Bransen looked at her closely, reading the anger on her dirty face. She might have been a pretty girl, once, an attractive young woman with blue eyes and wheat-colored hair. Perhaps once soft and inviting like a place to hide from the world, her hair now lay matted and scraggly, unkempt and uncut. The war had played hard on her; the only sparkle in her eyes was one of hatred, reflected in bloodshot lines and weary bags. There remained no soft lines there, just a sharp and hardened person who had seen and borne too much and eaten too little.
Bransen had no answers for her. He gave a helpless little shrug. With a slight bow he turned and started away.
“Now where are ye going?” the old man asked behind him.
“As far as I need to pass beyond this war.”
“But ye ain’t going away hungry!” the old woman declared. Bransen stopped and turned to face her. “No one’s to say that we folk o’ Hooplin Downs let a stranger walk away hungry! Get back here and eat yer stew, and we’ll find some work for ye to pay for it.”
“Might start by cutting me a new handle for me fork,” the old man said, and several of the others laughed at that.
Not the young woman with the toddler, though. Obviously displeased by the turn of events, she held her young child close and glared at Bransen. He looked back at her curiously, trying to convey a sense of calm, but the glower did not relent.
Repairing the pitchfork proved no difficult task, for there were other implements about whose handles had long outlived their specialized heads. With that chore completed quickly, Bransen moved to help where he could, determined to pay back the folk equitably and more for their generosity in these dire times.
In truth, it wasn’t much of a stew they shared that night, just a few rotten fish in a cauldron of water with a paltry mix of root vegetables. But to Bransen it tasted like hope itself, a quiet little reminder that many people—perhaps most—were possessed of a kind and generous nature, the one flickering candle in a dark, dark world. Reflecting on that point of light, Bransen silently chastised himself for his gloom and despair. For a moment, just a brief moment, he thought his decision to return to his wife and run away with her incredibly selfish and even petulant.
The people of Hooplin Downs didn’t talk while they ate. They all sat solemnly, most staring into the distance as if seeing another, better time. Like so many in Honce, they seemed to be a haunted bunch. Their silence bespoke of great loss and sacrifice, and the manner in which each of them tried to savor every pitiful bite revealed a level of destitution that only reinforced to Bransen how generous they had been in allowing him to share their pittance.
Darkness fell and supper ended. The villagers worked together to clean up the common area about the large cook fire. As the meager and downtrodden folk of Hooplin Downs moved about the sputtering flames, Bransen felt he was witnessing the walk of the dead, shambling out of the graveyards and the battlefields toward an uncertain eternity. His heart ached as he considered the condition of the land and the folk, of the misery two selfish lairds had willingly inflicted upon so many undeserving victims. His heart ached the most when he considered how futile his flickering optimism had been. Two men could destroy the world, it seemed, much more easily than an army of well-meaning folk could save or repair it.
Bransen sat before the fire for a long while, long past when the others had wandered back to their cabins, staring into the flames as they consumed the twigs and logs. He envisioned the smoke streaming from the logs as the escape of life itself, the inexorable journey toward the realm of death. He took the dark image one step further, seeing the flame as his own hopes and dreams, diminishing to glowing embers and fading fast into the dark reality of a smoky-black night.
“I don’t think I have ever seen a man sit so still and quiet for so long,” said a woman, interrupting his communion with the dancing flickers. The edge in that voice, not complimentary, drew him out of his introspection even more than the words themselves. He looked up to see the young mother who had questioned him sharply when he had first entered Hooplin Downs. The toddler stood now in the shadows behind her, which seemed to relieve some of her vulnerability, as was evident in her aggressive stance.
“All the work is done,” he answered.
“And so is the meal you begged, uh, worked for,” she added, her words dripping in sarcasm.
His eyes narrowed. “I did what I could.”
The woman snorted. “A young man, very strong and quick, who can fight well . . . and here you sit, staring into the fire.”
That description of his fighting ability tipped her hand.
“Your husband is off fighting in the war,” Bransen said softly.
