Grace
Frostgate, Forthyn
The young baroness of Kell shivered in the cold. She was wearing armor that was too large for her, and carrying a sword that was too heavy. A thick coat feathered with snow was drawn tight, a fur-trimmed collar so high on her that it pricked the tops of her ears. She looked ridiculous, but she did not want to upset her mother who had suffered enough, or offend their host by refusing his gifts. The coat, the armor, and the sword, had all been gifts from the thane of Frostgate. He had thought highly of her father and been genuinely grieved to learn of his fall to the Uthuk Y’llan. Grace had been moved by it, enough to wear the emblems of his city as she set out. The shield strapped across her slender back was all she carried that was her own, the unblinking Owl of Kell bobbing with her gait, looking back down the snowy road towards the city gate already half buried in the swirling snow.
Grace wondered if she looked any less mercenary than the half hundred fur-wrapped warriors that traipsed ahead of her. Wrapping herself deeper into her coat she watched them march. Her breath steamed as it left her mouth and froze her face. She did not know what she was looking for.
She wished her father had returned from Orrush Khatak. She wished for it every morning and night when her mother insisted she pray to Kellos and Syraskil for the destruction of their enemies.
Thinking of her mother, she turned and looked down.
Grace was taller now, if only slightly, her mother consigned to the pony-drawn limber since the Uthuk Y’llan had forced them to abandon Castle Kellar. And any last hope for her father. Grace had watched the hero, Andira, draw her from her coma, but whatever magic she had wrought had failed to make her walk. Perhaps she had forgotten that part, or had intended to return and complete her healing after the battle. Her mother had added the hero’s name to the long list of enemies against whom she planned vengeance, but her father, she knew, would have wanted her to look for the best possibility rather than the worst. It was exhausting, balancing them both in her mind. And it was a long road back to Kellar.
Mother was bundled up in skins and furs so that only her head and one arm were showing, the dirty whites and natural grays so distinct from the flamboyant hues of the Torue Albes. Her dark curls were tousled and knotty, her tanned face pinched, her lips blue, but refusing to bend to the cold and shiver. She was a princess though, whatever her trappings, and was herself dressed in mail and armed.
“Lutetia Dallia had less than this at her back when she set out to humble Lorim and become the first queen of the Torue Albes,” she said.
“They are mercenaries,” said Grace. “I don’t trust any of them.”
“Good. You should not. You are a baroness without a barony and surrounded by enemies. There is no one you can trust now but me.”
“Not even Graf Thorne?”
“Trust that he would rather have an indebted girl in Castle Kellar than the son or niece of some other rival, but no further than that. Frostgate and Forthyn have problems of their own.”
“I think… I think I’m a little scared of them.”
Her mother smiled. It was neither reassuring nor kind. There had been little gentleness left in her since the hero had led her husband to war. It was as though something good in her was still asleep, paralyzed like her legs, waiting for the hero’s return. It sounded like a story from one of the old myths. “That is good too.”
“I just wish we could have waited a little longer.”
“For what? For people to forget your claim, or to discover old claims of their own? No. Waiting is what your father would have done, and he was the first baron of Kell to lose Kellar since Penacor times. The time is now, while winter puts ambitions to bed and the coming of the Uthuk Y’llan occupies minds in Archaut.”
Grace bit her tongue, her heart urging to stand up for her father’s memory, but not wanting to argue with her mother.
It would do no good.
She was hurting. She needed Grace to be strong.
Grace sighed and nodded.
A misfit band of uncouths, sellswords, and motley adventurers, those miscreants too deep in their cups or too imbecilic to have departed Frostgate before winter closed the northern roads, and all led by an eleven year-old girl with nothing to offer but a lot of promises, and a bitter woman from beyond the Kingless Coast.
It did not sound like the opening to a propitious saga, not the ones with the happy endings that her father had always preferred to read.
But she hid it, and looked stern, and obeyed her mother.
She marched south.
To retake Kell.