David Farland
* * *
Years ago, while I was writing the first novels in the Runelords series, I introduced a historic character called “Mad King Harrill.” Later on, I brought other historical incidents together with the Toth Wars, and so on. I hint, for example, that my main protagonist is of mixed ancestry and has an albino ancestor.
Eventually these historical incidents wove together in such a way that I realized that I wanted to write a prequel series to the Runelords, and so I have begun some short stories that help flesh out the Toth War Saga. In this tale, “The King’s Despatcher,” I am weaving together some of the characters and incidents that will become central to this series—a mad king, at the beginning of a foreign invasion, pitted against a young hero who is hated by the people of his own land.
It’s fun stuff, and I can’t wait to finish the current series and get going on this one!
David Farland
The King's Despatcher
David Farland
“How can a man be true to a people that he hates?” Princess Avahn read in a whisper. She puckered her brow, not at difficulty with the script—for Sergeant Goreich wrote in a hand as crisp as his voice—but at the content of the missive. It wrenched her nine-year-old heart.
Perched in a high-backed chair in her private chamber, where sunlight fell through a thousand crystalline panes upon the parchment in her lap, she glanced at her matron. When Margaretha nodded encouragement, she continued to read:
“Dval is a promising young warrior, milady, one of the . . . What is this word, Margaretha?” Avahn pointed.
The matron, dimpled and gray-haired, leaned close to see. “Fiercest,” she said.
“Ah!” said Avahn. “One of the fiercest and most dedicated I have seen in all my years as Trainer of the Royal Guard. But I fear that he is growing to hate us. If he did not already bear a grudge when first he came under my . . . tu-te-lage?”
“Yes.” Margaretha nodded.
“You see, milady,” Avahn read, “the youths with whom Dval trains torment him mercilessly, by such acts as greasing the handle of his weapon and taunting him with vulgar names, as if it’s not enough that the Woguld people from whom he springs have always been our mortal enemies. I wonder that he hasn’t cut their throats in the night.”
Beside Avahn, the matron’s breath caught.
“He suffered terribly when first he came here,” Goreich’s tidy script informed. “Practicing at combat in the arena during high summer, caused his ivory skin to become burnt and blistered, as if boiling water had been flung across his back.”
Avahn stopped, heart contracting once more at imagining her rescuer in such distress. The tall, pale-skinned boy with silver hair and almost colorless eyes, likely not yet twelve, had come upon her mother’s wrecked carriage on the mountain road some weeks earlier.
“What is it, milady?” Margaretha asked.
“He saved me from the dire wolves,” Avahn whispered. “He had only a black dagger shaped from stone and Sir Hawkins’s duskin sword to hold off the pack, and he took many wounds. I know that he might have killed me, but he didn’t. He chose to protect me.”
She chewed her lip, remembering. Only her persuasion had kept her grief-maddened father from striking off Dval’s head. Instead, she’d granted him a place among Sergeant Goreich’s soldiers-in-training.
Dval had earned it. He’d killed a fierce Toth and then uncovered her nesting spot. Already the beardless youth was a hero.
Margaretha patted her hand. “Go on now, milady. Don’t think on it.”
Avahn sighed, and bent her head over the parchment.
“Providing him with a hooded cloak to shield his skin eased that . . . This word, please?”
“Affliction,” said Margaretha. “It eased his wounds, his burn.”
“Affliction,” Avahn repeated, “but he suffered dysentery at the outset, too. It came nigh to killing him, for our food did not agree with the barbarian.
“It still does not, but he has proven himself re-source-ful,” she sounded out the word, “a quality that I greatly admire in my warriors, and which truly cannot be taught. At night he leaves the barracks to hunt such prey as he can find: lizards on the beach, and crows or doves. He eats their flesh and their eggs raw.”
Avahn couldn’t prevent an expression of distaste at that, and she noticed that the matron grimaced as well.
“Three months on, he still endures exhaustion, for he trains with rigor and determination throughout the day whilst continuing to scavenge food at night. Yet, as I push him, he increases in skill and strength beyond his peers.
