“Where did I take you captive, Arvid?”
“A town with a large stone bridge. Largest I had ever seen.”
“What had you been doing through the end of winter and the beginning of spring?”
“We come and pillage among the southerners in Braech’s holy name.”
“How many of you?”
“My band, less than score,” he said. “In Braech’s name.” Here, the blond Islandman smiled. “Many times more on the river to the north. Hundreds of Dragon Scales. Gravek,” he said, rolling that last word proudly off his tongue, and sending another ripple of muttered disbelief down either side of the table. “And the Sea Dragon.”
Ruprecht Machoryn cradled his forehead in one hand. Landen’s hands were fists on the table’s smoothly polished surface.
“Who leads them?”
“Honored Choiron Symod,” Arvid said.
Allystaire took his hand from Arvid’s neck. “If you did not follow, he led a raiding party south into Barony Delondeur as soon as the thaw came. I expect other parties went into Oyrwyn, perhaps slipped through to Harlach. More could be operating. They gather by the Valdin, and I guess that Symod means to cut their teeth against the remnants of Varshyne, if there are any remnants,” he added hotly. “And when they have battle in their blood and plunder in their eyes, they will come south, and if a concerted effort does not meet them, they could wreak havoc upon Delondeur’s unprotected heart.”
“That seems like Delondeur’s problem,” Gilrayan said with a casual shrug.
“And then it becomes Telmawr’s problem, and Oyrwyn’s problem, and Innadan’s, and Harlach’s,” Allystaire shouted. “This is no polite battle over map lines. They mean to burn and destroy everything in their wake in the name of their God. The same God many of you keep chapels to in your homes, I add. He would see you swept along a tide of blood, and I come demanding you to no longer do His vile work for Him. Be better men than you have been. Be better rulers than you have been.”
He paused. The sound of his own breathing was loud in his ears, as the Barons and their advisors regarded him silently. Before any of them could find their voice, he hauled Arvid to his feet again.
“Landen,” Allystaire said, “this man pillaged, raided, raped, and enslaved your people. He is yours to judge and punish.”
The Baroness Delondeur came to her feet, eyeing the Islandman coldly. “Some of the victims of Symod’s raiding are in my camp. He will face their accusations before I decide anything.”
“I see how it is, then,” Gilrayan Oyrwyn stage-whispered loud enough for the table to hear him, even as he feigned at quiet by laying the back of his hand against his mouth.
“You are tiring me, boy,” Hamadrian rasped. “If you’ve something to say, say it aloud.”
“Only that Coldbourne left me to serve my rival. It’s as plain as the the break in the coward’s nose.”
“Allystaire does not serve Barony Delondeur,” Landen said through clenched teeth. “If any of you still doubt what happened, let me state the truth of it clear. He killed my father, who deserved killing, something I could not see until he was dead. That I live still is a testament to his mercy, yes, and his faith in me is something I hope to repay. I would offer him a Delondeur title, the richest I could bestow, if I thought for one moment he would take it. In the coming battle, I will stand with him rather than against him. If you have any sense, Gilrayan, you’d rush to do the same.”
Baron Oyrwyn sat back in his chair, drumming his fingers along its arms, eyeing Allystaire speculatively. “I see little reason to believe the savage. Perhaps he’s been bribed to say what he has. Coached to respond.”
“It is clear,” Allystaire said, “that my presence at this table is hindering the proceedings. My comrades and I shall withdraw to our camp. The morning after tomorrow, I will leave this place to raise whatever host I can. Be in it if you wish. If you wish to do otherwise, be prepared to explain to your own people why you were not.”
With that, Allystaire pulled his small string of prisoners to their feet and turned around sharply. There was a hubbub of protesting voices behind him. Harlach’s bass rumble underlaid it all, and he could pick out Gilrayan’s faint laughter. After a moment it faded into the noise as he stalked off, sweeping up Idgen Marte, Torvul, the prisoners, and Tibult in his wake.
