by J P Corwyn
"My apologies, Countess…" Robis sounded fearful of some punishment yet to come. The apology was genuine and full of rue. To be punished here in this makeshift court for breach of etiquette just before committing the acts of violence and destruction which were planned for this evening was an absurdity not lost on him - nor anyone else, like as not.
Ylspeth scraped her orator's flint and steel anew with her next words.
“If I might be allowed to continue?” she said with calculated gentility and amusement, mixed with a dash of prissy disapproval. The effect was immediate. Longer bursts of amusement, as much nervous energy as genuine mirth, came sputtering out of the crowd, and even from the kneeling figures before her. It died fairly quickly, but it was a genuine improvement over the half-hearted chuckling they had managed thus far.
Robis opened his mouth and managed an “I…” before Marcza elbowed him and veritably stage-whispered, “Do shut up, Robis.” This exchange elicited yet another burst of laughter. Before it could noticeably die away, however, Ylspeth raised her hands to the crowd to quiet them.
"You stayed," her voice was undramatic. Flat, simple, and true. There was no need to embellish. "The brave knights which we once had as our stalwart protectors here are either dead or have fled in an effort to save themselves from what I believe they affectionately referred to as "Her Excellency's Madness". Have I got that right, Greggor?" She sounded more amused than angered. Her question to Greggor was almost playful.
"Aye Lady, I believe that is how they fashioned it in their shouted farewells, even as they graced us with the image of their yellowbacks fleeing town."
“Well,” said she, in answer to the dark looks and murmurs the crowd was now giving, “The good news is, it’s quite likely we will end up facing them again. Perhaps even tonight, and undoubtedly with reinforcements walking, riding, or galumphing beside them.” This met with grim looks from some, and shocked silence from others, their jaws suddenly hung open. She allowed the silence to play out for three or four seconds before continuing.
“We need skilled men and women to protect us. Moreover, I am the Countess of Thorion. I will have knights to protect my person.” She paused only long enough to hear her voice fade into the lowering night sky. “There are those who were once granted that honor who are now proven yellow. They did not have the will or character to stand in service to their oaths. They lack the true courage of their sworn convictions. They put their own desires above the will of their Countess, their own fortunes held above those of the people they were meant to…were sworn to guard and protect. Yet I see before me worthy men and women who stayed and stood, who see the coming wave of blood and fire and do – not - flinch." Every eye was upon her. Every heart thundered. "There is a locked gate between us and tomorrow. It and those who built it and shut it against us believe that we are trapped. They believe there is no way we can escape their clutches. They believe there is nothing we can do but sit here and wait and mule and die."
She paused for a moment, assessing their reactions. They were pale. None of them seemed to blink, but from the smallest child to the oldest man, they stared with hot, hungry hope.
“But forged in fire and blood, we have a key," She did her best to meet each person's eyes, albeit briefly. This was the true test. "We will not all survive what is to come. Of that, you can be certain. But if we do our part, if each of us does our part; Westsong will live, and we will either open that gate or tear - it - down!”
They did not cheer. This was not a speech meant to evoke jubilant shouts of praise and enthusiasm. They did, however - each and everyone, as far as she could tell - nod and speak in assent with grim determination. That, in fact, had been the desired effect.
What she said next, however, took most of them off guard, as she had expected. It turned the tiny flame of their new courage into a bonfire of not merely hope, but a rather more tangible sense of greed. She hoped it would serve to drive them on, once their courage began to founder.
“Every one of our brave fighting men and women will kneel before me now and rise a Knight of Thorion. As for the rest of you - I hereby name each and every one of you free men and women.”
The crowd was full of shocked 'oh's' where firmly set jaws had but lately been. The Countess's words meant that none of them would ever owe labor on their Lord's land. That they could marry without their Lord's permission, settle unclaimed county land to call their own, plant what they pleased when they pleased on that land, and move around from settlement to settlement throughout the county with impunity. It effectively removed them from the shackles of their station, giving them the same rights and privileges enjoyed by other free-folk, such as small-hold farmers, merchants, and tradesmen.
