Blackwood Marauders
Page 1
By K.S. Villoso
Annals of the Bitch Queen
The Wolf of Oren-yaro
The Ikessar Falcon
The Xiaran Mongrel
The Agartes Epilogues
Jaeth’s Eye
Aina’s Breath
Sapphire’s Flight
The Black Dog
Birthplace
Blackwood Marauders
K.S. Villoso
Blackwood
Marauders
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, dialogues, places, events, situations, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is entirely coincidental.
Liam’s Vigil Publishing Co.
633-255 Newport Drive
Port Moody, V3H 5H1
BC, Canada
Copyright © 2017 by K.S. Villoso
Cover art by K.S. Villoso
ISBN: 978-1-7752356-2-0
www.ksvilloso.com
All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of very brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For more information, address Liam’s Vigil Publishing Co.
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Epilogue
Praise for K.S. Villoso
About The Author
Other Books By K.S. Villoso
Annals of the Bitch Queen
The Agartes Epilogues
Birthplace
Items of Interest, Salvaged Over The Years
To Quen, Mandy, and Ash,
“Warmth and light in the trenches, and luck enough to last another day.”
Chapter One
You don’t argue with a name like “Lucky” if you were lucky to be alive. Because all things considering, he shouldn’t have been when his father found him floating in that shipwreck, a tiny thing no older than a few days at most. Lucky to have survived the worst of the storm that tore the rest of his family into pieces, that a forlorn traveller seeking his fortune in Baidh happened to have looked over the railing at the last moment to spot him. Lucky that after the others had turned away, a young man chose to jump into the sea, saved his life, and raised him as his own.
Fate could be kind like that, when others call it fickle. For every child lost to the warlords’ quarrels in Jin-Sayeng to the east or taken as a slave along the coasts of Dageis to the north, there are others found abed at home. Warm sheets, fire at the hearth, a father who never lifted a finger against him, who beat him with kindness and wise counsel instead of a cane. Luck.
But that was old news to Luc. Twenty years had come and gone. He was no longer a babe curled up on his father’s chest, listening to old lullabies of a land he had never seen. Nor was he the same child growing sick of hearing how blessed he was that a man who had nothing to gain would choose to keep him. Tall, long-limbed, with wavy black hair that he kept in a short crop, the only thing that marked him as a foundling these days was the brown skin of his Gorenten blood. He had learned to deflect the looks with a grin—a foolish sort, non-threatening. He was told it wouldn’t be an issue in the bigger cities, but at least in the town of Crossfingers, he stood out like a sore thumb.
He recrossed his arms for what felt like the hundredth time that afternoon and finally caught sight of a figure hobbling down the street. Luc lifted his hand and whistled.
“Sorry I’m late,” Alun huffed, his normally pale face even paler now from the exertion. Sweat poured down his cheeks like rivers.
“Just stop for a moment,” Luc said, slapping Alun’s back. He had intended to make it a light tap, but Alun winced as his thin frame toppled forward. Luc gave a small smile. “You shouldn’t have been running, anyway. What would Da say? And Mother would kill me. I shouldn’t have gone ahead.”
Alun wheezed.
Luc sighed and waited until Alun caught his breath. A man leading a couple of pigs to the market stared at them a little too long as he passed by—long enough that he nearly tripped over the rope in his hands. Luc was used to the stares, but he still had to wonder at it. Although the only thing they shared was the black hair—their father traced his roots to Jin-Sayeng—he and his little brother were a common enough sight in town, familiar to many of the locals. Their grandmother told Luc not to worry about it, but he couldn’t help his own thoughts most of the time. He didn’t like the implications—that he didn’t care enough for his brother, for instance, his father’s trueborn son. Or that he brought shame to his father simply for existing.
Today, though…he wanted to make a difference today. Today, he told himself, I’ll be able to look him in the eye and tell him his sacrifices had paid off. The thought made him grin.
“All right,” Alun said, getting up. “I’m ready if you are.”
He smiled as they began the long walk down the street. The silhouette of the Skellcilan Academy, Crossfingers’ single shining beacon to fame, stood in the distance. Fear gripped Luc for the first time. It had been a week since the examinations. Initially, he had left the hall feeling smug over his chances at passing the prerequisites for military training in the Hafed capital of Tilarthan—he’d even bragged to their grandmother about how he had been expecting harder questions. The sums were laughable. He didn’t have a merchant’s upbringing, but the priest had done well enough by them, and Luc had always been the brightest among the children, at least second only to Alun. Now…
Now, he wasn’t so sure. Panic and doubt crawled over his heart like his grandmother’s needles prickling his fingers whenever he tried to stitch patches on his trousers. Out of nowhere, he laughed.
“You’re nervous,” Alun said.
“I’m not,” Luc replied.
“You are,” Alun persisted, grabbing his wrist to look him in the eye. His younger brother’s face broke into a grin. “Who would’ve thought! Me with the clubfoot, and you, big, strapping Lucky, scared enough to wet your trousers. Wait till Ceri hears about this. She’ll laugh herself silly.”
