The Swampling King (The Windwalker Legacy Book 1)

by Ben S. Dobson

  “It’s something to see, isn’t it?” Castar said, clapping Josen on the shoulder with one hand and gesturing wide across the pale lights of the Swamp. “Most never do. You’ll have quite a story to tell.” He and his retinue of a dozen guards and several squires had remained with Josen—as they did every day—while Rudol led the rest of the Greenwall knights ahead to root out hidden swamplings.

  Josen didn’t let himself flinch at the man’s touch, but it was a near thing. “I don’t see myself telling it often,” he said. “It’s going to end with death, and that always makes poor conversation.”

  “Far more of their deaths than ours,” Castar said. “And you’ll be safe under my protection.”

  “I can’t tell you what a comfort that is.” Josen didn’t try very hard to sound sincere. If anything, Castar’s protection made him more nervous. Shona’s warning was never far from his thoughts, and the knights of the duke’s personal guard were young, easily manipulated men from wealthy families. They’ll do whatever he tells them to. God Above, I wish he had gone ahead and Rudol had stayed. Which was saying something, considering Josen’s relationship with his brother of late.

  “It should be,” said Castar, and there might have been a hint of annoyance in his voice. “You have nothing to fear. The swamplings are outnumbered and poorly armed. Faced with a greater force that they can’t ambush, they’ll run and hide every time—and a fleeing man is a vulnerable one. We’ll take the ones caught in our net without many losses.”

  “How lovely for us,” Josen said. But Castar’s assurances only made him think of the swampling girl. She’s probably fighting down here somewhere. Dying down here somewhere. Unconsciously, he moved to push his fingers through his hair; they found the cold steel of his helmet instead. He pulled it off, then ran his hand through the damp curls plastered to his forehead.

  The Swamp was a quiet place, and the sounds of battle carried a long way, rising and falling in the distance. All four Stormhalls of the inner duchy diamond—Skysreach, Goldstone, Greenwall, and the Plateaus—had sent knights at Castar’s order, methodically moving inward from all directions to trap the swamplings between them. That morning, after two days of uneventful marching and two more of small skirmishes at most, the real fighting had begun. The bulk of the Storm Knight forces still hadn’t engaged, only the vanguard, but the circle was closing rapidly. Soon the swamplings would have nowhere to run.

  As the knights flushed bands of swamplings from hiding, the noises grew more and more frequent: the metallic clatter of armor, the clash of weapons meeting, the deep rumble of horns sounding long and short bursts in some sequence Josen didn’t recognize. Sometimes he heard voices between the louder sounds, crying out in pain, shouting in triumph. But never from the swamplings. He’d overheard the knights cursing the enemy’s silence—they said that the swamplings never spoke, never made a sound, not even as they died. Josen knew differently; he had heard the girl talk with his own ears. But still, when he imagined the swamplings, they were silent. Bodies piled high throughout the Swamp, silent in death as they had been in life. And in Josen’s mind, every one had the same face. Her face.

  It’s for the best. I need to trust Eian on this. She’d kill me if she had the chance. But still, every time he heard the fighting start again, he looked toward the sound and wondered if it was her being slaughtered.

  Two short horn blasts came from the direction Rudol had gone, closer than the rest of the noise. “The path is clear, Duke Castar.” That was Cer Ryon Ormond, whose father was among the richest merchant counts in the Plateaus—and almost certainly tied up in Castar’s purse strings. He was already reaching for the horn at his waist. “Shall I signal Prince Rudol to advance?”

  Castar rubbed his knuckles thoughtfully against his beard, then shook his head. “No, tell him to wait. It’s time you had a better look at our work, Prince Josen.”

  That was precisely the last thing Josen wanted. “I was under the impression that I’d be kept out of danger. The rumor is that I’m quite a delicate treasure.” His voice sounded calmer than he felt, and he raised an eyebrow, attempting a wry expression. “You wouldn’t put the heir to the throne in danger, Duke Castar, would you?” He hated to hide behind his inheritance, but it was better than marching into battle against the swamplings.

