by Dante King
“That’s right,” I said. “I spied her sitting on the bowl of the hill and watching the mayhem play out below. So, I went and tried to chat with her. I bested her and separated her from her crystal.” I patted my pocket where the little black sack rested safe and secure.
“What the hell is a bearmancer doing supervising an attack on us?” Tamsin said, spitting someone else’s blood from her mouth.
“Just what I should like to know if it’s not too much trouble,” Elenari said, fingering the pommel of one of her daggers meaningfully.
“And that’s what we’re going to find out,” I assured them, “but we’re going to do it in a way that won’t piss off Queen Frami anymore than she apparently already is. This is a diplomatic mission, remember?”
At the sound of the Vetruscan Queen’s name, the bearmancer, who was now sitting slumped against the well with her hands still bound, snorted disdainfully.
“Hm,” I said, kneeling down to look into the woman’s eyes. “Am I to understand that you’re not old Queen Frami’s biggest fan.”
Slowly, carefully, the bearmancer spat into the dirt between my feet.
“Hm,” I repeated. “I don’t speak Vetruscan, but I guess that’d be a ‘no’.”
“This one’s disdain would make sense of the regalia that every other soldier here wears,” Tanila said.
“Yeah, it’d make sense of the scratched-out crown certainly,” Saya said. She rolled over the corpse of a dwarf that lay nearby and all of us saw a patch with the bear’s head and crossed axes, but with the crown savagely cut out, sewn onto the shoulder of his cloak.
“There is strife in the Vetruscan Kingdom?” Dasyr asked the bearmancer.
The woman remained silent.
I ran my eyes thoughtfully over her face. “So, you’re a rebel,” I said. “A rebel against Queen Frami.” I looked around at the slaughterhouse that the market square had become. “They were all rebels.”
Still no answer.
“I see why it is the Queen has bargained for our… services,” Dasyr said in a low voice. “Having enhanced bearmancers fighting on her side… There must be much turmoil, a real threat of rebellion, for her to have considered such a course.”
“Yes,” Tanila mused. “The pertinent questions though are: what has caused this rift? And will our involvement make things even worse?”
All of us turned our gazes on the prisoner, but her mouth was buttoned up tighter than a fish’s asshole.
I sighed. “Let’s not burn daylight quizzing our guest. I’ve a feeling that she’s dug herself into such a deep hole with Queen Frami that she wouldn’t be able to hear our questions if we shouted down it as loud as we can.”
I looked up at the sky out of habit. The sun could still not be seen through the thick layer of swirling, baleful clouds.
“Hrímdale is another day’s march from here, following the right stream as Scrutor directed us,” Dasyr said calmly. “If we leave now and travel through the night, we can lie up and enter the city with first light.”
I reached down and pulled our captive to her feet, gently but irresistibly. Will was circling the stranger slowly. If he had been a hound, I was certain he would have been sniffing the bearmancer with considerable interest.
“All right then, Dasyr,” I said. “I like the sound of that. Let’s march. The sooner we return the Queen’s property to her, the sooner we might learn what sort of civil mess we have bumbled into here.”
And so we did.
We left the blood and carnage of the village behind us. We left the many bodies for the crows and the wolves and the other prowling things that inhabited the Wilderlands. We left the metallic stench of blood and the ghostly echoes of clashing metal in our wake.
By the time the sun rose the next day, we were camped just outside the Wilderlands Pass; the only way, bar the passage of the fjord, that one could gain access to the city of Hrímdale, the capital of Vetrusca.
The rising sun peeked below the blanket of minacious clouds and struck the gates that blocked our onward road. The bronze inlays that depicted two great bears lunging toward one another burst into a sudden molten flame.
I pulled the prisoner to her feet and pushed her ahead of me. Will, barely visible moving through the thin ground mist that hung about our calves, bobbed along just in front of me.
“Alright,” I said to the six blood-splashed and grim-faced warrior women who stalked behind me like half a dozen wraiths from hell. “Let’s go and play politics, shall we?”