“There’s been a lot of bed-wetting over these years, Alun. They’ve never been on my side.”
“Remember when you’d tell me there were no monsters hiding under it?”
“There weren’t,” Luc huffed. “You cried yourself to sleep, anyway. You and your damned imagination.”
Alun laughed. “And you’d hug me and tell me it’ll be all right. Hey, Luc,” he said, his face growing sombre for a moment. “It’ll be all right. You’ve got this.”
“Thanks,” Luc grumbled.
“I mean it. You’re smart. Even if Loma sometimes insists you were the dumbest kid she’s ever seen in her life.”
“And now you’re pushing it again.”
“We’ll pass. You’ll get to Tilarthan and be a general in the army in no tim
e.”
“A general?” Luc snorted. “More like front-line fodder for when Dageis invades.”
“Which isn’t going to happen any time soon. And then I’ll be in Skellcilan studying to be a builder. Maybe I’ll have my first house up by the time you come home after basic training.” Alun beamed, his cheek dimples deepening.
“A house in your first year? Da was right—you do get carried away with the dreams.”
“Someone’s got to do the dreaming around here. Don’t tell me you want to join the army just to be fodder.”
“Of course not,” Luc said.
“Then…?”
Luc gave a small smile. “Did you see the look on Da’s face when I told him?”
“He dreamed of joining the army once. Couldn’t knock that grin from his face for days. His precious Lucky, Hafed General!”
Luc wanted to pretend that such things didn’t matter to him, but he could feel the excitement as soon as he heard the words, quivering inside him like a secret waiting to burst. “They pay you for training, you know? We can get the kitchen fixed. Da always wanted an outside stove.”
“Grandma does, anyway. The stench of the fish she likes to fry…” Alun shuddered. “Speaking of food, I’m almost sure they’ll have a feast ready for us when we get back. Oh!” He grimaced. “I wasn’t supposed to tell you. Well, when we get home, act surprised.”
They came around the bend, drawing closer to the academy building and the main entrance, marked by stone steps that rose higher than the barn’s rooftop back home. When Luc had first seen it, it seemed endless, and he had been struck with worry over how Alun would navigate his way up without getting winded.
Alun grunted, as if hearing his thoughts. “The one thing I’m not looking forward to.”
“You’ll be in the dormitories. It won’t be so bad. Here,” Luc said, offering his shoulder. “One step at a time.”
Alun hesitated. “Come on, Luc. I don’t think—”
“We can get there faster this way.” He took Alun’s arm, and after a soft sigh, Alun conceded, gripping his hand with knobby fingers.
It was another common sight in town—the square-shouldered dark boy leading the thin, crippled one. The doubt returned, taking a different sort of form this time—one that revolved around his brother. If he went off to Tilarthan, who would watch out for Alun? You could only beat village boys so much before they start coming home bloody and their parents complained, which meant they never really learned to leave Alun alone. It was true that they were older now and that childhood squabbles ought to be left squarely in the past, but Luc wasn’t so naïve to think that his brother would ever be completely accepted. They used to steal his shoes and string them up on trees, claiming a clubfoot didn’t need them.
It was almost as if thinking about the bastards was enough to make them crawl out of the woodwork. Luc cringed as he heard the piercing whistle from the distance. “The ox and the turtle!” The statement was followed by raucous laughter.
“Ignore them,” Alun said.
Luc looked up. The boys from the village were there—at least five of them. Not boys anymore, he reminded himself, but it was difficult to see them otherwise. He glanced at the tallest one, the freckled, thin-lipped son of the farmer next door, the one with the eternally smug grin and the tendency to look over their heads, as if they existed as nothing more than mere toys he could step on if he wanted to. Luc hated that one the most. Michell, he was called, and just two weeks ago during the harvest festival, he had led his gang on a merry chase to botch Alun’s attempts to spend some time alone with Ceri.
“Ignore them, Lucky,” Alun repeated, breaking his thoughts. The bastards were jeering amongst themselves and Luc had to tear himself away from staring at Michell’s nose—which he had broken at least twice now—to look back at his brother. Alun squeezed his hand. “They’ll get their results and it’ll be over soon enough. We’re too old for this.”
“Tell them that,” Luc murmured, guiding Alun yet another step. “Didn’t Michell write the builder’s test, too? If he passes, you’ll be taking classes with him. You’ll be all alone.”
“He’ll be alone, too. I think the others went for the military test, and Flitch I know is apprenticing to be a scribe. I can handle Michell on my own.”
“You can’t even walk up the damn stairs on your own.”
Alun made a soft sound in the back of his throat. “Maybe I just let you help me to soothe your feelings.”
“Maybe.”
“Let it go, Lucky.”