  “You will be perfectly safe.” Castar’s voice was cool and certain in a way that would have been reassuring, if Josen had trusted him at all to begin with. “We’ll let Rudol and the others take the lead, but a closer look might be enlightening for you. Come.” He gestured for Ormond to sound the horn, and the young man blew a signal—two short bursts, one long.

  “Wait,” Josen said. “This wasn’t the plan. My father won’t like it.” A weak threat—if it was the duke’s word against his, Josen knew who the king would believe.

  “I think King Gerod will understand.” Castar drew his saber and started along the path of stirred mud and hacked vines that Rudol and his knights had left behind.

  “I never agreed to this!” Josen shouted at Castar’s back. But the duke just marched on, paying no mind to his protests. The guards and squires followed with their lanterns. Josen fumbled his helmet back on and hurried after. Much as he didn’t want to go, being left in the dark would be far worse.

  They trudged through the Swamp for some part of an hour—it was hard to judge time beneath the mist—along the path Rudol and his men had left behind. Even after four days, Josen found it difficult to accept how different the untamed marshes were from anything he’d ever known. He’d expected thick undergrowth, like the forests of the Wolfshead, but the floor of the Swamp was almost entirely barren. The only plants he saw were the vines that hung from the canopy; they sprouted between the roots of the boggrove trees, and wrapped up trunks in search of the sun. The trees themselves bore only sparse, vestigial branches until they spread into mushroom-tops of foliage a hundred feet or more above his head, broad leaves splayed wide to catch what little light they could. Only the faintly glowing toadstools growing amid rotten piles of boggrove leaves and the fat shelves of fungus jutting from rock faces seemed not to care whether they ever knew daylight. And the witchmoss. Throughout the darkness beyond the squire’s lanterns, patches of telltale green light sprouted indiscriminately.

  But the lack of growth didn’t mean ease of passage. The trail skirted around stinking pools of stagnant water, dodged gas-vents that spouted poison fumes without warning, and passed through mud-flats that thankfully reached only shin-deep instead of waist-deep. Stone ridges and fallen trees forced detours time and time again, and in places the vines hung low enough that the knights had to hack them aside. Along the sides of one small ravine, Josen saw the remnants of a giant web, still glowing slightly—the leavings of one of the Swamp’s wolf-sized ghostspiders. The sight made the hair prickle on the back of his neck, and he fruitlessly searched both sides of the ravine for the creature that had once called it home. Later on, in the same ravine, they passed through the middle of a massive fungus of some kind that looked to have blocked the way until Rudol and his men had chopped a path right through.

  As he followed in their footsteps, struggling to lift his mud-laden boots, Josen felt a grudging respect for the knights who had gone before. It was bad enough with the way cleared and marked—he couldn’t imagine how tiresome it must have been to make the path to begin with. I should tell Rudol that, it occurred to him. He would probably appreciate the praise. But when he finally caught a glimpse of light ahead and saw his brother’s big silhouette towering over the other knights, the impulse fled as quickly as it had come. He didn’t want to give Rudol another opportunity to feel superior.

  Rudol waited at the edge of a shallow marsh with a hundred knights arrayed in formation behind him, dark man-shaped holes in the surrounding lantern-light. Josen couldn’t make out anything beyond their shapes, but Rudol’s impatience was clear even so. For all the animosity between them, Josen still knew his brother better than most—he could see even in
silhouette that Rudol’s fists were clenched, and it wasn’t hard to read the message in that slight shifting of weight from foot to foot. He wants to do what he came here to do, and instead he’s stuck waiting for me.

  As they approached, Rudol came forward to meet Castar, followed by a lantern-bearing squire. In his steel helm he looked more imposing than ever, dark eyes glaring on either side of a flared noseguard like the beak of an eagle. “What are you doing?” he asked in a low voice, tilting his head toward Josen. “I thought he was supposed to be kept from the fighting.”

  “That’s what I said,” Josen muttered. Both men ignored him.

