Chapter 15
Dawn came late the next morning. The morning trumpet call did not. As the soldiers emerged from their tents, many looked around, perplexed. The sky was light, but their camp was still shrouded in darkness. Turning their eyes to the east, they quickly saw why.
The Utmars towered of them. Silhouetted by the rising sun, the mountains were a series of jagged black peaks cutting an ugly line into the sky. They were dizzyingly massive—tens of thousands of feet of sheer-sided rock. Marcus had never fully comprehended why Elessia didn’t share close ties with Kydona despite the two nations’ long histories. Seeing the barrier that divided them, he understood. He might have stood at the very edge of the world, had he not known what lay beyond.
They spent that day traversing the rocky foothills. The winding column of the king’s army struggled up and down slope after slope. Sword Company was fortunate to be in the lead; they at least had some semblance of a road. But even as they walked it, the cobbles began to shift beneath their weight. By the time the rest of the regiment had gone by, the road had disappeared altogether, leaving the remainder of the army to battle over the loose shale.
“Poor bastards,” murmured Hamo, his youthful tone colored by sympathy as he watched the army floundering along behind them. The silver ranks squirmed as men lost their footing, then became steady again as the ones behind pushed them up back up the slope.
“Listen hard enough,” Gill panted, “and you can hear them cussing.”
The soldiers around snickered. “I wager Vigilant tries something on us tonight,” someone called, with grinning nods of agreement. Bloodied and Vigilant regiments had developed a heated rivalry over the past weeks. One of Desceulx’s companies woke one day to find its standard missing, only to rediscover it at day’s end—acting as a saddle blanket for their commander’s horse. Furious, Desceulx had demanded a flogging, but an amused Durand had politely rejected him for lack of proof of wrongdoing. The supposedly “Vigilant” regiment had despised Bloodied ever since.
The regiment marched on singing merrily, their cadence carrying back for its wallowing rival to hear.
There rose a strange sound behind them. Marcus recognized hoof beats—though muffled and distorted by the shifting rocks—and his head turned just in time to see a troop of armored cavalry pounding up the hill after them.
“Make way right!” he shouted. The call went up and down the line, and the column shrank onto the right side of the road, craning their necks to see what the interruption was.
The dragoons were a fearsome sight. They were armored from head to toe in thick steel plate, the blue feather plumes of their helmets flying in the wind. The fine destriers they rode wore armor too, with their heads, necks and chests covered with banded steel. These were Elessia’s famed heavy cavalry, whose headlong charges could shatter whole sections of line, their long lances impaling several men in one stroke and leaving the survivors for their horses to trample.
“Why the armor?” Joyce asked in his highland accent. “They know something we don’t?”
“It’s a mark of pride,” Marcus told him, watching the dragoons stampede by—three hundred horses at the least. The sons of nobility and wealth, they commissioned their own armor, rode their own destriers and wielded swords that were family heirlooms. Their shields were emblazoned with their personal coats of arms, and their standard bore not their unit insignia, but the heraldry of their captain.
Catching a flash of burnished bronze amid the steel-clad riders, Marcus had no trouble picking out their leader. “Roberte de Auffay.”
“Roberte?” Vernon’s neck clicked as his head shot in that direction. “Here?”
Too late, the dragoons hurtled past. Not one of them turned his head to regard the chevaliers who’d moved aside. The flying pennants disappeared over the knoll.
“Well doesn’t that serve us right!” cried Gill, who had been so quick to laugh at the rest of the army’s misfortune. The dragoons had left the road in ruins.
“Rotten bloody bastards,” swore Ross, among other, more colorful statements from the others. The company shuffled back to the center of the road and pushed on with markedly greater difficulty.
Hamo nudged Marcus’s arm. “Who’s Robert Afraid?”
Marcus laughed. Hamo was an uncertain lad, known to stumble over his larger words. It, along with his overlarge eyes, gave him an air of innocence that made the younger soldiers treat him like a little brother, and the older veterans like a son. “Roberte de Auffay. Me and Vernon knew him years ago. A more arrogant sod you’ll never meet.”
“Not to say he doesn’t have a right to it,” Vernon piped in, red-faced with exertion. “Half the girls I got were his seconds. Not to mention, he’s the only man to ever beat this one,” he jabbed a thumb at Marcus, “in a proper bout.”