Chapter 9
By the time we were within thirty strides of the bronze-inlaid gates, they opened. A dozen flaxen-haired Vetruscan warriors strode out confidently and stood in two well-organized groups of six in the roadway.
Composed of both men and women, they were attired in the no-nonsense armor and armed with the simple weapons of proficient soldiers. On their heads were wedged dull helms worked in the shape of a skull. I was no taxidermist, but I assumed that it was a bear’s skull.
“Halt!” the man at the front bellowed.
It was very much an order and not a request.
The eight of us stopped. Will the wisp shrank behind my leg. I held the captive bearmancer out in front of me.
The guards were impassive of face, cold of eye, and steady of hand. They didn’t strike me as nervous upon seeing eight gore-splattered strangers strolling casually out of the dawn mists. On the contrary, they looked as sanguine as if this was all part of their morning routine.
For a long, frosty moment both groups eyed one another distrustfully. Far away, back toward the mountains, thunder murmured like a fretful child.
Judging by the stony, circumspect looks on either side, it would be my role to break this Titanic-sinking bit of ice.
“We’re here to see Queen Frami,” I said matter-of-factly. I suddenly felt like a little kid showing up at a friend’s door and asking if Tommy was in, or something.
The guardsman standing at the front of the group weighed the validity and merit of this statement with all the emotion of a stone.
“We come from the Mystocean Empire,” I said. “Queen Frami, I believe, is expecting us.”
“Ah, yes, the Mystoceans,” he said. His accent was thick enough to spread on toast, almost Slavic in its cadence. He still hadn’t moved a muscle. His hand rested on the pommel of his sword. His long, straw-colored hair blew in the gentle early morning breeze.
He’d asked me no question, so I wasn’t going to lie to him. I said nothing, but I gave him a look that communicated quite openly that he wouldn’t get any information without a collection of scalpels and thumbscrews.
The guard’s forbidding mouth turned upward in a small smile. Had he understood? It certainly looked that way. He snorted softly, and his stance relaxed almost imperceptibly.
I maneuvered the captive bearmancer forward so that she stood in front of my group.
“We were waylaid on our way here,” I said. “By bandits. Or so we thought of them at first. We took this one alive. Just this one. I thought Queen Frami might want to have a chat with her.”
The guard captain’s eyes flicked over to the bearmancer who was staring defiantly at him. He spat carefully off to one side.
“Aye,” he said. “The Queen will most likely wish to question this one. I am Captain Grafa. Follow me, please. It would be best if none of your company drew any of their weapons or did anything… abrupt while we walk through the town.”
And, with that, Captain Grafa turned on his heel and walked back toward the bronze gates of Hrímdale.
The rest of the guards parted to let him pass and then waited for us to follow.
“Leave the prisoner with my company,” Captain Grafa told me. “I will have two of them escort her to the gaolhouse.”
I did as he asked. Though the situation looked as cordial as might be expected, I couldn’t shake the feeling that both my company and Captain Grafa’s guards were walking on eggshells.
Two guardswomen hurried away w
ith the prisoner between them. They shoved her along just as fast as she could go. It seemed the bearmancer prisoner was about to have the kind of friendly chat that involves having your kidneys tenderized with axe handles.
Captain Grafa headed our little procession with myself following, Will at my heels and the rest of Mystocean Empire contingent following behind. The nine remaining guards fell in around and behind us, ringing us in. The guards, all of whom were blonde haired and strong jawed, maintained their chilly aloofness, but none of their hands so much as stirred to draw their weapons.
We walked under the eaves of the impressive gates and into the Vetruscan capital of Hrímdale.
“This is pretty different to back home, huh?” Saya muttered into my ear as she looked around with her clear blue eyes. “Quite different to the Drako Academy.”
She was right, it was.
It reminded me of a setting from a Viking special on the History Channel.
