Treason Keep

by Jennifer Fallon

  “Toss the nobility? If Hythria adopted that policy, you’d be out of a job.”

  Tarja wondered if he should warn Garet about the inadvisability of getting into a discussion about the merits of various systems of government with this man.

  “Worse, Commandant, I’d be the first in line to be beheaded. My uncle is the High Prince of Hythria. I’m his heir, unfortunately.”

  “Unfortunately?” Tarja asked.

  “Taking the Hythrun throne isn’t going to be easy, and keeping it will be even harder. The other Warlords think I’m a bit…precocious. There may come a time when I call on Medalon for assistance. Assuming the Kariens and their Fardohnyan allies don’t come pouring over your border to wipe us all out.”

  Tarja had wondered what the price of Damin’s assistance would be. “I’m sure Medalon will remember your aid when the time comes.”

  “You’re very free with your promises, Tarja,” Garet remarked. “You’re not the Lord Defender yet.”

  Tarja glanced at the commandant, but didn’t answer him.

  “Well, for the time being, I think we’re safe enough,” Damin said. “Jasnoff can order his knights to the border with little ceremony, but we’ve time yet before the bulk of his army arrives. Although if they don’t get here soon, winter will be on us.”

  “That would be too much to hope for,” Tarja remarked. “The Kariens must know how hard a winter campaign will be.”

  “Lord Setenton is Jasnoff’s Commander-in-Chief,” Damin agreed. “He’s too experienced to try campaigning in the snow.”

  “You need to train your men to deal with armoured knights, too,” Garet added. “A man encased in armour can be hard to kill, and neither the Defenders nor the Hythrun have much experience fighting them.”

  “But he’s easy enough to disable. Just knock him of his horse and jump up and down on him for a while. That’ll knock the fight out him.”

  Tarja smiled. “I’ll let you inform the troops of that sage piece of tactical advice.”

  Damin shrugged. “It sounds silly, but it works. Have you any idea how hard it is to get up wearing a suit of armour? Hell, they can’t even mount their horses without a block and tackle rig. Knock them on their backs and thrust your sword through the eye slit. Works like a treat. But the knights aren’t our problem. The true problem lies with Hablet and the Fardohnyans if he puts his artillery at Jasnoff’s disposal.”

  “Cannon, you mean?”

  Damin nodded. “I’ve never seen one myself, but I’ve spoken to a few who have. The only thing in our favour is that Hablet guards the secret of what makes them work as if it’s more precious to him than all his children put together. I suspect he’ll find it a lot easier to give away his daughter than his precious cannon.”

  “I’d heard rumours of an alliance,” Garet added, taking the waterskin from Tarja. “But nothing substantial. I’ve also heard rumours that the reason Hablet guards the secret so closely is because his cannon are notoriously unreliable, inaccurate, and just as likely to kill the cannoneers as they are the enemy. Hablet’s weapon is his enemies’ fear of the cannon, not the cannon themselves.”

  “Even if that’s true, I don’t want to face cannon fire with swords and arrows.”

  “Even without cannon, if there is an alliance, Fardohnya could attack from the south,” Garet pointed out. “We can’t afford to split our forces.”

  He said our forces, not your forces. Tarja wondered if the slip was accidental, or if it meant Garet had finally chosen which side he was on.

  “We’ll need time,” Tarja agreed with a frown. “Until we gain control of the Citadel, the Defenders we can put in the field are barely half the number we need.”

  Damin nodded in agreement. “I can spare another three centuries of Raiders, but any more than that and Krakandar Province will begin to look a little bit too inviting to my neighbours. I can always send to Elasapine, if worst comes to worst. Narvell would send me five centuries of his Raiders if I asked him nicely. I imagine that many Hythrun troops garrisoned in Bordertown would make Hablet think twice about sailing up the Glass River.”

  “Narvell?” Tarja asked.

  “Narvell Hawksword, the Warlord of Elasapine,” Damin explained. “He’s my half-brother. My mother’s second husband was his father.”

  “How many husbands has your mother had?” Tarja asked.