* * *
“That was not,” Torvul said, “the opportune time to leave. Nor was it particularly diplomatically done.” The dwarf squatted on his stump-thick legs before their fire, fussing with a large pot hung above it on a tripod. From time to time as he stirred, added, or tasted, it released fragrant scents of chicken, onion, or herbs that had Allystaire’s stomach rumbling.
“Is it ready yet?”
“You’ve no sense of timing, is the problem. And about as much tact as a rockslide.”
Idgen Marte ceased her pacing behind Allystaire’s seat upon a log and said, “He’s not wrong, Ally. You didn’t make any progress.”
“I did not see how I could. I presented them my ultimatum, my prisoners, and then Gilrayan…” He clenched his fists tightly at his sides. “The man knows precisely how to anger me. Had I kept listening, I doubt I could have stayed my hand.”
A stray snatch of song floated out from Gideon’s tent as all three of them quieted down.
“At least he’s not wasting the last of the light,” Idgen Marte said. Then, clearing her throat, she called out in her cracked and broken voice. “Scales! Stop tryin’ to play songs until the scales are perfect.”
“So is that why y’rode away from the life y’knew?” Torvul stood straight, rubbing a fist against the small of his back. “He just angered ya?”
“For three years, Torvul, I tried to make him see sense. I tried to bring out whatever of his father was in him. Finally, his plans, his desires grew to be too much for me to bear. It was leave or kill him, and I had sworn to Gerard Oyrwyn not to do that.”
“What was that plan, then? What did he mean t’do?” Idgen Marte swung one leg over the log and sat down at the other end, facing Allystaire.
“Besides bleed his treasury dry? Order his liege lords to raise rents until his people were broken? Knighting swords-at-hire who were little more than assassins? It was an accumulation of things.”
“There had t’be somethin,” Toruvl muttered, “and the stew won’t be done till ya tell me what it was.”
“Fine,” Allystaire said, “he was holding a war council. The heat of the summer had reached even up into the mountains and we had broken off a campaign against Harlach when we had made no progress. He then hatched a plan to bring Innadan with us against Harlach. A masterstroke, he called it.”
Allystaire sighed deeply. “He wanted us to wear false livery, knights to put on the colors of Harlach knights, our men to put on Harlach tabards, and sack and burn Innadan villages. It was an appalling violation of everything that knighthood and honor could ever mean.”
He held up a hand to forestall Idgen Marte’s protest. “I know, knighthood and honor do not mean much. Yet I will never forget the look on his face as he laid out his strategy for us, and what he said.” He twisted his features and spat out the words, “’Don’t stint the rape or the torch.’ Those were his words, his plan: to murder the innocents among our allies, Idgen Marte. And the hateful way he said it.” He shook his head, pounded a balled fist against the log.
“I know,” Allystaire went on, staring hard into the fire, “that armies are not easy on the places they conquer, or the people. When I saw it, or heard of it and could prove it, I hung the men who did it. I made reparations when I had the means. And for all these years I pretended that such dumb shows, such carefully maintained distance, absolved me of the sin of it all, the horror wrought upon innocents. That I would hang a man and pay a handful of silver to someone he wronged made me better than him, for all that I was part and party to ruinous
farce of it all. So I thought. I know that I probably did not hang men who deserved it, or hanged some who did not. My hands are as red as those of any man alive.”
Finally he lifted his eyes, first to Torvul, and then he turned to Idgen Marte. “Yet to see those crimes as a weapon? As a lever to move our own ally against a third party with whom he had little quarrel? I could never have lived with that. I could never have been a part of it, and I knew I could not serve the man who proposed it, nor could I kill him. I held my oath to his father, spoken when I was barely six winters old, as the most sacred thing I had ever done.”
“You can kill a man who’ll propose such a plan and rest easy knowin’ you did right that day,” Idgen Marte said, following hard on Allystaire’s words. “And I never swore any oaths to his father.”