Hrímdale was built on the shores of a great fjord—a huge inland lake fed by a river that presumably led out to the sea. It was built almost entirely of wood felled from the forests blanketing the slopes of the impossibly steep fells that enclosed it in a natural boundary. A few buildings were crafted from stone, but they looked to be the more important places; the undercover market, the blacksmiths, and other places that a township such as Hrímdale could not easily afford to have accidentally burned down.
The roofs were shaped like the upside-down hulls of ships. In fact, it appeared that an old fishing or warship had been recycled and flipped on its roof and turned into a building.
Despite the early hour, there was much activity. Men and women were hurrying up and down the docks, loading or unloading fishing gear into boats, readying themselves for a day out in the water, or returning from a night out on the river or the sea. Breath smoked in the chill air, and there was a heady, but not unpleasant, scent of fresh and smoked fish mingling with woodsmoke and damp earth.
As we walked through the town, people slowed or stopped what they were doing to look at us. Many of them—most of them—watched us walk past with open suspicion. Children, as they love to do with strangers, pointed at us and chattered amongst themselves like hedgerow sparrows.
Captain Grafa acknowledged a few people, nodding to a baker and a net-mender as we passed, but offered no one anything in the way of an explanation as to who we were or why we were there. Clearly, he had his orders and he meant to stick with them to the letter.
After the few days we had spent in the Wilderlands, the bustling atmosphere actually soothed me. I almost forgot what we were doing here and ached to examine the stalls and shops and workshops. The ring of metalsmiths’ hammers, the yelling of sailors, and the bleating and bellowing of livestock filled the air.
In only a short time, it became clear that Vetruscans held bears in just as much awe and respect as the Mystoceans did their dragons. Many of the visible wooden surfaces were carved with bear motifs. Moored at the multiple piers stretching into the still waters of the fjord, were ships sculpted into the head of a bear, the reaching paw of a bear, a single bear claw, or the whole figure of a running or standing bear.
“Holy shit, would you look at that?” I heard Tamsin say softly.
I looked to see a small square off to our right where kids were chasing and dancing around a full-grown grizzly bear.
The creature would have been all of fourteen feet tall on its hind legs, but it was currently sitting on its ass and watching the small children zooming around it in circles. Every now and again, it would reach out a paw, the claws of which would quite easily have been used to rend some of the skinnier children, and make a playful attempt at batting the child closest to it. All the kids would scream and laugh in unison, and then begin running in the other direction.
“How come you never do that with any of the kids in Drakereach?” I asked Noctis in the privacy of my own head, with my metaphorical tongue wedged in my metaphorical cheek.
The Onyx Dragon did not lower himself to answer me, but I got the strong impression that if he were able, he would have given me a withering glare—or, possibly, lit me up like a Roman candle.
Bears of different descriptions roamed the muddy streets. Among them were your standard black, polar, Kodiak, and sun bears, of course, but there were also bears with moss instead of fur, bears covered in glittering blue crystals, bears with horns, bears that walked along on their hind legs as easily as a man might, and bears as small as cats.
Captain Grafa wended his way through the throngs of people carrying fishing equipment, bundles of spears, baskets of potatoes and cabbages, and lengths of timber, while we followed as best we could and tried not to trip over masses of stray chickens.
At length, we came to the top of a main thoroughfare, a boardwalk, that skirted the edge of the fjord. Our guards closed in a little tighter around us, which made me think we were fast approaching the end of our tour.
My hunch was right. We rounded a low promontory, and I found myself looking up at a great hall, crafted of some iron-gray wood, standing on a low cliff that jutted out over the fjord. If this fjord had been back on Earth, the hall would have been sitting on the million-dollar prime real estate.
Captain Grafa motioned us to follow him toward a set of stairs carved into the side of the cliff, wide enough to accommodate at least six people.
I had just set my foot on the bottom step when a voice boomed out above me. It was such a loud and commanding tone that, for the space of a second, the waterbirds around the lake stopped singing. The voice rolled out across the still water like the thunder we had experienced out on the plans of the Wilderlands.
