The Dame

by R. A. Salvatore

  T

  oo many,” Harcourt said to Milwellis as the reports came in one after another regarding the strength of their opponents. “We will sweep the field of them, perhaps, but will not have enough might left to tear down Ethelbert dos Entel’s tall walls. The city is well fortified, with many engines of war lying in wait behind her stone barriers.”

  Prince Milwellis rubbed his face. He knew that Harcourt was responding not only to the reports regarding Ethelbert but also to those concerning his own force. His men were growing tired and increasingly glancing back to the northwest. Attrition was already beginning to work against him, with men simply disappearing from his ranks, and the whispers said that it was from more than confrontations with Ethelbert’s soldiers.

  “Have the runners returned from King Yeslnik?”

  “King Yeslnik is long gone from the field, my prince,” Harcourt replied. “He is almost directly south of Delaval City by some reports. Others say that he and his private guards have gone back to Castle Pryd.”

  “We have Ethelbert in a trap from which there is no escape,” Milwellis protested. “We have turned his desperate attempt to break out. It was a showy and dramatic response by Ethelbert, to be sure, but without the numbers to back up any change in the course of the battle!”

  “All true,” said Harcourt. “But King Yeslnik is not to be found, and I doubt we’ll get him and his warriors back to the field in time to finish this grim business.”

  Milwellis blew a frustrated sigh.

  “And Yeslnik’s tactics work against him, and us, regarding such an event,” Harcourt went on. Milwellis looked at him curiously.

  “His retreat was marked by the scorching of the world,” Harcourt explained. “Every village, every field of crops, every garden, and most every animal was trampled under boot. So fearful was he that Ethelbert and his assassins would pursue, he destroyed the ability of Ethelbert’s army—of any army—to follow his route back to the west.”

  “He intended to put Ethelbert in a box of barren ground?”

  Harcourt shrugged. “Likely he means to send the fleets of Delaval and Palmaristown to assault Ethelbert from the sea. Or perhaps he hopes to keep Ethelbert in his city while he solidifies his grasp on the rest of Honce, and by sheer weight of support force Ethelbert into a truce.”

  “A truce that would include no assassins from Behr, no doubt,” Milwellis remarked with a knowing chuckle.

  “Let us hope that he is wiser than he is brave,” Harcourt dared to say, knowing that some levity was needed here, since Milwellis’s dream of finishing off Ethelbert seemed suddenly an unlikely thing.

  “Sweep the field,” Milwellis ordered.

  “My prince?”

  “Chase Ethelbert’s ragged band back into the city,” Milwellis explained. “Let us see if the walls of Ethelbert dos Entel are as solid as you fear.”

  “And if they are?”

  “Then we will turn back to the north.”

  “How far?”

  “Let us follow Yeslnik’s lead.” He grinned as he added, “Around Felidan Bay to the Mantis Arm? A few fortresses under the flag of Palmaristown scattered about the Mantis Arm would serve my father’s seaborne designs well.”

  Harcourt smiled and nodded his approval. “A wise leader has more than one road before him and keeps both trails open for as long as he can.”

  “And has wise advisors to help guide his course,” said Milwellis.

  The regrouping and advance was on in full that very day, Milwellis’s army, promised a swift victory or a swift return to Palmaristown, marching with eagerness once more. They crashed through two of the villages they had already flattened on their first pass, and all the people of those hamlets fled before them.

  They found only meager resistance from a couple of small Ethelbert encampments that were not fast enough in flight before them.

  They arrived in Yansinchester yet again, the last sizable town before Ethelbert dos Entel itself, the high-water mark of Milwellis’s advance. This time they found the town itself deserted; they knew the survivors to be in the one structure in Yansinchester that had escaped the first march intact, Chapel Yansin.

  “Bring the wounded to be tended by the brothers,” Milwellis ordered his commanders. “And harm no one in the chapel. Allow these peasants some manner of peace. Perhaps they will think Laird Panlamaris beneficent when our pennants snap in the strong coastal breezes above this land.”