They were overwhelmed. Some of them looked as if they'd been struck in the head by something heavy. Others embraced one another and wept, or excitedly gibbered about what they would do with their newfound freedom.
Ylspeth was satisfied. It was a beginning. The promise of a new dawn. Now they simply had to survive long enough to truly embrace it.
“Arise Sir Robis, Dame Marcza, Sir Greggor, Sir Valgar…” She spent a far too brief time going to each in turn, separately accepting their oaths of fealty, offering a word of praise, thanks, and encouragement. All the while she attempted to commit each name to memory, though she knew Greggor would undoubtedly have written every one down on one of his blessed lists.
She bade Sir Greggor stand and act as her herald, having him summon the next batch of armsmen before her. It contained Westsong’s own constable, a guardsman from her own retinue, the newly-orphaned heir to the house of Eastshadow, and two men she had never intended to extract or accept oaths of fealty from. In truth, she doubted they had the capacity to understand what such an oath would mean.
Yaru and Arafad had been caravan guards when they first rode into Westsong a week ago. They appeared to be of mixed descent, of the steppe tribes of Eoden and the northern sands of Shesh, and were strange in custom. They were also halting in their imperfect speech and were thus generally mistrusted by nearly everyone in Westsong because of it. She knew this and a good deal more about them, but both of them had impressed the shrewd Greggor as being reliable men who knew little of fear. He had taken pains to urge her to press them into service, as with the others, and so she had agreed, despite her misgivings.
"Kneel," said she.
Haltingly, as if performing an action alien to them, the pair obeyed a moment after the others had knelt in the dust of the manor's yard. She once more spent a far-too-brief moment speaking with each, before moving on to the next in line.
“Arise, Sir Alnik.” He of the warm brown eyes. “Arise, Sir Jaran. Sir Lanwreigh of Eastshadow. Your father’s death cut me to the bone. When we return to the capital for the proper ceremony, you may rest assured that I will restore your ancestral lands and lordship to you.”
Face haunted, eyes shining, Lanwreigh nodded.
Another one barely old enough to shave, let alone be accounted a man. Ylspeth struggled to maintain her countenance of determined encouragement. Hells; he's barely keeping his mingled rage and misery at bay. If he cannot master himself here and now, how will he manage when the fires are lit? Inwardly, she marked the heir to the Lands of Eastshadow as likely among the first to die.
She nodded back with what she hoped was a fortifying smile. As she moved to begin the small ceremony anew with Yaru, the words she'd been waiting for came at last from one of the aged watchmen in the upper windows.
“Excellency! The sun is down!”
✽✽✽
THREE
Kaith stood leaning in the doorframe. The entry to the manor itself came hard on the heels of a short flight of two steps. It wasn't much, but the position gave him the effect of being fully a head taller than the crowd at large. He reached up and rubbed his fingers along the stubble of his chin. The wind gusted up from the south, brushing its dirty fingers through his strawberry blonde hair. It carried with it the horrid, mingled pe
rfume of oil, dung, mud, and rot which Kaith had helped mix and apply, as the Countess had ordered. Following her instructions, he'd used it to coat the buildings flanking the bridge. She'd said it would burn even in a rainstorm, and he doubted it not one jot. While it didn't look like rain tonight, the burning buildings were a necessary part of Greggor's plan. He intended to control the shape and size of the battlefield for as long as possible, creating a hellishly dangerous chokepoint to funnel the enemy to where their fighting men would be waiting.
He watched as Arafad rose, now Sir Arafad. Kaith realized he was wrinkling his nose at the smell, but that it might look more as if he were wrinkling it at the idea of Arafad’s fortune. He forced the muscles of his face to relax, which ultimately caused him to sneeze. No one offered him a blessing, however. Why would they? They were all too excited.
