No, give him the swift ride every time.
He had enjoyed just such a ride this very evening and was on his way back to camp. Snow had been falling hard, and Jakon trudged slowly through it, climbing a steep bank to cut across the fields. As he approached a small wood he saw a horseman enter the trees. It was his commanding officer, Barin Macy, in his uniform of scarlet and gold, partially obscured by his fur-lined cloak. Jakon paused in the moonlight, idly wondering what the general would be doing at that time of night in such a desolate place. Under normal circumstances Jakon would not have gone a single step out of his way to find out. Curiosity was not one of his vices. On this occasion, however, the general was riding across the path Jakon was to take. That posed a problem in that he had slipped out of camp without a pass, and were he to be seen, he would have to endure a flogging.
He hunkered down beside a bush and waited for the rider to exit the trees.
Only he did not.
Jakon was growing cold and decided to see if he could creep past the small wood without being noticed. Keeping low, he angled his way down the slope to the edge of the trees. He could hear voices now and paused again.
“They’re northerners. There’ll be few tears shed,” he heard someone say.
“Even so, they are good fighting men. It’ll not be easy,” came the reply.
“I think you are wrong, Macy. They’ll be expecting nothing. Your men will get in close, and at the first volley the Eldacre men will panic and run. Keep your cavalry back to mop up stragglers. And bring back the head of the traitor Macon.”
“Dammit, Velroy, this is hard to believe. The Gray Ghost has been our finest cavalry leader. He’s turned several battles. Why would he defect to Luden Macks? It makes no sense.”
“It is not for us to question orders. Pick your men carefully and ride out late the day after tomorrow. Attack the town the following morning. Come in on all four sides. No one must escape.”
“What of the townsfolk?”
“The Redeemers will take over after the battle. They will question the citizens and deal with any deemed to have covenant sympathies.”
“By heaven, Velroy, this feels like a dirty business.”
“Do it well and you will be given command of Ferson’s lancers. Lord Winterbourne also offers a thousand pounds as a gesture of his continuing goodwill toward you and your family.”
“That is most generous.”
“Lord Winterbourne makes a very good friend, Macy. It is worth remembering.”
“A man can never have enough friends,” answered Macy. “Convey my thanks to the lord and tell him he can rely on me and my men. And now I must go. This cold is eating into my bones.”
Jakon ducked down. He heard the creak of leather as the officer mounted. Then he saw the rider swing his horse back toward the camp. Jakon waited until the other officer also had departed, then rose from his hiding place.
Jakon Gallowglass did not have many friends.
But two years earlier, a ball lodged in his thigh, he had waited to be killed by covenant scouts. He had been hunkered down on a stretch of open ground, two dead comrades alongside him. Dragging himself behind one of the bodies, he had lain there quietly as shots rained in on him. He could hear some of them thunking into the corpse and others kicking up dirt close by. Then he had heard a shot from behind him. With a curse he rolled to his back, scrabbling for his pistol. There were no covenanters there. It was a young, sandy-haired musketeer wearing the leaf-green tunic of the Eldacre regiment. He was kneeling on the ground some fifty paces behind Jakon’s position. Shots peppered the ground around him, but he coolly loaded and fired. Then a horseman on a huge gray gelding came thundering across the open ground. A young rider wearing a wide-brimmed gray hat and a long gray greatcoat leaped to the ground alongside Jakon, hauling him upright and lifting him into the saddle. Vaulting up behind him, the rider kicked the gelding into a run. A shot screamed by them, ripping the hat from the rider’s head.
The gelding took off and was soon out of range of the muskets. The rider drew up and helped Jakon to the ground. Other cavalrymen moved past them, galloping out toward the high ground and the covenant snipers. The officer knelt beside Jakon, examining the wound to his thigh. “Broke no bones and missed the major artery. You’re a lucky young fellow. I’ll put a tourniquet on it until we can get you to a surgeon.”
“Thank you, sir.”