“And this is not all: he is becoming . . . What is this?”
“Conversant,” Margaretha answered.
“Con-ver-sant, if not yet fluent in our tongue,” Avahn read, “and he will master it, I trust, as he does all else set before him. You have given me a most worthy apprentice, milady, for which I thank you.
“Your most humble servant, Sergeant Edvard Goreich, Master of Training in the Room of Arms.”
Avahn continued to gaze upon the letter for long moments. Then she passed it to Margaretha, who rolled its stiff parchment and retied its midnight-blue ribbon with sure fingers.
Sergeant Goreich says he is a worthy apprentice, Avahn thought, and that he is increasing in strength. But how long can he, will he, bear the torments of the others? How can he not increase in hatred for all things Mystarrian when I would have him learn to love us?
She allowed herself another sigh. “I must speak of this to my father,” she said, and pushed herself from the tall chair.
“Do you think that is wise, milady?” Margaretha’s warm eyes bore concern.
“Wise or not, I must speak with him,” Avahn replied.
She knew where to find her father. She darted toward the nearest turret stair.
King Harrill sprang from between the merlons, reaching for his sword, when Avahn stepped onto the castle’s rampart. “Da, it’s but me,” she apologized.
She hung back, eyeing him, fearful of what her once-strong father had become since her mother’s death. He’d scarcely slept in many weeks. Circles dark as bruises marred his face, beneath hazel eyes that never saw her anymore, but remained focused on the distance. His sandy hair had grown unkempt, and he never stopped muttering about enemies.
She’d heard servants whisper throughout the castle during the past weeks. King Harrill the Cunning had become King Harrill the Mad, a broken man in a time when Mystarria required a strong hand. The whispers didn’t anger her as they would have before, for she knew that they were true.
As if recognizing her at last, the king uttered a sigh and turned his face to the sea. A soft wind over the clear water, laden with odors of fish markets in the north, ruffled his hair and made Avahn wrinkle her nose.
Down in the green water at the castle’s edge, sea lions barked.
“Why do you keep coming up here?” she asked. “Where are our far-seers?”
“They do not tell me all that they see,” her father said without glancing at her. “They cannot be trusted.”
When she drew up beside him, rising on her toes to peek over the merlon, he said, “Do you smell it? The wind is tainted. The Gestankin giants are watching us, but my far-seers do not tell me of them.”
He whirled then, his eyes alight with madness, and began to sniff her hair, her dress. “Perhaps it is you. Perhaps you aren’t my daughter at all. Perhaps you are a Gestankin, come in secret to kill me next. I should seize you right now and hurl you into the sea!”
“No!” Avahn shrank away. With his three endowments of brawn, she knew very well that he could do it. She had seen him slay the dire wolves’ pack leader with one mighty fist to its head, there on the mountain where the wolves had ravaged her mother’s body.
In a moment, breathing heavily, her father appeared to come to himself. He leaned against the merlon she’d just abandoned and narrowed his eyes on the east. “There are black ships,” he
muttered. “The Toth have black ships, but they never come to dock. The far-seers don’t tell me of them.”
She waited until he’d ceased his ranting to speak. She didn’t approach him again. “I received a missive today, from Sergeant Goreich at the Room of Arms,” she said. She didn’t falter, but kept her voice firm and deliberate.
The king did not react. He kept staring out to sea, beyond the archipelago of crystal castles, beyond the Courts of Tide.
Avahn drew herself up. “I know that you have forbidden me to show any kindness to the Woguld boy,” she said, “but I long to see him again. Sergeant Goreich wrote that he is a worthy apprentice, the best he has ever seen, but that he suffers terribly in training. I want to take him a present, to show him that he can learn to love and trust Mystarrians.”
King Harrill pivoted away from the merlon to fix his full gaze on her, dark as the smudges below his eyes. “No,” he said, and for a moment Avahn heard the familiar decisiveness in his tone.
Then it melted. “I do not trust that boy. There is only one way that he may prove himself worthy to me, and that is to bring me the head of a Gestankin giant.”