Hamo grinned. “You make it sound like a feat.”
Vernon rolled his eyes. “Oh aye, it is.”
Marcus gazed after the vanished dragoons, mulling over the prospect of meeting Roberte again. He wasn’t the same sort of elitist as Jaspar, in that he didn’t think himself better than anyone for the sake of blood. Roberte just thought himself better than everyone, period. He was a cocky son of a bitch—always had been.
Wearing a thoughtful frown, Marcus crested the hill. Then another, and several more after that. Each was taller than the next. The Utmars loomed ever higher overhead, enormous beyond reckoning. Bleak. There was no vegetation to speak of—just barren rock.
And at the foot of the iron grey mountains sat Fort Desmoine. “There she is!” came the cries as the company crested yet another hill, the highest one so far. The last vestiges of civilization had faded nearly a week ago, and the fort was good cause to rejoice. For most of them, anyway.
“That?” Jorel rumbled, his jutting forehead creased with scorn. “That pebble is Desmoine?”
Aubrey punched the big man’s elbow. His teeth stood stark against his face, which the hills had coated with sparkling black dust. “You can sleep outside then, brother. That’s one more bunk for me.”
“Besides,” added Avery, still limping slightly on his rolled ankle, “you’d take up two bunks on your own, you fat lug. You’d break ‘em both, too.”
The fort was a tiny thing, a child’s pillow castle compared to Arlimont. It was built of piled shale, the same stone as the surrounding mountains. The keep was more an oversized hut than anything else. The outer wall was barely two stories high. Desmoine was a mockery of a fortress, and the monstrous peaks of the Utmars only accentuated its diminutive size.
But it did have one advantage: placement. It sat at the mouth of the Southern Pass, a narrow opening between two mountains. So narrow, in fact, that only a battalion was necessary to plug it. A larger garrison was simply wasted space.
As they approached the fort, its size quickly made it obvious that no one would be bunking there that night. Jorel had a good laugh over that one, though everyone else was less than pleased.
The trumpets sounded the halt, and the army coiled and squared itself into its usual box camp. Officers circulated the order that there was to be no digging that night. The army was to get a full night’s sleep.
The regiment’s glee at that announcement was short-lived. For some reason no one could understand, Bloodied was assigned to plug the Southern Pass. They were to defend it in shifts the whole evening through, one company at a time. Sword Company, to their dismay, got the worst shift of all: the second to last.
Once camp was made, they wolfed down their rations—an accomplishment, considering the food’s near-inedible quality—and practically leapt into their tents, anxious to catch as much sleep as possible before their watch came up. Marcus did the same. He was fast asleep within moments.
The nightmares came, as always, but they didn’t have their usual edge. He made it the whole three hours without jolting awake. But all too soon, his rest was over. He woke to the sound of chainmail rustling.
“Time already?” he yawned,
blinking drowsily. Outside his tent, it was pitch black, but he could make out Vernon’s kneeling form.
His friend glanced around. “Bloody hell, mate. Here was me trying to sneak off. Go back to sleep.”
Marcus snorted. “As if.” He rolled out from under his blanket and started getting dressed.
“Really, there’s no need. Sergeant even said you deserved a solid night of sleep.”
“I didn’t hear him say that.”
“Well aye, you were passed out.”
“Too late. I’m already half dressed.”
Vernon sighed and handed over Marcus’s sword belt. “You’re a stubborn breed of ass, did you know that?”
A few minutes later, fully armored, the pair gathered with their company around the fire pit. Captain Rowley had the sergeants take a head count. Once satisfied that everyone was present, he formed them into a column and marched them off. The pass was a mere quarter mile away, and they made it in good time. Shield Company accepted the relief gladly. Still yawning, Sword Company lined the mouth of the pass, already anticipating two hours of dozing in the darkness.
It wasn’t to be. Carpenter made frequent rounds to ensure his battle line stayed awake, and at any rate, the chill air made sleep an unlikely prospect.
Grudgingly, the men turned to conversation. They spoke in murmurs, as if unwilling to disturb the night’s stillness. Marcus found himself guarding the barricade alongside Aidan, Damon and Atwood. The twins did most of the talking, each feeding off the other’s nervousness.
