“What happened to the drunken dragonslayer?” Yonmar asked, motioning to the water. “From your reputation, I expected you to stay soaked in wine this whole trip.”
Bershad scratched at his beard. “Shouldn’t believe everything you hear about me.” He could barely pass an hour behind city walls without filling his belly with wine, but out in the wild, he felt different. The rhythm of the forest kept his body relaxed and calm. Always had.
“So, what do we do if the Skojit attack?” Felgor asked, looking around in the woods.
“We’re miles south of the Line of Lornar,” Bershad said. “Only danger down here is slipping on a loose rock.”
“That family was killed south of the Line,” Yonmar pointed out.
“I doubt that,” Bershad said. “Those soldiers have to fill quotas for Garwin just like tax agents. We could scour these woods for a month, don’t think we’d ever find those slaughtered miners.”
Vera frowned. “Swine have stronger morals than you mainlanders.”
“Last I checked the widows weren’t known for their ironclad scruples,” Yonmar said. “Spies and assassins masquerading as bodyguards.”
“At least we don’t murder people to fill … quotas,” Vera said.
Bershad shrugged and took another long drink. “We’ll sleep south of the Line tonight. Tomorrow, might be worth coming up with a plan for the Skojit.”
* * *
Near dark, Vera scouted ahead and found a place to camp beside the bend of a small mountain river. When they caught up with her, she’d already managed to pull four trout from the water with a piece of cord and a steel hook. They were gutted and skewered and she was starting a fire beneath them.
“Handy little assassin,” Felgor said, turning to Yonmar and smiling. “Saved your ass.”
“We all have a part to play,” Yonmar said.
“What’s yours again?” Bershad asked. “Pissing off barons and losing our food?”
“That wasn’t my fault,” Yonmar said. “Ghalamar tightened their regulations.”
“Is that what you’re gonna say when you can’t get us into Balaria, too?”
“That will be different. I’ve made a deal in Taggarstan that cannot be undone.”
“Why?”
Yonmar glared at Bershad. “I don’t need to explain myself to the demon of Glenlock Canyon.”
Bershad felt his stomach sink. The mention of Glenlock Canyon did that to him. He let the conversation drop.
They shared the fish and warmed themselves by the fire. The pine needles of the tree above them were as long as fingers, and they cast spiked shadows over their campsite. Yonmar complained about his feet, then started making another mud figure. Felgor and Rowan traded drinking stories. Vera sat off to the edge of the firelight, saying nothing.
Bershad ate his fish. Didn’t say much. Argel had put him in a low mood. Felgor prattled on for a while about nothing much and Bershad had him just about tuned out when there was a short silence and then a question that caught his attention.
“Why do they call him the demon of Glenlock Canyon, anyway?” Felgor asked Yonmar.
“That’s how our friend here earned his blue bars,” Yonmar said with an oily smile. “Nasty bit of business.”
Things were quiet. Rowan looked like he was about to break Yonmar’s face open.
“Well,” Felgor said, “let’s hear it, then! I shared plenty of stories with all of you so far.”
When Bershad again refused to look up, Yonmar cleared his throat and leaned forward.
“Fourteen years ago, the young heir to the Dainwood was sent to quell an uprising in the eastern part of his province. You see, toward the end of the Balarian Invasion, Almira had a bit of trouble coming up with fresh soldiers. More than half of our wardens had been killed. Most peasants of fighting age, too.” Yonmar paused to pull a bone from his totem bag and placed it carefully on his mud statue. “So King Malgrave used mercenaries. He hired a particularly vicious outfit called Wormwrot Company. They were led by a young but sadistic commander. What was his name again, exile?”
“Vergun,” Bershad muttered. “Vallen Vergun.”
“Exactly. Vergun.” Yonmar smiled. “When people reminisce about the war, everyone talks about Cedar Wallace and the battle at Black Pine, or Hertzog’s charge to the sea after the Balarians retreated. But the only reason Almira managed to even fight in those battles was because of Vergun’s and Wormwrot’s bloody work. After the war was won, Almira’s treasury couldn’t cover the bill. Not even close. So, for sixteen years the king was forced to pay off his debt to Vergun at a steep interest rate. Damn near doubled the original cost of the hired legions.”