  “Five, the last time I counted,” Garet remarked, obviously surprising Damin with his knowledge. He looked at the Warlord and shrugged. “I run the Defender Intelligence Corps, my Lord. I’m supposed to know these things.”

  “Then you should know she might have married again, by now. She had her eye on a very rich Greenharbour gem merchant when I saw her last.”

  Tarja shook his head in amazement. It was rare for Sisters of the Blade to marry or have more than one or two children. Only the farmers of Medalon, for whom children were a convenient source of cheap labour, tended towards large families.

  “But even with a thousand Hythrun raiders, we still need the Defenders in full force,” Tarja pointed out with a frown, getting back to the problem at hand. “At the moment, we’ve got your seven hundred Raiders and about six thousand Defenders here, and that’s less than half.”

  “How many longbowmen do you have?”

  “Five hundred. The rest are still at the Citadel. Why?”

  “I’ve been watching them train. I doubt if I could draw one of those damned bows.”

  “We train them from boyhood,” Tarja told him. “They’re selected from the cadets and they grow up with their bows. As they get stronger, the bows get longer, until they can draw a full-sized weapon. They’re very good, I’ll grant you, but they’re irreplaceable. You can’t just hand the bow along to the next man in line when a longbowman falls. And even with the others still at the Citadel, they number less than fifteen hundred.”

  “We can use them to our advantage. Assuming Hablet doesn’t arm the Kariens with cannon, your longbows out-range any weapon they can bring to bear against you. Kariens consider the bow and arrow a peasant weapon. They have archers, but nothing of the calibre of your longbows. If we concentrate on protecting them, you could cut down any advance like a farmer mowing hay with a scythe.”

  “And your mounted archers?” Garet asked.

  “We’re hit-and-run specialists,” Damin shrugged. “Any man of mine can fire three arrows into a target the size of an apple at a gallop in under a minute, but our bows are short-range weapons. There are too many Kariens for that sort of tactic.”

  “What about the rebels?”

  Tarja shrugged. “Another thousand at the most. Most of them have never held a weapon. Jasnoff can field an army of over a hundred thousand with the Church supporting him. With the Fardohnyans as allies…I’m not sure I can count that high. I suppose they could pray for us.”

  “Never underestimate the power of prayer,” Damin warned. “If Zegarnald, the God of War, takes our side, we should do well. And we’ve yet to hear from the Harshini.”

  Tarja didn’t argue the point. He had no faith in Damin’s gods.

  “I thought the Harshini were incapable of killing?” Garet asked

  “There’s plenty of ways to frustrate the enemy without killing him.”

  “I suppose,” Tarja agreed, a little doubtfully. “Maybe they could bring their demons and scare the Kariens to death.”

  “If the Kariens bring their priests with them, we will need the protection of the Harshini and their magic,” Damin warned. “When Lord Brakandaran returns, we will know more.”

  Tarja frowned at the mention of Brak. “He’s been gone more than five months. What makes you think he’s planning to return at all?”

  “He’ll be back,” Damin assured him.

  “I wish I shared your confidence.”

  The fact was he wanted to see the Harshini rebel very badly—and not simply because he needed to know what help the Harshini could offer in the coming battle. Brak would know if R’shiel lived.
Months had passed since she had vanished, quite literally, but he had seen enough wounds in his time to know that hers was fatal. Yet the Harshini were magical creatures and R’shiel was half-Harshini. A small spark of hope still burned in him that she had somehow survived Joyhinia’s sword thrust, but as the days, weeks and then months passed with no word from her, his hope was fading.

  “Is something wrong?”

  Tarja shook his head. “I was just thinking of someone, that’s all.”

  “The demon child.”

  “I wasn’t thinking of her in those terms,” Tarja said wryly. “But I was thinking of R’shiel, yes.”

  “Her fate is in the hands of the gods, my friend,” Damin reminded him. “There is nothing you can do about her. On the other hand, there is something we can do about those damned knights.”

  “What did you have in mind?” Garet asked, a little suspiciously.

