by Henry Thomas
this is a genuine rare bird book
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Copyright © 2019 by Henry Thomas
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Set in Minion
epub isbn: 9781644280614
Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Thomas, Henry Jackson, author.
Title: The Window and the Mirror: Book One :
Oesteria and the War of Goblinkind / Henry Thomas.
Series: Oesteria and the War of Goblinkind.
Description: First Hardcover Edition | A Genuine Rare Bird Book | New York, NY; Los Angeles, CA: Rare Bird Books, 2019.
Identifiers: ISBN 9781644280102
Subjects: LCSH Goblins—Fiction. | Magic—Fiction. | Good and evil—Fiction. | Imaginary wars and battles—Fiction. | Fantasy fiction. | BISAC FICTION / Fantasy / Dark Fantasy
Classification: LCC PS3620.H62795 W56 2019| DDC 813.6—dc23
For Hazel, Evelyn, and Henry
Contents
Prologue
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Acknowledgments
Prologue
Kingsbridge. Oesteria. Mid-Fall.
It was near dawn when the flaming barrel interrupted his sleep, crashing through the shingled roof of the inn and exploding through a beam that pinned the Innkeeper to his hearth. The man in the cloak levered the cracked beam as the family hurriedly dragged the Innkeeper to safety. The family kept thanking the man as he walked out the door.
“Don’t go to the Upper Ward,” he found himself saying. “As soon as he can move, you should clear out of this town.”
“Where will we go?”
“Anywhere. Just don’t be here when the soldiers come.”
Her eyes registered that she knew what happened when the soldiers came. “How will we get out of the city?”
“The river or the Low Gate is your best chance.”
She smiled at him for a moment, and it almost seemed to him that this were some grand game that they were all playing—that as the dawn broke all the pieces on the board would reset for the next game. But he knew war and he knew that did not happen, and he knew that he may have already lost the precious advantage of surprise in his attempt to escape the besieged town.
“Farewell, lady.” He inclined his head toward her and stepped back out onto the street. He cursed to himself as he looked up at the lightening sky. He was hoping for darkness, at least until he was through the attackers’ picket lines and had cleared the town walls. If it were too risky, he could always try to swim the river. He could take his place among the other corpses that would soon be bobbing along the surface and float out of the town and no one would pay him any mind. Not his first choice, but it would do.
If I get a choice, he thought.
His chances were dwindling rapidly. A gang of youths armed with rods and makeshift weapons came careening around a corner ahead of him, most of them making for the bridges, but a few troublemakers stopped to loot an already-looted storefront and throw stones at him. He rounded a corner and listened to them whoop and holler by him, beating their sticks and stones against their beleaguered town’s walls.
He silently switched back and forth down one small winding alley then the next until he had eluded the mob and edged closer toward the unknown danger of what lay beyond the wall. By the time he reckoned he was within a few hundred strides of the Low Gate, he had been walking undisturbed for a time. In the east was the dusky glow of sunrise through the smoke and glare from fires spreading well into all parts of the Lower Ward. The townsfolk had fled this part of the city, it seemed. The building tops blazed all around him as he picked his way toward the Low Gate of the town wall. There would be the gatehouse, either abandoned or overrun. If he found it abandoned, as he hoped to, he could use it to scout a way out of the enemy’s lines, maybe to the baggage train of the attacker’s army. There he could lose himself in the sea of camp followers that trailed after every army.
The whores and the knaves look out for one another, he thought. They’d never give me over to the Lord Fieldmaster, or whatever his rank was called in whatever bloody army it is out there; except he was neither a whore nor a knave. Faulty logic, he chided himself. He stooped beneath an overhanging beam of a half-collapsed house. In a few days, he would disappear again.
And no one will ever miss me, he mused. If I can make it to the gatehouse, and if it isn’t crawling with combatants; otherwise I might be swimming for it, he thought, grimacing at the chill of the morning. He had half risen beyond the low timber beam when the rumbling of cart wheels and the sharp sounds of an ironshod team clattering over the stones reached his ears. He dropped into a low crouch and backed himself under the shadow of the ramshackle wattle and daub house that had checked his progress.
Whoever it was, he thought, they were coming fast. He sat there and laughed ruefully for a moment. What a morning this had turned out to be. And what a mess, what a bloody mess—and for no good reason. This town was valuable, he would not argue that, but it was a fool move to take it. Whoever did this would have legions of spears on them from the larger garrisons downriver and upriver and be trapped in a matter of days and driven to the coast. Off the cliffs and into the sea or on the point of a spear, death waited for them. He could count offhand three times in recent memory when similar fates had befallen some jumped-up bandit or petty warlord, but never at a town like Kingsbridge. It was small and hard to defend, but it was of strategic value.
