David Farland - Brotherhood of the Wolf

“He curses me soundly—we were never friends, you know—and orders me to come rescue him. Well, I’m two years his elder, and at fifteen I figured I’d rather be damned than ordered about by a boy who’d been twelve two weeks before. Keeping a goodly distance from the tree, I shout, ‘Did you call me a son of a whore?’

“And your son cries, ‘I did!’

“Well, it didn’t matter that he spoke the truth,” Baron Poll continued. “I was not about to be so cursed by a thirteen-year-old. So I shouted up at him, ‘Call me “sirrah”, or you can save yourself!’ ”

Baron Poll fell silent, became thoughtful.

“What happened then?” Roland asked.

“Your son’s face became dark with rage. We’d never been friends, as I said, but I never had guessed how much he hated me. You see, I’d always ridden him mercilessly when he was a child, damning him for a bastard, and I think he saw through me. He knew I was of low parentage, so he thought I should treat him better than the other boys did not worse. So I deserved his hatred, I guess, but I never knew a boy could hate so much. He said, ‘When you’re dead, if you die with honor, then I’ll call you ‘sirrah! But not a moment before!’

“Then he drew his knife,” Baron Poll added more soberly, “and climbed farther up that tree and started laughing and going at the bears himself.”

“With nothing but a knife?”

“Aye,” Baron Poll said. “He had endowments of brawn and stamina in his favor, but he was still not much more than a boy in stature. The bears had climbed out onto some big limbs, and I don’t know a man in his right mind who would have fought them thus. But your boy went after them, maybe just to prove to me that he could do it.

“I think he would have killed them, too. But the bears saw him coming and jumped first. So when the boar saw bears dropping like plums from the tree, he decided to give up on your son and go hunt acorns, instead....” Baron Poll chuckled at the memory.

“That was when I first realized that young Squire Borenson would someday become captain of the King’s Guard,” Baron Poll continued. “Either that or he’d get himself killed. Maybe both”

“Both?” Roland studied Baron Poll’s face now. The man was enormous—three hundred pounds of fat, all covered with hair as dark as night. But his expression was thoughtful.

“Men who become captain of the King’s Guard seldom keep the post long. You know that King Orden’s family was attacked by assassins three times in the past eight years?”

Three attacks in eight years seemed like a lot. In recent history, Roland had never heard of anything like it. When he’d given his endowment of metabolism into the King’s service, he’d never quite imagined that he would waken to such dark times—his own king dead, the whole kingdom of Mystarria under attack from invaders.

“I hadn’t known,” Roland said. Having been asleep for twenty years, he hadn’t really had a chance to catch up on recent history. He wondered if Orden had had any local troubles—neighbors who might have wanted him dead. “Who sent the assassins?”

“Raj Ahten, of course,” Baron Poll said. “We could never prove it, but we’ve always suspected him.”

“You should have sent an assassin down to waylay him,” Roland replied, seething with righteous indignation.

“We did—dozens of them. Among all the kingdoms of Rofehavan, we’ve sent hundreds, maybe even thousands. We’ve tried to kill him and his heirs, wipe out his Dedicates and his allies. And the Knights Equitable spent their own forces, as well. Damn it, this is no little border skirmish we’re engaged in.”

It was astonishing that one Wolf Lord could repel so many attacks and still be as powerful as Raj Ahten was rumored to be.

Yet evidence of it was everywhere. All this afternoon, as Roland and Poll had been riding, they’d met peasants fleeing from the north. Men and women pulling carts loaded with bundles of clothes, some scraps of food, and the few valuable possessions they had to their name. They also saw signs of recent movements of armies—Mystarria’s warriors heading north into battle.

Roland fell silent.

“Uh-oh,” Baron Poll muttered. “What do we have here?”

They rounded a bend and looked down a rise. On the road ahead, a horse was down. Broken leg by the looks of it. The beast had its head up, looking around weakly, and its rider was trapped half underneath it. The man was dressed in the garb of a king’s messenger—a leather helm and green cloak, a midnight-blue vest with the image of the green knight on its chest.

The messenger had passed them not an hour before, shouting for them to get out of his way. Now the fellow wasn’t moving.

Roland and Baron Poll raced forward. The low spot in the road was muddy from rains two days past—not so muddy that you’d notice it right off, but Roland could see where the horse had slid as it rounded the bend, skidding a hundred yards. After skidding, the horse had apparently twisted its leg and gone over. Riding a force horse at full speed—one with three endowments of metabolism could be dangerous. A horse that tried rounding a bend at sixty miles an hour could misplace a foot, charge full speed into a tree.

The messenger obviously was dead. The man’s head rested at an unsightly angle, his eyes were glazed. Flies danced in the air around his tongue.

Roland hopped down, grabbed the fellow’s message case from within his tunic, a long round scroll pouch made of green lacquered leather. The injured horse looked up at Roland, uttered a cry of pain. Roland had seldom heard that sound from a horse.

“Show the beast some mercy,” Baron Poll said.

Roland took out his short sword, and when the horse looked away, he gave it a killing stroke.

Roland opened the message case, pulled out the scroll, and studied it for half a second. He did not know how to read or write more than a few words, but he thought he might recognize the wax seal. He didn’t.

“Well, open it up,” Baron Poll said. “At the very least, we must find out where it should go.”

Roland broke the wax seal, opened the scroll, found a hastily penned missive. He recognized some of the words: “the,”

“a,”

“and.” But Roland couldn’t figure out the larger words no matter how hard he squinted.

“Well, out with it, damn you!” Poll cried.

Roland gritted his teeth. He wasn’t a stupid man, but he wasn’t educated, either. He hurled the message at Baron Poll. “I can’t read.”

“Oh.” Baron Poll apologized, taking the scroll. He appeared to read it all in a glance.

“By the Powers!” he shouted. “Keep Haberd was overwhelmed at dawn by reavers—thousands of them: They sent news to Carris!”

“I doubt that Duke Paladane will rejoice to hear more bad news,” Roland said.

Baron Poll bit his lower lip, thinking. He looked south, then north, obviously worried about which way to go. “Paladane is the King’s great-uncle,” he said, as if Roland might have forgotten over the past twenty years. “He rules now as regent in the King’s stead. But if he’s put under siege at Carris, as seems likely, there will be damned little that he can do about the reavers. Someone should take this news back south to the Courts of Tide, to the counselors there, and to the King.”

“Surely more than one rider was sent,” Roland said.

“We can hope,” Baron Poll said.

Roland made to mount his horse, but Baron Poll cleared his throat loudly, nodded toward the dead messenger. “Best grab that man’s purse. No need to let it go to the scavengers.”

Roland felt queasy robbing a dead man, but he knew that Baron Poll was right. If they didn’t get the fellow’s purse, the next man on the road would. Besides, he told himself, if he was going to deliver the King’s message, he ought to get a messenger’s pay.