“Very well. Then go. Did you bring any men with you when you came here?”
“No. Just me. Had a squire but he died on the journey. Wasn’t much use anyway, if I’m honest. Good lad, but good isn’t enough to survive these days, is it?”
“No, I suppose not.” Amron thought a moment. “If you must have your taste of blood, fine, but I would prefer you not to ride alone. Pick out a few of these knights and take them with you. Sir Harold, see him supported by some men-at-arms as well.”
“Yes, my lord. How many?”
“A dozen will serve.”
That was all done within a short ten minutes, and away Sir Bryce Coddington went, riding hard into the murky woods on the back of his barded horse, with young Sir Trystan Spencer, tall Sir Dederick Dudden, and an old, one-eyed hedge knight called Sir Cod Murray for company. After that Amron gave his speech, calling forth to the gathered men to inspire them and speed them on the march. He spoke of the families whom they must avenge, the living loved ones they must protect, how a man defending his own country counted for ten invaders on the field of battle. They were words he had spoken a hundred times before, dressed up in a hundred different ways, but the essence was always the same.
“Standard battle script,” the Ironfoot called it after. “But it’s the delivery that’s important.”
Amron nodded and steeled his eyes. He hoped he would continue to deliver for his people…with script and steel both.
31
Sir Hadros had the map. He laid it out in the draughty wood cabin they’d taken for a council chamber, using stones to hold it down at the edges. The wind rattled through the rotting timber walls, the floorboards creaking and cracking as the men moved in to look. Outside, the weather was dreary, the skies grey and overcast yet the rains had not yet come. They would, Sir Pagaloth knew. They come every day out here.
“Here,” the hedge knight said. He prodded at a blur of ink that marked the small wood they were in, of elm and oak and ironwood, one of a hundred that clothed this vast verdant land. “That’s us right there.”
“You’re sure?” asked Ruggard Wells, squinting.
“Aye, sure as when I mounted your sister, Rug. But we don’t want to talk about that now, do we?”
Wells glared at him. He was a grizzled old man-at-arms of fifty winters, with grey streaks in his beard, eyes hard as flint, and a dome as bald as an egg. He said nothing.
“The Smallwood,” Skymaster Sa’har Nakaan noted, looking at the name scrawled onto the map. “That is a little…what is the expression? A little on the nose?”
Hadros gave a chuckle. “Aye, you’re not wrong, Skymaster. Half the names around here are the same. The Littlewood. Light Elm Forest. Teen Oak. All things like that.” He pointed them out, prodding here and there. “All part of the greater Wandering Wood. Once before these valleys were all forested, but they were cut back for roads and farms and such, making all these little pockets. It’s only the local people who use these names, though.”
Sir Bardol was studying the map with a dour look on his face. There was nothing new there. “We’re a long way from home,” the knight observed, in that toneless, perpetually unhappy voice that made Pagaloth want to fall asleep or slap some life into him. “It will take us ten days to corral the deserters back to the city. At least ten days,” he groaned.
“Especially if these damnable rains keep coming,” Hadros added in, “and they don’t look like they’re going to relent any time soon. Before long every wood will become a bog and every valley a sea. Hell, we’ll be swimming back at this rate.” He made a face. “And I’m not one for swimming.”
Sir Bardol shook his head. “Nor I.” He was a haggard, angular man, old beyond his thirty-five years, with thin folds of dark skin beneath his eyes that made him look constantly exhausted. “I think it may be time to turn back, Hadros. Four hundred men is enough.”
The hedge knight nodded thoughtfully, rubbing at his lumpen chin, stiff with short brown bristles, going grey in places. He looked to the other members of the council, a strange motley of men from north and south. “What do the rest of you say?”
“No,” grunted the Piseki Sunrider Tar Moro. He wore brown and golden robes, mud-spattered and rain-soaked, over scalemail armour in links of fine bronze steel. “There are more men out there,” he said. “Many more. We should not stop yet. There is more work to be done.”