“No, Idgen Marte,” Allystaire said. “He did not attempt to carry off such a plan; had he done, one of the two of us would now be dead. And yet, if I had killed him then, if one of us did now, what then? He has no heir. It would be a squabble amongst his lords to assume his seat. Perhaps Garth would succeed him, perhaps Naswyn, or perhaps the entire Barony would crack apart as Harlach seized his chance. I could not know then and I do not know now, except for this fact: people would die. Hundreds, at the least.”
“He’s right, Idgen Marte,” Torvul said, after a brief lull where the run of a scale up and then down floated out from Gideon’s tent. “We need a united front. He may be despicable, but we can’t kill a man solely for the words he spoke.”
“If he speaks them to me, he’ll die,” she replied hoarsely.
“Take your hand off your sword,” Allystaire muttered. “We are here to make peace, not fewer Barons. We cannot seem to be threatening them, and we certainly cannot kill any of them unless we have no choice.”
“You’ve already threatened them, Allystaire,” Idgen Marte muttered. “You put the threat right in front of them. Revolt.”
Allystaire shook his head, hunched over in his seat, and lowered his eyes to the ground. “What other threat could I make? I will march against the Braechsworn, and I will take any man willing, and I needed a way to make them give me the men.”
“Why’re you so sure they will, anyway? They know where Symod’s army is. They could march to meet it themselves.” Torvul once again sniffed at the pot, stirred with the wooden spoon that dangled against its side.
“Delondeur and Innadan will want me at the head of whatever force they can muster,” Allystaire said. “They have both said as much. When word spreads to Oyrwyn, the men themselves will want me. Telmawr will likely do whatever Innadan says to do. Machoryn and Damarind are far from where Braech’s hammer might fall, and will be able to bring little to the campaign, but it does our faith no harm for this to be their introduction to it.”
“That leaves Harlach,” Idgen Marte said, “and he’s too proud to be seen following you.”
“All he needs to do is show up on the field,” Allystaire said, “and be pointed in the right direction.”
Idgen Marte snorted. “If he’s so fearsome, why does everyone at the table seem to hold him in contempt?”
Allystaire shook his head. “He is an old-fashioned sort. Too old-fashioned; all he ever understood of battle was to run straight at the other bastard and try to hurt him.”
“I’ve seen you fight,” Idgen Marte said flatly, “and that is precisely how I’d describe it.”
“One to one? Yes, of course,” Allystaire said. “Yet that is no way to lead in battle, when other lives are at stake. Unseldt never met a hill he would not charge, or a false retreat he would not chase after.”
“Y’still seem too certain,” Idgen Marte muttered, “and I’m not. They’ll try to make you break or bend before they agree t’anything.”
“Supper is ready,” Torvul announced, with a clap of his hands. “If someone’d spread the word.”
There was enough light for Allystaire to see Idgen Marte’s eyes swing meaningfully to him, so he started off towards the sounds of Gideon’s lute practice.
Idgen Marte swung off the log and was by Torvul’s side, leaning over the pot with a few steps.
“They’ll try to break or bend him,” Torvul muttered. “You’re right.”
“He won’t.”
“’Course he won’t. I’m not worried about him, it’s just, d’ya know why you add other ores, or earths, to iron when ya want t’make steel?”
“Holds an edge longer, lighter, more flexible.”
“And there it is,” Torvul said, pointing a finger towards her. “He’s iron, Idgen Marte. Strong and durable, but inflexible, brittle. Easily broken in the right place. You and I, we’re what make him steel. D’ya understand?”
Idgen Marte thought a moment, as the rest of the inhabitants of their camp began to converge on their fire. “Dwarf,” she said, “the Goddess Herself gave me that task. I need no reminders.”
Torvul just smiled as he dipped a ladle into the pot.
* * *
Allystaire sat across the tent from Gideon, who had gone right back to the lute after eating. They boy sat cross-legged on the cot while Allystaire, finally free of the weight of his armor, stretched his legs out from the stool, keeping his hammer on the small table, his right hand only inches from it.