He had been traveling quite a bit these last few months and had neither seen sign nor heard word of any large army on the march, and he would have seen or heard something if this force outside the walls was more than a couple hundred strong. Hell, everyone would know. Although there was a tinge of unrest at any given time, threats were dealt with in short order. You could not hide a large force; they ate up the countryside like a plague of insects with their foraging. Then there was the inevitability of crime within the camp, and the crimes committed by the soldiers against the country folk who sought to protect their livestock or their daughters, even their sons, and the ropes and the hanged men and the butchery. The basest of men were sometimes conscripted into soldiery, and their basest passions seemed to blaze brighter as they moved further away from wherever it was they called home. Every dog is free when no master holds his leash, and men were difficult animals to control when they thought they had no one to answer to for their actions. How many soldiers had he hanged on his marche
s? How many deserters and miscreants had met their deaths by his decree? One hundred and nine, he remembered. One hundred and nine men he had ordered killed. So few, considering the size of his forces, yet he remembered every one, at least by number. Hard decisions had to be made and he had made them without remorse. Such was the life of a man of power, who held a command and many lives in the balance. But if that man was who he had been, then he was but a shadow of that man now. He was little more than a fugitive.
He squinted into the smoky haze and thought he saw a flitter of movement, but then it was gone. There would have been grievances and word would have traveled ahead faster than any army could have. There was something afoot here that he could not grasp, he thought, as he huddled in the waning shadows. He craned his neck as the horses grew louder and the large rolling cart came around the corner and into view. It skidded a bit as it made the turn, and the metal rims of the wheels struck sparks on the cobblestones. It was a jailer’s cart, tall and square with iron furniture girding its jostling bulk all the way around in several riveted bands that gave the cart a striped look in the half light. The driver cracked his whip and urged the team on in a shrill voice dripping with fear. The road made a low dip and rose again, climbing past where he was concealed and turning as it spilled its way through the Lower Ward and toward the river. He could now see there was another figure atop the wagon, a furtive-looking youth lying on the roof and pointing a crossbow behind him as the wagon bounced over the stones and began to make its way uphill. The exhausted horses slowed and were straining at the traces as the immense weight of the cart came to bear down on them, and the whip’s crack and the fear in the driver’s voice was making them panicked. The lead horses reared and threw their heads, slinging lather and snot to dapple the stones and buildings around them. The driver cursed as they slowed. The younger man with the crossbow was screaming for the driver to whip the horses up the hill, but it was no use. The team was done and the two men had chosen poorly if they had chosen the jailer’s cart for speed.
It was the perfect spot for an ambush, he realized. And then he saw them coming and heard the men screaming for mercy as six riders made to ride them down. The two men had both leapt down from the stalled cart, the driver drawing his long knife and motioning the crossbowman toward the cluster of unburned buildings, but the younger man was panicked and attempting to cut a horse free from its traces with his belt knife. He shook himself free from the fleeing driver and had managed to get the horse halfway out of the harness when the riders were almost upon him. The youth was waving his hands and screaming at them to stop, but decided at the last moment to retrieve his crossbow, and with a loud plunking sound he shot his quarrel and managed to hit one of his attackers before he was cut down in a red wash and a scream.
The driver was making straight for his hiding place, he realized, but his chances of making it were almost too slim to calculate with any certainty, he thought, as he watched two of the riders peel away and move to cut the driver off.
He cursed himself for sitting there and watching, but he was unarmed and unsure of the events that led to this scene he had witnessed. He reminded himself that he was trying to escape this town first and foremost, and that this business was none of his own. Yet he found his hand closing around a fist-sized stone with a particularly pleasing heftiness to it, and his feet moving him to a clearer position where he might be able to launch an attack. Or at least slow the lead rider for a beat—enough to buy the ill-fated teamster a moment or two to make for cover.
Why do I care to endanger myself recklessly while un-armed? The thought was on his mind even as the stone he’d heaved sailed through the air in its perfect arc, seeming to hang there for a moment before smashing into the side of the lead horse’s head and sending it flailing and screaming as it lost its balance and fell, dumping its rider headlong onto the cobbles with a sickening crack. He had been aiming for the rider, but the result was much better than he had hoped for. The driver had stopped and wheeled at the sound of approaching hooves and had raised his long knife over his head in a guard and taken a shaking stand. He could see that the man’s hosen were soaked in fresh piss and could hear sobbed oaths choking from his mouth in that shrill voice, but craven or not, he was standing his guard and he was going to face down his attackers. For that the man had let the stone fly, he realized.
