He knew then the reason. The thoughts, the image, were a blessing, a moment of peace in a roiling storm. He tried to say her name, Milkeila, but he could not.
The sounds receded, the light disappeared in a blink, taking her beautiful form with it, and Cormack drowned in a cold and empty darkness.
FOUR
The Crutch
Bransen rolled off Cadayle and onto his back. He threw his arm up over his face and even miscalculated that action, thumping himself hard on the forehead. Tears of frustration welled in his eyes, and with much trembling and shaking, he managed to guide his arm down to cover them. Cadayle came up to her side on one elbow to look over him.
Down below, Bransen’s foot twitched and shot out to the side, smacking against the front support of their tent, nearly caving in the entrance. In ultimate frustration, the man managed to clasp the soul stone which lay at his side.
Cadayle gently stroked her husband’s bare chest and whispered soft assurances to him.
Bransen didn’t move his arm, didn’t look at her.
“I love you,” Cadayle said to him.
Despite his stubborn pride, Bransen reached over and clasped the soul stone that he had placed at his side. “You would have to, to suffer my … my clumsiness.”
Cadayle laughed, but bit the chuckle off short, realizing that it wasn’t being taken in the manner in which she was offering it. “We knew that it would take time,” she said.
“It will take forever!” Bransen retorted. “And I do not improve! I dared believe that by now I would be free of the soul stone. I dared hope …”
“It takes time,” Cadayle interrupted. “I remember the Stork, who could hardly walk. You can walk now without the stone tied to your head. You have improved.”
“Old news,” Bransen replied, and he finally did lower his arm so that he could look at his wonderful and understanding wife. “My improvements were dramatic and I dared to hold hope. But they have stopped now. Without the stone I am a clumsy oaf!”
“No!”
“Without the stone I cannot even make love to my wife! I am no man!”
Cadayle pulled away from him and sat up, shaking her head. As Bransen rambled on she began to laugh.
“What?” he asked at length, growing very irritated.
“I am unused to the Highwayman so full of self-pity,” she said.
Bransen stammered and could not even give voice to his anger.
“You have brought down a laird and robbed the prince of Delaval—twice!” Cadayle said. “You are a hero of the folk—”
“Who cannot make love to my wife!”
Cadayle kissed him. “You make love to me all the time.”
“With a gemstone bound to my forehead. Without it I am too clumsy.”
“Then be glad that you have it!”
Bransen looked at her blankly. “I want—”
“And you will find it,” she cut him off. “In time. But if you do not, then so be it. Be glad that we have the soul stone. Indeed, I am.” She frowned. “But even if we didn’t have it, even if you could not make love to me with any grace, do you believe that it would affect the way I feel about you? Do you think it would diminish my love and adoration for you?”
Bransen stared at her.
“If I could not make love to you,” she challenged him, “would you throw me from your life to find a ‘whole’ woman?”
Bransen’s stammer was powered by more than his physical infirmities.
“Of course you would not,” Cadayle pronounced firmly. “If I believed you could, I would never have agreed to marry you.”
Cadayle’s expression softened. “I love you, Bransen,” she said, her small hand stroking his chest. “The physical act of making love is sweet to me with or without the gemstone upon your head. There is no more to be said, and no more of your self-pity, if you please. I cannot suffer it from my beloved, who could kill a dragon protecting me. You have stepped yourself so far above the common man that self-pity from you is worse than irony. It is foolhardy and laughably ridiculous. You are the Highwayman. You are the best man I have ever known. A better does not exist. You are my husband, and every day I awaken and thank God and the Ancient Ones that Bransen Garibond found his way into my life.”
Bransen tried to answer, tried to respond that it was he who should fall to his knees in thanks, but Cadayle silenced him by putting her finger over his lips, then bringing her own lips in to brush his softly. She moved atop him, then, straddling him and kissing him all over his face, whispering assurances all the while.
Bransen knew that he was the fortunate one here, but he let it go and lost himself in the softness and beauty of his beloved Cadayle.
She’s not to like this,” the scraggly-faced old man said through his two remaining teeth.