She snorted again, helplessly, angrily, pitifully, and looked to the side. “My husband got stuck to the ground by a Palmaristown spear,” she said, chewing every word with outrage. “He’d likely be there still if the animals hadn’t dragged him away to fill their bellies. Too many to bury, you know.”
“I know.”
“And here you sit, because your work is done,” she retorted. “Here you sit, all whole and breathing and eating the food of folk who don’t have enough to give, while men and women fall to the spear and the sword and the axe.”
Bransen stared at her hard. She shifted and put her hands on her hips, returning his look without blinking. He wanted to tell her about Ancient Badden, how he had fought a more just war in the northland of Vanguard, how he and Jameston had saved a village from marauding rogue soldiers. He wanted to blurt it all out, to stand and stomp his feet, to scream about the futility of it all. But he couldn’t.
Her posture, her expression, the power forged by pain in her voice, denied him his indignation, even mocked his self-pity. He had his life and his wife, after all.
“What side are you on, stranger?”
“Doesn’t matter.” Bransen dared to stand up straight before her. “Both sides are wrong.”
He saw it coming but didn’t try to stop it. She slapped him across the face.
“My husband’s dead,” she said. “Dead! The man I love is gone.”
Bransen didn’t say that he was sorry, but his expression surely conveyed that sentiment. Not that it mattered.
“They are both wrong?” The woman gave a little helpless laugh. “You’re saying there’s no reason we eat mud and go to cold beds? That’s your answer? That’s the answer of the brave warrior who can dodge a pitchfork and snap its head from its handle with ease?”
Bransen softened. “Do you wish that I had fought and saved your husband?” He was trying to send a note of appeasement and understanding, but the question sounded ridiculous even to his own ears. His face stung when she slapped him again.
“I wish you had got stuck to the ground and not him!” She spun away from him, and only then did Bransen realize all the village folk had gathered again to hear the exchange. They looked on with horror, a few with embarrassment, perhaps, but Bransen noted that many heads were nodding in agreement with the woman.
“It’s all a matter of chance!” The woman stomped back and forth before the onlookers. “That’s what it is, yes? A hundred men go out, and twenty die! A thousand men go out, and more die.” She turned on him sharply. “But the more that go, the more that come home, don’t they? A thousand targets to spread the bite of Yeslnik’s spears mean that each has more of a chance to miss that bite. So why weren’t you there?” She launched herself at him. “Why are you here instead of showing yourself as a target to the archers and the spearmen?”
This time Bransen didn’t let her strike him because he knew the situation could escalate quickly and dangerously for everyone. He caught her wrists, left and right as she punched, pinning them back to her sides. She began to wail openly, keening against the injustice of it all. He instinctively tried to pull her closer to comfort her, but she tore away, spinning about so forcefully and quickly that she lost her balance and tumbled to the dirt, where she half sat, half lay on one elbow, her other forearm slapped across her eyes.
Bransen’s instincts again told him to go to her, but he didn’t dare. He looked up at the many faces staring at him, judging him. He held his hands out questioningly, starting to back away.
A trio of women went to their fallen friend, one pausing just long enough to look up at Bransen and mutter, “Get ye gone from here.” Her words sparked more calls. The woman’s rant had touched a deep nerve here.
They weren’t interested in his truth. All that mattered to them was the injustice that a young, obviously capable man was sitting here, seemingly untouched by the devastating reality that had visited upon all their homes.
Bransen took another step back from the outraged woman and held his hands up again, a helpless and ultimately sad look upon his face as he walked away.
When he was back in the empty forest, wandering the dark trails, Bransen’s memory of his encounter in the village only reinforced his growing belief that he did not belong here . . . and perhaps not anywhere. He thought of Cadayle, the one warm spot in his bleak existence, and of their unborn child. Was he damning them both to a life of misery by his mere presence? Should he, after all, go the way of the younger Jameston Sequin, the way of the recluse, and not the way of the Jameston who had made the fateful and errant decision to come back into the wider civilized world?
What kind of husband would drag Cadayle and their babe into such an existence?
