Dragon's Trail

by Joseph Malik

  “No. What are you doing?” asked Javal, curious.

  Jarrod snapped open his multitool to reveal a pipe reamer, and pried at the bottom of the inside of the trunk. It was snug, but lifted with effort. “Got it,” he said. “False bottom.”

  Underneath was a second batch of letters, bound in twine and still sealed with wax that bore an impression from a signet ring.

  “Captain?” he handed them to Javal.

  Javal untied the twine and opened the top letter. Jarrod looked over his shoulder. “What is it?” He didn’t recognize the language.

  Javal did. “We’re leaving,” he said. “Right now.”

  Loth swung Ulo’s chair around, slammed it against the wall. His lip snarled but his voice was low: “Heed this, you damned fool—”

  Ulo boredly tapped Loth’s hands and motioned for him to let go.

  Loth loosened his grip on Ulo’s lapels and stepped back.

  “I don’t know how you managed this—” Damn, it was hard to stay mad at someone so calm.

  “I managed nothing,” Ulo insisted. “How could I have done anything? I was several days' ride from here.”

  “Yes, you and Mukul, building a war.”

  “You have asked me to.”

  “Listen to me,” Loth stressed. “I don’t care what you’ve built. I don’t care what you’ve done. You are here—you are alive—only at the convenience of Parliament. Take only what you’re offered, and no more.”

  “I will take,” said Ulo, very precisely, “what I want.”

  “You need to be careful with your words,” said Loth.

  “Marghan wanted me dead.”

  “Everyone wants you dead!” Loth stepped back, and slumped against the wall, rubbing his temples. “As you’re about to see.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Marghan has sons. You won’t live a week.”

  Ulo sighed, and then stabbed the air with a finger. A parchment on the desk next to Loth began to smolder and erupted in a small flame.

  He pinched his fingers together, and the fire died with a wisp of smoke. “Let them come.”

  “Oh, they will,” Loth assured him. “They are knights, and strong. No magic will save you.”

  “Not as you know it,” Ulo corrected. “Your leaders are afraid that I have my father’s magic. Remember, he once flayed a man to his bones beneath his armor. He struck down an entire tower with a wave of his hand, and diseased the army raised against him. Kaslix is afraid that I have a power this world hasn’t seen in hundreds of years, which is why I’m here.”

  “Do you?” asked Loth. “Do you have your father’s magic?”

  Ulo nodded. “I have more.”

  Loth sat at a long table in the officers’ chambers of the Hold of Gavria, across from Commander Gar. Alone in the huge room, they still spoke in hushed tones.

  Gar, commander of the House Fletcher Independents of Falconsrealm, had covertly been appointed as a warlord of what Gavria had deemed the New Falconsrealm Forces—the various unaffiliated troops skulking about Falconsrealm and the Shieldlands awaiting Gavria’s orders.

  The wad of letters that Javal and Jarrod carried back to High River contained, among other things, a handful of missives between Commander Gar and various mercenary knights with alarmingly specific instructions to accompany weapons and armor coming in from ships on the Border River and instructions to cache them at sympathetic keeps and manors throughout the Shieldlands. Worse, though, was a note from the Lord High Chancellor of Ulorak to Duke Edwin Hillwhite.

  Gar was having a tough time remaining calm. His signature was on some of them, as well.

  A handful of his hardest troops, under Duke Edwin's direction, had done horrible things to Sir Aidan and Sir Rohn to try to convince them to cough up the missives. Both of the knights of the Stallion had died in tremendous—and, Gar felt, deeply unnecessary—pain, with Edwin standing over them in clinical interest long after Gar had left the room in revulsion time and again. All this because Rohn’s last words were a promise to Aidan that if they didn’t talk, Edwin's death would be worse than theirs; a statement the duke saw as a personal challenge.

  It had been enough, though. Throughout days, neither had said a word except to recite the promise that Edwin would die worse. And now they were dead, and the letters were still missing. And Edwin was getting the way he tended to get, which tended to make men like Gar nervous.

  On top of it, he now sat across a table from General Loth, a sworn enemy of many years’ standing, and the one man he feared above all others, even Edwin. The Hillwhites, he thought, certainly had a gift for bringing people together.

