“And many do, Sir Hadros. Let’s not deal in generalities.”
“Aye, fair enough.” He clapped his gloved hands together, rubbing them against the chill of dawn. “So, this Fireborn, then. You want to talk to him now, or…”
“Now,” Lythian said. And the pair of them stepped away.
The captives were being kept outside the city, housed in a makeshift pen erected in the ruin of the warcamp, bordered by a ring of sharpened posts, a deep, stake-lined ditch, and watched over by a strong complement of spearmen, swordsmen, and bowmen. Before the battle that camp had been occupied by the Taynar forces; now it was a broken blackened thing, a chaos of torn tents and scorched timber, burned wagons and crippled carts. Within its rotting corpse, Lythian had ordered that accommodation be made for the southern prisoners they had taken. Many had been caught once the battle was over, throwing down their arms and surrendering. Others had run at the sight of the Dread, only to return in ones and twos and small downtrodden troops, to give themselves up and hope to be granted passage home to their own lands. Whether they would be awarded such clemency was yet to be seen. That is a decision for our new king to make.
“Did any others come while I was sleeping?” Lythian asked, as they walked.
“Few more trickled in, aye. Couple of Lumarans. A cat-less Starrider. Three more Agarathi, this Fireborn included. Your dragonknight’s with them now.” Sir Hadros squinted over toward the prisoner camp, uncertain. “You sure he’s the right man for the job, my lord? This dragonknight. They’re his people, after all. He might try to let them go.”
“Only if I order him to, Sir Hadros. I understand your concerns, but Sir Pagaloth is sworn to me by oath, and a man of honour besides. He is aligned in our course, I assure you.”
In the east the sun was climbing above the horizon, bringing light to the devastation of the coastlands, the earth churned and blackened, scarred with steaming pits. The wide handsome estuary where the Steelrun River emptied into the Red Sea was unrecognisable, choked in ash and mud and death. What thickets of trees had existed here were burned down to stumps and cinders, green turned black, life to death, all from Drulgar’s passing and the destruction he wrought in his wake. From the city walls down to the shore, thousands lay dead, picked at by carrion crows and crabs, their flesh already starting to rot. Though they were doing what they could to gather their own dead for burial and cremation, the same could not be said for the enemy.
If they are truly our enemy at all, Lythian thought. We should be fighting together in this. Drulgar…Eldur…they are a threat to us all.
Sir Hadros wrinkled his nose. “High time we put a torch to all these corpses. This stink’s only going to get worse.”
“We don’t have the manpower or the material,” Lythian said. “We’ll have to bear the smell for now.”
“Sour to us, sweet to others. All that death attracts dangers, my lord.” He waved a hand to the sea. “Some of the watchmen said they saw dragons during the night, swooping down to feast on the corpses down yonder near the shore. And we heard a great deal of howling too. Might just be regular wolves come from the woods, but there are sunwolves out there too now, and other older things as well. Fellwolves, grimbears, darkcats, direwolves, all sorts. I saw a stormhag myself, a few weeks ago, when crossing through the Heartlands. Tried to lure me into its lair, it did. Evil bloody witch.”
“You did well to avoid a grisly fate, Sir Hadros.” Lythian could not be sure if he was lying, but gave him the benefit of the doubt.
“Aye, and don’t I know it. I’d sooner die in the jaws of the Dread than be boiled alive in some stormhag’s pot. Not a nice way to go.”
“One of the less pleasant, I agree.”
They continued on past a dead dragon, its tongue lolling out of its mouth like a dog, a spear embedded in its left eye halfway up the shaft. The oaken hedge knight gestured to it with a chunky finger. “That spear’s not even tipped in godsteel,” he said. “There’s proof if ever it’s needed that any man can slay a dragon.”
Lythian liked the thought. There had grown a pervading belief that only Bladeborn knights and men-at-arms could best a dragon in battle, but it wasn’t so. “I should have every disbeliever brought out here to show them the evidence, Sir Hadros. It might serve to inspire them.”