  “They’re looking a bit too comfortable for my liking. I think we should wake them up.”

  “What does that mean exactly?”

  Damin laughed. “It means putting aside your damnable Defender’s honour for a time and learning to be sneaky.” He climbed to his feet and dusted off his trousers. “We need to do something about their supply lines, for one thing. What about it, Commandant? Are you with us?”

  Tarja glanced at Garet curiously, knowing there was much more to Damin’s simple question than whether or not he wanted to attack the Karien camp. The older man studied them both in silence for a moment.

  “I’ll not be a party to anything thing that reeks of stupidity,” he warned, climbing to his feet and handing the looking glass back to Damin. “That also includes your ludicrous scheme for replacing Joyhinia, Tarja. Come up with something workable, and I’ll back you to the hilt. But what you’re planning is insane. And I plan to die in my bed a very old man.”

  “That’s the most uncommitted excuse for an agreement I’ve ever heard.”

  “Be satisfied with it. It’s the best you’re likely to get until you show me something devised by brains, not wishful thinking.”

  Damin glanced at the two of them and shook his head. “Let’s just push him off the cliff and be done with it, Tarja,” he suggested.

  “I hear you have a reputation as a cunning warrior, Lord Wolfblade. I can’t for the life of me imagine how you came about it.” He pushed past Damin on the ledge and began to climb down to the narrow trail where their horses were tethered below.

  “If this man was not your friend, Tarja…” Damin began.

  “He’s just testing you. We need him.”

  “No, you need him. I’d just as soon see him dead. And I warn you, every moment I spend in his company, the idea becomes more attractive.”

  Damin slammed the delicate looking glass back into its leather case and began to follow the path that Garet had taken.

  Tarja shook his head. The last thing they needed was Damin Wolfblade threatening to kill Garet Warner. With Garet’s assistance, it would be far easier to fool the Quorum into believing all was well with the First Sister and his help was essential if they were to eventually replace her. And if the Kariens really had allied with Fardohnya, their only hope of preventing a southern incursion was Damin’s Hythrun Raiders.

  Not for the first time since Joyhinia had won the First Sister’s mantle, Tarja wished he had let her hang him. He would never have become involved in the rebellion. He would never have led the raid to rescue R’shiel that resulted in the death of the Karien Envoy, and they would not be facing an invasion. But what hurt most, when he let himself think on it, was R’shiel. If not for him, she would be alive and probably in blissful ignorance of what she really was.

  But then again, maybe nothing would be different, even if he had died. The Harshini had known all along what R’shiel was and had sent Brak to find her. Garet and he had identified the Karien threat long before any of these other events took shape. Whichever way he looked at it, he was caught in circumstances that seemed to be constantly spiralling out of control. He remembered thinking, more than a year ago, when he was riding toward capture in Testra at the hands of Lord Draco, the man who turned out to be his father, that life was no longer certain.

  He was starting to wryly think of those times as the good old days.

  The ride back to the Defender’s camp was tense. Damin was angry and Garet silent. Tarja wished he could think of something to say that would bring some sanity to the situation. He had always liked and respected Garet Warner, yet he had found a rare friendship with Damin Wolfblade—ironically, a man he had spent four years on the southern border trying to kill.

  It was late afternoon when Treason Keep appeared on the horizon. Although the engineers had done their best, it was unlikely the Keep would ever be useful as anything but a temporary headquarters. Tarja wondered what had happened to Bereth and her orphans. There was no sign of them at the Keep. Had they survived? Or had Bereth found a safer place for her brood? Tarja wished he had the time to discover their fate.

  The tents of their army covered a vast area surrounding the old ruin. The Hythrun were camped on the western side of the plain, and as they neared the sea of tents, Damin reined in his mount and studied the camp thoughtfully. Tarja stopped beside him. Garet rode on, not interested in the view.

