Miles Cameron - The Dread Wyrm

“I thought you were dead,” Ser Alcaeus said.

Mark shrugged. “I thought so, too. I fell from the wall.” He shrugged. “I woke up hungry and with two broken legs.” He shrugged again. “Nothing found me to eat me, I guess.” He barked an uncomfortable laugh. “Now I guard the same stretch of wall.”

They looked out over the north and west together.

To the north, the Wild stretched on like a dark carpet, the great trees in the middle distance fading into the tall mountains of the Adnacrags and their white-clad peaks. A single road, wide enough for one wagon, wound out of the wooded hills at the edge of sight along the stable banks of the Canata river that came, cold and black, out of the mountains and descended into the valley through abandoned farmsteads and newly colonized steads and a handful of tilled fields from families that had survived the siege and planted last season.

There was a convoy on the road, glittering with spear points. It was still a good league from the walls, and yet it seemed to flare with colour.

To the south-west, the Royal Road ran up from the great ford at Southford and up to the south gate of Albinkirk, and then west out the west gate and on the north bank of the Cohocton. The north road-often a pair of wagon ruts-joined the Royal Road almost a half a league out from Albinkirk’s walls, where the flooded waters of the Canata ran south from the mountains and poured under the three stone arches of the ancient bridge, which the prosaic inhabitants called Troy, a hamlet of nine houses and a fortified tower.

Out on the Royal Road beyond Troy, a party of three people on horses-or perhaps donkeys-ambled in the clear spring air. The downpour had swept the sky clear and the wind had driven the clouds south. The heavy downpour had flooded the streams, but it had stripped the last ice out of the shaded corners of the fields.

“They must be damp,” Alcaeus said. He turned to young Mark, who shrugged.

“Sometimes I think of killing myself,” Mark said suddenly. His voice was flat.

Alcaeus looked at him carefully. He had things to do, and plots to weave. But this was a man who’d faced the wave of monsters with him.

So Alcaeus leaned casually back against the cold merlons of the curtain wall and tried to look nonchalant. “Why?” he asked quietly.

The young man looked out over the fields. “It’s all I think about.” He shrugged. “There’s no time before it. The attack. It is just… dark.”

Alcaeus nodded. “You think that perhaps this is not the best job for you?” he asked. “The same piece of wall?”

“They all died,” Mark said. “Everyone I knew. Everyone but me.” He turned and looked out over the fields. “I think that I died, too. Sometimes that’s how I make sense of it. I’m dead, and that’s why-” His voice had begun to rise in pitch.

Alcaeus had seen all the signs before.

“That’s why you should be dead, too, but you aren’t-” Young Mark stepped in close and went for the baselard at his waist, but Alcaeus, who had seen men broken by war and terror since he was a child, stripped the weapon from him and put the man down on the catwalk as gently as he could.

“Guard!” he called a few times.

The two roads met by the inn at Troy. The inn was small, nothing like the fortified edifice at Dorling, but the King’s Arms at Troy was a pleasant building with six mullioned windows newly replaced by the innkeeper, a tall, thin man whose Etruscan parentage showed in his straight black hair and aquiline nose. Sheer luck had preserved his roof and his floors from the forces of the Wild; he’d helped hold the walls of Albinkirk and done his best to fight fires. He’d poured his fortune into restoring his inn, preparing for what he hoped might be better times, and he’d watched with sickened apprehension as more and more reports came into his common room of raids on the frontier, of monsters and death.

The morning rain had been so heavy on the frozen ground that his lower basement had flooded, and he was down there, bailing with a bucket with all four of his scullery maids and both of his grooms, when his wife’s shrill voice summoned him to the common room. He pounded up the steps with the grooms at his heels and he took the long Etruscan halberd off its pegs behind the great fireplace as he passed and turned into the great low common room that was the centre of his inn-and his village.

There were neither irks nor boglins in the courtyard. Instead, framed in the doorway was a knight in the richest armour Giancarlo Grimaldo had ever seen. He bowed.

The young knight returned his bow. “You are the keeper?” the young man asked.

“My lord, I have that honour,” Giancarlo said, setting his halberd into the angle that the mantelpiece made with the wall.

“I am Ser Aneas Muriens, and my mother, the Green Lady of the North, wishes to take her midday meal in your establishment.” He inclined his head slightly. “We are wet, and my mother is chilled.”

“I will make up the fire and serve you only the best.” The yard outside was filled with men-at-arms and servants, and they would all need to be fed. It was two months’ business in a single convoy, and all he had to do was survive it.

He turned to Nob, his best groom. “Run along to Master Jean’s and ask for both his daughters. Quick as you can.”

His wife leaned forward and hissed, “And send Jean’s son Robbie to Lady Helewise at the manor house and see if you can get her girl and Jenny to serve the duchess. Fetch Lady Helewise herself if she can come.”

Nob was out the kitchen and running in heartbeats, spraying new mud as he went.

But the great Duchess of Westwall was not coming in. She was out in the stone-flagged street-stone flagged only to the limits of the village, and with the sewer running down the middle in stone-slabbed confines cleaned by an old stream-sitting on a magnificent, high-blooded eastern riding horse. Chatting with a nun on a donkey.

“Let her through!” Ghause snapped at her men-at-arms. Her tone of command gave way to the dulcet accents of seduction as she leaned down. “My gossip, the saintly Amicia. Give an old woman your blessing, my sweet.”

Amicia had had several minutes to recognize the banner, and the men-at-arms. She knew Ghause’s youngest son and her captain. She still found the impact of the woman enough to rob her of words.

Ghause Muriens, mother of the Red Knight and of Ser Gavin, wife of the Earl of Westwall, was not a tall woman, although few people remembered her as small. She was, in fact, just five feet tall in her stockings; though not so small when booted and spurred atop a tall horse. Her honey-blond hair was as unmarked by time as her face or the skin of her neck or the tops of her breasts, and she wore the very latest in Etruscan fashion, a long pointed hat with a great spray of ostrich plumes held in an heraldic brooch, a perfectly dry cloak in her own colours of green and sable, lined entirely in sable so black it looked hermetical and trimmed in royal ermine to which she had every right as the king’s sister. She wore gloves of dark green and two matching emerald rings in red gold, and her waist was clasped with a heavy knight’s belt of cockle shells in the matching gold, and a similar chain-the shells full size-lay over her shoulders and breasts under her cloak. Her spurs were gold like a knight’s, and she wore a great sword of war-an uncommon accoutrement for a woman even in Alba-the scabbard green and all its fittings gold.

Just behind her in the crowded street was a great bird, too big to be a hawk and possibly large even for an eagle, on a perch and jessed and belled and hooded. It was huge. The size of a big dog. It gave a mad screech that made horses shy.

The duchess glanced at it and turned back. She wore the value of the whole village on her back. The people came to their doors or lined the street to see her, and she waved politely and smiled.