Avahn met her father’s eyes. That is a task he can never accomplish, Da, for Gestankin giants live only in your twisted imagination.
Afternoon sunlight seared the grand arena. Dval squinted through its glare at his opponents, youths three or four years older than himself, though not so tall. Their leader had positioned himself so that the sun slanted over his shoulder, into Dval’s face, rendering him practically blind. Dval knew that it was deliberate.
Most of his experience lay in the bow and arrow and with his obsidian dagger, a deft weapon for small spaces, including under an enemy’s reach. He’d never seen a warhammer, with its four-foot-long shaft and two eighteen-inch spikes on the head, before he’d come to the Rooms of Arms. Though effective for killing reavers, and though his arms and shoulders had grown strong from swinging it, he considered it an awkward weapon, and its usefulness limited.
“Come here, piss boots,” the boys’ leader jeered. “Come and strike me.”
Dval gritted his teeth and closed his eyes against the sun. Keep shouting and shifting your boots in the sand, barbarian, and I will find you and strike you, he thought. I don’t need to see you when you make so much noise.
Dval’s bare feet made no sound in sand that scorched his soles. He had found his boots soggy and stinking of urine when he’d pulled them on that morning. He had found the charred tatters of his cloak in the barracks hearth as well. So his skin had burned and reddened through the day, as it had during his first week in the arena.
“Come for me, piss boots,” the older boy taunted again.
The others, slowly closing on him, took it up as a chant: “Piss boots! Piss boots!”
Dval shut out their racket, like so many cawing crows, and adjusted his grip on the warhammer. Beneath their noise he heard the leader’s boots scuff. He raised the hammer. Advanced.
A rock struck the back of Dval’s head, a smarting blow.
To distract me. He ignored the tickling sensation of blood down his scalp. They fear me. But they will fear me more when they see that they cannot stop me.
“Piss boots,” the boys chanted, revealing their positions.
“Here now!” Sergeant Goreich’s strong voice silenced the chant. “Dval, come here. The rest of you will continue sparring until I order you to stop.”
Dval resisted the urge to touch his bleeding scalp as he crossed to the Master of Training. He held his head up, as befitted a warrior of the Woguld. Sergeant Goreich stood in the lengthening shadow of the barracks, and Dval opened his eyes from tight slits as he joined him.
“Where is your hooded cloak?” the training master demanded first.
“I found it burned this morning,” Dval said, “on the barracks hearth.”
“And your boots? What fool comes to train in the arena without boots?”
“Pissed in,” Dval said.
The training master’s face darkened. For a moment Dval thought Goreich might strike him, blame him for the loss of his few belongings. But his bellowed order brought the other boys running. They formed a ragged half-circle before him.
“Take off your boots,” Goreich said. “All of you.”
Wordless, though their faces betrayed questions, they obeyed. Soldiers-in-training wore boots of fine, supple leather, polished black or dark brown, which reached to their knees. They set their boots in front of Goriech, curiosity edging their wary expressions.
Holding their gazes with his own, Goreich unlaced the crotch-piece of his trousers and began to relieve himself into the nearest boot. Its owner stared, aghast, and Goreich said, “For the next three days, your boots shall be your piss-pots. Do you hear?”
Dval saw stunned nods around the circle.
Goreich fastened his trousers. He sniffed the wind, made visible by dusty curls gusting across the arena. “Winter will come soon and nights will become frosty. If you want to stay warm, you will have to burn your cloaks. No wood will be brought until you do.”
More stares greeted this announcement, but Dval glimpsed not a flicker of rebellion in any eye. No one dared.
“Dismissed,” Goreich said, but as Dval made to follow the others, the sergeant clapped a hand on his burned shoulder. “You come with me.”
Dval followed without speaking. Outside the high seats and enclosing wall of the arena lay the town where he foraged at night. He squinted in the afternoon daylight, but with his long legs he didn’t have to push himself to match the sergeant’s stride.