“You mean you want to keep looking for your precious wolf,” scoffed Ruggard Wells. “We’re not going on for the sake of your pet, Moro. Just admit that’s all you care about. You could care less about finding more deserters. You think every one of them is a craven anyway.” He snorted. “Might say the same about your wolf. It ran away as well.”
Moro turned on him. “You dare…”
“Dare? What’s so daring about calling it how it is? Your wolf’s a frightened little pup and your cat’s no better, Bellio. They’re both dead. Just accept it.”
Moro’s dark eyes burned with rage. “When I find Natallios, I will demand a death duel with you, Vandarian. You will see then that he is not a coward, when he rips out your throat and opens your belly.”
“All right, calm down there Moro,” Hadros said, pulling the man away. “You two and your bickering…” He sighed. “Now let’s get back to the matter at hand. Moro, you want to keep going. Bellio, I’m guessing you’re the same?”
Starrider Anson Bellio was as pleasant as Sunrider Moro was peevish. He was slim as a dagger, youthful and handsome, with mysterious, purply-brown eyes and smooth dark ebony skin. He wore dark leather garments with a black cloak sprinkled with silver spots. “I miss Eleesia deeply,” he said, in that long-suffering way of his. “I will not deny it. My heart breaks each day to think…”
“All right, no need to go reciting poetry, Anson. You miss your starcat, we know that, but it’s been long weeks now and there’s been no sign of either of them. Best let it lie.” He looked at the Piseki Sunrider. “Both of you.”
“Never,” grunted Moro.
Bellio only lowered his eyes, his anguish marrow-deep.
Hadros looked at Sa’har. “Skymaster. Your thoughts?”
Sa’har Nakaan was stroking at the wisp of white beard on his chin as he perused the details of the map. “We are told there is a large group of deserters gathered here,” he said, in his quiet croak of a voice. A thin finger reached out of his crimson robes, gesturing to a dot on the sheepskin scroll, marked with the name Fronnfallow. There was a skull sign next to it, the skull of a wolf it looked, which did not seem a positive omen to Sir Pagaloth Kadosk. “If we are to return to King’s Point, it would be sensible to travel to Fronnfallow first. We can turn west after.”
“Or we just turn west now,” Ruggard Wells came in. He squinted down at the map as though it was some fell creature to be feared. “Fronnfallow’s a dark place, and best avoided. There are ghosts there in those ruins, spirits of Fronn himself. I say we go back right now. No good will come of us going there.”
Sir Hadros gave a bark of laughter. “Since when did the dead frighten you, Ruggard? It’s the living that concern me more.”
“The dead inhabit the living,” the old man-at-arms warned. “You know the stories, Hadros. Those spirits get into the living wolves and make them monstrous and mean. They grow unnatural in size and strength and you can hear them howling from a hundred leagues away, like they’re Fronn himself come back from the dead.”
Hadros did not seem in the least bit fazed. “Well, we’ve heard no such howling and Fronnfallow’s only a few hours march away. So I’m guessing we’re fine. And if these wolf-spirits are infesting the local lupine population, then I doubt we’d be hearing about a group of deserters in camp there, would we? Men don’t put down roots when there are monsters about.” He looked at the map again, jabbing at it like he was trying to get its attention. “I say we go. If there are some deserters camping there, as that Agarathi claimed, we can assimilate them and then head home.”
“You’re making a mistake…” Ruggard started.
Hadros cut in. “You’re as fretful as a maid on the morn of her wedding, Rug, and doing yourself no favours with all this naysaying. When we get back to the Point, and I report to Captain Lythian and the king, what do you want me to tell them? That Ruggard Wells, the battle-hardened old warrior, moaned every step of the way? That he was unmanned by children’s tales of spirits and ghosts? Or that he was valiant and bold and a good fit for a Varin cloak?” He met the man’s eyes. “Aye, it’ll be the latter I’ll wager. So stop with your bleating. We’re going, and that’s that.”
“Fine,” Wells grunted. “But if you think Daecar’s going to let us all into the order for this, then you’re as mad as Miller is. That’s never going to happen.”