  The Defender’s tents were laid out in precise lines, each housing four men, with spears and pikes stacked in neat piles between them. Their camp was as neat and orderly as Defender discipline demanded. The much smaller Hythrun camp looked like a motley collection of warriors out on a hunting expedition. No two tents were alike, and they had been erected anywhere the Raiders felt like making camp. A pall of smoke hung over the camp from the cook fires and the huge open-air forge built against the southern wall of the Keep. Even from this distance, Tarja could faintly hear the rhythmic ringing of the smiths’ hammers as they pounded the metal into shape. The need for additional swords, pikes and arrowheads was urgent. Jenga had decided that making them on site was preferable to shipping them from the Citadel, although the lack of fuel for the hungry fires almost outweighed the advantages of being able to make and repair their weapons at the front.

  North of the camp lay the training grounds, marked by a vast expanse of scuffed ground and lines of tall hay bales, to which rough outlines of man-shapes had been secured to give the trainees something to aim at. Mounted, red-coated sentries patrolled the camp perimeter in pairs. The Hythrun sentries were out of sight, hidden by the long grass.

  To the south was the sprawling tent city that housed the rebels, the camp followers and anyone else in Medalon who thought there was a quick fortune to be made in a war. Jenga had given up trying to make them leave.

  “The Fardohnyans have me worried,” Damin admitted eventually, once Garet was out of their hearing. “Karien knights are fools. They expect everyone to play by the same rules as they do, and are therefore predictable.”

  “And the Fardohnyans?” Tarja had never fought them. In his experience they preferred trade to conflict. But an enemy that caused the Hythrun Warlord concern was an enemy to fear.

  “Hablet keeps a huge standing army. His troops are well trained and they think on the run,” Damin warned. “They won’t play by the same rules as the Kariens. It’s one of the reasons Hythria has avoided an open conflict with Fardohnya. And then there’s Hablet’s cannon…”

  “What do you suggest?”

  Damin shrugged. “I think we need help.”

  “Point me at it,” Tarja said wearily.

  Damin glanced at him and then laughed. “I think it’s time I spoke to my god. I am, after all, His most worthy subject. Zegarnald owes me a favour or two.”

  “I thought you said you didn’t know how to contact the gods?”

  “I believe I said I didn’t know how to contact the God of Thieves. The God of War is a different matter entirely. He speaks to me often.”

  “What does he say?” Tarja asked curiously.

  “Ah, now that is between me a
nd my god. You return to the Keep and try to keep things under control. I will see what I can do about some divine assistance.”

  “Damin!” Tarja called uselessly, as the Warlord spurred his magnificent stallion forward. Damin ignored him and galloped toward the camp.

  Tarja watched him go, wondering about the wisdom of allying himself with someone who thought the fickle Primal Gods could help them against the might of the Karien army, allied with the almost uncountable Fardohnyans.

  Garet was right, he thought heavily as he spurred Shadow on towards the camp. He was trying to win a war with wishful thinking.

  CHAPTER 11

  The Isle of Slarn was a miserable, bitter place; shrouded in mist and surrounded by a treacherous reef that made even the most seasoned sailor nervous. Adrina watched the island growing larger through the mist, shivering in the chilly spray that splashed over the bow in the grey, overcast morning.

  “It’s a great honour,” Cratyn told her solemnly, “to be allowed to visit Slarn.”

  “You think so?” she asked, gripping the rail tightly. “I’ll try to remember that as I’m being dashed against the reef, just before I drown.”

  Cratyn looked at her unsmilingly. He had solemn eyes in a not-unpleasant face, but he had no sense of humour that Adrina had been able to detect thus far.

  “The Overlord will protect us and see us safe into the harbour.”

  “That makes me feel so much better.”

  “I am pleased to see that you are beginning to appreciate the power of the Overlord,” he noted, as if her comment had been a profession of faith rather than a snide dig at his boring old god. “When we reach Slarn, the priests will appoint a Confessor to aid your conversion to the true faith.”

  “You’re assuming I plan to convert, then?” she asked, bracing herself against the violent lurching of the hideously painted ship. The captain was screaming orders to his crew, fighting to be heard over the crashing waves and the creaking boat.

  Cratyn looked astonished. “As the wife of the Crown Prince, you must set an example of faith and virtue for all the women of Karien.”