  Gar tossed down a short mug of whiskey in two gulps. “Last I heard, Sir Javal of Ravenhurst was getting involved. Those guys were members of his order.”

  “That’s going to get complicated,” Loth admitted.

  “I’ve got a contingent of hard men on scutage at High River. I doubt Javal even realizes what he’s gotten himself into. Him and his snot-nosed sergeant. My men will take them out.”

  “That ‘snot-nose’ bested me at hand fighting,” Loth reminded, his voice that of a man who’d recently eaten a lime. “And if you think you can take Sir Javal in a fight, you’re a fool.”

  “I didn’t say me,” said Gar. “I’ve got men who can do the job.”

  “I’d like to meet them.”

  “No,” said Gar. “You wouldn’t.”

  VII

  BOURRÉE

  “If you do not have audacity of heart, all else is missing.

  Audacity, such virtue is what this art is all about.”

  — Fiore dei Liberi, c.1409

  Jarrod would never have believed that he’d one day be so exhausted. He staggered up the stairs of High River to his chambers and flopped on his bed, in his armor.

  Javal joined him, closing the door behind, some minutes later.

  “You checked for pitchforks,” the knight assumed.

  Jarrod opened one eye and glared at him.

  “And?” Jarrod needed to know.

  Javal opened his hands, indicating that he was powerless in the situation. “There’s a formal feast tonight. Ambassadors from Gateskeep. We can’t see anyone, until at least tomorrow. Alby, the genius, says affairs of state can wait.”

  Jarrod’s hands went to his aching forehead. “I can’t believe this.”

  “For dinner tonight, leave your swordbelt but bring a dagger.”

  “What, no forks?”

  “Wise-ass. They’ll be looking for us.”

  “Who will?”

  “Everyone. Be forewarned,” he added. “This castle is crawling with southerners. I’m fairly certain a good percentage of them, if not Gavrians, are from Gar’s forces.”

  “Great. What do I wear?”

  “Warrior blacks. It’s a formal feast. But wear boots you can run in. I’d suggest you bathe. Hurry.”

  In a chamber one floor below Jarrod and Sir Javal, Carter Sorenson tried again to lace his knee boots. Even in ten tries, he couldn’t make them look quite right. There was a method to fold the extra leather neatly underneath and anchor it there while crisscrossing the laces symmetrically up the front. And he didn’t remember it.

  His legs ached, and his face was windburned around his beard from a long afternoon against a headwind heavy with hail and rain. He understood now why the route between Gateskeep Palace and High River was called Hellweather Pass.

  He cursed, took a deep breath, and surveyed the puzzle.

  Daorah appeared in the doorway, and watched him tie and untie the garters. She giggled at the sight, and he looked up and flushed.

  “I just can’t do this,” he admitted, adding, “Wow,” as his eyes traveled her. She wore a bright red court dress, cut low and cinched tight, a mink cape covering the scars on her shoulders. Her hair was tamed as best it could be, muzzled under a headdress of black and gold beads.

  “You look—” Carter h
adn’t the words.

  “Don’t say it,” she interrupted. “I think I look perfectly ridiculous.”

  “—ah, harmless,” Carter decided.

  She commended his choice of words with a stern nod. “Clever man. Here,” she bade him give her his foot, and deftly cinched up his boot. Then, from her ankle, she handed him a short infighting dagger in its sheath. “Put that somewhere,” she instructed as he gave her his other boot to tie.

  Carter looked his garb over. This was his introduction to the Highriver nobility; he had dressed in a green silk brocade tunic with an unlaced V-neck and capped sleeves over his black, gold-embroidered lord’s tunic and deerskin trousers. The sleeves of the lord’s tunic he’d rolled up, baring his forearms. His gold ambassador’s sash crossed his chest and tied near his belt. He looked prouder than Hercules, fiercer than Conan, thrice the hellion of Jon Carter. He was the king’s prize tonight, the world’s most awesome warrior.

  After a moment’s thought, he stuck the dagger down the front of his pants, securing the trousers’ drawstring through the belt loop of the scabbard. “Ain’t no man in the world gonna search me there, huh?”