  He and Harcourt got a laugh out of that order.

  They were not laughing a short while later, however, when the first couriers from Laird Panlamaris’s force arrived with news that Milwellis’s father had marched and been met with a magical barrage outside Chapel Abelle and was besieging the monks of the mother chapel.

  Milwellis’s face twisted in anger at yet another dire turn in this unfolding drama.

  “Trust in your father,” Harcourt said to calm him. “He is as fine a general as has ever ridden the ways of Honce.”

  Milwellis chewed his lip, his dark eyes flashing dangerously, his hands clenching into fists at his sides.

  “My prince?” Harcourt asked.

  “Are we to battle for useless land in the name of a king who had not the courage to stand and fight on his own behalf while our brethren and my father and laird battle treachery near to our own home?” Milwellis blurted, his breath coming in ragged gasps.

  Harcourt put a hand to his shoulder to calm him.

  “Advise me,” Milwellis demanded, pleaded.

  “Do as our king,” Harcourt said. “Turn and burn the land behind your march.”

  Milwellis began to nod. “To Chapel Abelle,” he whispered, as if he couldn’t put anything more behind his voice.

  “Most of Ethelbert’s minions are back in his city now,” Harcourt offered hopefully. “We can run to the gates of Ethelbert dos Entel within a matter of hours.”

  “Tomorrow,” Milwellis decided, his voice suddenly strong once more. “A fresh march. Let us get close enough to shoot our arrows at them and turn quickly enough to persuade them that we leave of our own choice. Perhaps we can even send a message to Laird Ethelbert, a warning that if he comes forth we will destroy him.”

  Harcourt nodded, glad to see that his prince was continuing to think on his feet, adapting, and wisely, to every new twist.

  “Tomorrow,” he echoed. “And today we camp here in Yansinchester?”

  “We have unfinished business here,” said Milwellis, turning his angry stare right at Chapel Yansin. “For here we discover enemies of Palmaristown.”

  They came within sight of Ethelbert dos Entel’s northern reaches the following afternoon, staring down from the same hills where Milwellis had lost his knights. The carnage of the battle remained all too clear. Milwellis trembled with rage.

  Harcourt did not miss that reaction. “My prince,” he said comfortingly, drawing the volatile young man out of his fuming contemplations.

  “Would that I had Ethelbert’s head on the ground before me,” Milwellis growled.

  “But you do not, though take heart in that you have surely wounded him more profoundly than he you.”

  Milwellis looked up from the body of a Palmaristown knight—Erolis, he recalled, though the carrion birds had done too much to disfigure it for him to be sure—and offered a thankful nod to his honest companion.

  “What can we do to sting Ethelbert one last time before we turn?” he asked. “What can we do to make him know that we are here, right before his wall, and that he daren’t come forth?”

  Harcourt grinned and nodded.

  Under the cover of darkness, on that cloudy and moonless night, every archer in Milwellis’s force crept down from the hill to the field before Ethelbert dos Entel’s north wall.

  They couldn’t see their target any better than any defenders might see them, of course, but then, their target was the size of a city.

  A hundred bows lifted to the sky and let fly. Then again and again and many more times after that until at
last cries came from the city as Ethelbert’s people realized they were under attack. The last volley was flaming arrows, five score streaking through the night sky to cross over the wall and seek further fuel within.

  A response finally came, but by then the Palmaristown archers had turned and fled.

  Several fires erupted within the city wall, Milwellis and Harcourt saw from the hilltop. Perhaps a few people had been injured or even killed, perhaps those fires, though surely quickly attended, would cause some damage. But none of that was the point, after all. Milwellis had just told Ethelbert that he was here in the dark within striking distance of the desperate laird’s last refuge.

  The next morning Milwellis’s army moved back to the north, driving livestock and villagers before them, destroying the gardens and the fields.