The driver didn’t have time to notice his good fortune, however, as the second rider was already on him. The steel flashed and sparked in the dim dawn as the driver met the rider’s attack and drove it away, but the force of the charge turned him and spilled him onto the street. Now the rider was turning for another pass, his mount skidding to a halt, rearing and wheeling on its hind quarters in a well executed display of horseman-ship; he had turned and started back toward his quarry before the driver had managed to regain his feet. It was then that the rider seemed to notice that his comrade had been taken out by an unknown third party in the fight, and judging by the way he had handled his mount, the rider was experienced enough to be wary before he started his second charge. His helmeted head took in the collapsed house for a moment.
The man stepped clear of the rubble and hiked his cloak up over his shoulder so that it would be clear of his legs and arms. He knew that he had been spotted by the rider and the fight was on him now. The other four riders had dismounted; two of them seemed to be attempting to force open the gate of the jailer’s cart while the third tended to their wounded comrade, who appeared to have taken a quarrel through the guts. At the moment they were all three looking elsewhere, but he knew only a few blinks would pass before they took notice. The driver cast a furtive look at him.
“Stand away!” the driver warned, brandishing the broad-bladed weapon he held.
The cloaked man’s eyes never left the rider. “I stand with you,” was all that he said. The driver just looked confused and then scared again.
He could see the rider surging forward, and he ran toward the sprawling horse that was attempting to stand itself on the street, his eyes resting for a moment on the fallen rider with his head twisted back at an unnatural angle, his fixed lifeless eyes unblinking. The horse had managed to get up, and stood unsteadily with its legs splayed out, snorting and throwing its head. He put his hand out toward it, but it reared and bolted away before he could grab hold of the bridle. That would have been sweet, he thought, but he wouldn’t place much trust in a mount that had just had its bell rung. You could have simply ridden away though, you great bloody fool. Now it was too late, he knew, but it had been too late from the moment he had picked up the rock, and he knew that too. Nothing to be done for it now, he thought. The sword lay a few yards away where the rider had dropped it and in two running strides he had gathered it up and was sprinting toward the cart. It seemed the most unlikely thing to do, so he simply did it. He could hear the shrill voice of the driver calling to him—calling him back, calling for his help, and cursing. It was hard making decisions when lives hung in the balance, but he had always been able to make them without remorse, and now was just one more of those times. He turned in time to see the driver taking cover in his own former hiding place, and the rider wheeling and slumping in his saddle.
Well, he thought, the craven driver has some skill with the blade it seems. Which was quite good now that he thought about it because the odds of him living out the rest of this horrid morning had greatly increased with the removal of one mounted man intent on laying his skull open. Unfortunately, there were three more just a few strides ahead of him—in varying degrees of alarm at his approach—who most assuredly would try to kill him. He met the first of them at a run and took the man’s blade from him as he dealt him a blow to the base of the skull with the flat of his sword, sending him face-first to the ground.
The rider who had been nursing his comrade managed to stand and half draw his blade when the man struck him hard in the mouth with the pommel and sent him sprawling backward and falling over his gut-shot fell
ow. The last rider near the jailer’s cart had just managed to find his stirrup as the man sent one of his captured swords spinning through the air toward him and his mount, causing the animal to rear and spill its rider onto his back onto the street. The fallen man cursed and rolled to his feet while drawing his sword. The rider leapt out and attempted to take the man by surprise with a quick thrust, but the thrust was turned with a blow that took the rider’s hands, his severed fingers hitting the street just a moment before the sharp sound of his sword clattered through the morning. The upstroke came before either sound, and the hilt of the man’s sword took the rider full in the face, smashing his nose into a bloody mess and leaving him writhing and moaning on the cold stones before he stilled. The man held the sword out in front of him. He wheeled around in a circle and took in what he saw.
He understood the battle was over then, and though he felt as if he had lived it forever, it had all transpired in less than a moment. It was always that way, he knew. The battle could be magic and the moments could be manipulated. “Or so the masters say,” he muttered to himself. The driver came trotting up on his trophy horse, eyeing him warily but not without a little wonder mixed in his eyes. Maybe he’s just embarrassed now that he reeks of piss, he thought, but the driver had another look in his eyes besides that, and that was the dangerous look he had come to know as the dim glimmer of recognition, which, as someone who was a fugitive, he found to be irksome.
“I want to thank you,” spoke the driver. His voice was broken, but the shrillness of it was gone.
“Who is in the locker?” the man said, hoping to curtail the driver’s inevitable question.
“Some soldier’s girl we was bringing here from Torlucks-ford,” the driver wiped his face with a bloodied hand. He looked as though he was going to cry again, then he blurted out, “Some Dawn Tribe girl, and that’s what Sim has to die for?”
His accent was from somewhere north of Kingsbridge; it was Rhaelish perhaps. He saw that the driver could barely stand to look in the direction where the crossbow wielding youth’s body lay sprawled on the stones.