Dawson McKeege shot the hunched old grump an incredulous look. “They’re all dead,” he said, sweeping his arms out to the smoking ruins that had been a thriving town only a few days before, and raising his voice so that the others of the troupe could hear him well— before the arrival of Dame Gwydre, who was said to be only a few hundred yards away. “How could anyone like this, old fool? Men and women and children of Vanguard, our brethren, our fellows, slaughtered before us by the monstrous plague.”
“Goblins and them wretched blue trolls!” someone shouted from the side.
“Aye, and with Alpinadoran backing, not to doubt!” a third chimed in.
Dawson could only nod. The war had grown all about the northern frontier of Vanguard, and now, if this was any indication, it had snuck in around the edges. For this burned and broken town, Tethmawle by name, sat closer to the Gulf of Corona than to the battlefields in the north.
The sound of approaching horses ended all the chatter, and the fifteen men of the expedition turned as one to regard the procession galloping down the road. The elite guards of Castle Pellinor led the way and took up the rear, sandwiching a trio of monks dressed in their brown robes, a pair of advisors lightly armored and armed, and two women who both seemed at ease on their respective mounts, riding hard and not in the sidesaddle manner, which had become fashionable among the courtesans of the holdings south of the Gulf of Corona. One of those women, the taller of the two, with hair going silver, but her shoulders still tall and straight, held the attention of the onlookers most of all.
“She should not be out of the castle,” Dawson muttered under his breath, and he rubbed his weary eyes and tried to be at ease. He could not, though, and he found himself glancing around nervously, as if expecting a host of goblins and trolls and other monstrosities to swarm down from the tree line and score the ultimate kill in this wretched war.
The procession rambled up to the edge of the town, the soldiers fanning out into defensive positions while the seven dignitaries trotted up to Dawson and the others.
“Milady Gwydre,” Dawson said with a bow to his ruler, his friend.
Gwydre rolled her leg easily over her mount and dropped to the ground, handing the reins to one of the nearby men without a thought. She spent a moment surveying the area, the smoking ruins, the charred bodies and the bloated and stinking corpses of small gray-green goblins and blue-green trolls littered all about the area.
“They fought well,” the old coot near Dawson dared to remark.
Gwydre shot him a glare. “They are all dead?”
“We’ve found none alive,” Dawson confirmed.
“Then it was no small force that came against them,” said Gwydre. “How? How was such a sizable group able to sneak so far south?”
“Samhaist magic,” one of the monks whispered from behind, and all three of the brown-robed brothers launched into quiet prayers to their Blessed Abelle.
Gwydre seemed more annoyed than impressed, and Dawson agreed with her completely.
“It is a wild land, milady,” Dawson said. “We are not populous. Our roads are hardly guarded, and even if they were, a short trek through a forest would bypass any sentries.”
 
; “And their determination is aggravating,” replied Gwydre. She walked past Dawson and motioned for him to follow, then held up her own advisors, even the Lady Darlia, her dearest friend, so that she and Dawson could move off alone.
As always, Dawson was impressed by how in control and command Dame Gwydre remained. She carried an aura of competence around her, one that had initially surprised many of Castle Pellinor’s court. For Gwydre had been just a young girl that quarter of a century before when her father, Laird Gendron, already a widower, had been killed unexpectedly in a fall from his horse while hunting. Gendron, revered by the folk of this northern wilderness known as Vanguard, had held the scattered and disparate communities together with a “warm fist,” as the saying had gone—a saying applied to Gendron, to his father before him, and to his great uncle who had been Laird of Pellinor before that.
“I cannot tolerate this,” Gwydre said, her lips tight, her voice strained. “Chapel Pellinor’s fall has created unrest, and the folk will be all the more unnerved when news of Tethmawle’s fate spreads through forest trails.”
“You fear they will question the fortitude of their dame?” Dawson asked, and Gwydre sucked in her breath and snapped an angry glare at him. But it did not hold, of course, for Dawson McKeege was perhaps the only person in all of Vanguard who could have spoken to Gwydre with that necessary candor.