He gave a sound of assent, though deep inside, he found it hard to. The doubt had now assumed the form of full-fledged worry—deep and gnawing, and nothing which the thought of glory and honour could fix for him. If he went to Tilarthan, who would patch the roof during winter? Da was still young, but he had fallen off the ladder a few years ago and Luc didn’t like the idea of that incident repeating itself. And there was only Grandma and Alun’s mother at home. Ceri, he knew, would help out whenever she could, but she had her hands full at her father’s farm and they had relied on her charity as a family far too often.
No way around it, he thought as they reached the top landing. Michell and his boys had already gone ahead, the double doors swinging as they stampeded through the halls. You’ve got to make this work. A year’s worth of training wages will be enough for Da to hire some help, and then maybe we can get some pigs along with the goats, and a cow or two for milk. If he made it so his father never had to work another day in his life, all the better.
Beside him, Alun laughed.
“What’s so funny?” Luc asked.
“I just never imagined we would get this far,” Alun said, patting Luc’s shoulder. His eyes all but disappeared when he smiled, a trait he inherited from their father. “We’re men, now, Luc. Men!”
“You’re unnaturally excited about this. Well, I suppose you would be, since you only started shaving last year…”
“You’ve never even kissed a girl.”
“Say it a little louder, Alun. I think Michell didn’t hear you.”
“Lucky’s never kiss—”
Luc clouted Alun on the head.
“And you,” Luc hissed, “don’t even have armpit hair.” He nodded down the corridor. “This is your hall, I think. You all right to go ahead by yourself, you runt bastard?”
“You’ve got to stop worrying about me,” Alun grumbled. “You go on.”
Luc hesitated.
“Lucky,” Alun said. “Look at me.”
He did, and had the sudden glimpse of the small, sickly boy Alun had been, of how often he had been at death’s door. Whenever their father sang him lullabies, there had been a touch of desperation in it, a plea to Yohak and any other gods that would listen to spare his boy and let him live with a measure of dignity. If Alun could be brave, he could do this.
Luc took a sharp breath and smiled. “General Luc. It is growing on me,” he said. “I suppose I should get used to it.” He gave his brother a wave as he strode down into the next corridor.
~~~
Luc still remembered the day they had first arrived in Crossfingers seventeen years ago—him, his father, and the golden-haired woman he married, heavily pregnant with Alun. He couldn’t recall how his life had been before that, but he remembered gazing up at the buildings, overwhelmed by everything. There weren’t a lot—Crossfingers was a small enough town—but they had towered over the boy like trees, all solemn and grey and withered. His fears had been squelched by the feel of his father’s hand, rough calluses enveloping his smooth little fist.
“You’re missing the open road, yeah?” Jak had asked, the years he spent out in the west having stamped its mark on his speech. Luc didn’t know it then, but it made his family seem even odder—the thin, dark man, clearly Jinsein but speaking like a native Baidhan, the rotund, fair-skinned woman with eyes as blue as the sky, and the child, even darker than the man, with eyes like steel. “Well, we’ll find our home soon enough. Don’
t you worry.”
Back then, and for all the years of his boyhood after, his father’s voice had the power to soothe his worries away. It changed in the last few years. Between trying to keep Alun from the village boys’ pranks and the chores that kept him busy in the farm, Luc had grown acutely aware of the weariness in his father’s steps, the way he would look at a crop ruined by early frost with lines under his eyes. They didn’t talk much about it—Jak believed in keeping his chin up, in hard work and toil yielding its own rewards, and he responded to Luc’s concerns with a grin, thin fingers clasping the young man’s broader shoulders.
Two months ago, the goats were killed.
A wolf, the guards had figured, though Luc had never heard of a wolf just diving into a pen and leaving body parts uneaten, ground into the mud like paste. Others from the village claimed it was probably a bear—a larger, vicious sort, coming down from the mountains to wreak havoc on the lowlands. Or—and as soon as that or was uttered, they fell silent, turning back to their tin mugs of gin and watered-down ale and refusing to speak any further. The Hafed could be cold, secretive like that, Jak used to say. Best get used to it.
Whatever it was, it killed everything, including the goat kids they were supposed to sell for money that would tide them that whole winter through. No crops, no goats, only five sacks of potatoes left in the pantry, and Grandma’s cough getting worse…suddenly Jak’s “Don’t you worry,” wasn’t enough, and his cheerful smile felt empty. And Luc felt empty, too—helpless, like the ground had opened up from under his feet. The man who used to carry him on his back now stood shorter than him, stooped, lingering on the edge of panic and despair.
Luc went to town that same day to try to get work, but none would take him. It was late fall, almost winter. Crossfingers wasn’t a rich town. And besides, why take the Gorenten when you could hire the neighbour’s girl down the street? After the ninth shop had closed their window to his face, Luc happened to glanced over the long line along the steps of Skellcilan Academy, where youth from many of the villages in southern Hafod were putting their names through in the hopes it would take them out of those dank hellholes and out into the wider world.