine their purpose. Idgen Marte stood close, watching, fascinated. Allystaire, dubious and dour, leaned against the cottage’s doorjamb with his arms crossed.
Laid out on the table about which the alchemist paced was Allystaire’s armor: dark grey steel, pitted, scored, and dented. “I cannot see anything you have done to improve it, besides the gauntlet you showed me before. What exactly is the point to this, then? Armor is armor and there is no enchanting it, not with gifts such as yours.” The dwarf turned and scowled at Allystaire, and the man lifted his hands, palms out. “Your own words, Torvul. Not mine.”
Torvul scowled even deeper. “Don’t quote my own words back at me, boy. And as for what good it’ll do…” He sighed. “Showmanship. A little majesty won’t hurt you any.”
“I wouldn’t go using ‘majesty’ in his direction, dwarf,” Idgen Marte put in. “You know how twitchy he gets.”
“I don’t mean with crowns n’plenipotentiary powers. I mean the looks of the thing. What do your stories of paladins all have in common?”
“They are all probably untrue,” Allystaire offered.
Torvul waved a hand dismissively. “Truth, untruth, all just shades when it comes to stories. Stories aren’t facts, and they aren’t meant to be. This,” he went on, pointing at the armor and the instruments laid out—a boar’s hair brush, several small hooks, a glass dropper—“gives you a certain quality that’ll make people take notice. People who otherwise wouldn’t. And,” Torvul smiled faintly, “it’ll put the fear of the Goddess into your enemies.”
Then he turned back to the table and sniffed each jar, one after the other, and went on. “Back to my original question. Your stories have a certain style in common. Knights in shining armor. Bigger than life. Fair to look upon. You’re big, I’ll give you that, but I’ve seen bigger. Fair passed you by ten or twelve years ago, I’d say.” He narrowed his eyes under craggy brows and added, “Fifteen, even.”
“That leaves shining armor,” Idgen Marte pointed out. She opened her mouth to go on, but Torvul beat her to it.
“Precisely,” he said, snapping a finger. “And no—I can’t enspell your armor. Not like a thaumaturge could. But I can give it style. “ He smiled the devious, knowing smile they had come to know.
“What good is style? Style, I have often said, gets men killed.”
“What he means is that he will make you a beacon.” Mol suddenly sidled in, the door shutting almost noiselessly behind her. “Of hope,” the girl added. Water dripped off the cloak she’d thrown on over her robe as she came to the hearth and set the wet outer garment carefully on the stones. She reached up to take one of Allystaire’s huge, swollen-knuckled hands in both of hers. “When he is done, no one who sees you in this armor will have any doubt. Those with call to fear you will know their fear, see it thrown back upon them, and be weakened by it. And those whom we fight for—they’ll be able to look at you and know their own strength.”
The door opened again, and this time Gideon entered with a spray of rain before coming to the table and peering at the instruments and vials.
“Awake, finally,” Torvul asked him.
The boy nodded, and reached for one of the vials, till Torvul grabbed him by the wrist. “Just because you’re the aetherial shapeshifting troll’ o’ the’ hill today, doesn’t mean you get to touch my instruments or my tinctures. Got to do more than defy a god or three to do that.”
“I wouldn’t have harmed anything. Not sure I could muster the energy to change its composition even if I wanted to,” the boy protested.
Allystaire walked forward and put a concerned hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Gideon, did you overtax yourself? Expend all—”
“Not at all,” the boy replied, shaking his head. “I’m just tired. Too tired to focus, except for a small thing.”
“Good.” He gave the boy’s shoulder a squeeze. “You did well today, lad. Too much longer without rain, folk would have started to get suspicious, fearful. You rewarded their faith, and that is what we are here to do.”
“Well if we’re done speechifying, let’s get t’work.” The dwarf stopped, thought a moment, and said, “Well, I’ll get t’work. The rest of y’ just stay out of the way. Even you,” he added, glancing at Gideon and shooing him with a playful swat.