  “You intend to make me fight for you?” she grinned, patting his crotch. “The ladies will be coming for you in droves.”

  Carter offered her his arm. “My lady knight?”

  She accepted it with a coy nod of her chin. “Chancellor.”

  As he loaded up his plate from the various trays floating around the table, Jarrod grumbled about his hopefully-temporary prohibition. He craved a night of raving debauchery.

  However, he’d decided that horny, drunk and loud was not the best thing for a hunted man to be tonight. And with the threat of unknown evildoers looking to make his life complicated, he made a point to not seek out Daelle. He was mildly perturbed that he found this harder than he thought he would.

  Since it was a formal feast he wore a black cape with his rider’s pin. The molded carbon-fiber shoulders of his jacket exaggerated his taper beneath an oversized set of warrior blacks. With a belt cinched tight around his warrior blacks he appeared to sport a physique that would have Mighty Mouse asking him for workout tips.

  Sir Javal seemed to be enjoying himself, laughing and pushing elbows with the noble next to him as the table piled higher and higher with the best food in the land: whole fowl baked with a crust of egg and cracked pepper, sausage and clotted cream pie, ten varieties of root vegetable dishes with twice as many gravies, and tender steaks of venison and lamb. There was coffee—real coffee—from Gavria, a selection of wine from Gateskeep, and cheeses galore.

  Jarrod paced himself, not wanting to become too stuffed to fight his way to the door should need arise. He quietly ordered the wine server to fill his mug with coffee in the kitchens rather than pour him a drink from a passing tankard.

  Jarrod toyed with a bowl of steaming leek soup and stared lovingly at the sausage pie as it passed him. When this is over, I’m gonna get so fat, he promised himself.

  Across the table from him, the noble observed, “Here are the ambassadors.” The feasting hall din rose to ride a sea of applause.

  “Jarrod,” Sir Javal pointed toward the door, where a man who had to duck his head through the doorframe made a stunning appearance with a tall, dark-haired woman in red on his arm.

  Jarrod set his knife down. Carter! “Excuse me, my lord, sire,” he begged them both, straightening the front of his black cotehardie as he rose. “Carter!” he yelled uselessly through the noise, raising his arm to signal.

  Carter and his lady were weaving their way over to the ambassadors’ table, on the right of the vacant seats of prince and princess, and opposite the High Council, where Sir Javal’s foster father, the venerable Lord Nor of Ravenhurst, sat quietly, pulling his beard.

  Jarrod made his polite way to the far end of the room, catching Carter’s arm. “Hey!”

  Carter turned in surprise. “Jarrod!!” They embraced briefly.

  “What the hell are you wearing?” Carter asked quietly.

  “Arming jacket,” said Jarrod, adding in English, “Motocross gear.” He was glad Carter hadn’t embraced him lower; he’d have felt the pistol tucked into his waist beside the carbon-fiber backplate.

  “Expecting trouble?” asked Carter under his breath.

  “You have no idea,” said Jarrod through his teeth. “We gotta talk.”

  Carter was grinning for show. “I’ve got your back. Keep smiling. How have you been?” he asked in the Gateskeep language.

  “Oh, you know. I’m—” wanted by half the Court, and holding military secrets that could get us both crucified. “Ah, training,” Jarrod shrugged. “Order of the Stallion. It’s difficult. You’re the new ambassador to Falconsrealm?” he changed the subject.

  Carter puffed out his chest. “No, I’m here as a Chancellor. This is Knight Commander Daorah Uth Alanas, of the Royal Pegasus Guard.”

  Jarrod accepted her hand and kissed it lightly. “Commander.”

  Daorah replied, “A pleasure, rider.”

  “Please, join us at our table,” Carter invited. Jarrod shot a furtive glance at Javal, who was watching him intently. What is he staring at?

  Could Carter be on Albar’s side? He was, after all, Albar’s guest.

  Jarrod doubted it. But then, at the moment, he and Javal were more or less outlaws, largely depending on whom one talked to.

  So, now, wait. If Albar knows what’s on those missives—which likely prove that he’s in league with Gavria, planning to overthrow the whole country—could he somehow have convinced Gateskeep to hunt us down? Is that why Carter’s smiling so broadly? And Gar has guys here, somewhere, and surely he has friends on the royal council—he’s a commander just like Carter’s babe, here.