  “This purge is my responsibility,” said Castar. “It isn’t that I don’t trust you, Rudol—the men remain yours to command. But I would hardly be doing my duty if I did not observe the front with my own eyes, at least for a time. And it will be valuable for Prince Josen to actually see something. His presence here will carry little weight if he has nothing to say when asked about it afterward.”

  “I could always lie. It isn’t that difficult.” Josen waved a hand between the other two men, demanding their attention. “Do I have any choice in this? Because I would very much like to return home alive.”

  “You can trust your brother to keep you safe,” said Castar. “If there are better men in the Knights of the Storm, I haven’t met them. Rudol, what say you?”

  Rudol grunted his assent with a brusque nod, then shifted his gaze to Josen. “I won’t let any swamplings near you. Just stay out of the way. My men have a job to do, and we’ve wasted enough—”

  A sounding horn interrupted Rudol, four blasts of varying lengths from very close by. Josen’s breath stopped in his throat as the knights drew their weapons. “What was that?”

  No one answered; their attention was elsewhere. Castar locked eyes with Rudol, and gave a quick nod. “Go. We will follow behind.”

  Rudol’s hand was on his saber, and he started to turn, then stopped, his eyes flickering back to Castar. “Maybe you should—”

  “I told you, Rudol, you have the command. You are ready for this. But I will be here if you need me.”

  For just an instant, it didn’t look like Rudol would move, and then his hands clenched into fists and he spun on his heel, drawing his sword in the same motion. “With me,” he said to the squire at his side, and then sprinted back toward his men with the lad following close behind.

  Under normal circumstances, Josen would have spent more time dwelling on Rudol’s brief hesitation—the last thing he expected from his brother was doubt. But just then, his own absolute terror was a more pressing concern. He gripped Castar’s arm, vaguely aware that his hand was trembling as he did. “What’s going on? Where is he going?”

  “The fight is coming this way, Prince Josen. We should be safe here, but one never knows.” Castar’s smile was chilling. “Perhaps,” he said, glancing down at Josen’s empty hand, “you should draw your sword.”

  Rudol

  “They’re trapped between us and the vanguard now,” Rudol said, raising his voice so that even the rear ranks could hear. “Nowhere to run.” His throat tightened and he swallowed, hoping no one had noticed. He’d never led men in battle before, but he knew that soldiers took their confidence from their commander.

  He had two hundred Greenwall knights under his direct command, three more companies of the same size nearby, and one with the vanguard ahead. Another fifteen hundred out of the Plateaus, Skysreach, and Goldstone, some with the van and the rest in the circle of the rear guard to the north, west, and south. More than twenty-five hundred men with the squires and adjutants. Twenty-five hundred, and Duke Castar had entrusted him with every one.

  In fact, the duke might have been listening to every word Rudol said. Voices carried in the Swamp, and he and Josen were not far behind. If there was a time for weakness, this wasn’t it. Not in front of Castar, and especially not in front of Josen.

  “They’re in the palm of our hand; its time to make a fist.” With one finger, Rudol drew an invisible line across the marshland. “Rampart formation, here. Units of twenty, no farther apart than our lanterns will reach. I don’t want to see anything that even looks like darkness between you. Nowhere for a swampling to slip past. We close the circle until we see grey on the other side”—he tapped the stormcloud-grey tabard draped over his chest—“and crush everything standing between. Cer Allem, your men have the south. Cer Wendell to the north. I’ll lead the center. Cer Hughan, signal the rest of the commanders to do the same.”

  Cer Hughan Heln had been with the knights for decades, a grizzled grey-haired man who had served as a knight-captain until a wounded arm had forced him to give up his sword for an adjutant’s horn. He knew his ciphers by heart, and never needed to hear an order twice. He lifted his horn to his lips and sounded a complex series of blasts. Moments later, four more horns sounded in acknowledgement. Rudol had chosen his knight-captains well; almost before the horns finished sounding, they had their men divided and organized as ordered.

  “Ready on your signal, Prince Rudol,” Cer Hughan said.