“Do you remember when Laird Gendron died?” Gwydre asked somberly.
“I was with you when we received the news.”
Gwydre nodded.
“Aye,” said Dawson, taking the cue. “And so began the whispers, the laments of ‘why hadn’t the laird sired a son?‘”
“The lower their voices, the louder they sounded,” Gwydre assured him. “Those voices were part of the reason I so abruptly agreed to marry Peiter.”
The admission didn’t startle Dawson. “He was my friend as he was your husband. I suspect that he, too, heard those whispers, and couldn’t suffer to see his beloved Gwydre so pained.”
“I was a young woman, barely more than a girl,” Gwydre admitted. “And never in my life had I done anything that would have, or should have, inspired their confidence. Even those years later when Peiter died, their doubts about me rightfully lingered.”
“That was fifteen years ago, milady,” Dawson reminded her. “And before your thirtieth birthday. Do you fear that they still doubt you?”
“We are in a desperate war.”
“It is Vanguard! We are always at one war or another. The woods are full of goblins, the coast crawling with powries, the northland thick with trolls, and never in my life have I met a more disagreeable bunch than those Alpinadoran barbarians.”
“This is different, Dawson,” Gwydre said. Her tone quieted the man more than her words. For there lay a truth there that neither could deny. Dame Gwydre had taken a lover, an Abellican brother, and in the two years of her tryst, that particular Church’s stature had grown considerably throughout her holding and by extension, throughout Vanguard—much to the dismay and open anger of the dangerous and powerful Samhaists.
“You fell in love,” Dawson said to her.
“Foolishly. I placed my heart above my responsibilities, and all the land suffers for it.”
“Those same Churches were going to fight, with or without your actions,” Dawson argued. “As they fight a proxy war through the lairds in the South, where, it is said, three hundred men die every day.”
Dame Gwydre nodded and couldn’t deny the truth of Dawson’s claims, for indeed, this same battle for religious supremacy over the folk of Honce was playing out throughout the Holdings of Honce Proper. There, the fight between Abellican and Samhaist was shielded from view behind the fa$cLade of the warring lairds Delaval and Ethelbert, but it was no less real and no less fierce.
In the South, the Abellicans were clearly winning, for their gemstone magic, both healing and destructive powers, was coveted by the many lairds feuding for dominance. In the quieter North, where few Abellicans and fewer gemstones haunted the wild land, the Samhaists had found refuge, so they had believed. Tied to the seasons and the world and the animals great and small through wise and ancient traditions, Samhaist wisdom served Vanguardsmen well indeed.
But then Dame Gwydre had fallen in love with an Abellican brother.
“There will be more Tethmawles,” Dame Gwydre said solemnly. “One community after another will be sacked.”
“I beg you not to tell that to your subjects, milady.”
Gwydre shook her head to deny the dryness of Dawson’s remark, and that action conferred to Dawson that she wasn’t being melodramatic. She knew that she was losing to the hordes from the North, the legions of Ancient Badden.
“My council with Chief Danamarga did not go well,” Gwydre admitted, referring to the powerful leader of one particularly friendly Alpinadoran tribe, with whom the men of Vanguard often traded, and who many times had graced Gwydre’s table at Castle Pellinor. “He will likely keep his clan out of the fighting.”
“That is good news,” Dawson said. “His warriors are fierce.”
“But he will not intervene on our behalf with the other tribes.”
“The Samhaist influence is great among the Alpinadorans. But great enough to keep them allied with ugly goblins and the light-skinned trolls?”
Dame Gwydre shrugged and scanned the burned-out village. “We are losing, and Danamarga is a pragmatic man. If Vanguard is to be sectioned by the victors, then he would not serve his clan well to be left out of that gain.”
“Vanguard is land. Without us it is empty land,” Dawson argued. “What good will it alone bring to the Alpinadorans? What point is this war?”
Gwydre nodded her complete understanding. The Samhaists, so they believed, were egging on the monsters and the barbarians, but the underlying logic told Gwydre and her advisors that Ancient Badden didn’t really want to wipe the Vanguardsmen from the region and chase refugees back across the Gulf of Corona.