Torvul selected the first vial. Its contents were colorless, but when he lifted its stopper, it released a metallic scent into the air. “To bind,” he nearly chanted. “As the Goddess has bound us.”
He began carefully pouring the liquid, in tiny droplets, starting at the top down: helm, pauldrons, cuirass, upper and lower cannons of the vambraces, the greaves, and last the gauntlets. But he did not merely pour; he picked up one of the hooks on the rack and began carefully scraping the liquid, which clung viscously to the surface of the armor, spreading it carefully into every crevice. When the hook he had picked did not reach, he selected another, smaller, and yet again another smaller. Then he set down the empty vial and took the second, full of what appeared to be cool liquid silver.
“To brighten.” Now, Torvul was either into the role, or absorbed in his work, for there was no nearly chanting. He sang in his deep rumble. “So none in this world will miss his coming.”
Again, he poured with a hand as steady as a mountain, and again he picked up a thin hook and began scraping, teasing the liquid he poured, till every bit of the armor was covered. Allystaire stifled a yawn. Idgen Marte shuffled her feet. Mol and Gideon fidgeted.
Finally, Torvul finished, set his tool and the empty vial down, interlaced his fingers, and cracked his knuckles. Then he took up the last vial and uncorked it. Its scent filled the room.
To Allystaire it was the smell of a cold late winter morning in the mountains of his home, when the sun was dauntingly bright and the entire world seemed fresh.
“To reflect.” Torvul lifted the vial in both hands. He poured.
The room was suddenly filled with an intense, almost blinding light. Always prepared, Torvul tugged down the thick lenses he’d had stuck over his head, and continued. Allystaire had to shield his eyes in order to watch, as did Idgen Marte.
Mol and Gideon looked on, apparently untroubled.
Torvul took an age scraping and brushing. And when he was done, the room glittered with the radiance of the overhead lamps cast back by the armor upon the table.
Its surface gleamed like a mirror of pure silver, throwing back their reflections in dizzying multiples as they crowded around the table.
Allystaire leaned forward and brushed a finger against it. Torvul did not stop or scold him. He could feel the scarred and rough surface of his armor, as familiar as his own hand. Yet his fingerprint left no mark upon the bright, perfect surface. “Is it an illusion?” He turned to Torvul, lifted his hand from the armor.
“Yes and no,” the dwarf said, shrugging.
“Is it a lie, then? A seeming, only? A glamour, with the truth of my old gear beneath it?”
“Hope is never a lie,” Mol said, as she stood on her tip-toes to look down upon the table.
“The girl has the right of it,” Torvul said. “’Course she does. Not known her t’be wrong yet. When I said yes and no, I wasn’t just playin’ games. The armor is what you were, it’s a part of you, and it is ugly and hard. That’s true. Yet you’re a paladin now, the paladin, the Arm of the Mother, and that’s what people will see in this armor—and that is true as well.”
“We have all been Called,” Allystaire said. “You and Idgen Marte and Mol and Gideon as surely as I.”
“Not in the way that matters to folk. People will need this, Allystaire. People here, in Thornhurst, will need it, and you know it.” Idgen Marte answered this time. “I’m the Shadow—I am meant not to be seen. Torvul is the Wit; his strength isn’t in arms the same way ours is. No offense,” she added to the dwarf.
“None taken. Most weapons are just a stick with a blade at one end and an idiot at the other, you ask me.”
“Fine,” Allystaire said. “Help me gather it up and I will go put it on.”
“Wait,” Gideon said, coming forward suddenly, his voice halting. He lifted a hand, the fingers and palm outlined in a faint whitish glow. “Could I?”
Torvul smiled broadly and crookedly. “Go ahead.”
The boy had to pull a chair to the table and kneel on it in order to press his hand directly onto the center of the breastplate. “Close your eyes,” he said, suddenly, and they did—but the sudden brightness that filled the room turned Allystaire’s vision red behind his eyelids. When he blinked back into clarity, the Golden Sun of the Mother stood in brilliant relief against the silver of the cuirass.