  And dragging with them the twenty-three brothers of Chapel Yansin bound for Chapel Abelle.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Worthy

  T

  hey’re running,” Jameston remarked to Bransen. “Like deer before the wolves.” The pair stood looking to the east from opposite branches of a tree. Something was happening there, some fighting or other commotion, but they couldn’t make out what, exactly, for a line of hills blocked their view even from the high perch. That was the nature of this ground along the southernmost Honce coastline, as if the towering mountains just south of their position, the great Belt-and-Buckle, had collided with the sea in days long lost to the world and had strewn great broken mounds all about the region.

  Suddenly soldiers were scrambling past the trees as if the demon dactyl itself was close on their heels. Not far before them, one spearman stumbled as he headed down a slope, nearly thrown from his feet as the back quarter of his spear shaft collided with a tree. Finally orienting himself, he just threw the spear to the ground and continued his desperate run.

  Bransen got Jameston’s attention and pointed up above.

  “Too thin,” the scout replied, meaning the branches.

  Bransen shook his head and started up anyway, falling into the malachite in his brooch. He lessened his weight greatly, his hands easily propelling him skyward. Within only a few moments he had climbed nearly twenty feet to the tree’s tiny top (which wasn’t bending under his weight in the least). He looked back to see Jameston gawking at him and shaking his head in disbelief.

  Bransen suppressed his smile and looked to the east again. Though he still couldn’t see as widely as he had hoped, the view proved enough to make out the pennants flying over a large force.

  “Palmaristown,” he muttered, turning his gaze south. The structures of Ethelbert dos Entel, built on steps up the mountainsides, were in clear view only a couple of leagues away. Was the war nearing its end? And what might this mean for his quest to find the Jhesta Tu? Bransen danced his way back down to Jameston and relayed the information.

  “So these are Ethelbert’s men,” Jameston remarked, glancing down at the fleeing force. “They’ll run all the way to the city, I’m guessing.”

  “Not all of them,” Bransen determinedly replied. To Jameston’s gasp of surprise, he leaped from the tree and floated—floated, not fell!—to the ground. He was running as he landed, scrambling through the thick copse to intercept nearby soldiers.

  “I’ve got to get me some of them damned stones,” he heard Jameston mutter as the man carefully and painstakingly worked his way back down to the ground.

  The Highwayman slipped into a grove of pines, sliding silently through the dense branches. He followed a movement out of the corner of his eye to his left, and he glided as a shadow to intercept.

  The man ran before him; the Highwayman’s foot thrust out to strike the trailing foot of the fleeing soldier, kicking it behind his other ankle. The man tripped and tumbled forward, landing awkwardly in a skid on his knees and hands. Apparently still oblivious to the source of his fall, he started to scramble back to his feet.

  A fine sword blade atop his shoulder, its sharp edge barely an inch from his neck, froze him in place.

  “Please, sir, I’ve a family,” he begged.

  The Highwayman retracted the sword, grabbed him by the collar and hoisted him to his feet, turning him as he stood to look him in the face. The soldier gasped, eyes widening as he considered the black clothing and the unusual gemstone brooch.

  “Affwin Wi?” he asked.

  The Highwayman paused at hearing that name yet again. “You know Affwin Wi?” he asked.

  “Of her all do,” the terrified soldier replied.

  “Let him go!” came a cry from the side where a pair of soldiers appeared, swords in hand. They advanced slowly toward the Highwayman, their blades raised threateningly.

  “Oh, I’m not thinking that you’re in a place to be telling him what to do,” came an answer to the side of the newcomers, who both looked and blanched at the sight of Jameston Sequin, his bow drawn, arrow leveled.

  “Easy,” the soldier with Bransen instructed his companions. “He’s one o’ Affwin Wi’s boys.”

  The other two certainly did relax at that.

  “Praise the ancient ones,” one muttered while the other gave the sign of the evergreen.

  Bransen and Jameston exchanged glances, both of them noting yet again that curious combination and juxtaposition of the major Honce religions. The ancient ones were Samhaist gods, the evergreen the sign of the Order of Blessed Abelle.

  “If ye’re to sting him, then now’s the time or never’s the time,” one of the newcomers remarked.

  “Him?” asked Bransen.