“We have our new king for that. If ever we needed inspiring…well, that chanting last night was enough to rouse the spirits, don’t you think? Even out here we were singing out his name. King Daecar! Amron the Great! Taken him long enough to admit it, so the men are saying.”
“And what do you say?”
“Not much. I only arrived here a few days before the battle, my lord. Not really clued in on all that’s been going on. Though this about King Amron sharing the rule with Dalton Taynar…not sure who he was trying to convince with that. Even the Taynar men I’ve been talking to said they never saw Dull Dalton as their king.”
“Less of the dull, if you would. Now is not the time to be using a man’s mocking epithet. His blood has barely run cold.”
“His blood ran out, so I hear. All of it. That’s how he died.”
“Yes, well…I know Dalton was not the most popular man, but he was a First Blade of Vandar, for a time, and ought to be honoured as such. We do not mock our departed, Sir Hadros. We venerate them, and praise them, and send them to the Eternal Halls with grace.”
“And Varin’s Table,” the hedge knight put in. He slowed, then stopped, beside another fallen dragon, this one savagely butchered and beheaded with a hundred spears and arrows pricking it like a porcupine. “Captain, I wonder…”
Lythian stopped and turned to face him. “Yes?”
“Well…we’ve had our run-ins in the past, haven’t we, you and I?”
“We have.” Lythian had met the man on several occasions, and even fought with him once before when on campaign during the last war. He had not known he was here, at King’s Point, let alone alive, until after the battle was over. In truth he had assumed the man to have died years ago, but apparently he was still plodding along, hoping for an opportunity to win glory and renown. It was what brought him here, Lythian knew. Though perhaps he didn’t anticipate anything quite so cataclysmic as this. “Go on, Sir Hadros. What’s the ask?”
“That.” The stocky knight waved a finger at Lythian’s cloak. “I want one of my own. The gods know I always have.”
“Gods and men both. I remember a time many years ago when you petitioned to join the order.”
“And I was close too, you might recall. Would have made a good Varin Knight if it wasn’t for that trouble I got into as a boy.”
Lythian thought a moment. “The desecration of the statues?”
Sir Hadron blew out through his lips. “I was young and impressionable. Just a stupid boy getting caught up with the wrong crowd, is all. We got it in our heads that King Ayrin was weak, so…well, we defaced a statue or two in the town square…”
“Ayrin’s Cross, was it?”
“The worst possible place,” the knight grunted. “They’re all so high and mighty over there and gods do they love King Ayrin the Wise. We lads were more fond of the warrior kings, you know how boys can be. Was just a stupid thing, a bit of water and dye and now I’m branded for life. The sort of thing my father would have brushed under the rug if he was a lord, but no, I was born to a middling household knight and never had such leverage.” He let out another heavy breath. “Anyhow, I suppose I was just wondering if you…”
“Might anoint you myself? Permit you into the holy sanctum of Varin’s Order?”
“Aye, just that. I’d ask for a castle when all this is done, but let’s be honest, I probably won’t live that long. Better to plan for the afterlife, wouldn’t you say? A seat at Varin’s Table…now that’s something to fight for.”
In other circumstances, Lythian might have smiled at the man’s forthrightness. It was hard to do so here, however, surrounded by such devastation and death. “That isn’t my decision to make, Sir Hadros.”
“Then whose is it? Dalton Taynar’s dead, so is Vesryn Daecar. Leaves us First Blade-less, doesn’t it? Now mayhaps Lord Amron might have retaken the mantle, but no, he’s king now, so he can’t be doing that. Leaves you, my lord. You’re seniormost in the order…and a bloody handsome man too, I should probably add.” Devastation and death or not, the man gave a winsome grin. “I’d serve you to my dying breath, believe that, Captain Lythian. And I know others would too, if given the same chance.”
Lythian didn’t doubt it. The lure of Varin’s Table was a powerful one to be sure. But all the same, such an honour was not to be given out so freely. “Any man who joins the order must earn it, Sir Hadros.”
“Or just have the right family name,” the man came back, and not without a note of bitterness. “Too many Knights of Varin have bought their way into the order. You know that as well as I do, my lord.”