While the serfs hadn’t been elevated to the gentry, the prospects for their future, presuming that they all survived the road between here and Thorionden, were now brighter than they’d ever been before. If they lived, they were all now free men and women. Socially speaking, it was as if each one had been given a fine black charger to carry them from place to place, task to task, and fortune to fortune. Unshackled for the first time in any of their lives, they laughed and cried, planned and postulated as to what their futures now held. For the first time ever, they honestly didn’t know.
Kaith's party hadn't been in Westsong a week yet. They'd ended the two-day journey at sunset three nights ago. When the entourage had arrived for the Countess's annual inspection of her lands and the autumn festival, none of the local peasantry could've imagined such an outcome or such an ill fate for so many.
It was a mad confluence - the kind told around fires and in smokey halls with the wind moaning outside, as if the lady of the Shivering Song herself were just beyond the door, riding within the Coach Devour, looking for wayward souls to feast upon.
Who would tell their tale? They were all living it, now, but who would be left to tell it at its end?
Everyone, if I have anything to say about it, he thought.
No sooner had the thought come to him, fully flowered, than it was banished by the realization that, yes, he had been that arrogant just now. While it wasn't hopeless, the Countess was, he reckoned, quite right. They certainly wouldn't all see tomorrow.
CHAPTER 2:
OF DUST AND IRON
ONE
It had taken them the requisite two days to cover the distance between Thorionden, the County seat, and Westsong. The trip had gone without serious incident, and by the time they’d gotten horses stabled, carts secured (the unloading of all but the necessary goods would wait until the full light of morning) and eaten a light supper, most of them were ready for the luxury of a proper bed.
By mid-afternoon on that first day, people had begun to notice that the place was extremely quiet. It wasn’t until later that somebody finally put their finger on what sound was missing: Birdsong.
That evening, someone spied a crow flying overhead that dropped out of the sky like a stone, with no sense of direction or aim. Westsong’s game warden, Milton Forester, and his son went out to investigate just near sunset.
They never returned.
During breakfast on the second day, Forester's wife appealed to the Countess for help. Neither husband nor son had returned from the previous night's investigation. As the bird had fallen within bowshot of the town's bridge, she was more than a bit concerned but was wary of venturing out so near to the treeline alone.
As guests in the house, the breakfast table was often seen as an impromptu and informal council table. Forester's wife had been loathe to interrupt the meal of the great folk but had been rightly told that Alnik, the constable, was attending her Excellency this morning. She was, in truth, fortunate to have called while so many were there at table. Surely someone would stand to see to the matter and find her missing kin.
Sir Reginald of Wick was among those seated at the table, along with his youngest son, Robis, whom Kaith had been seated across from. At sixteen, Robis may not have fully matured physically, but constant training and an insatiable desire to keep up with both his father and his elder brother had driven him farther down that path than most boys his age, and some men with half-again his years. As his voice hadn’t broken entirely yet, he sounded soft and tentative most of the time, unless he spoke with true excitement. Then he sounded overeager, or worse still, sickly.
The Countess turned her head to look across the table at the assembled knights, squires, and men-at-arms. Most of them, Kaith noted, paid focused attention to their meals: quail eggs, pale breads, fruit, bacon, and a soft, creamy cheese.
The Countess did not actually respond to the peasant woman’s concerns with any sort of visual or verbal acknowledgment, but Kaith was certain he understood his mistress’s mind.
When, a moment later, the Countess drew the constable’s brown-eyed attention by lifting the first finger of her left hand from the tabletop, effectively stopping him before he could rise to attend the Forester woman, Kaith knew he’d been right.
He'd met Robis's eyes across the table, and was about to suggest the youth and, perhaps, Lamwreigh go investigate together when he'd felt a foot squeeze down on the toes of his left boot. Based on the angle, the press hadn't come from Robis, but from his father, seated in front of Kaith and to the left. When Robis gave no sign he'd felt anything, Sir Reginald caught Kaith's eye, staring a silent question toward him and offered a brief but sheepish smile. A heartbeat later and Robis's face showed surprise and mild pain. He'd cleared his throat and spoken to the Countess in as clear a voice as he could muster.