The man laughed. “Don’t thank me. Thank that idiot rifleman of mine. He’s too good a man to lose. If I hadn’t pulled you out, he’d still be there in the line of fire. As it is, I’ve lost a damn good hat,” he said, pushing his hand through his long golden hair.
“You’re the Gray Ghost.”
“One of these days I must find out where that name originated,” said Gaise Macon. “Now, what can we use as a tourniquet?” The Gray Ghost had untied a white silk scarf from around his neck and, using Jakon’s pistol as a lever, had tightened it around the wounded thigh. “That should hold you, lad. I’ll leave you in the capable hands of young Jaekel here.” Patting Jakon on the shoulder, he returned to his mount and rode away toward the hills.
Jakon eased himself up into a sitting position. The rifleman sat beside him. “Thanks,” said Jakon.
“Don’t mention it,” said Taybard Jaekel, and they sat in silence for a while. Jaekel pulled a plug of smoked meat from his hip pouch. With a small knife he cut it in half and handed a section to Jakon. “Need to loosen that tourniquet,” said Jaekel. “Leg’ll rot if you don’t.”
“Did you hit any of them covenanters?” asked Jakon.
“Two.”
“You only fired twice.”
“That’s why there were only two.”
The leg was beginning to pain him, but Jakon still managed a smile. “I’m Jakon Gallowglass. I owe you one.”
“If I see you near a tavern, I’ll let you buy me a tankard of ale,” said Jaekel.
It was a good memory.
Now Jakon Gallowglass, cold and angry, stood at the edge of the woods, staring at the twinkling fires of the camp not two hundred paces distant. Given the choice, he would have preferred to have arrived five minutes after the officers had gone, to have heard nothing of their plans. That way, when he had heard of the death of the Gray Ghost and Taybard Jaekel, he could have experienced a little grief before resuming his life of fighting and whoring.
Gallowglass swore long and loudly, his anger rising.
He had spent many evenings in the company of Taybard Jaekel. He liked the man. He did not fill one’s head with questions. Added to which he had saved Jakon’s life twice now. “Damn and perdition,” he said.
If he headed off toward Shelding, he could be there by late morning. At which point he would have moved beyond desertion and become a traitor.
Jakon Gallowglass was not a fool. Even if he warned the Gray Ghost, it was unlikely that the man or his company would survive. If they did, they would become hunted men, hundreds of miles from their homeland.
“Best you look after yourself, Gallowglass,” he whispered.
Then he turned his back on the Shelding Road and returned to his barracks.
Marl Coper had always been ambitious. As a child living on the southern coast with his widowed father he had dreamed of a life of power and riches. In that order. His family had been poor though not poverty-stricken. His father was an army surgeon and had received a tract of land and a good house upon his retirement. After that he tended to the citizens of Lord Winterbourne’s southern estates. He would not have seen himself as poor. There was always food on the table, but clothes had to be mended, and shoes repaired. They owned only two horses, both old and swaybacked. Marl needed more than that.
He was a good student at the local school, reading endlessly, studying Varlish history. It seemed to Marl that the greatest attribute of history’s giants was ruthlessness combined with a single-minded goal. Closer examination, however, showed that all the great men had also learned the craft of politics. Th
ey had acquired mentors, men who could lift them, supply them with contacts, and ease their way through the treacherous alleyways of power.
Marl’s first mentor had been a canny old man who ran Lord Winterbourne’s southern manor. The thirteen-year-old Marl had run errands for him, seeking to please him at every turn. The old man had taken a shine to him and had begun inviting him to his home, where Marl had performed services of a more disquieting nature.
By the time Marl was nineteen he had learned all that he could from the old man. It had not occurred to him at that time to engineer his death and thus take over his role. Marl was still young and unsure of his skills. One day, however, fate intervened. They were crossing the ice-covered River Tael, when suddenly the surface cracked. The old man was spun from his feet, landing heavily, his legs slipping under the water. He scrabbled to hold on to the tilting ice. Marl threw himself flat and instinctively reached out for his mentor. In that moment he realized they were totally alone. Unseen. Slithering forward, he reached the old man, whose lips were already blue with cold. “Pull me out, boy. Be careful, though. If we both go under, we’re doomed.”