  Geez. I’d hate to fight Carter.

  For that matter, I’d hate to fight Carter’s date.

  Jarrod got the go-ahead from Javal, and Carter motioned the three of them toward the table and ordered the steward to bring another plate and seat for Jarrod.

  From the dais, Jarrod could see the entirety of the gala. He sent a server for his plate, which was at a table out on the floor. He saw that Sir Javal had moved to one of the nearer tables, which was full of knights of their order.

  “So, you’re a King’s Rider for the Order of the Stallion?” Daorah spoke around Carter.

  Jarrod nodded in affirmation as his new stein was filled with the potent black beer he’d come to love so much. He whistled for the other page, a boy named Hilg, and passed his stein on to Carter.

  “Quite impressive,” Daorah admitted.

  Beside her, Carter raised Jarrod’s beer. “May you live so long as you want, and never want so long as you live.”

  Hilg arrived with Jarrod’s coffee, and he returned, “May the halls of your home be blessed with the sounds of running children.”

  Jarrod didn’t miss that Daorah’s hand gripped Carter’s at this.

  “So, are you enjoying yourself, yet?” Jarrod asked, half a joke.

  Carter choked, recovered, and answered, “Time of my life. I killed a sheth.”

  “Yeah, I heard,” Jarrod said.

  Daorah added, “He’s far too modest. He killed three sheth. He fought them naked as a babe, and one was a chieftain. The Chancellor broke its neck with his bare hands.”

  “The guy in the armor,” Jarrod said.

  “Yeah, that guy,” said Carter. He put his other hand on hers and they smiled a loving smile at one another. “It was a teamwork kinda thing.”

  “Wow,” Jarrod breathed at the thought, double wow-ing as a blonde woman in white lace and far too many jewels entered the main doors to the feasting hall, accompanied by four guards and, Jarrod’s heart sank at the sight, nearly-Prince Albar. Jarrod’s soul shrank to the size of a cinder. What is it with rat-faced assholes and hot chicks around here?

  The room erupted in applause and cheers as the two (and even as much as he’d have lik
ed to have bashed Albar’s teeth out, Jarrod admitted they were a stately couple) stood on the dais at the head of the hall.

  “Wow,” agreed Carter.

  “I would hit that like the fist of a wrathful god,” Jarrod admitted in English. Carter spit some of his drink onto the table.

  “What did he say?” asked Daorah.

  “I’ll tell you later,” said Carter.

  The ambassadors rose one by one, as Albar and his fiancée, whom Jarrod knew was the Princess Adielle, eldest child of the mighty King of Gateskeep, worked their way down the bench side of the table in greeting.

  Jarrod had never seen Adielle until now. They locked eyes, a moment as awakening and sweat-inspiring as stepping on a rake. Ah, Princess, he sighed wistfully, you are most definitely worth dying for.

  Adielle enthralled Jarrod, for two distinct reasons: she had azure, trusting eyes and a smile like warm cocoa; and two, she was the first princess Jarrod had ever been within arm’s reach of, and so presented with the remotest possibility of saving.

  Okay, may the halls of our home be blessed with the sounds of running children.

  Hell, Jarrod realized. I have to introduce myself.

  He dropped to one knee before her with his chin on his chest and his fist on his heart. Say it loud. Let every man here know who to come kill. “King’s Rider Jarrod Torrealday, Son-Lord of Knightsbridge, Order of the Stallion, Highness.”

  The princess’s voice, all projection and patient warmth, had the slow sweetness of caramel. “Ah! King’s Rider Jarrod! We’re told to expect great things from you! I understand you’re quite a swordsman.”

  Albar’s lip curled into something like a snarl. It wasn’t quite a threat, but a distasteful sort of glare which Jarrod didn’t see but the rest of the room certainly did.

  Jarrod smiled at the floor. Ooh, Skippy, that had to hurt.

  But how he wanted to tattoo those three words, Quite A Swordsman, on his arm, and paint them on his shield in quotation marks with her royal seal below. “Your words, Highness, are too kind,” he insisted.