“That’s the problem with large debts,” Bershad said. “They tend to linger.”
“Vergun kept his army in Almira to make sure he got paid,” Yonmar continued. “They took over a town called Glenlock on the eastern coast of the Dainwood. Vergun and his men collected their gold in installments and … how shall I put it? They enjoyed the taste of the Dainwood’s countryside. But the war had been over for a long time, and Almira’s wardens had been replenished. The king figured it was time to strike a better deal. That’s where he came in.” Yonmar motioned to Bershad. “Hertzog sent the young jaguar lord to negotiate better terms for the rotten deal. As a show of strength, the king allowed Bershad to take three thousand wardens with him. His first military command.
“But this is where things get sticky,” Yonmar continued. “See, instead of trying to negotiate with Vergun, Bershad rode down to Glenlock and started a fight. He managed to kick Wormwrot Company out of the city, and they fled into the nearby hills. Bershad gave chase, and a few days later he cornered Wormwrot Company in a box canyon. The mercenaries were trapped. Thing was, Vergun had snatched a few hundred Almiran prisoners during his retreat. Peasants, mostly, but he grabbed a few small lords, too. Lined them up at the mouth of the canyon, necks tied to cottonwood trees, and dared Bershad to charge. And a day later, the evil bastard did it.”
“It wasn’t that simple,” Bershad growled.
Yonmar shrugged. “Simple or not, the exile got hundreds of innocent Almirans killed. Women. Children, even. And then there was the massacre afterward. The wardens who were there said Bershad howled like a demon as he cut down the soldiers. Ran murderous lines through their ranks, horse and blade dripping with blood and gore. Cutting at the hanging corpses as he rode. Of course, he didn’t get all of them.” Yonmar smiled. “Rumor has it that Vergun escaped and fled back east across the Soul Sea. The rest of his army became crow’s food.”
That was the story everyone in Almira had been told. And it was accurate except for one detail Bershad had kept to himself all this time. The only other person who knew the full truth was Hertzog Malgrave. But Bershad didn’t bother correcting Yonmar for the same reason he hadn’t told Ashlyn the full story at Castle Malgrave. It didn’t change anything.
“This unfortunate incident happened to occur about the same time Shiru Malgrave went into labor with her fifth child,” Yonmar continued. “The birth went hard on the queen, and the child was stillborn. Just before the queen followed her dead child down the river, she told King Hertzog that the baby hadn’t been his child at all. Leon Bershad, high lord of the Dainwood and friend to the king, had been making rather frequent visits to the queen’s bedchambers over the last few years of her life. In his grief for Shiru, so they say, Leon Bershad confessed his crimes when the king confronted him. Hertzog Malgrave executed Leon the day before Bershad rode back into Floodhaven with children’s blood on his hands. So nobody argued much when Hertzog ordered a pair of blue bars put on the young heir to the Dainwood.” Yonmar looked at Bershad and called out to him. “Tell me, exile, do you ever wonder how things would have played out if you hadn’t gone all bloodthirsty in that canyon?”
Bershad glared at Yonmar, rage boiling up inside his throat. “Do you ever wonder what your lungs would look like if I cut them out of your chest?”
Nobody said
anything for a while after that.
Felgor licked his lips. “Well, I’m no soldier and I’m definitely no lord, but it sounds like they backed you into a crap-covered wall, then got angry when you came back smelling like shit. The king brought those mercenaries into Almira, not you. And anytime soldiers draw swords, innocent people wind up dead. That, I’ve seen firsthand. One man’s never responsible for all of it.” Felgor looked at Bershad. “Being honest, I like your other name better.”
Yonmar flinched. “Well, look at that. The thief sides with the murderer. Should have expected the criminals to stick together.”
Bershad nodded at Felgor but didn’t say anything. He’d stopped searching for a justification or forgiveness for Glenlock Canyon a long time ago.