  “Prince Milwellis,” the other newcomer clarified.

  “Aye, that one came back mad because you and your friends stung him so hard the first time,” said the first. “So stick him again, we beg, and this time stick his own body, if ye’re getting me point.”

  “He’s a dog what’s killed a thousand mothers and more than that o’ children,” said the man standing beside Bransen.

  “To see his blood staining the waters o’ the Mirianic would do our hearts good when we come from Entel, and don’t ye doubt that we’ll be back,” said one of the others.

  “Where is Affwin Wi?” Bransen asked. “Has she returned to the city?”

  The three soldiers exchanged shrugs.

  “She’s still out, I’m thinking,” said the one near Bransen. “Not far from here, last I heard.”

  “Be gone,” Bransen told his prisoner and the others, and they were happy to oblige.

  Bransen fixed his gaze on Jameston, who nodded solemnly and slipped back into the thick grove of pines, with Bransen close behind.

  T

  wo other sets of eyes watched the exchange between the strangers and the soldiers, all the more carefully when they took note of Bransen’s sword.

  Merwal Yahna motioned to Pactset Va, and the two men slid away from the scene, no less silent than the black-clothed stranger carrying a sword he should not possess.

  “Jhesta Tu,” Merwal reported to Affwin Wi soon after. “There is no doubt.”

  “He wore our clothing,” said Pactset Va, a young and strong specimen with small dark eyes and his hair bound in a topknot. “And carried a sword as your own traced with vines.”

  Affwin Wi drew her broken blade and rolled it over in surprisingly delicate hands that had many times driven right through the throat of an opponent. She looked to Merwal Yahna with an expression that was not hopeful. The Jhesta Tu had hunted them in Behr, but they had thought their mercenary stint with Laird Ethelbert would allow them reprieve from their continual trials against Affwin Wi’s former masters. Had they found her again?

  Affwin Wi took some solace in the likelihood that this new mystic would be acting mostly alone; the Jhesta Tu considered the adjudication of the matter of a rogue like Affwin Wi to be a personal challenge for their disciples, whereas the Hou-lei traditions Affwin Wi had come to follow, much more forceful and warlike, called for as many warriors as needed, and then some more, for any given task. In simple terms, Hou-lei did
n’t fight fairly. Three times before the great warrior had helped her fend off Jhesta Tu.

  Since the Jhesta Tu’s companion in the woods earlier was surely not of Behr or Jhesta Tu, Affwin Wi had no reason to believe this time would be different.

  W

  ell, you do look like a southerner,” Jameston quipped as he and Bransen made their way to the southwest, tracing a wide perimeter of Ethelbert dos Entel. “You’ve got the skin for it.”

  Bransen could only shrug. Though Jameston was teasing, his words were true enough. With his brown skin and jet black hair, the black clothing and his exotic sword, the Ethelbert warriors had thought him from Behr. And they understood the significance of his dress. “Affwin Wi,” he mumbled, and he found it hard to breathe. They were close; the Jhesta Tu were close.

  “And what are you planning to do when we find these folk?” Jameston asked as if reading his mind, which was probably not a difficult thing to do at that moment.

  “Learn from them,” he replied. “You cannot understand, but I am trapped in an infirm body.”

  “Are you, then?” the scout asked, his eyebrows rising along with the sides of his mouth as he put on an incredulous grin.

  “Without this,” Bransen explained, pointing to his brooch, “I am a helpless, babbling fool, the one you saw being dragged toward the glacier after the troll fight.”

  “Wasn’t it a knock in the head?”

  “A knock in the head that dislodged the gemstone,” Bransen explained.

  Jameston nodded and smiled. “I wondered on that. I saw you walking—being dragged, actually—and thought you knocked silly beyond any chance of regaining your senses.”

  Bransen lifted an eyebrow. “Thank you for the assistance.”

  “Told you not to fight the damned trolls.”

  Bransen let it go with a laugh, not willing to recount all those earlier questions at this pressing time.

  “You think these strangers we’re hunting will free you of that stone?” Jameston asked.