Gideon stood up and admired his handiwork, then frowned. “Not quite,” he said, and leaned back down, one finger outstretched. He traced a quick outline, then stood back, and gestured towards the cuirass. They crowded around the table to see the small outline of a hammer within the eight-pointed sun.
“Put it on,” Torvul said. “I’ve improved the fit and shortened how long it’ll take.”
“I have not got my gambeson,” Allystaire said.
Torvul smiled and pointed to the curtained-off bedroom. “I took the liberty.”
Allystaire gathered up the armor with Gideon’s help and marched off, waving the boy with him. “Best you learn how to help me in and out of it,” he said. “I want you next to me till the point of battle.”
Their voices trailed off as they pulled the curtain. There were some muted orders, a thud as some piece hit the floor, some rattling and creaking, and finally Allystaire emerged, helm under his head, glittering in mirror-bright silvered armor.
“I feel a little ridiculous,” he murmured.
“Do I really need to remind you that you look as you did in the vision the night we built the altar?” Idgen Marte cocked her head to one side.
Mol closed in, leaned forward to touch the sun on his chest, the hammer within it, tracing the outline with her short child’s finger. “This is what they might call you one day, Allystaire, a long time from now,” she half-whispered. “Hammer of the Sun.”
“Might?”
The girl looked up at him with a sad weight in her eyes. “Nothing is set, and all remains in flux. We may yet be conquered, our light snuffed out. It is not given to us to know how this ends. Not even to me.”
Allystaire sighed and wrapped his arm around the girl’s shoulder, hugging her, careful of the weight of the armor. “Nothing is being snuffed out. Not today, not ever.” He let the girl go and looked to Torvul. “Have you got polish for it?”
“Don’t need it,” Torvul said. “It’ll never smear, never stain, never be marred. Damaged, yes, broken, maybe. But give me iron stock and the right earths and I’ll give you steel, and however patched, however mended, that armor will be forever this bright. All the soils and sins of the world will keep from it as if in fear.”
Allystaire nodded, lifted the helm up to his eyes with both hands, and blinked at the distorted reflection of his own scarred and broken-nosed face in the crown. “We have work to do, to make sure that people remain for us to inspire, aye? Let us be on with it.” He tucked the helm back under an arm.
The hearth spat, and a flame lifted from a log that suddenly split, flaring brightly in the rain-darkened room. When his armor caught the firelight and reflected it, Allystaire heard the smallest note of the Goddess’s song, and despite himself, his heart swelled.
* * *
Hundreds of miles distant, like the firelight reflected in Allystaire’s bright armor, the harbor in Londray was a mirror of dancing flames. And while the city burned, the handful of knights and men-at-arms that had, in the early days of autumn, imprisoned the Baron Delondeur and installed his natural son Chaddin as Baronial Regent, were hunted men.
Having tossed aside their badges—grey cloths wrapped around the upper arm—three such men alternately elbowed and skulked through the alleys and lanes of the capital city, moving always towards the wall and the gate.
“I hope the rumors are true,” one murmured quietly, his breath puffing visibly into the air. He was younger, shorter than the other two, cradling a crossbow with a loaded bolt like an infant against his chest, errant blond hairs straying from underneath an iron-banded leather cap.
“We’ll know when we get clear of the city and make for the rally point,” another replied, his voice smoother and more educated. He wore a sword on one hip and walked with a long-handled axe in one hand, thick spikes at the head and opposite the single blade. He was the tallest, with a well-groomed brown beard and the clank of mail beneath his clothes.
“If I may ask, sir, why’re we headin’ to some village the other side o’the Thasryach,” the third man asked. He was the oldest, a lined and scarred face with deep-set, wary eyes surrounded by creased and wrinkled flesh. He walked with an unstrung bow standing in for a walking stick, trying and failing to conceal its true purpose, and a shorter, cruder sword on his hip.