Yonmar kept talking, and Bershad was having trouble fighting the urge to cut his tongue out, so he got up from the fire and dug a candle out of a saddlebag, lit it with a stick from the fire, and moved over to where Alfonso was grazing. First, he saw to his sword, wiping the blade with a goatskin oilcloth and then searching for any remaining rust spots he hadn’t taken care of during their journey across the Soul Sea. He rubbed each of them away with a sharpening stone, glad to have the routine back again.
Bershad was worrying at a crescent-shaped rust mark the size of his fingernail when Vera abandoned the campfire and walked over to where he was sitting.
“If you came over to hear my side of Glenlock Canyon, don’t bother,” Bershad said.
“I don’t care about your past unless it’s going to affect my future,” Vera said. “I came to get a better look at your sword.”
Bershad looked up at her. He couldn’t get a good read on the widow yet.
“It belonged to my uncle,” he said. “Gregor.”
“I’ve never heard of an Almiran carrying a Papyrian sword. You mainlanders are famous for those enormous blades. We make fun of you for them.”
“Gregor used to travel to Papyria every spring during the early years of Hertzog’s marriage to Shiru. He was a good ambassador. He liked places that were different from his home. Can’t say the same for most Almirans.” Bershad worked a piece of rust loose from the blade and flicked it aside. “Anyway, Gregor admired Papyrian craftsmanship so much that he asked a smith there to design this one for him.”
“What’s it called?” Vera asked.
“No name,” Bershad said. “That part’s all Almiran. No names for our gods or our blades.”
“I see. It’s a custom design, yes?”
“That’s right.”
He offered the sword to Vera hilt-first. She took it and nodded approval as she tested the balance.
“Is your uncle dead?” Vera asked, passing the sword back to him and sitting down. Alfonso came over to sniff her open palm, then wandered off to eat more grass.
Bershad shook his head. “Exiled, like me. Except his was voluntary. Gregor forswore his titles and property when I was a boy. All of his Dainwood lands and holdings went to my father, but the sword went to me. Then he took a catboat out of Floodhaven harbor and disappeared. Last anyone saw him, he was heading directly into the heart of the Soul Sea. Nobody’s heard from him in twenty years.”
“Why did he leave?” Vera asked.
Bershad shrugged. “Didn’t say. Might have been he knew my father was fucking the queen and didn’t want to be around when Hertzog found out. That’s what most people think. But my father said Gregor was changed by the Balarian Invasion. He took a bad injury that nearly killed him, and after that his mind became a cage that rattled too easily in the wind. He needed a quiet place to find peace.”
Bershad stopped talking and focused on a freckle-sized spot of rust near the guard of his blade. From the corner of his vision, he saw Vera move to stand up.
“What are the names of your daggers?” he asked. Vera had done well during the Argel attack. He wanted her on his side when the next fight arrived. And nothing bonds two killers like a conversation about their weapons.
“Kaisha,” she said, patting the right dagger. “And Owaru.”
“Beginning and end,” Bershad said, translating the Papyrian words. “I guess that makes you the middle.”
“You speak Papyrian?”
“You’d shudder at my accent.”
Vera smiled at that and rubbed her thumb against Owaru’s handle, which was made from orca bone.
“I’m glad you’re with us,” Bershad said. “Not sure we’d have escaped Argel without you.”
“Yonmar wouldn’t have, anyway.” Vera scowled at the lord.
“I wouldn’t have been too upset.”
“If we didn’t need him alive, I wouldn’t have saved him.” She moved her right arm in a slow circle. “Strained my shoulder a bit hauling him out of the way.”
Bershad finished with the sword and slid it back into the scabbard. Set it aside. Then he unstrapped his breastplate, shucked off his mail, and went to work on the links by the candlelight, looking for tangled or bent rings. He found six, and went over to a sack of replacements in one of Alfonso’s saddlebags. He rubbed the beast’s snout after he’d taken the rings, watched his ears twitch happily.
“Seems like that donkey receives the majority of your affection,” Vera said when he sat back down to start replacing the rings.
“With donkeys, you know where you stand,” Bershad said. “True of all animals. Dragons might be vicious killers, but I never saw a great lizard pretend to be anything besides exactly what it is.”