Marl reached out, pushed aside the old man’s questing hand, and thrust his head down under the ice. The old man fought hard, but the current dragged him below the ice.
Marl Coper made a fine steward. He reorganized the running of the manor and introduced a new breed of cattle, purchased from the north, which were more hardy and supplied more beef. He improved the horse herds, acquiring three fine stallions from across the sea. The manor house itself had fallen into disrepair, as Lord Winterbourne spent little time there, but Marl brought in carpenters and stonemasons to renovate the building. Despite the expenditure, the profits from the estate doubled in three years.
He worked tirelessly with one aim in mind: to impress the Winterbourne family. Initially that meant catching the eye of Sir Gayan Kay, Lord Winterbourne’s younger brother. Impressing him was not easy. The man was a knight of the Sacrifice, boorish and arrogant. He had a habit of speaking his mind regardless of the hurt or the offense caused. He maintained that this was the duty of a knight, to speak the truth. As always with such people, were people to speak their minds to him, he would fly into uncontrollable rages. Marl observed him quietly for more than a year. He noted that Gayan Kay professed a hatred of sycophants yet surrounded himself with the most appalling toadies.
Marl organized hunts for Gayan Kay and his friends, arranged the balls and gatherings he was so fond of, paid his overdue bills, and kept largely in the background until he had studied the man fully. He learned to read Gayan Kay. The man had an ego the size of a mountain, but he was no fool.
Except for his belief that he was a poet of distinction.
Often he would invite his friends to listen to his latest compositions. They were mostly maudlin and trite, but his friends would applaud wildly. Marl joined in and waited for his moment. One evening he listened as Gayan droned on and noticed that the knight was not offering the piece with his usual verve. Marl sensed that he was unsure of the poem, as well he might be. It was singularly awful. At the close all his friends told him how wonderful it was. Marl took a deep breath. “I do not think, sir,” he said, “that it is worthy of you.” A stunned silence followed. Gayan Kay’s face went pale. Marl pressed on smoothly. “Had any other poet offered such a piece, I would have praised him to the skies. It is wonderful and vibrant. But your work, sir, is normally touched with greatness.”
Gayan Kay stood silently for a moment. “Damn,” he said, “but I do love an honest man. He’s right. The piece is not worthy of me.”
Within a remarkably short space of time Marl became Gayan Kay’s closest friend.
As a result he was drawn into the close circle of men who gathered around the powerful Winter Kay. Their first meeting had been inauspicious. Winter Kay had nodded in his direction, then moved away. He was unlike his brother. Marl watched him closely. He did not suffer fools, and he was immune to flattery.
It was another year before he saw him again. Winter Kay arrived in the south, took a tour of the manor house, then summoned Marl to the newly refurbished rooms on the southern wing.
“You have done well, young Coper,” said Winter Kay. “It seems to have been fortunate for my family that old Welham vanished beneath the ice when he did.”
“I am happy to serve, my lord.”
“Tell me how he died.”
Marl looked into the man’s cold eyes. “The ice cracked as we crossed the river. He was swept away.”
“Could you have reached him?”
“I did reach him, my lord. He died, though.”
“My brother is impressed with you, sir. He is easily impressed. I am not.”
Marl said nothing as Winter Kay observed him. “From all I have heard you are a thinking man. From what I have seen you are an ambitious one. Ambition is a fine thing. How far, however, will you go to achieve your ends?”
“As far as is necessary, my lord.”
“Would you kill?”
“I would obey the orders of my lord, whatever they were,” he answered smoothly.
“I think you would. Find a replacement for yourself here. Train him for a month, then join me at Baracum.”
