“So said Laird Bannagran?”
“There was no time to tell him,” said Bransen. “I return now with important information. Announce me, I beg, and send a courier to Master Reandu.”
The man looked at him suspiciously for a few heartbeats, but then nodded to his companions and disappeared inside. Just a few moments later, Bransen found himself entering the audience hall of the Laird of Pryd yet again.
Bannagran smirked and shook his head at the sight of him. “You are like the wart I keep cutting from my toe,” he said.
“Forgive my absence,” Bransen said.
“Forgive? Do you think I was angry at hearing that you had fled the lands once more?” He snorted derisively. “I thought that I could put away my knife and that my toe would know relief, and this time, perchance, forevermore.”
Bransen caught Gwydre’s concerned look beside him and so he tossed her a reassuring wink.
“And who is this that you have brought? One of the Duwornay women?”
Gwydre’s expression remained concerned, but Bransen motioned to her, and with his reassuring nod, she pulled back her hood.
Bransen turned to Bannagran, sitting halfway across the room, to gauge his reaction, and, indeed, the man started, leaning back with his eyes wide, then coming forward, certainly interested.
“Callen Duwornay?” he asked and started to rise.
“A forward scout,” Bransen corrected, “come to accept Laird Bannagran’s agreement and word that he will honor a flag of parlay.”
“Parlay? What are you babbling about, Stork?”
Bransen took the insult in stride. “I have returned ahead of the most important meeting Laird Bannagran might ever know.”
“Ethelbert again?”
“Nay,” Bransen replied, and he painted a wry smile on his face to heighten the laird’s intrigue.
“Father Artolivan, then,” Bannagran reasoned, and if he was at all impressed with that possibility, he didn’t show it. “I would have thought him too old—”
“Father Artolivan is dead,” Dame Gwydre interrupted.
That silenced the man. He came forward a step, looking Gwydre up and down, clear intrigue on his dark face.
“Will you offer your word of honor?” Bransen asked.
Bannagran eyed him suspiciously but gave a slight nod.
“Dismiss your guards,” Bransen bade him. “All of them.”
Bannagran stared at him hard for a moment but then motioned for the sentries to leave the room. Bransen followed them to the heavy oaken door and shut it behind them.
“Artolivan is dead, you say?” Bannagran asked the woman.
“Father Premujon of Vanguard now leads the Order of Blessed Abelle. It was he who blessed the army, my army, when we swept Laird Panlamaris from the field before St. Mere Abelle.”
Bannagran’s eyes widened, indeed!
“Laird Bannagran, I present to you Dame Gwydre of Vanguard,” said Bransen, walking up beside his companion.
“You come here, to the court of your sworn enemy, unarmed?” Bannagran asked.
“I have the most dangerous weapon in the world beside me,” Gwydre assured him. “And I have the word of an honorable man, do I not?”
“That remains to be seen, perhaps,” said Bannagran. “But what I am not is a foolish man. You come to me championing the cause of Laird Ethelbert, whose murderers tried to assassinate the couriers you sent to him. Is that your meaning of ‘honorable’?”
A sharp knock on the door interrupted the conversation, followed by the voice of Master Reandu. “Laird Bannagran! I would speak with you and Bransen.”
Bransen looked to Bannagran for permission, and the laird just laughed at the ridiculousness of it all and waved his hand toward the door. “I will enjoy his expression when you tell him his beloved Father Artolivan is dead,” he said to Gwydre, but before he could begin to revel in his cleverness, Dame Gwydre shot back, in all seriousness, “No, you won’t.”
Bransen opened the door and Reandu, Cormack, and Milkeila rushed in, and before they could even begin to properly greet Bransen, Cormack identified Dame Gwydre and all three stared in silent confusion.
Bransen closed the door behind them.
“Ah, yes, and back to our discussion of Laird Ethelbert,” Bannagran started again. “Ask your emissaries, lady. Ethelbert’s assassins tried to kill them, and these same assassins murdered King Delaval, who was ever a friend of Pryd. And you come here in the hopes that you would convince me to fight for his cause?”
“No,” said Gwydre. Bannagran’s volume had increased by the word, and he had moved much closer to Gwydre, an obvious attempt to make her feel smaller. But she didn’t back away an inch. “For Honce!” she said right in his face. “I come here in the hopes of convincing you to fight for what is right.”