“Ancient Badden and his disciples do not wish to minister to goblins and trolls,” Dawson said. “Nor to the barbarians of Alpinador who loyally follow their own gods.”
“Gods not far removed from the Samhaist deities,” Gwydre reminded.
“True enough, but would you expect Danamarga and the other chiefs to relinquish their control to Badden’s miserable priests? Of course they will not.”
“Then this whole war is to teach me a lesson,” said Gwydre.
Dawson shrugged, for he could not disagree. “It is to drive the Abellicans back across the waters and secure Vanguard for the Samhaists,” he added. “We, all of us—indeed, even Dame Gwydre—are caught in the middle of a war of religions. And it won’t end with Vanguard if Badden drives the Abellicans south. He knows that Laird Ethelbert and Laird Delaval have thrown in fully with the Abellicans, and it’s not to his liking. He will chase the monks from Vanguard, then use us to cross the gulf and assail Chapel Abelle itself. Begging your pardon, dear woman, but that’s no fight I’m wanting.”
His dramatic tone brought a much-needed smile to Dame Gwydre’s angular features, an impish grin that reminded Dawson of the beauty of the woman. Even now in middle age she retained much of that beauty, but the last year had weighed heavily on her, and too rare flashed that smile, reassuring and warm, superior but not condescending, and surely disarming.
So disarming.
It said much about Ancient Badden’s hold on the land, and even more about the current state of the war, that Dame Gwydre’s smile had not brought Chief Danamarga to their side.
“We must force upon Ancient Badden that wider fight you believe he desires, and before the battleground is his for the choosing,” Gwydre said, and her eyes turned from Dawson to the south.
“An immigrant army,” Dawson muttered.
“It is a fine season for the folk of Honce to turn their eyes to the open and beautiful North, I think,” Gwydre confirmed. “Palmaristown, from all reports, has become the haven of rats and foul odors, and
there are rumors that the refugees of the war collect en masse at Chapel Abelle, where there is little excess shelter and supplies. And yet, we have villages already built and ready to house those who would seek a better life, and a land as bountiful as any in Corona.”
“Villages empty because all the men are fighting the war, or are already planted in the ground,” Dawson reminded her, but he stole none of her momentum.
“It is the way of things,” she said. “A man who comes here to fight for Gwydre is fighting, too, for his future. If he remains in the South, he will be swept into Delaval’s army, or Ethelbert’s, into a war whose outcome will have no bearing on the prosperity or security of his family. What will change for the folk of Palmaristown, or any other town, if Ethelbert wins? If Delaval wins? They are two lairds of the same cloth—their fight is one for personal gain and not over any manner of governance. But up here, the battle has more meaning. Up here, my warriors strike hard at the flesh of goblins and glacial trolls.”
“And men,” Dawson pointed out.
“Barbarians,” Gwydre corrected. “Not the brethren of the men of Honce as we see in the South. Not a brother, perhaps, who through mere circumstance moved to a town now serving the other side.”
Finally it seemed as if Dawson had run out of answers, and so Gwydre looked at him directly, flashed him that commanding grin, and said, “The gulf is calm, and the ships are waiting.”
“Chapel Abelle?”
“That would be a fine place to start,” said Gwydre. “The brothers there know of our desperation, and they do not wish to have a powerful Badden ruling Vanguard unopposed. Let them direct you to towns not yet emptied by Delaval’s press crews.”
“If Laird Delaval learns of my actions in stealing his potential soldiers …” Dawson warned.
“Do not let him know.”
Dawson smiled hopelessly. When Dame Gwydre made up her mind it was not to be easily changed.
“They will come,” Gwydre assured him. “You will convince them.”
Dawson McKeege knew the meaning of Gwydre’s “convince,” and while it left a sour taste in his mouth, in looking around at the ruins of Tethmawle, it was not hard for him to weigh one evil against the other. Without hardy reinforcements, this wretched sight before him would soon become all too common.