The pass made them uneasy, and Marcus couldn’t blame them. Moonlight stood no chance of reaching the narrow crack between the mountains. The result was a pitch black maw that swallowed the men in shadow. There was something oppressive about this place. Maybe it was the way every sound echoed down its length, so that their own murmured voices were reflected back at them as what sounded like the whispering of ghosts. Or maybe it was the simple knowledge of what had transpired in that pass just a few months before. Only a few miles distant, a whole regiment had been slaughtered.
Regardless of the reason, the men were edgy.
“Why did I sign up for this, anyway?” Damon muttered. His arms were the size of tree trunks, but they were useless against this drowning blackness.
Aidan’s teeth chattered. “Let me know once you’ve got an answer. I signed up because of you, you bastard.”
“That makes you a bastard too,” his twin brother pointed out.
Marcus laughed, if only to show them that there was nothing to be afraid of. “It’s a question, though. Why did you join the Watch?”
Damon pondered his answer. “Escape, I reckon.”
Aidan’s voice filled with indignation. “From what? We had a fine life back home, in Isenne. Nice and quiet, no black God damned murder-filled oversized ditches like this here…”
“Well tell me then, brother of mine: what’s the farthest we got from home before the Novitiate?”
“Easy. Ten miles. At harvest time.”
“Aye, and we lived for harvest time. We got to leave home. Even if it was just once a year, even if we only went ten miles, give or take—”
“Well that was safe,” protested Aidan.
Damon waved a hand—appeared to, anyway. The dark made it hard to tell. “You thought that was safe? You remember father petitioning Lord Devoret to be allowed to leave the village. Months in advance he did it! And Devoret would say, ‘Yes, yes, you may go,’ but when the time came to sell the crop in town, the roads were suddenly full of bandits—”
“But we hired guardsmen to protect us!”
“Aye, from Devoret! We hire two men with puny little swords to guard us, and the bandits are suddenly gone! Bloody miracle is what that is.” The burly twin spat on the ground with a loud squelch. “I’d believe it, if I didn’t see those buggers peeking at our wagon through the trees. There must’ve been a score. You saw them yourself.”
“I saw a bunch of skinny cowards, is what I saw.”
The conversation was now more of an argument, but Marcus didn’t much mind it. If anything, it captured his attention. “But you had blades as well, did you not?” he pressed as the twins fell silent.
They both looked his way. “Blades?”
“Weapons.”
They exchanged a glance. “Commoners, with blades?” Damon chuckled. “Won’t happen. They took ‘em all. I still remember when Devoret’s men came and took my father’s, after he came home from the war.”
Aidan nodded. “Had to beat him senseless, they did.”
Marcus shook his head. He remembered when the law had been passed in the city—a measure against violent crime, Parliament said. With their leave and the king’s, every blade in Ancellon had been requisitioned. It was an unpopular act, to say the least. Some swords had been passed from father to son for generations, and their owners hadn’t given them up willingly. The riots had been bloody and frequent.
Marcus scowled. “Who hired you the guardsmen?”
“Eh?”
“Whose men were they?”
“Oh. Lord Devoret's. Who else?”
“Bear with me for a moment. Could you imagine why those bandits would have left you alone when they could have easily overtaken you?”
Aidan gave a shrug. “They wanted easier pickings, I reckon. Someone else going to market—with an unguarded wagon, that is.”
Marcus went to rub his hair, only to encounter the cone of his helmet. He settled for scrubbing an eyebrow instead. “So you joined the Watch so you could escape your village without your lord’s permission? Without fear of being killed?”
The twins conferred with another silent glance. “I hadn’t looked at it from that angle, but I suppose that’s part of it.”
“The other part,” Aidan added, “was going around a dead end. We never made any money off the harvest, that’s the truth. You have to pay everyone. First you’ve got to tithe your crop to your local lord. How much would depend on his quality. Then you have to sell the rest. You pay for the guardsmen so you can get to town. You have to pay tolls on the road, then more to cross the bridge outside of town. You set up your wagon in the square, then whatever coin you earn, you have to give a portion to the duke. You go home, pay the tolls again, and then, once you’re home, you pay a tax to your lord.” He looked at his brother. “Did I cover it all?”
“You missed some,” said Damon with a shrug of his thick shoulders. “The point is, by the time we got back home, we had precious little coin left over.”
Marcus understood. He knew racketeering when he saw it. The dukes had come up with a clever system of trapping their own peasants on their holdings: keep them in poverty. The ones who tried to better their lots, like Aidan and Damon’s family, only fattened their lords’ purses. He wouldn’t have been at all surprised to hear that the bandits on the roads were in the local duke’s employ.