“Is that why you hate Yonmar so much?”
Bershad glanced at the young lord, who was massaging his feet and staring at the mud figurine he’d made. “I’ve known worse.”
“Like who?”
Bershad looked at Vera. She seemed genuinely curious.
“Before I got my blue bars, I was the heir to a powerful family. Our lands were fertile and wild. And our wardens were some of the most feared warriors in Almira. There was this small lord named Umbrik who had a few holdfasts and a coffee plantation along the northern border of our province. No wardens under his command. He wanted to win my favor so when I became a high lord, I gave him a few soldiers to start his little army. He’d bring me shipments of reserve wine and coffee and rain ale each moon turn. Tell me about the different jaguars he’d spotted in the forests because he knew I liked them. I thought we were friends.”
Bershad paused for a moment to slip one of the missing rings into place.
“A year after I was exiled, I came through Umbrik’s lands for a writ. Hertzog made sure that I was never sent too far into the Dainwood—too many deep-rooted loyalties that might sprout—but Umbrik was far enough north to be acceptable. I was excited to see a familiar face. Sleep under a roof. Maybe even in a bed, if Umbrik was feeling especially generous. But the small lord came down from his muddy little tower with his sword drawn. He was wearing a jaguar cloak, just like Yonmar is now. He yanked the cloak from his shoulders, threw it on the ground, and pissed on it while I watched. Said he’d go out and kill himself a fresh one in the morning. Then he told me exiles had no place on his property, and to get my donkey and my tattooed face out of sight.”
“Charming man,” Vera said.
“Back then, everybody assumed I’d be dead soon. And they didn’t want to risk angering the king by showing me respect. Funny thing is, I came through Umbrik’s lands again almost ten years later, after I was famous. He’d ingratiated himself with the Grealors by then—set up a dozen lumber mills on his land and turned those thousand-year woods into gold. He even managed to build a nice little town near his plantation that he named after himself. Umbrik’s River or Glade or some shit. Pretentious bastard. Anyway, by the time I came through a second time, it was normal for the lords of Almira to invite me into their manors and castles if they were sure Hertzog Malgrave wouldn’t find out. So Umbrik dispatched a warden to fetch me from the tavern I was drinking in and bring me to his freshly constructed villa. He insisted on throwing a feast in my honor so his wife and children could
meet the Flawless Bershad.”
“Did you go?”
“Sure,” Bershad said. “Never turn down kitchen-cooked food and the chance to sleep in a bed—that’s a rule of dragonslaying. Mostly me and Rowan have been doing this for fourteen years.” He motioned to the fish and thin sleeping mats. “Anyway, Lord Umbrik fawned over me just like he did when I was the heir to the Dainwood. And when he passed out from drinking too much ale, I took his pretty wife upstairs to their marriage bed and fucked her senseless until dawn.”
“So, some of the stories about you are true.” Vera smiled.
Bershad shrugged. “Point is, an animal will never pull shit like that on you. If you know how to look, you’ll always know where the wild things of this world stand.”
Vera stared at Bershad for a few moments. “Speaking of wild things, how did you know that dragon was going to attack Argel?”
“Seeing it come down from the mountains was a clue.”
“Maybe it was, but you cut the top of that man’s head off before the Red Skull appeared. How did you know it was coming?”
Bershad hesitated. “You’ve got a pair of eyes on you.”
“Answer my question,” Vera said.
Bershad had started feeling the approach of dragons in his bones about five years into his exile, after he’d already taken three or four bad wounds and used the moss to heal his body. Bershad knew the two were connected, he just didn’t know exactly how. But he couldn’t tell Vera the full truth, so he told her something close.
“Even before I had these blue bars, I’d been around dragons my entire life,” he said. “The Dainwood has more Blackjacks than Floodhaven has stray cats. And the world changes when the great lizards are nearby. Goes quiet and still.” He shrugged. “Once you learn to recognize that, dragons have a hard time surprising you. That’s all I did.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Suit yourself.”
Vera squinted at him. “Most men would be proud of killing that Red Skull. You saved a lot of lives. Why aren’t you?”
Blood of an Exile Page 19