“I,” he began, “I will go investigate this, your Excellency, by your leave.”
“What an excellent idea!” Sir Reginald said. He had flashed a look of surprise to his son, then turned to the Countess. “Excellency, with your permission, I will ride out with my son. It will give me an opportunity to study him in the field, as it were.”
The Countess had inclined her head, given a gesture of acquiescence, and returned to her quail eggs and Alnik’s halting report on the state of affairs here without a word.
Forester’s wife was nearly apoplectic with relief and shocked gratitude. Rather than the constable, she had somehow managed a knight and his squire to take on the task of looking for her man and boy. She did her best not to make a fool of herself as she offered a torrent of thanks and exited the manor.
✽✽✽
TWO
Thirty minutes later found Kaith stood on the balcony of the guardhouse to the east of the bridge. Valgar was with him. This being their first guard shift here at Westsong, and one of Kaith's first half-dozen in total, Valgar was showing Kaith precisely what it was he wanted the younger man to do.
“One of us will be here at all times," Valgar said. "You want to make certain we have short and longbow at the ready, with a quiver's worth of ammunition for each."
Kaith nodded his understanding, then checked the sightlines.
“You’ll not need to worry too much about anything coming from the east or west, though you should keep an ear out if you take my meaning."
Kaith had just been about to ask. The balcony offered a fantastic view of the bridge and road south, the only way to get into or out of the village, but the view to the east was utterly blocked by the upper floor to which the balcony was attached. There was no place along the parapet that allowed any sort of vantage in that direction. The general store across the road was also two stories tall, blocking much of the westward view. After a moment’s contemplation, understanding broke upon Kaith’s face, causing Valgar to smile.
“From here we command the road and the bridge..." Kaith said. He paused only for a moment, then pressed on with a nod. "The moat prevents anyone from ambling into Westsong from the east or west, and both the general store across the road," he knocked on the wall behind him with the back of his left hand. "And this second story provides nearly flawless cover from any
approaching force, or if it came to that, assaulting archer fire from either direction."
Valgar’s slightly oversized mouth stretched into a smile of pleasure that was almost comical. “Absolutely right.” He said. “I’m sure I don’t have to tell you why both sets of archery gear are needed. You know the weapons better than I do.”
“How to build and repair them, maybe. You're certainly better at their use than I am," Kaith said. Without pausing to give Valgar an opportunity to argue, Kaith pressed on. "The short bow has nowhere near the range of the long but is perfect if you don't mean to shoot in an arc. All the power in a straight line."
Valgar nodded, his face still split in that slightly oversized but unmistakably sunny grin.
“The longbow obviously provides greater range, but the shots have to arc in order to best make use of that. We can hit them easily enough if there’s a them to hit, just this side of the treeline if that's too far for the short bow." Kaith paused, considering, then mouthed an 'ah' before concluding, “But it can also be used for a comparatively silent signal to somebody in the village.” He was picturing the need to signal a guard back at the manor house without waking the entire town - something coming on the road perhaps, worth alerting all on-duty guards about, but not waking the whole town over.
Valgar's smile evaporated to be replaced by a look of abject vacuity.
“What? No!” Valgar said. “Longbow’s there in case you spot a deer while on duty. If it’s out of short bow range, you can fell the thing with a shot from longbow.”
Valgar said the word longbow as if it was someone’s name, dropping the word the, which would normally have heralded it. Kaith doubted if the man were even aware that he was doing it. It was a holdover from his first fifteen years of life. He'd grown up in Birchorg a few days ride from the capital. Such rural upbringing meant Valgar hadn't ever altogether lost the peasant patois he'd carried out of his first home. Greggor had outright purchased him from that village's bailiff, but Kaith had never gotten the story in its entirety. Valgar hadn't ever been terribly forthcoming about his past. As easy-going as the man was in all other matters; that had always struck Kaith as strange.