Of course, he had heard this before—during his forays into the mires of Ancellon. He’d met men trapped into their fathers’ professions: ropemakers, dockhands, rug weavers. Guilds kept firm control over the skilled trades. Whoever wanted to become a mason or smith had to undergo a strict selection process that kept the poorest out, since they couldn’t hope to pay the fees for their lengthy apprenticeship. Caught between impossibilities, men often became thugs in the gangs that ruled the backstreets. Children were cutpurses and pickpockets. Women were prostitutes. The traits they had in common were destitution and disillusionment, and it had disturbed Marcus profoundly to see people in Elessia’s glorious capital brought so low. Hopelessness, he supposed, could have that effect.
He looked at the twins. “What would you have spent it on, had you made more?”
“Never really thought about it. Iron plow?”
“Or an ox,” added Damon.
Marcus pitied them. Both of those things could only increase the duke’s profit. The twins had thumbed their nose at their landlord in the only way they could: by leaving for the Novitiate and never coming ba
ck. But they had left their family behind, too—their young brother and two sisters, whom they spoke of often, as well as their aging parents.
He masked his thoughts with a smile. “Both fine choices, I’m sure.” Reminded of all the things in his life that he’d gotten for free, and feeling badly about it, he decided to drop the subject. He returned his gaze to the gaping maw of the Southern Pass.
The burly twins did likewise. With the conversation gone, they quickly became jittery again. Muttered oaths filled the dark, echoing eerily down the pass.
“Fucking hate this… feel like a Goddamn black horseman is gonna come shooting out of there any second…”
Atwood, the veteran, had been standing aside quietly all this time. He spoke for the first time. “It’s not the Kydonians you ought to be fearing. It’s their weather.”
“Why’s that, old man?”
It was an affectionate insult, one that Atwood had never taken offense to. “In spring and summer, it’s hotter than hell. It’s the sun that does it. There’s no cover—only miles and miles of fields, and flatter than your mum when you both were done suckling her dry.” He let the groans fade, mustache twitching as he grinned, before continuing. “You couldn’t hide if you wanted to. That sun’s always over your head, just beating down hotter than it has any right to. You’ll swear the days are longer there, and you’d probably be right to say so. Last war, we lost more men to thirst than the enemy. Maps were bad. We didn’t know where the bloody rivers were.”
Marcus tried to imagine the hottest day he’d ever lived through. Then he imagined coping without water. The thought wasn’t pleasant.
“And the winters,” Atwood said with a shiver. “You know the expression, ‘Chills your very bones’? Well, Kydona’s winter does just that. I saw frostbite so bad that it cut through flesh, got right down to the bone. You see fingers and toes go black, and when the chirurgeons chop them off, you won’t even feel a thing. It happened to a lot of good men. The worse ones, they lost hands, feet, ears… noses.”
The three younger soldiers looked on, aghast. “N-noses?” Aidan stammered, clutching his.
The old soldier grinned wider. “Oh aye. But the ones who do, they’ll usually die soon after. The wound freezes. Frostbite digs in, cuts deeper. There’s nothing to be done for you once that happens.”
“Well what the hell do you do to stay warm then?”
“You change your socks and drawers as often as you can. You drink water. Don’t eat snow like you’ll see some lads doing. Keep dry, keep moving.”
Aidan wasn’t satisfied. He tugged at one blue sleeve. “What’s this going to do? I’ll freeze to death in a fall breeze, for God’s sake. And,” he added, “we never got issued coats.”
Marcus remembered that day he’d spent at the conference table with the king, the lord marshal, and Council of Highest—when the high lords opted against supplying cold weather clothing to the army.
Atwood’s grin faded. “That’s a problem you solve on your own.”
It was a poor answer, and they pressed him further, but he refused to elaborate. The twins made their outrage clear, but to Marcus, the lack of reply was an answer in itself. Whatever the then-Prince Audric and his army had done to keep warm in Kydona, Atwood was not proud of it.
The fruitless conversation did have one advantage: it got them through the remainder of the guard shift. Another company soon arrived to take the next, and Sword Company moved back to their camp more bleary-eyed and exhausted than before. There was little point in sleeping, though; only an hour remained until first dawn. Such was the nature of the universally despised second-to-last watch.