“Because that was Chaddin’s plan,” the second man replied. They stopped at the end of an alley and the youngest one went into a crouch and crept around, his loaded crossbow sweeping side to side. He stopped and waved the others forward. “You two were not present when that knight escaped the dungeons and exposed the Baron. He made quite an impression.”
“True what they say of ‘im, m’lord?” the younger one asked, turning hopeful eyes towards the knight. “A paladin?”
“He killed a sorcerer, and he showed the strength of many men,” the knight answered him. He paused, resting for a moment against the wall of a building. “Chaddin…the Baron,” he corrected himself, “he wanted this kept quiet, but the man, the paladin, he was Lord Allystaire Coldbourne.”
“Out of Oyrwyn? Couldn’t be,” the bowman said, spitting to the side. “A paladin? I seen his handiwork these years.”
“Lionel Delondeur called the man Coldbourne, and he would know,” the knight said. “At any rate, enough. We can make the wall by dawn and be on our way.”
“Be lucky to get to the mountains before deep snow,” the bowman muttered.
They went on in silence, the sounds of violence or a scream occasionally intruding upon the night.
They turned a corner only to find their way blocked by a semicircle of figures shrouded in darkness. No weapons were evident, but the air of menace was palpable.
The beardless crossbowman snapped his weapon up and fired his bolt, even as the knight raised his axe and the bowman took his bowstave into his left hand and drew his sword.
The bolt thunked home in one of the shrouded figures, in the center of the chest. Its barbed head would do untold harm to a man’s vitals. It was, against any target at this distance, a fatal blow.
The figure did not move or flinch or even cry out. The bolt seemed to hang loosely in folds of clothing.
The knight shifted his axe to a two-handed grip and advanced half a step before he suddenly stopped, bound in place by invisible chains. His companions found themselves similarly frozen.
From behind the ring of tall, silent, cloaked figures stepped a smaller one, hooded, with faint, sickly yellow trails of energy emanating from his eyes.
“Three more volunteers,” he murmured. Though soft, his voice seemed to reach out and caress the three men who were caught, passing across their skin with an air of casual mastery. “You are bound now to great service for your Baron.”
“We don’t serve that slaving blackguard.” Through gritted teeth, the knight managed to squeeze out a few words. “We’re Lord Chaddin’s men,” he added, grimacing with the pain and the effort.
“In life, yes,” the hooded figure replied, stepping close so that the knight could see the ruin of his face, the bilious yellow light leaking from his eyes and the corners of his mouth. “But that life has ended. In death you will serve Baron Delondeur more faithfully, more capably, and more fully than you ever could have done before.” He raised one gloved hand and made a sharp gesture. The cloaked figures that had penned them in came forward.
As two of them closed in on him, the knight had only the time to catch quick impressions: a hand that seemed made of broken bits of metal tied together with ropes of sinew and patches of flesh, a face that was more bone than skin. And then darkness.
* * *
The crossing from Keersvast to Londray had been the most miserable time of Evolyn’s life.
Not because it was late in the year to sail. Not because she shared an open-deck with Islandmen swords-at-hire. A true priest of the Sea Dragon did not fear death at sea, and if the weather had become dangerous, there was power she could bring to bear. And Islandmen were the most devout of Braech’s worshippers; they treated priests of any rank with something akin to awe.
It was because she had not sailed on the boat with Landen Delondeur, missing the chance to renew a childhood acquaintance and perhaps curry favor with the future ruler of Barony Delondeur, not to mention coordinate strategy for the coming fight.
But even that was only a small part of what had bothered Evolyn. Namely, it had been the other passengers. She had felt something wrong when she stepped on board to find the captain of the vessel dislodged from his cabin. Her feelings were confirmed when she saw the mysterious mottled yellow and blue light that leaked under its doorway.