“And for Bannagran,” Bransen added, but no one paid him any heed, all eyes locked on Gwydre and Bannagran, these two most impressive and powerful figures, standing barely a hand’s width apart and staring at each other with such intensity that if someone had dropped kindling between them and it had spontaneously ignited, not a person in the room would have been surprised.
“For Honce,” Gwydre said again. “For the people of Honce. For all of those who have been forgotten in the march to personal glory.”
“For the peasants?” Bannagran asked dismissively, and Gwydre fiercely scowled.
“What choice was offered to the people of Honce, peasant and noble alike, in the decision of these two lairds, Delaval and Ethelbert?” Gwydre asked.
“The choice of which.”
“Merely that?”
“That is more than they deserve.”
“You do not believe that.”
“You do not know me,” Bannagran reminded her, but Gwydre’s ensuing smile took a large measure of the certainty from his rigid expression.
“By what right?” she asked. “Ethelbert and Delaval and now this wretched Yeslnik after him claim the throne of all the land simply because they presume themselves the strongest. It is not by edict, not by the request of the lairds, and not for the good of the holdings. Nay, it is the temptation of power and nothing more. To be the king is what they, all three, demand and desire. To expand their personal powers and nothing more, and for their folly tens of thousands have been pecked by the carrion birds and the crops fail and the young and old sit hungry and cold. Tyrants, all three.”
“And Gwydre is different?”
That evoked a hard and angry stare from the woman, her eyes flashing dangerously.
Bannagran’s dark eyes flashed as well in response. A smile creased his face as he took a deep breath—took a deep breath because Gwydre had obviously just taken his breath away.
“By Abelle,” Bransen heard Reandu whisper.
“You will find that I am someone who does not like to be mocked, Laird Bannagran,” Dame Gwydre said in a low and even voice. “I came here in good faith to appeal to a man of character.”
“You came here hoping that I would bow before you and lend you my thousands so that you could steal victory from the weary and warring lairds and thus claim Honce as your own,” Bannagran replied. “Do not pretty it with pretty words, lady. The blood smells the same.”
“And yet, the church supports my claim.”
“If you believe that will impress me, then perhaps you should scold your scouts who told you of my affinity for the church, Abellican or Samhaist. I’ll not weep for dead Father Artolivan, I assure you.” He looked at Reandu as he finished, and the man blanched as Bannagran’s words truly registered.
“Then you are not as wise as Bransen, who championed your character to me, believes,” said Gwydre. “For Artolivan was a wise and temperate man, blessed with generosity and wisdom in amounts far greater than those of this foolish young king you slavishly follow.”
The word “slavishly” had proud Bannagran standing up straighter, squaring his shoulders and narrowing his eyes.
“O wondrous Laird B
annagran,” Gwydre taunted. “The great Bear of Honce, sniffing the heels of foppish King Yeslnik.”
“Beware your words, lady,” Bannagran said quietly.
“How many victories will you have to win on the field, Bear of Honce, to repair the legacy of any man who would whimper at the whip of sniveling Yeslnik?”
“A victory that strikes dead the Dame of Vanguard should suffice.”
The four onlookers shared alarmed expressions, but Gwydre didn’t blink.
“You disappoint me,” she said evenly, and of all the words launched that day, those seemed to strike Bannagran the hardest. Mostly it was her tone, Bransen and the other onlookers knew, for it was full of honest remorse.
Bannagran didn’t reply, didn’t blink, and quickly erased his wince.
“Am I permitted to remain in Pryd Town this night?” Gwydre asked. “Or should I be away at once?”
“I would be within my rights to take you prisoner.”
“Laird!” Reandu gasped, and Bransen took a step forward, more than ready to intervene, with lethal force if necessary.
But Gwydre disarmed them both by lifting her hand to the side to ward them away. “There is more to the character of Bannagran than Bannagran is brave enough to admit,” she said.
Bannagran laughed at her. “You may stay in the castle itself, of course,” he said. “I would have it no other way, Lady of Vanguard. I’ll honor your parlay.” He turned to Bransen. “But that one will be the guest of Master Reandu at Chapel Pryd. I need no assassins in my midst.”