The company spent the ensuing time breaking down their section of camp. Darkness made the task difficult, but soon enough, they had loaded the wagons and stuffed their rucks. Assembling by the road, which was more a loose gravel track than anything else, they dropped their rucks and settled down against them. The rest of the army wouldn’t be up for a quarter hour at least. Marcus sat with his back propped against Vernon’s, mulling over the night’s revelations—and the sort of country he would one day rule.
His thoughts were anything but heartened.
In the shadow of the mountains, dawn was almost nonexistent. Clouds gathered thick on the upper slopes, blotting out the morning sunlight. When the trumpets blew, the army woke to darkness.
Some had risen earlier than others. Despite the lack of light, Marcus picked out a group of horsemen congregating at the edge of the camp. The horses ate greedily from canvas feed bags hung around their necks as the riders secured gear to the saddles. Soon after, they rode past Sword Company—a score of men in light mail, armed only with shortswords and bows, sitting geldings with sinew that stood taut on wiry legs.
They were scouts, and everyone knew what that meant: the generals had no idea what lay on the other side of that pass, save that it was enemy territory.
The company threw each other dour looks. Any lingering desire for sleep had departed with the scouts, and they sat in darkness, listening to the formless sound of the army breaking camp. Soon enough the rest of the regiment formed up behind them, then the rest of the army after. Thirty thousand men lined the road in a thick, banded column of steel, every man standing with bated breath as they waited for the long-awaited call—the one that would send them marching into the enemy’s lair. Just ahead lay the Southern Pass, every bit as imposing by day as it was by night.
For an hour and more, the Royal Watch waited. The minutes eked past, the tension they all felt stretching longer and longer but never dwindling, until their heartstrings quivered with strain and threatened to snap. Captain Rowley made his way up and down the column, cracking jokes and murmuring assurances, but all he got for his trouble were forced smiles.
They wanted to go. No one cared if it was forward, only that they moved.
A messenger on horseback arrived from command. He spoke to Rowley for a moment before riding off again. The captain relayed the order to Lieutenant Lemay and the others, who spoke quietly to the sergeants, who were all of a sudden yelling, “Ground your rucks! Plate on, lads! Armor up!”
The men exchanged looks that were even darker than before, then complied. Marcus dug into his bag and wrestled his cuirass out. Its segmented plates rustled as he pulled it over his head. Jorel stooped to tighten the buckled straps on either side, checking the pauldrons to make sure they were snug against his shoulders. He knelt so that the smaller Marcus could do the same for him. Next came a leather cap, followed by a chainmail coif, and finally the cone halfhelm. His eyes kept crossing in a reflexive need to study the noseguard hovering between them.
Rubbing them exasperatedly, Marcus looked around. The Royal Watch was headlong into its preparations. He saw the spear companies fastening on their strangely lopsided armor—high neckguards and thigh plates that protected their left sides, the sides they would present to the enemy as they leveled their pikes. Archers were slinging on an extra quiver each, stringing their longbows, testing the draws. The chevaliers, the backbone of the Watch, had decked themselves out in armor identical to Sword Company’s and unslung their shields, which they hefted uncertainly with their left arms, unaccustomed to balancing the weight against their spears.
A wagon came forward at the behest of two great oxen, stoic in their stupidity. One line at a time, the company piled their rucks in the wagon’s bed until the axles creaked, the canvas cover bulging as the cargo threatened to spill over. The wagon drivers didn’t seem to care. They just secured the tailgate and loitered, glowering all the while. Their task was a vital but thankless one: to join the other supply companies at the army’s tail, forming a baggage train that they would guard while everyone else fought.
Marcus wondered who was the luckier: the men who died winning victories, or the men who lived wishing at a chance for glory.
He looked past them, past the roiling army as it struggled into readiness. He imagined he could see through the hills of black shale, beyond the Sien River
and the thick woods that clung to its banks. In his mind’s eye, he saw the gentle green hills of Ancellon’s countryside—and the city itself, its white walls sparkling in the morning sunlight, its shops and stands already opening for the day’s business. There was the majestic palace rising above it all, and the towering grey shape of the Keep standing sentinel over even that. The people would only be rousing just now, cursing groggily at the brightness—not knowing how lucky they were.