That question nearly drove Bransen to his knees. The implications were too harsh for him to even entertain their possibility.
Where would he fit in? How would he ever fit in?
And most important of all, why would he want to?
TWO
The Inevitable Spiral
Prince Milwellis burst into the barn with a roar of defiance. Flames ate at one wall, but the mob battling within hardly seemed to notice, so desperate was their struggle.
The young, red-haired warrior prince rushed at one nearby fight, where a Palmaristown man lay bloody on the floor and two others tried desperately to keep up the with the furious movements of the red-capped dwarves darting all about them. One soldier scored a hit with his sword, a solid stab, but the dwarf shrugged it off and returned with a smash of his spiked club that shattered the man’s knee. Only Milwellis’s intervention prevented a second and more devastating powrie strike as the soldier tumbled in agony.
The prince struck with his sword, a devastating slash across the powrie’s chest that sent the dwarf stumbling back . . . but just a step. The ferocious little beast came on again with a snarl and a howl and a most wicked grin. Milwellis fell back, not willing to trade blows with the powrie. As he retreated he shoved his remaining comrade toward the dwarf.
That man, too, stabbed the dwarf hard, a strike that would have felled most opponents. In response the soldier got the club right between the eyes, a spike stabbing into his brain. His legs dropped from under him. As he fell he twisted the dwarf’s club awkwardly, tying up the creature.
Milwellis stepped in. This time his clean strike at the powrie’s neck finally finished the vicious little thing.
Milwellis jumped back and looked for the next opportunity. Beside him, the man with the crushed knee pleaded for help.
“Silence, fool!” Milwellis hissed, kicking the wretch to silence. “Crawl out of here!”
The fires reached across the ceiling, the barn surely lost. Milwellis and his men knew it and worked toward the door, but the remaining powries—the prince was shocked to see that there were only three others—fought on as if they hardly cared. Another Palmaristown man was pulled down and slaughtered and then another, though the last desperate swing of his sword managed to take one powrie with him.
Milwellis pushed his way through the door, tripping over the man with the shattered knee. The barn roof fell in behind them, sending sparks and embers flying into the night sky. Milwellis regained his footing and brushed the dirt from his clothes, storming about, cursing every step. “Only four?” he yelled in outrage. “Only four?”
For he had lost nearly a score of fighters in that barn, killed five to one by powries.
“Easy, my son,” Laird Panlamaris begged a few moments later, the old man riding over at the sound of Milwellis’s bellowing.
“Four, Father!” said Milwellis. “Four wretched powries held that barn for half the night and killed a score of my finest warriors.”
“These are formidable foes,” Laird Panlamaris agreed. “A bitter lesson I learned decades ago upon the sea.”
“They are the curse of Honce,” said another who rode up, a giant of a man, wearing the brown robes of the Order of Abelle. “Do not forget who loosed the evil upon us.”
Prince Milwellis eyed Father De Guilbe squarely and nodded, his face locked in a hateful grimace.
“Dame Gwydre did this,” De Guilbe said. “Dame Gwydre and Father Artolivan, the heretic who claims to rule the church.”
“They will pay with their blood,” vowed Milwellis.
“Not to doubt,” agreed the Laird of Palmaristown, whose once-great city now lay before him in near ruin, the devious work of barely a hundred powries. “When Palmaristown is secured once more, the scourge of red caps driven into the Masur Delaval and drowned like the rats they are, I will sweep Gwydre’s Vanguard into ruin.”
“Do not forget Chapel Abelle, I beg,” said De Guilbe. “If I am to take my rightful place as leader of the Order of Abelle, loyal to King Yeslnik and you, Laird Panlamaris, then I must be properly seated at the chapel that has come to be the center of power for my order. No replacement chapel, however grand, will suffice.”
“Not even if King Yeslnik builds you the grandest one of all in Delaval City with a congregation numbering in the thousands?” the laird asked.
