Miles Cameron - The Dread Wyrm

Ser Gabriel’s smile was thin. “Then we should probably stop talking and get a move on. Corporals and above, outside in the yard. Then we move.”

His authority was so palpable that Ser Gavin almost saluted his brother.

Armoured and ready to ride, Sauce stood by her horse in her ancient arming jacket, the one she’d stopped wearing almost a year before. She’d been forced into it this morning because her new, beautiful scarlet arming coat with its finely worked grommets and fancy quilting had torn-two grommets ripped clean through by the lace that held her right arm harness. The old one was smelly and too tight and crisp with old sweat on old leather and linen so filthy it felt like felt.

She mused on the feeling. Considering, as she munched an apple still hale after a winter in the inn’s cellars, that she’d once been used to clothes this filthy; she’d once been quite a tough thing, and now she chafed, her shoulders unused to the rough fabric.

“I’m getting soft,” she said.

Mag was already up in her wagon seat, high above Sauce. “Don’t you believe it, my sweet,” Mag muttered. “What you are getting is older .”

Sauce winced.

Mag was sewing away at her nice arming coat, and Sauce, who was virtually blind to both ops and potentia was still able to feel the strength of the older woman’s working, the way a blindfolded prisoner might feel the kiss of the sun.

Around them, one by one, the knights and men-at-arms of the company came out of the common room, paid their tabs and tallies at a long table set in the yard for the purpose and went to get the last points tied on their harnesses, or to get a strap or buckle looked at.

Ser Dagon La Forêt paused by Sauce’s horse. He was shifting uncomfortably inside his new six-piece breastplate. He settled it on his hips and winced. He gave Sauce a rueful smile. “Must we ride in harness every day? Couldn’t we let some of the bruises heal?”

Sauce was pleased at some remove to know that she wasn’t the only one bitching.

Ser George sighed. “If there’s a safer place in all Nova Terra than the country around the Inn of Dorling,” he said.

Mag laughed and nodded her agreement. “Only a fool would come inside the Circle of the Wyrm,” she said.

The Wyrm of Ercch-sometimes known as Master Smythe-held a territory many leagues across, centred on the white-topped Mons Draconis. The drovers and the inn lived within the Wyrm’s claim, and prospered. Travellers were seldom disturbed, although a few faint-hearted souls claimed to have seen a flying creature as big as a ship and refused to pass that way again. Merchants, on the other hand, always travelled across the Wyrm’s dominion.

Sauce handed her apple core to her riding horse. “By all accounts, the Outwallers came right up the stream and hit the drovers-inside the circle,” she said.

Ser Dagon grimaced.

“Company’s never been ambushed,” said an archer, the master tailor, Hans Gropf. He was standing with his palfrey to hand and two small boys waxing his leather gear at his feet.

Ser Dagon nodded his acknowledgement.

“Company’s only four years old,” Wilful Murder muttered. He stood in the middle of the yard, watching everyone with his mad eyes. He was holding all the horses-Nell’s job, but he liked the chit and she’d run off to get her boy onto the right pony, or somesuch. “Lots o’ time to get bounced and massacred. When we get soft. Mark my words.”

Ser Dagon shook his head. “Well-I’ll just suffer in silence, then.”

“If’n we start any later, we might as well wait ’til tomorrow,” Wilful Murder muttered, loudly enough to wake the dead.

Sauce saw the captain, standing in the inn door. Bad Tom came out and embraced the innkeeper’s eldest, Sarah, his dead brother’s wife. It was quite an embrace. Some of the pages looked away, and some whooped.

Mag’s head turned, and Sauce saw her searching the baggage train-all apparently a chaos of horses and wagons and donkeys and wicker baskets. Looking for her daughter Sukey. Who had been Tom’s lover for a year and more, and now was publicly displaced.

The captain-Gabriel, as he now was called-materialized at her elbow, as the bastard had the habit of doing, with Ser Michael and Ser Bescanon at his heels. Just looking at him made her smile.

“Where’s the good count?” Ser Gabriel asked.

“We had a trifling disagreement,” Sauce said in a put-on version of the genteel accent. “He’s off grooming his vanity.”

Ser Gabriel’s face twitched but gave no more away. “Sauce, will you take your banda and cover the baggage train?”

Sauce nodded.

Ser Gavin walked up. Apples were the fashion of the day, and he tossed one to his brother. “Can we get moving?” he said impatiently.

Tom appeared. If he was concerned that he had just publicly humiliated the daughter of the most powerful sorceress in a hundred leagues, he gave no sign. “You called?” he asked.

The captain nodded. “You’re not my primus pilus, ” he said. “You’re the Drover. I can’t order you into my line of march.”

Tom laughed. “Nah-never think it. I’ll follow you. The fewkin’ sheep are so slow I’d just as soon butcher the lot.”

The captain nodded sharply, all business. “Right, then.” He looked around for Count Zac, found him, and beckoned him. When the short easterner rode up, the captain bowed, since, technically, he and Zac were peers. Zac returned the bow. He glared at Sauce.

Mag narrowed her eyes at Tom.

Ser Dagon smiled innocently at Ser Gavin. Ser Gavin, who was particularly eager to reach his lady love at Lissen Carak, shifted uncomfortably, as if by moving his hips he could get the column moving.

The captain sounded remarkably like himself. “Friends,” he said, “I begin to suspect that if I don’t offer you a constant diet of danger and drama, you go and manufacture it for yourselves.” He looked around. “Very well-Count Zac, if you will be pleased to lead the way. Ser Michael with me, then Gavin, and then Ser Dagon followed by Ser Bescanon. Baggage last, covered by Ser Alison. The drove brings up the rear. They’ll raise a lot of dust, and we don’t want to be the drag.”

“You are taking the precautions of war,” Count Zac said, somewhere between a protest and a query.

“Master Smythe made his views plain,” he said. “There’s a big force north of us, forming at the edge of the Adnacrags. We’re leaving the Empire and entering Alba. The sun has been warm long enough for every Outwaller in the world to have slipped south past Ticondaga. Right? We’re at war. When someone like Master Smythe gives you a warning, you’re a fool not to heed it.”

Their nods were uniform.

“Good. Let’s ride,” the captain said in his captain voice.

That voice relieved Sauce. The more he was Gabriel, the less she felt she knew him. She preferred the captain, with his steady arrogance and his adamantine self-assurance. Gabriel had entangling alliances that the captain didn’t have-a mother, a family, a set of alien obligations.

Sauce got her steel-clad leg over her riding saddle and waved at her squire, who had both her chargers. “Keep close,” she said. If the captain said war, it paid to listen.

The new trumpeter sounded a long call-the last summons. Ser Alison trotted her horse along the restless ranks of her ten lances, arrayed just outside the inn’s gates. Then she placed herself at their head and saluted the captain as he rode out with Ser Michael and the banner-three lacs d’amour in gold on black. Father Arnaud carried the banner today. The company was split into three, Sauce knew, and had new recruits in every lance, so that discipline had to be fiercer than usual and little things like saluting were suddenly important. The company’s gonfalonier, Ser Bescanon, was now the primus pilus , and few of the oldsters took well to his taking Bad Tom’s role. No new banner bearers had been appointed, and the company’s well-loved Saint Catherine was in Liviapolis with Ser Milus and the White Banda.