The lights did not go out during the entire crossing. They flickered, they dimmed, but they were ever-present. After three days she felt them like an ache in her eyes, thought she could scent them like rotting fish at the bottom of a barrel. She knew what they portended. When, steeling herself, she had gone to discuss the conduct of the coming battles with them, she had been laughingly dismissed. They had no need of gods, she was told; only men.
Which is why, now, with the battle for control of the Dunes quickly won by Landen and two ships worth of swords-at-hire—and the horrible craft of two sorcerers—Evolyn found herself kneeling at an altar of Braech in a small, hidden chapel in the Temple at Londray.
Have you any honest faith left, Symod? Would the Sea Dragon truly have us make an accord with such as them?
She stared hard at the sculpture of Braech. Small, crude, less adorned with gemmary than most of the others in this grand Temple, Evolyn had come to it precisely because it promised solitude. During her novitiate she had discovered it while penance-sweeping; the layer of dust over the statue, the chains that held it above the altar, and the altar itself had spoken of long disuse. Since then it had been her private place to pray, to reflect, to seek guidance.
She stared hard at the Sea Dragon, the dull greened bronze, and willed it to answer her.
“Father of Waves, Master of Accords, Dragon of the Sea, guide me,” she mouthed, the words barely audible even to her. “This is not our way. Honest battle or cunning bargain, yes. There are loyal servants, holy berzerkers who would go to this battle simply for the asking, others who would do it for plunder or to make their name or their fortune. We would strive against this upstart, strength for strength. Or find the leverage to move him from his heresy.” Though Fortune’s soft glove has already failed. “But to make dark bargains that no one must know of, to pay in promises and whispers to things that were once men and are now, what?” She resisted the urge to spit when she though of them, of the reek of death that she caught when she was forced to talk to them, of the way their whispers had buzzed at her ears like a repulsive serpent’s tongue.
“Tell me, Braech. Lead me, Sea Dragon.”
Evolyn stared hard at the old and tarnished image of her God, hoping to hear some whisper, some echo.
Nothing came.
Evolyn stood up, smoothed out her robes, and made a decision. She had brought Landen and the swords-at-hire to the fight. She had aided the rescue of the Baron. But parts of Londray were in flames and fighting continued in the streets.
She would not go to battle in Thornhurst. Not like this, not hiding behind other powers. If Braech was not to lead, then Braech would not go.
“Surely the sorcerers will destroy them,” she murmured. “They will not need me to help them, nor will I risk the lives of Braechsworn guardsmen or warriors. Braech will be represented, but the Sea Dragon leads, or the Sea Dragon does not fight.”
* * *
As the last of fall’s two months gave way to winter’s early frosts, Allystaire sat in a tent grown increasingly uncomfortable. With braziers of glowing embers pulled close to the table he used as a desk, he staved off sleep with an old habit. One by one, he listed the forces, the assets, at his command, examining them for weakness, considering strength.
“The Ravens,” he murmured in a barely audible voice. “Solid. They can hold a wall, or go over it in the dark. Yet I cannot ask of them what I might of men who serve the Mother, and not my sister’s links.”
He paused, spreading his hand out on the table. “Renard, his militia. Decent enough bowmen. Not real soldiers. They cannot be left alone in the heat of it. Keegan and his wildmen.”
He sighed, lifted his hand and cradled his forehead. “Then me, Idgen Marte, Torvul.” He paused, and then added, “Gideon.”
He stared into the glowing coals in one of the braziers, and said aloud, having thought the words several times already, “It will not be enough.”
The walls are nearly up, and gates. All the folk here will know what it means if they are taken.
The walls will not stand any engines, he thought. Not likely Delondeur would bring one, if it is him I have to worry about. And bandits will not have them.
If sorcerers come, he began to think, but he cut the thought off with a clenched fist rapped lightly against the table. “Let them come. Gideon and I will find a way.”
If Delondeur brings a hundred men? Two hundred? A thousand?