“What the bloody hell are you smiling at?” Vernon demanded. Still wearing the expression, Marcus shook his head. “Nothing much.” He’d been thinking of Jacquelyn. Maybe she was sleeping late this morning, her light brown hair tangled on the pillow. Or maybe she was combing it out in front of the mirror right this minute, hating how ugly she was without makeup on. He wished he could be there with her, if only to tell her how wrong she was.
But he wasn’t with her. With that thought, he came back into his own present. The smile went away.
Excited whispering surrounded him. “The commander’s here!” Before Marcus could digest that, a hand nudged his arm. He turned.
Commander Durand faced him, decked in his plain armor with only a red helmet plume to denote his rank. He gazed on him with grey eyes that were soft and reassuring. “Are you ready, chevalier?” he asked quietly.
It took a moment to realize the officer was holding his hand out. He took it. “Ready, sir.”
Something gleamed in Durand’s eyes, though Marcus couldn’t be sure what it was. “Truly, you are. Good luck.” Then he released his grip and moved down the line, shaking hands, gripping shoulders, murmuring gentle words. His soldiers accepted, their eyes solemn beneath their low helmets.
“Thank you, sir,” men said to him. “God bless you, sir.” They meant it. They knew what a rare trait they were seeing in their senior officer. This man was no uncaring highborn who would commit them to a slaughter for his own gain. This was a man they could fight under, and gladly—because he cared for them. He would bring them home.
Marcus was suddenly and fiercely proud to be serving under Lyle Durand.
With his encouragement said, the commander mounted his horse rode back up the line, his hand pressed to his temple in salute. The air reverberated with the cheer his regiment raised for him, yelling and stamping their feet and rattling their shields as he rode past.
The hoof beats faded, and the waiting started all over again. The short-lived excitement dwindled in the face of foreboding. Just a quarter mile away, the ever-dark Southern Pass gaped like a toothless mouth just waiting to swallow them whole—just as it had with the 22nd Regiment a season ago. With their eyes flickering nervously over the mouth of Kydona, the minutes ground by, agonizingly slow.
The striated battle lines of the Royal Watch flexed as the soldiers shifted their stances, unaccustomed to their armor and unmanned by the sunless canyon before them. There was nary a mutter to be heard, save prayers.
Chaplain Stallings helped with those. He was a strange sight—black armored, red-cloaked, a wolf’s pelt draped around his shoulders. His mace was a double-handed weapon, its pommel cast into the shape of a skull and its head into that of a clenched fist. Parchment strips scrawled with holy verse dangled from wax seals stamped onto his armor’s every surface. Most disconcerting of all was his helmet: a howling brass skull leering from under his low hood. Appropriate for a priest of Ancel—death incarnate, wrath embodied.
From the gleaming skull’s mouth, the regimental chaplain’s voice boomed, “Steel your hearts, sons of Ancel! Suffer not weakness to water your soul, for weakness is a sin in the eyes of our Aspect!” He walked the lines at a deliberate pace, his mace raised high above his head. Even a hundred yards away, Marcus could smell the incense from the burner dangling from his waist. “What does weakness spawn?”
“Doubt,” a few uncertain voices said.
The chaplain was not pleased. He slammed his mace into the ground. Shattered rock flew in all directions, some pinging unnoticed off his jet black armor. He voiced the demand once again, only far louder.
This time, the reply carried much more vigor. “Doubt!”
Stallings nodded. Marcus could imagine the wild grin beneath that helmet—almost. It occurred to him that in three weeks of marching, he had never seen Stallings’ face. Such was the lot of the chaplains: anonymity, chastity and fanatical zeal in all things.
The chaplain shouted, “What does doubt spawn?”
“Hesitation!” two thousand voices chorused. Every Elessian man knew this prayer. Their fathers had taught it to them as children, and they had learned it again as novitiates.
“What does hesitation spawn?”
“Mercy!”
“What does mercy spawn?”
“Forgiveness!”
“And what is forgiveness?”
“Heresy!”
“Heresy, amen!” roared the faceless chaplain, prowling back and forth, his skulled visage scrutinizing the men before him. “Punish the wicked; that is your task. Condemn the guilty; that is your calling. Deliver the evil unto God; that is your undertaking. Deliver, that the Lord may judge them! But beware! Safeguard your own souls even as you send the wicked into the Lord’s sight! For whom does he judge most harshly of all?”