“Take your boots to the stream and wash them out,” the burly man said. “Fill them with water to rid them of the stench, and then wear them until they are dry. That will shape them to your feet.”
Dval nodded. He’d done the same as a child, with every new pair of moccasins he’d received.
“Now.” Goreich left the wain-rutted track through the town for a lane better suited to people on foot or horseback. Halfway along, he approached a tidy timber house with a thread of smoke winding lazily from its chimney. “Hilde!” he shouted as he strode inside. He beckoned Dval in after him.
The place smelled of stew simmering, and Dval inhaled hopefully. Opening his eyes completely in the welcome dimness, he made out a trestle table and benches before a great stone fireplace. A pot hung above glowing coals.
A sturdy woman with a weathered face entered from the second room, her skirts rustling.
“My wife,” the sergeant said, as the woman surveyed Dval from his sunburned scalp to his dusty bare feet. “The boy needs a cloak, Hilde, long as he is tall, made of black, and with a deep hood.”
“Ach, Edvard,” she cried, waving her hands as if in alarm, “he looks as though he’s in need of mending first. Bleeding all down the back of his head!” She snatched a basin from its shelf by the mantle, dipped it half-full from a large bucket by the door, then rummaged through a basket in another corner for scraps of cloth. “Now then, sit down, young man,” she said.
Dval sat on the end of the nearest bench. The cold water on the wadded cloth smarted in the cut at first, but as the woman dabbed away, murmuring all the while, he couldn’t help but relax a little.
The sergeant is a fair man, he decided. This is a Mystarrian that I can trust.
Water splashing and tinkling in the fountain behind Avahn overwhelmed the lazy hum of insects among the meticulously arranged flowerbeds. Scarlet, purple, and a variety of yellows glowed all around her, and their mingled fragrances hung on the desultory afternoon air. Avahn shifted on the sculpted stone bench, longing to follow the path between the flower beds, but Margaretha tapped the parchment spread across her knees.
“These are the lands of the merchant princes,” she said, and ran a fingertip along borders painted in fine black brushstrokes. “What can you tell me about them?”
“They bring goods to our coasts from far away,” Avahn said. “Lace and silver and rare fruits and, on occasio
n, monkeys. I should like to have a monkey!”
The matron smiled, a bit indulgently Avahn thought. “Yes, that is true,” she said, “but there is something more important to remember. Among the merchant princes, men are not taught how to fight. They believe it wiser to pay others to bleed for them. Soldiers called mercenaries are as much a commodity to them as silks and spices.”
Avahn stared at her. “Surely that can’t be! They would try to buy men’s loyalty with gold? But what if another merchant offers to pay the soldiers more?”
Margaretha laughed, a sound as pleasant as the fountain. “You are wiser indeed than all the merchant princes, milady. A true liege wins the hearts of his vassals so that their loyalty cannot be bartered. But this knowledge will give you a great advantage, should you be required to marry a merchant prince. You will be able to manipulate him with ease.”
“I shouldn’t want to marry a man so weak that I could cow him,” Avahn said with indignation. “I want—”
A shout outside the garden’s arched entry stopped her. A messenger burst through and bowed. “It’s time!” he said. “Where is your father the king, milady? It’s time!”
Avahn crinkled her nose. “Time for what?”
“The Toth’s eggs are beginning to hatch. Your father the king must be told.”
The Toth’s eggs. Avahn remembered the burned village at Moss End, the men clubbed to death, the women gutted. The huge female Toth had tried to come at her and the giant Bandolan in the shattered remnants of the fortress. Dval had come to her defense there, too, had almost been crushed by the monster when at last it was felled.
In the morning, her father’s men had uncovered two thousand eggs, nested in a sunny sandbar. They had smashed all but ten at her father’s insistence that they learn more about the creatures.
“I wish to see the Toth’s eggs hatch for myself,” Avahn said, and sprang from the stone bench. Before Margaretha could call to her, she slipped past the messenger standing in the arched entry.
Unfettered II: New Tales By Masters of Fantasy Page 20