“A hundred I can keep at bay. Even two or three, mayhap. He could not muster a thousand men as winter comes on. Not unless most were untrained rabble rousted off the streets of Londray.”
Even so, whatever men Delondeur could bring were sure to have among them well-trained, well-equipped veterans. And when it comes to veterans, there are the Ravens, me, Idgen Marte, Renard, and Torvul. He paused. Keegan, I suppose.
“That is if it is Delondeur who comes,” Allystaire spat. “What of Fortune? What of Braech? The sorcerers?”
He lowered his head to his hand again, then stood. He felt the cold more than he once did. His knees protested, as did his back and his aching shoulder. He felt every one of his collection of scars and hurts.
Without knowing exactly why, or even considering the impulse, Allystaire placed one hand against the edge of his table and knelt, wincing as first one knee, and then the other, touched the ground. Rugs and mats had been laid down where there was space, but even so, the cold leeched through the ground and into him.
And then bowing his head, the paladin reached out to his Goddess.
Mother. He stopped, cleared his throat, and started again, murmuring the words aloud. “Goddess, I have tried to do your will, use your Gifts as I thought you would wish. And my best judgments, and my plans have come to this, to sitting and waiting. I have made your people a target. I know nothing of what our enemies plan. The walls I have built, the stores and the trenches and the cunning plans, may all come to nothing.”
As he spoke the words aloud, admitting to his worst fears, Allystaire began to feel the same kind of cold, gnawing despair he’d felt in the sorcerer ‘s trap on the road. “And this is a trap of my own making. Goddess, if you would but give me a sign, some indication of whether I have done well, or done ill…”
He waited, shutting his eyes, trying to turn inward, trying to stretch his hearing for some note of Her song.
He waited. For how long, he didn’t know. Then, with a sigh, Allystaire levered himself back to his feet and wandered over to the other table his tent held, pulling back the cloth that covered his armor.
In the breastplate, he could see his reflection as well as in any mirror he’d ever owned. His oft-broken nose bent to the left side of his heavy, square face, more deeply lined than the last time he saw it. More flecks of grey in his hair and in the two-day’s worth of beard upon his face. Much more, he silently admitted. Besides age and the odd new crease, there was nothing changed in it; it had been the face of Lord Allystaire Coldbourne, Castellan of Wind’s Jaw Keep, Oyrwyn war-leader for the better part of a score of years. Now it was the face of whom?
“Allystaire, the Arm of the Mother,” he murmured.
It was the same face, of the same man.
“So what would Lord Coldbourne do in this moment? With no army to speak of and unknown enemies with unknown plans on his position? Develop some freezing knowledge of my freezing enemies,” Allystaire answered himself forcefully, thumping a knuckle down on the breastplate. He turned his eye towards the tent flap and the dark and cold of the night beyond, considered a moment, then grabbed a fur-lined mantle from the top of the small chest that held his clothing and strode into the night.
* * *
“You,” Torvul said groggily, “had better have a good reason for wakin’ an old dwarf in the middle of the stone-crushed night.”
“I do,” Allystaire said. He knelt on the floor of the inn, pushing an iron into the coals of the hearth and stirring them up, then laying on a fresh log from the nearby pile. He straightened up, and surveyed the weary faces at the table he’d dragged near the fire: Idgen Marte, Renard, Torvul, Gideon, and Ivar. Only the last of them didn’t appear surprised. “What,” Allystaire began, “have we been doing wrong?”
“Layin’ up like a rat in a hole,” Ivar said fiercely.
“Precisely. We surrendered the initiative to our enemies. Whoever they are.”
“Allystaire, the Archioness herself told you they’d be coming back with a Declaration of Anathemata.” Idgen Marte’s voice was weary.
“Aye, but who is enforcing it? More Temple rabble? Will Delondeur come? Does Lionel Delondeur even live? Or did his natural son execute him? We do not know any of this.”
“To tell the truth,” Torvul said, “I’ve been waiting for some peddlers, minstrels, other folk who carry news t’come by. They haven’t.”