“His servants!”
“Permit not that first sin of weakness, that when your time comes, you may stand upright before God! For what are we, and what are we not?”
“We are sons of Ancel,” Marcus intoned with all the rest, “and we are not afraid!”
Nodding with satisfaction, the chaplain stalked off, slinging his mace as he went. There came a near-audible sigh of relief at that. The Royal Watch feared its chaplains more than they feared the enemy. They were conduits of Ancel’s will, and they could punish deviancy as they saw fit, without interference from the chain of command. They exercised that authority only rarely—but when they did, it was usually through the nine-tailed whip holstered beside their personal weapons. Every Elessian man had known the cat-o’-nine’s bite at least once, and never wanted to again.
Marcus almost winced, though he wasn’t sure whether it was from the memory of his lashing or the reason he had gotten it.
No sooner had Stallings finished than the first pair of scouts emerged from the pass at a gallop, gravel flung in the air behind their stamping hooves. Waving, the horsemen blew past the lead company and disappeared. It was a good sign; the first few miles of the pass were clear. A few minutes later trumpets blared the ready call, and the soldiers’ tense stance became more rigid still. They squared their shields and lifted the butts of their spears off the ground, ready to march at the order.
Captain Rowley’s barrel chest expanded. “Forward!” his deep voice called, beard quivering. The call repeated up the army column, and Sword Company stood with bated breath. They looked up at the black wedge of the pass, and despite their promise to the chaplain, there wasn’t a man in that formation that didn’t know fear in those stretching moments.
“March!”
Gravel crunched under Marcus’s foot. He wasn’t sure what he had expected, but the first step wasn’t in any way difficult. The next was even easier. As he fell into step with the rest of his company, marching to four sergeants’ joined cadence call, the tension in his belly came unknotted. Not completely—just enough that he could think, that he could realize this wasn’t all that bad. Whatever lay ahead, he would not face it alone.
Together with his company and regiment, he crossed the threshold of the Southern Pass. Marcus had never minded enclosed spaces before—but now there were sheer rock faces to either side of him, so close together that two wagons couldn’t have fit through them side to side. Rocky outcroppings protruded at regular intervals, splayed and cracked like sheaves of dried parchment—and every shale page looked ready to come crashing down on his head at any second. It was dim; the sun’s rays could not find an angle to penetrate between the mountains. The air was close, akin to that of a musty cellar recently flooded.
The rock amplified every sound. The synchronized footsteps turned into a thunderous storm of racket, the ring of their armor into a discordant symphony.
With all of this, claustrophobia suddenly became a very valid fear.
Marcus looked aside. Hamo’s face was beaded with sweat despite the chill. The youth glanced back at him and grinned as if nothing was wrong. Beyond him, Reggy—the mandolin player—was humming what sounded like an old lullaby. Jorel chewed endlessly on what must have been his tongue, his enormity a pale thing in comparison to the mountains. Joyce kept trying to scratch the blue woad tattoos on his cheeks, only to knock himself on the chin with his shield, tangling his knotted beard.
It was fascinating, seeing the small ways men coped with fear. Marcus wondered how he did it. Then he checked the urge to run his fingers through his hair—the helmet would have gotten in the way anyway—and found he already knew.
Hours passed. Despite its name, the pass seemed unwilling to let them do so. The ground was pitted and uneven. Sometimes it was loose shale. Other times, the soldiers glanced at their feet to discover that they were traversing solid rock—buried boulders, unspeakably large. There were cracks in which any of them could have easily broken an ankle, but the men in front were sure to raise their hands to mark each hazard for the constricted ranks behind. Other obstacles they could see quite well on their own. They clambered up and down hills of piled rubble, struggling to keep some semblance of order in the ranks. Whole battle lines shrank aside to avoid jutting promontories of razor sharp rock.
Hellish as the terrain was, no one thought to complain. They had more important worries. Hard men glanced around uneasily, scrutinizing every slope, overhang and crevice. An incessant itch nagged between Marcus’s shoulder blades, as if his body expected an arrow to thud into his spine at any moment.
It wasn’t an unfounded fear—because three hours into the pass, they came upon the cairns. Two thousand of them. There had been no dirt to bury the 22nd Regiment in, so piles of ragged stone had to suffice. Swords and spears were stuck upright between the stones, helmets balanced on top. A whole season after the fact, the steel was just beginning to speckle with rust.