Father De Guilbe couldn’t contain his grin about that intriguing possibility, though he quickly dismissed it. “Only if the rot at Chapel Abelle is cleansed,” he declared. “A grander chapel would, indeed, be a step forward for the church, but only if the disease that has rotted its core, Chapel Abelle, is cleared from the land. Else that rot will continually spread, and the lies of Artolivan and his cohorts will undermine any of my efforts to bring the flock more in line to the edicts of King Yeslnik and the lairds who rule Honce. We cannot ignore Chapel Abelle!”
“And yet, friend, we would not again throw our men at those walls and against the gemstone barrage of a hundred brothers,” Milwellis reminded him no. He looked to his father, whose face was locked in a grimace, his teeth grinding.
“Look at your city nearly burned to the ground!” De Guilbe shot back.
“We will trap them in their hole and take all the land about them,” Prince Milwellis promised. “We’ll keep them in and keep them silenced.”
“We will bombard them until they fall upon their own knives out of madness and despair,” Laird Panlamaris added, growling out every word. “From the field and from the sea! We will fill their walls with thrown stones.”
Both De Guilbe and Milwellis thought the remark to be mostly bluster. To truly sack Chapel Abelle would require a vast army and armada at a price untenable to King Yeslnik’s designs, particularly now that vicious powries had entered the fight on the side of their enemies. Certainly the wizened and seasoned Laird Panlamaris understood the truth of his words.
Prince Milwellis stared at his father and saw no hint of doubt in his steeled gaze.
“Come along,” Laird Panlamaris told all around him, his voice still thick with simmering rage. “We’ve more powrie rats to catch.”
The rocking of the ship across the currents and waves of the great river seemed much more acute belowdecks. Yeslnik expected that he would find his wife with her head out of their private chamber’s porthole, “feeding the fish,” as Captain Juront of his flagship (newly named Grand Dame Olym in honor of his wife) often called it.
He was pleasantly surprised to find that Olym was not at the window and didn’t seem to be heading there anytime soon. Dressed in fine and revealing lace, her smile only adding to the
obvious invitation, the Queen of Honce leaped upon her husband as he entered, wrapping his slight frame in her ample arms. Smothering him with passionate kisses, Olym reached over to shut tight the cabin door.
“There are powrie boats in the river,” Yeslnik managed to say between kisses.
“We will destroy them,” Olym rattled back in a single breath as she drove him back with a ferocious kiss and pushed him onto the bed.
“We will make Palmaristown in the morning,” Yeslnik went on. “The city is in great disrepair. Hundreds were murdered by the dwarves.”
“You will destroy them,” Olym said without the slightest hesitation or reservation. She sat up and straddled him, pulling aside the folds of her garments. “You are the King of Honce. You are Yeslnik the Terrible, and all will tremble before you!”
She began clawing at his shirt, trying to undress him and herself furiously as the moment of passion swept her away.
“Yeslnik the Terrible,” the foppish young king whispered to himself during the frenzy. He liked that. And he liked more the wild passion that had come over his wife of late! He had slunk back to Delaval from the far west, from the gates of the city of his greatest foe, Laird Ethelbert, in near despair, the promises of a swift victory slipping away. Emotionally flailing about, unsure of his next move or even of any point of any possible next move, Yeslnik had found strength in the least expected place: the arms of a wife who had cooled to him greatly over the last couple of years and, indeed, who had taken an obvious fancy to the rogue known as the Highwayman, the very same dog Yeslnik blamed for the murder of his uncle, King Delaval.
Even as Olym began to almost savagely ride him, Yeslnik recalled that the chasm between him and his wife had widened after Yeslnik’s embarrassment on the road in Pryd a year before. His coach had been assailed by powries, and only the Highwayman’s intervention had saved the day. Of course, the rogue had then humiliated Yeslnik and stolen from him!
Olym had turned from Yeslnik then and toward the knave! Yeslnik had been blaming the Highwayman for his conjugal troubles, but now, finally, pinned beneath his nearly frantic wife, he understood the truth. Power and danger drove this woman’s hungry loins. She wanted—nay, demanded—a man who would crush the skull of an enemy under his boot with hardly a thought, a man who carried a sword more often than not bloodied with his enemy’s entrails.