“I’ll not leave Dame Gwydre,” said Bransen.
“Yes, you will,” Gwydre corrected, and when Bransen stared at her hard, she responded in kind and bid him to be gone.
“I will have an attendant show you to your room, lady,” said Bannagran. “You will be gone with the sunrise.”
“Gladly away,” she agreed.
Below the side kitchen area of Castle Pryd, in smoke-filled rooms of mud and stone, where the rats ruled and the cockroaches served as commoners, the few miserable human intruders, guards and prisoners alike, lost all sense of time and humanity.
Beaten and starved, Wahloon dangled by his wrists, the iron collars digging painfully into the base of his hands.
Painful, but only when the disciplined warrior allowed it to be. Wahloon had trained under Affwin Wi in the ways of Hou-lei, the ways of the warriors of Behr. Like the training of their descendants, the Jhesta Tu, the discipline of the Hou-lei was all encompassing. It strove for harmony between mind and body within a specific philosophical framework that balanced the relationship in the realms of the physical and tactical by disregarding the emotional—in the Hou-lei’s case, the elimination of conscience, for conscience was viewed as weakness in a warrior. That was the distinguishing feature between Jhesta Tu and Hou-lei, for a Hou-lei warrior was an instrument of war. Nothing more and nothing less. A perfect, disciplined weapon.
Mind and body joined. Mind over body when necessary.
Wahloon did not feel the pain, not the whip gashes in his back, not the bruises on his face, not the cuts along his hands and wrists, not the strain of hanging suspended from the floor. He allowed his shoulder muscles to stretch and twist appropriately so that they did not resist the weight.
He tried several times to writhe and squirm his wrists out of the bracerlike shackles, but to no avail. He had no footing, no balance with which to manipulate the items. He needed something to stand on.
Torchlight stung his eyes and alerted him of movement. One of Bannagran’s troglodytes entered the chamber, a hunched and twisted man, bearded and filthy, with two twisted yellow and green teeth and only one good eye. He was a diminutive fellow, hunched and round, his broken form accentuated by a sleeveless woolen sack he wore from neck to knees. He carried a plate of food, rotten and maggot-ridden. Even that meager and wretched meal wasn’t for Wahloon, though, but for the gaoler, who grinned evilly as he dipped his greasy fingers into it and shoveled a writhing mass into his mouth.
“Oh, but are ye hungry, smelly one?” he asked.
Wahloon’s response came in the form of a kick, weak and pathetic, but effective enough to clip the plate and upend its contents into the gaoler’s face.
Wahloon groaned and let his legs fall limp, seeming weak from agony and hunger.
The gaoler howled in rage and stepped forward to pummel the helpless man, who was not so helpless after all.
Up snapped Wahloon’s legs, around the troglodyte’s neck. The warrior locked his ankles together. Suddenly strong, Wahloon twisted his hips over one way, then back the other and the flailing gaoler turned with him, lurching side to side. The troglodyte tried to yell out, but it came forth as a gurgle. He slapped and pinched at the warrior’s legs, but Wahloon felt no pain. He tried to bite at the legs, but Wahloon had his shin under the man’s chin and would not allow him to squirm free at all.
Wahloon flipped right over, crossing the chains, so that he was facing the wall, and bent hard at the waist, pulling the gaoler forward and down beneath him. To the troglodyte’s surprise, the prisoner then released him, planted his feet on the back of the hunched man’s shoulders, and snapped his lower body forward, ramming the gaoler into the stone wall.
The gaoler caught himself enough to avoid splitting his bald head wide open, though he was bleeding badly. As Wahloon shoved away from him, he tried to scurry to the side, but before he had gone a stride, in came the warrior’s bare foot, knifing hard against his throat and slamming him again against the wall. Now he was gurgling and lurching, and Wahloon swung level before him and began pumping his legs, knees rising to smash the troglodyte in the face repeatedly.
He went down to his knees, and Wahloon let himself twist back the other way. He used the momentum of that swing to bring his legs up and over, inverting in a hanging roll and straightening with all his strength and speed as he came around so that he double-stomped the kneeling gaoler’s shoulder and head, throwing the man facedown to the floor.