Idgen Marte sat up straighter, her eyes sharpening as she woke up completely. “The minstrels are the first to know to avoid a place. Word travels faster than you’d credit.”
“Thornhurst is unlikely to have been on most of their routes,” Gideon, quietly confident, said. “Birchvale and Ashmill Bridge are larger towns with more links to earn, but close enough that folk from here could travel there.”
“For the better singers and players, aye,” Idgen Marte allowed. “But for those still makin’ a name or those can’t handle the competition? Thornhurst’d be ripe.”
“There’d be little traffic here, but some, surely,” Torvul said. “And there’s none. Pilgrims and folk moving here aplenty, but not anyone looking to make some weight. And they’d see it on the road, the patterns, the movement. If I were still out there, be Cold-damned sure I found my way here with the kinds of things farmer folk are usually wantin’.”
“They know someone will target us. We know someone will target us. We have to do something to find out who.” Allystaire’s eyes flicked from Gideon to Torvul. “Have you two any thoughts on that score?”
Torvul pulled at his beer and sat back, rubbing his stubbly chin. “Might be we could do something.”
Gideon looked as though he wanted to speak, but closed his mouth and merely nodded.
Allystaire frowned. Ask him later. Privately. “Good. And Idgen Marte?”
“I suppose I could roust Keegan and his lads and we could start scouting parties. Depends how far you want us to range how much good it’ll do.”
“Use your judgment,” Allystaire replied. “Hardly your first time heading scouts.” He looked to Ivar and Renard and said, “As for us—we need to redouble our efforts at getting the men ready. Any man who has taken up arms, that is all he does. Less what need drives to feed his family, from now till the longest night.”
“What ‘appens then?” Ivar leaned back in her chair, grimacing.
“I know only that the Goddess told me to be ready for it. And ready does not mean lying like a rat in a hole. Now all of you, back to your beds. I want to hear plans after breakfast tomorrow.”
They stood to leave, but Allystaire waved Ivar aside. When the others cleared the door, he said to the woman, “Captain—if you already knew what I was doing wrong, what stopped you from speaking up? You know I have never been one to grow angry at anyone for speaking the truth.”
Ivar sniffed, fixing Allystaire with an indifferent stare. “Not sure what ‘tis ya do anymore, m’lord,” she replied. “Lord Coldbourne I knew ne’er woulda let murderers go w’out stretched necks.”
Allystaire frowned, hardening. “I was prepared to do that if it proved necessary.”
“It oughta been necessary when m’man turned up dead,” Ivar retorted hotly.
“There is more at stake than a warband, Ivar.” Allystaire tried not to shout, and only barely succeeded. “More at stake than an army. I serve a different power now, one that seeks more out of this world than merely perpetuating itself.”
“Tha’s a lot o’words don’t say anythin’ ‘bout lettin’ a brother o’battle go unavenged, and no matter how ya pretty it up, that’s what ya did.”
“Vengeance and justice are not always the same.”
“It ain’t justice I’m freezin’ after.” Ivar was just short of shouting through her gap-toothed mouth, the words whistling over bare gums and around what brown and cracked teeth remained. “Ne’er was. A warband don’t work if it ain’t everythin’ for yer brother. Was a time you knew that. Now I hear a lot o’mercy and Goddess and love and other horse-shit I can’t see, spend, taste, drink, lay, or fight beside. Tha’s why I didn’t speak. S’why I don’t speak now ‘less you ask. Now I’m seekin’ my bed and I’ll be up when ya need me and we’ll serve our accord. The Iron Ravens have ne’r broken one. Don’t be shocked when it’s up and we vote t’leave. All I can say.” With that, the leather-clad woman turned and left without a backwards look.
“Is she going to be trouble?”
Allystaire should perhaps have been startled by Idgen Marte’s voice so close behind him, but part of him wasn’t. He realized, unconsciously, he’d known she was there. “No. They will do their duty, meet the terms of their accord with my sister, even if that means dying to the last.”