  Rudol nodded and took a deep breath. “Squires, two to a unit. Keep to the rear with the lanterns. We need enough light to see by, not so much that we’ll be blind if we lose it. The rest of you, do not look directly at the lanterns! Night-blindness will get you killed. Protect the men beside you, and do not underestimate the swamplings. They are clever, and they are not constrained by honor. They cannot match our numbers, or our arms, but that is no excuse for foolish mistakes! We have trained for this—hold to that training, and they cannot defeat us! We are the Sky’s wrath, come to make these swamplings answer for their sins! We are the cleansing rain, come to wash away their filth! We are the lightning, come to burn away their corruption!” He’d heard Duke Castar give the same speech a dozen times before; he prayed it would work as well for him, because he couldn’t think of better. Drawing his saber from its open-backed scabbard, he thrust the blade high into the air. “We are the Storm!”

  And to his secret relief, his knights lifted their weapons to the sky and answered his call. “We are the Storm!”

  Rudol pointed his blade at the darkness ahead, his left fist clenching tight at his side. “Positions!”

  Hughan sounded his horn again, and the units spread out, marching for their assigned places on the line—all save for Rudol’s own men, two units of twenty who fell into formation in front of him. Rudol felt a flutter of nerves in his stomach, watching them move at his command. Twenty-five hundred men, he reminded himself. No weakness.

  He could hear the swamplings coming now, footfalls stamping out an ever-closer beat. Not loud, but not their customary silence either. Too many of them forced together for that. And then, movement. Just the suggestion of it, darker shadows amidst lighter ones, but Rudol’s eyes were trained to judge distance in the perpetual night of the Swamp. A scant few hundred yards of marshland stood between his men and the enemy.

  “Here they come,” he said, and the moths flapping in his stomach grew into eagles. He swallowed again and stole a glance over his shoulder. He could see the light from Duke Castar’s retinue some hundred yards back, and vague silhouettes moving in it, but if the duke was watching him, he couldn’t tell. I won’t disappoint him. And I absolutely will not falter in front of Josen.

  He gripped his saber tight and turned to Cer Hughan. “Sound the advance.”

  Zerill

  It was the light that was killing them, as much as the steel.

  Zerill hunched amid a mass of low-hanging vines as a highlander lantern passed nearby, keeping as still as she could. But she couldn’t hide forever. All around her, spheres of orange light a hundred times brighter than anything native to the Swamp cut swaths across the battlefield, sweeping back and forth in unpredictable patterns. Wherever they landed, she could see her people dying, joining the hundreds dead already. Against knights clad in steel mail, the only advantage the Abandoned had was darkness; the light took that away.
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  And it would only get worse. Farther back, a near-solid wall of brightness moved ever closer. The Storm Knights’ rear guard, inexorably closing their circle.

  The Heartspears were still trying to fight. That was the duty of their kin, to fight to the death so that the Shadowfeet and Lighteyes had a chance to escape. They moved in and out of hiding, attacking from behind when possible, and when the light found them, they killed as many as they could before the Knights of the Storm overwhelmed them. As many as they could, but three Heartspears fell for every highlander, and there seemed to be an endless number of men in those same grey tabards, those same steel helms that made them all look identical.

  Zerill had been safely hidden at the Kinhome the last time the highlanders attacked in such numbers, younger even than Azra was now. She’d been in fights before, ambushed trade caravans and Storm Knight patrols, but she’d never been caught in a proper purge. She’d always thought she could imagine what it would be like: light, and chaos, and knights everywhere. But she hadn’t been prepared for the noise. Horns sounded from every direction, signals that she didn’t understand, tearing the silence of the Swamp to pieces. She flinched every time, and fought the instinct to cover her ears—she couldn’t take her hand off her spear. In the cacophony of horns and cries and clashing weapons, even a highlander could move quietly enough to take her by surprise. That terrified her more than anything.

  The light she was hiding from continued by, which meant it was time to move. The only way out was past the rear guard and their wall of lanterns; all she could do—all any of them could do—was hope that she found a gap. She thought she’d seen one in the direction she was heading, but it might have been nothing more than a ridge or a stand of boggroves blocking a squire’s lantern. Light was hard to read in the Swamp, especially at a distance.