He groaned and tried to rise once, but just once, before he fell flat and hard and lay still, making little mewling and gasping noises.
Wahloon flipped back the other way and stood atop him, finally releasing the pressure from his weary shoulders. He stomped hard on the back of the man’s head a couple of times to ensure that he wouldn’t roll away, and then he used his newfound leverage to begin his work on the shackles—not a difficult task for one who had trained in the ways of Hou-lei.
He thought for a moment of donning the gaoler’s bug-ridden wool smock but grimaced in disgust and shook his head. Besides, he understood the pathetic martial prowess of the sentries in the area. If they recognized him, they would quake in terror, and that would only make killing them more pleasurable.
“The days are dark,” Cormack lamented back at Chapel Pryd.
“There is no sunrise,” Reandu agreed.
“Come with us, brother,” said Cormack. “To St. Mere Abelle. We will follow the will of Blessed Abelle, protected by high and thick walls King Yeslnik cannot breach.”
“The army of Vanguard will arrive presently, if they have not already, and you would surrender to your despair?” Bransen said from across the room, where he sat on the sill of an open window that faced Castle Pryd.
“Ethelbert will not come forth,” said Cormack. “Indeed, after his assassins assailed me and Milkeila outside of Pryd, I am not sure that I want him to leave his city! And you witnessed the response of Bannagran.”
“I thought that the meeting went better than I could have hoped.”
All three in the room turned curious stares Bransen’s way.
“Dame Gwydre was not taken prisoner,” Bransen explained. “Nor was she turned away. Nor did she back down from Bannagran’s snarl—indeed, her bark was louder than his own, and made him take notice.”
“Did you expect that Laird Bannagran would have imprisoned her?” Milkeila asked.
“It was a possibility.”
“And still you brought
her here?” Cormack asked and scolded.
“I don’t deny the desperation of our situation. I know about Ethelbert, though I wonder if he was aware that the assassins hunted you. I do not believe he has as tight a leash on Affwin Wi as he believes.”
“We’re talking about Bannagran and Dame Gwydre and your decision to bring her from the safety of St. Mere Abelle,” said Cormack.
“She brought herself out from behind the walls, first to sweep aside Laird Panlamaris and his catapults and then to march east to meet with the Vanguard flotilla. I merely persuaded her to come to Pryd Town to meet this general whose aid she so coveted. And, as I said, I think it went quite well . . . better than I had hoped.”
“He refused her,” Cormack reminded.
“And she is in his castle, as his guest,” said Bransen. “Did you not see it?”
“See it?”
“Dame Gwydre intrigued him,” Master Reandu explained. “Her wit, her courage, her presence.” He nodded at Bransen. “Yes, her words cut the man deeply, else he would have sent her away, at best.”
“Intrigued him,” Bransen repeated, returning Reandu’s nod. “At the very least, Dame Gwydre’s blunt words have given Bannagran pause and made him less comfortable with his role as the foolish Yeslnik’s foolish pawn.”
“He’ll not likely turn traitor,” said Cormack.
“Not now, perhaps,” said Bransen. “Some seeds take time to grow.”
“And in that time, Yeslnik will conquer the world.”
“No,” Bransen said, smiling serenely. He moved from the window to regard the others, to make sure he had their complete attention. “King Yeslnik will govern only where his armies remain.”
“He will push Laird Ethelbert into the sea, surely,” Cormack argued.
“And I hope that the man cannot swim,” Bransen replied. “I’ve no doubt that King Yeslnik’s armies are beyond our power to battle, but we have a weapon that he does not.” He paused to watch the curious trio lean forward with anticipation. “We have the spirit-walking brothers,” Bransen explained. “We will know where Yeslnik’s armies are and where they are marching. And so let him chase us futilely the length and breadth of Honce. Whenever his armies conquer a holding and then depart, we will walk in behind them and bid the people to hold hope. And if ever his armies leave open a flank or send out lesser forces, we will meet them and crush them. And all the time, St. Mere Abelle will remain undaunted and unconquered, a beacon of hope against King Yeslnik. Time will work against him as his warriors grow ever wearier with their endless marching and as his general Bannagran continues to realize that the man is a fool and continues to mull the words and promises of Dame Gwydre.”