The company stared at the crude graves of their dead brothers. Sorrow and anger in equal measure flickered across their faces. Here and there, lady’s handkerchiefs had been tied to weapons’ hafts—the last gifts of lovers and wives before their men had left them. There was a mandolin much like Reggy’s leaning against one cairn, and atop another, a set of reed pipes whistled hollowly in the chill breeze.
Marcus had known before how the 22nd Regiment had died. Seeing the place it had happened, he realized there was a difference between knowing and understanding. He saw the narrows where the Kydonians had established their chokepoints, the clusters of graves there where the Elessians had fallen in their desperate bid to escape. A glance overhead revealed rocky shelves, perfect for archers to rain death into the massed ranks below. The enemy had hemmed the whole regiment in, shot them full of arrows, and cut them down when they tried to retreat. Only once no Elessian stood had the enemy left their positions—and then, to cut the throats of the wounded and steal the fallen banner.
He knew murder when he saw it.
Punish the wicked.
He was glad of the opportunity. By the time this day ended, a whole army of Elessians would see these graves. In the north, an entire division of Royal Watch would pass the border villages Tsar Sidor had razed to start the first Kydona War. They would march by King Basil’s humble grave and feel the same anger that Marcus did now.
By the time this day ended, a new generation of Elessians would be unleashed on the golden plains of Kydona—with a new king, and a new cause for retribution.
“They will pay!” shouted Captain Rowley. His finger pointed forward—east, toward the enemy. “By our swords, lads, we will take our due! Remember well what you see around you, and Kydona will pay!”
Sword Company’s bellow of affirmation echoed up and down the lonely pass, and the stones themselves trembled.
One by one, the cairns drifted past until they were all lost to sight, reduced once again to anonymous mounds along the mountain path. Free of them, the company marched on with a renewed sense of purpose.
It took some hours yet to reach the end of the Southern Pass. The frail sunlight dwindled still more in that time, until the men stumbled, swearing, over crags that even the sharpest eyes couldn’t pick out. Eventually, though, a sliver of grey light became visible up ahead. It was all Marcus could do not to break into an overjoyed run. He satisfied himself with watching the light brighten, the breach widening with each passing yard.
At last, they reached it. Sword Company barreled into the open with speed a dragoon would envy, raising a cry of exultation.
The transition was as startling as it was wonderful. Marcus was no longer hemmed in by oppressive grey rock. There was grass beneath his feet—scrubby and brown, but alive nonetheless. He had never imagined he would be so grateful to see a plant in his life. The sun was all but gone, disappeared beyond the mountains—the wrong side of them. In its absence, Marcus couldn’t make out much anything of the land he had just invaded. Ahead lay a flat horizon, silhouetted against a purple sky. Everything between it and him was blackness.
The order to halt finally came. Marcus had never been so happy to hear the call to make camp. The army compacted itself into a massive square, dug the fortifications, and set up tents. Marcus settled onto his mat beside Vernon, palms blistered from hacking into the tough Kydonian earth—hard grass compacted layer upon layer, then the mulchy soil beneath, still half-frozen from the recent winter.
He could hear the first watch moving along the ramparts. A whole regiment stood guard at each side of the square camp, and would be all night. Nonetheless, the prince sharpened his blade and tucked it under the rolled blanket that acted as his pillow. He would sleep with a hand around the grip—because he still remembered the fire burning in Andrei Pronin’s eyes as the guards hauled him from the Sanctum. He was under no illusions; this was a dangerous place.
At long last, on a trail of quashed hearts and broken bodies, Marcus Audric de Pilars had arrived in Kydona.
The war for the east rages in Kydona: From Ashes…
Acknowledgements
Mom and Dad, for instilling in me a love of reading and story-telling.
My fiancé Cait, for her constant support and her love, an inspiration to me always.
My brother Chris, for the fantastic critique and proofreading. Couldn’t have done it without you.
Sam Carr, the awesome artist who drew up this cover, and hopefully many to come.
Thank you all!
About the Author
Thomas K. Krug III lives in Skippack, Pennsylvania with his beautiful fiancé, Caitlin. When not whittling away at sequels, he’ll either be glued to his Xbox or sipping bourbon—always on the rocks. He put the finishing touches on his first book in Afghanistan, where he served as a junior officer in the United States Army.
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