Marl had expected his first mission for Lord Winterbourne to be tough, but the nature of it caused his first serious doubts. Winter Kay had a mistress who had given birth to a son. She wanted him to marry her and threatened to take the matter of her son’s birthright to the royal court. Marl’s orders were simple: Kill the woman and the brat and dispose of the bodies. Marl had stood outside the woman’s home in the midnight darkness, thinking back to his youth and his father’s teachings. Killing old Welham had been a spontaneous act. This was calculated murder. In the end Marl reasoned that if he did not do it, someone else would. And that someone else would reap the rewards. Therefore, if the woman was effectively dead anyway, why should he not benefit from it? He strangled her and the child and dragged the bodies down into the front room, which he doused in lantern oil.
He could still see the flames as he topped the farthest rise.
Now, as he rode with his two retainers into the grounds of the Moidart’s winter manor, he was what he had always desired to be: a man of power and influence. Winter Kay ruled the Redeemers and virtually the land. The king was a straw in the wind, nothing more than a human banner to be waved when necessary.
One day, perhaps soon, Marl would find a way to supplant even the dread Lord Winterbourne. But first there was the problem of the Moidart.
Few among the ruling classes had not heard of the Earl of the North. He had survived numerous assassination attempts during his thirty-year reign. He had been shot, stabbed, and almost burned to death when the old manor house had been set ablaze. Marl drew rein on his horse and looked beyond the imposing manor to the blackened timbers and collapsed stones of the old house some distance away within the trees. No attempt seemed to have been made to remove the ruins.
A middle-aged officer with a heavy jaw and tired eyes stepped from the manor house and strode down to meet the riders. He exchanged a few words with the two sentries who had accompanied the Redeemers from the gates, then turned toward Marl.
“Good afternoon, gentlemen. I am Captain Galliott, and I welcome you to the winter manor. I shall show you to your rooms, but first, as is the custom in the north, would you please hand over your weapons to the guards. No knives, swords, or pistols are allowed in the lord’s presence.”
“By heaven, sir,” said Marl, who had been forewarned of this rule, “we are Redeemers and knights of the Sacrifice. It would be unseemly to surrender our weapons.”
“Indeed it would, sir,” Galliott said smoothly, “but do not consider it a surrender. You are merely offering a mark of respect to the Moidart. The weapons will be well looked after and offered to you upon your departure.”
“Very well,” said Marl with a sidelong glance at the slender figure of Kurol Ryder. He carried two knives within h
is riding boots, long, sharp disemboweling blades. They would suffice.
The three Redeemers dismounted, removed their sword and knife belts, and left their pistols in the scabbards on the pommels of their saddles.
Galliott led them up the steps to the main doors and then onto the first-floor gallery. There each of the men was assigned a room. Marl’s was the largest. It was comfortably furnished with a fine bed fashioned from pine with an ornate headboard. There was a writing desk set by the window, and in the hearth a fire was glowing.
“I shall have a servant bring you some refreshments, Sir Marl,” said Galliott.
“Just a little water, Captain. I need to pray and continue my fast until this evening.”
“Of course, sir. The Moidart is busy at present, but I will send a servant when he is free.”
“Most kind, Captain.”
As Galliott withdrew, Marl removed his black riding cloak and draped it over a chair. Then he lay down on the bed and closed his eyes. Despite the training Winter Kay had offered him and the added energy supplied by the orb, Marl had never found it easy to break free of the confines of his body. It was always an effort involving intense concentration and not a little discomfort. Searing head pain always followed. However, he managed it, and his spirit floated above the bed. For a moment he gazed down on his form, then slowly drifted through the door and out onto the gallery. Galliott was standing at the bottom of the stairs talking to a soldier. Marl floated closer.
“They give me the creeps, Captain, and I don’t mind admitting it,” said the man. “All dressed in black and pretending to be holy. I’ve heard stories about them bastards. Freeze your blood, it would.”
“You shouldn’t listen to stories, Packard. They are knights of the Sacrifice, and they are fighting a war on behalf of the king. More than that, though, they are guests of the Moidart and will be treated with the utmost respect.”