“Welcome, envoys of the Mystocean Empire, to my home!”
I looked up. The early morning sun shone briefly out from behind a cloud and lit the figure standing at the top of the stairs. It was turned into a silhouette, a black hole cut out of the stormy sky beyond.
Queen Frami had a big silhouette; I could say that much about the woman if nothing else.
“Thanks very much… Your Majesty,” I said, with a little less surety than I probably would have wanted. I realized I had never chewed the fat with a queen before. It threw me off-balance a little.
The Queen barked a laugh that sounded more like the grunt of a bear than that of a woman.
To be expected, from one in her line of business, I thought.
“You’re like me, Dragonmancer,” she said. “Not one who is accustomed to standing on ceremony. One who finds it far easier to walk all over decorum and convention rather than try to avoid tripping over it, eh?”
I hadn’t really known what to expect from the Queen. Truthfully, I hadn’t really dwelt on the actual meeting of the woman too much. There had been a lot to think about before we got here; namely, not getting lost or killed.
I was pleased to see that the dark, broad figure standing above me styled her speech more after a pirate than a politician.
“You might say that I’m more at ease in the middle of a battlefield than a ballroom, Your Majesty,” I said ruefully.
“I am hoping that a banquet hall might be a compromise that agrees with you,” Queen Frami said.
I could still not see the woman’s face because of the damned sun, but I smiled up at where I thought it might be.
“That sounds like just what the apothecary ordered, Your Majesty,” I said amicably. “After a few days out in the Wilderlands under the pouring rain, I could use a beer.”
“Just the one?” the Queen growled.
“Well…” I said.
The Queen of Vetrusca laughed, and I made a show of looking around, out over the fjord and up at growing hills surrounding us.
“It’s one hell of a place that you have here,” I said.
“Very beautiful indeed, Your Majesty,” Elenari chipped in.
“Stark, savage, and uncompromising,” Saya said with approval.
The silhouetted Queen put her hands on her hips and took a step downward.
/> “The fjord is naturally defended by impassable hills on all sides,” she said, raising a large hand and sweeping it around the enormous bay, “and can only be reached through the fjord or through the Wilderlands Pass, which is the route that all travelers have to take.”
“A fine and enviable defensive position,” Tanila said. “No wonder that the Mystocean Empire and the Vetruscan Kingdom have not bothered to fight one another for many years.”
“Long may it continue,” Dasyr said.
The sun went in. Queen Frami, ruler of the Vetruscan Kingdom, was suddenly revealed.
She was a huge woman. Her silhouette, bereft of details, had not done her justice. She wore a bear skin cloak over her shoulders and a simple crown of bones and twigs on her head. Her hair was gray and long and matted into the thick dreads that hung down her back. A patch covered one eye. A sword lay in a scabbard on her hip, and from the shape, I figured it had more in common with a meat cleaver than it did with a cutlass or a rapier.
With the piratical eye gear, dreadlocks, and oversized boots, I couldn’t help but think that Queen Frami could be this world’s female incarnation of Odin the Allfather.
“Long may it continue,” the Queen growled down at us.
There was a threat that hung over us like the shadow of a raincloud, something unspoken. It was the implicit reminder that, although we were all getting along swimmingly just now, it would not take much for someone to say or do something that would end up with all of us treading water with the sharks.
“How about that beer, Your Majesty?” I asked in an amiable voice.
Queen Frami stirred from where she had been staring thoughtfully at Dasyr and Tanila.
“Yes…” she said. “Yes, indeed. Where are my manners?”
She nodded at Captain Grafa who had stayed standing as still and unblinking as a statue through this whole exchange.
“Let our guests through, Captain,” she said. “Have your guards follow and take up positions outside my hall for the protection of our esteemed companions.”
Tamsin and Renji exchanged a quick, wry look; they weren’t fooled by this apparent concern of the Queen’s. It was obvious that the guards would be stationed outside so that they were within easy hollering distance should things go to hell at the negotiating table.
