Miles Cameron - The Fell Sword

Behind them the whole camp was being struck. Rows of tents went down like pins on a bowling green. Wagons were loading at the head of every street. The pages were currying horses or leading them to the men-at-arms.

Men were pissing on fires.

The Captain watched it all, munching an apple, and he nodded at the thought. Pissing on fires.

Nell, his new page, appeared with his ugly warhorse. He didn’t have a name for the brute – after riding one horse for four years, he was now killing a horse in every fight.

At a cost of a hundred florins a horse.

Still, he gave his apple core to the ugly brute, and the horse took it with more delicacy than his ill-bred head showed.

Nell stood nervously. Toby tried to motion her away – she was thirteen and no one knew why she’d been made the Captain’s page except for Toby, who knew that horses loved her.

The Red Knight’s gaze crossed hers. He raised an eyebrow. ‘Yes?’ he asked.

She flinched. ‘Which – I don’t know what to do.’

The Red Knight glanced at Toby and walked away, towards a small fire left for him by a servant.

‘You don’t talk to him,’ Toby hissed. ‘Christ almighty, girl! He’ll turn you into something unnatural. Talk to me. Never to him.’

Mag handed him a cup of hippocras.

‘Your usual cheerful self?’ she asked.

He looked back at where Toby was gesticulating at Nell. ‘I don’t know why I’m saddled with the child care,’ he said. Then he shrugged. ‘Never mind me, Mag. Are we ready to march?’

The seamstress shrugged. ‘Do I look like an officer? My wagon is packed, of that much I can assure you.’ She paused. ‘Except, of course, my tent and my daughter.’

The Red Knight smiled and drank her hippocras – the best in camp.

Bad Tom – six feet and some inches of unruly muscle and long black hair – appeared from the third to last tent still standing in the camp. In the doorway, Mag’s daughter Sukey could be seen, as well as one attractive bare shoulder. Bad Tom was fully armed, cap-à-pied, and he gleamed in the new sun.

‘I’m going to miss all yon,’ he said. ‘If I go to be a drover.’

Mag scowled at her daughter. ‘If you are not quicker, my girl, the Captain will leave you behind!’

The Red Knight raised an eyebrow at his first lance. ‘Are we ready to march?’ he asked.

Bad Tom didn’t even look around. ‘Finish your wine, Captain. You said “matins” and it ain’t rung yet.’

Seeing the two of them together seemed to act as a magnet. Ser Michael came first, fully armed. Ser Gavin was next, from the opposite direction, his great tawny warhorse held in his fist by the reins, and Ser Alison – Sauce – cantered up, already mounted.

‘I don’t even have to sound officer’s call. Where’s Gelfred?’ the Captain asked.

The forester was sent for. Nell could be seen running from wagon to wagon as if her life depended on it. She was very fast.

The Morean, Ser Alcaeus, came up with a hawk on his wrist and two small birds dangling from his belt, and he and Gavin began a quiet conversation about the bird.

The last three tents came down. The occupants of the final one, who had slept through every morning call and several volleys of orders, had cold water poured on them and were kicked. The Captain’s new trumpeter, who fancied himself a gentleman, was one of them.

Cully, an archer, punched the young gentleman in the head.

There was cheering.

Gelfred came up on a pretty mare.

Sauce reached out and patted the horse on the head and then blew into its mouth. ‘Sweet thing,’ she said. ‘What a pretty horse!’

Gelfred beamed at her.

The Red Knight drained his cup and tossed it to Sukey, who caught it.

‘Everyone ready?’ he asked.

‘What’s the plan?’ asked Sauce.

The new trumpeter – soaked to the skin and with a swelling on the side of his head – came stumbling along the line of fires.

The Captain scratched under his beard. ‘Gelfred is to ride for Liviapolis and find us a nice, defensible camp about a day’s ride away. Two days’ ride at most.’

They all nodded. Two days before, they had received word that the Emperor – their prospective employer – was missing. Liviapolis was his centre of power, one of the three largest cities in the world as well as being the home of the Patriarchate, one of the centres of the faith, and of the Academy, the very epicentre of the study of hermeticism.

Ser Alcaeus nodded. ‘And then we attempt to learn what, exactly, has happened.’

Tom grunted. ‘Sounds dull. Why the fucking Morea, anyway?’

The Red Knight looked over the hills to the east. ‘Riches. Fame. Worldly power.’

‘How are we going to deal with Middleburg?’ Tom asked. The fortress city of Middleburg – the third largest in the Morea, after Liviapolis, widely known as ‘The City’, and Lonika, the capital of the north – was viewed as impregnable and sat astride their line of march east from the Inn of Dorling.

The Captain snorted. ‘Kilkis, the locals call it. Only Alban merchants call it Middleburg.’ He ate the last bite of his sausage. ‘Friends have arranged our passage.’ His eyes met Tom’s. ‘If we don’t make trouble, the garrison there will let us pass.’

Gelfred winced. ‘And fodder?’ he asked.

‘We’re to meet with a party. It’s dealt with, I tell you.’ The Captain was impatient.’

Ser Gavin sighed. ‘Easier getting in than getting out, if something goes wrong.’

The Captain glared at his brother. ‘Your hesitation is noted.’

Gavin rolled his eyes. ‘I only mean-’

Ser Alison – Sauce – put her hand on Gavin’s shoulder and made him flinch. It was the shoulder that was now covered in fine green scales. Such things didn’t trouble Sauce. ‘When he’s like this, there’s no dissuading him,’ she said.

‘What about Wyverns?’ asked Wilful Murder.

Gelfred laughed. ‘Not a single one,’ he said. ‘If we fight, we’ll face nothing but the hand of man.’

The archers all looked at each other. There was silence.

‘Any other comments?’ the Captain asked in a voice that should have stifled any such.

‘I hear there’s a princess,’ said Sauce.

The Captain smiled crookedly. ‘That’s what I hear, too,’ he drawled. ‘Let’s ride.’

Harndon – The Royal Court

The King sat comfortably in a great black oak chair, with a pair of wolf-hounds at his dangling fingertips. Most of his attention was on two apprentices who were laying pieces of armour out on a heavy table in the corner of the great receiving room, under the Wyvern head he’d mounted there with his own name under it.

The King was tall, broad and blond, with a pointed beard and a thick moustache. He carried the weight of muscle required to fight in heavy harness, and his skin-tight scarlet jupon strained every time he leaned down to scratch Emma, his favourite wolfhound.

‘If you’d taken the wolf, you little bastard, there’d be more meat for you, too,’ he said to Loyal, his youngest male hound. He gave the dog a mock-cuff, and the young male looked at him with the kind of worship that dogs reserve for their masters.

The Master of the Staple cleared his throat politely.

The King looked up, and his eyes slid right off his Master of the Staple and went to the armour.

The Queen put her hand on the King’s arm and breathed in. To say the Queen was beautiful would be to do her an injustice. She was beyond mere beauty. Her skin had a texture that made men want to touch it to see if it was real; the tops of her breasts, which showed over her tight-laced kirtle, shone as if they had been oiled, and drew the attention of every man in the room each time she moved despite the careful arrangement of her gown and her decorous carriage. Her red-brown hair was glorious in sunlight, and perhaps she had taken the time to site her chair in the best of the late afternoon sun – her salmon-pink overgown so perfectly complemented her hair that even men might have noticed it, if only they hadn’t had so much else to admire.