“You are getting better, if you ask me,” Allystaire said, when Gideon took his hand from the strings to flex it, curling the fingers and tightening the hand into a fist and then unclenching two or three times.
The boy opened his mouth, then bit his lip, finally spitting out, “Thank you.”
Allystaire chuckled. “What did you mean to say?”
“That Idgen Marte’s opinion is the one that matters in this,” Gideon said sheepishly. “Or that you’ve said yourself that you have no ear for music.”
“I can tell the difference between a note well or badly struck,” Allystaire said. “Besides, Idgen Marte could lie to you about what she hears. I cannot.”
Gideon nodded, pursing his lips as if he hadn’t thought of that. With a sigh, the boy set the lute down on the cot next to him. “Do you think the Baron Oyrwyn will agree to the peace?”
It was Allystaire’s turn to sigh. “I cannot make out the workings of that man’s mind. I never could, even when he was a lad.”
“What was he like, then?”
“Smart, but in a way that cut. Cunning, always looking for a way to promote himself. I suppose he had to be that way, as bastard-born, if he wanted to gain his father’s attention. He was never first among his age in the yard—not with Ghislain only a year his elder—but never last, either.”
“Ghislain?”
Another, heavier sigh. “Gerard Oyrwyn’s only trueborn child. The only one I know of besides Gilrayan.”
“How did he die?”
“In battle, eight years past. Delondeur thought he could catch us by surprise by trying a path through Varshyne, what was left of it, circle round the mountains, and come through the taiga. We rushed what we could to meet him, but too many knights were in Harlach when we realized what was happening. Ghislain took charge of the first force to meet him. He was not quite nineteen summers old and he had been knighted a bit less than a year and a half before.”
“And he was a better man than Gilrayan?”
“He would have been,” Allystaire replied. “Of that I am certain. He was every inch his father. It was easy to see, even in his youth, a man we would all have been happy to follow.”
“Why did Gerard Oyrwyn only have one true-born son? And why does it matter so much anyway? And if there was only the one potential heir, why was he not kept out of harm’s way?”
“I will answer those questions in reverse,” Allystaire said, sitting up and straightening his legs. “Gerard Oyrwyn did not believe that the toll of war should be borne only by the poor. Granted,” he said, lifting a palm, “the greater part of
the cost always falls to them. Even so, he would never have held his son back from a battle that threatened the very heart of the Barony. Ghislain would never have stood for being left behind, either. He was eager to prove himself, and men were eager to follow him.”
He paused for breath, lifted his eyes to Gideon. The boy’s dark eyes shone in the lamp light, studying him and his responses in that frank way he had. “To the second, it matters because it always has. A child born to a knight or a lord outside of marriage is only owed whatever the father decides he or she is owed.”
“That’s despicable,” Gideon said flatly. “And to say that it is so because it has always been so is faulty logic.”
“I know,” Allystaire said, “it is one more thing I never questioned. Though I had reason to.”
“You never had any so-called natural children, did you?”
Allystaire shook his head. “None of any kind.”
“How certain are you?”
“Certain enough,” Allystaire said. “I never married and no woman I, ah…knew…ever claimed to have my child. I like to think they would have done.”
“And what would you have done in the event?”
“Are we losing the thread here? This seems irrelevant.”
Gideon shook his head. “No. I want to understand.”
“Fine,” Allystaire said. “I like to think I would have provided all that I could, full rights and recognition. A moot question now, though.”
Gideon nodded. “Then what did you mean, you had reason to question it?”
Allystaire swallowed hard. “The only woman I ever wanted to marry, she was the natural daughter of an Oyrwyn lord. He acknowledged her, and she was raised at the fringes of court, but when the time came, he would not grant her his name, nor dower her.”
“Could you not have married her despite that?”
“Gideon,” Allystaire said, raising the tips of his fingers to his forehead, “I do not wish to speak of it any further.”
Silence reigned for a moment. “Then, what about Gerard Oyrwyn? Why did he have only the two children?”
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