“Think it’ll come to that?”
“I do not mean it to.”
“This isn’t their fight.”
Allystaire laughed. “No fight is a warband’s fight. And every fight is. You know that as well as I do.”
“Have you spoken to them of coming to the Mother? Have you even tried?”
“If warbands have a faith, it is in themselves. If they must have a god, they will take Fortune, perhaps Braech. You said as much yourself, once.”
“Seems a long time ago.” She paused, and then stepped out of the shadows to face him. “Listen, Keegan and his lot can scour the woods and the hills. I’m better off if I set out myself up to Ashmill Bridge. Speak to the singers and the traders and the wanderers. I’ll learn about what’s going on in the barony. We shouldn’t have been this cut off—there’ll be news out there if we turn our ears to hear it. I’m leaving at first light.” Her voice was quiet, but firm, and her tone brooked no argument. “I’ll be back in a week. You know there’ll be nothing in that town can touch me. Aye?”
Allystaire nodded mutely and Idgen Marte walked hurriedly off. Feels good to be doing, instead of waiting. He followed her footsteps outside and found Gideon just outside the door in the weak grey light of pre-dawn.
The boy didn’t meet his gaze. “When…during my strike against the Sea Dragon’s priests who held the rain away…when I left this form?”
“I was there watching, Gideon, but you never spoke to me about what you did. Only that it worked.”
“Well, when I left the form of my body—not left it, but changed it, I became a dragon of wind and air.” He frowned. “That is not quite right. I became my thought. Became my imagination and my will, and what I did could best be described as having been done by a dragon made of wind and air.” The boy suddenly lifted his head and stared at Allystaire. “Do you understand?”
“No. Yet go on, and see if I learn something by the end.”
“It was wildly freeing. And I can do it again. In a short time I can scout the entire valley of the Ash for you.”
Allystaire felt the possibilities opening before him, and his mind briefly reeled. To know exactly where an enemy is, and how many of him there are, at any given moment. He stemmed the tide of thought before it swept him along, cleared his throat, and said, “Gideon, if you can do as you say, it would be of immense value to us.”
The boy nodded. “I know. It is just…I fear it, Allystaire. I fear that I will not want to come back to this flesh,” he said, poking his thin chest with a finger turned inward, almost disdainfully. “Since then I have felt so confined, so slow and small.”
Allystaire felt his heart sink even as his stomach rose up to meet it. “Truly?”
“I have lived a life of the mind—what could be more tempting than to live entirely as will?”
“What do you need to make you able to, ah, come back, as you put it, to your flesh?”
“I simply have to be able to master myself.”
Allystaire shuffled next to the boy and put an arm around his thin shoulders. “Gideon—in my days as a war-leader, I would have given anything to have access to the ability you have just described. And had I found a man who could do it—I would have given him no choice. Whatever leverage I could apply to him, I would have. I will give you no orders. I will say only this.” He paused for a quick breath. “Doing this could save lives. Could save the Mother’s folk, Her Temple, everything we are trying to build. If sacrifices are to be made, it must be by those of us She has called.” That’s a Cold-damned hard thing to lay on a boy of twelve, Allystaire thought, recriminating himself.
“And as for mastering yourself—that is the hard bit. It always is. A man must look straight at the end he seeks, the same way he looks straight at anything. How he gets there, what he is capable of, what he is willing to do, all depend on that first act.”
“Looking straight at it?”
“Yes.”
“I will think on it. And I will have an answer by noontime. Fair?”
Allystaire nodded and stood, patting the boy on the shoulder. “Whatever you decide, Gideon.”
As the boy walked off into the cold, Allystaire thought on the Goddess’s words to him at the vigil, and silently prayed. Goddess, Mother, Lady, please do not let him be a false dawn. Then he remembered precisely what she had said, and amended the words of his prayer with downcast eyes.
Mother, I beg you. Do not let me fail him.