The Dread Wyrm (Traitor Son Cycle) (5 page)

Toby sheathed his arming sword after looking at the blade for nicks. “I’m with you, Nell,” he said.

The captain made a sign that they could talk. He was examining his own blade, the new red-gripped arming sword that matched his long sword for war—gilt-steel guard and round pommel, and two newfangled finger rings on the guard.

“What do you need?” Toby asked. He was breathing hard.

“Robin needs you. He’s hard pressed for time and water got at Ser Michael’s armour.”

“Sweet Jesu and all the saints!” Toby shook his head. “If a man will spend all night in the arms of a—” He looked at Nell. “I’ll go.”

“Feel free to give him some shit,” Nell said. “But I promised to fetch you.” Whatever Toby lacked in fighting skills—he was late to the life of arms and a slow physical learner—he was the best metal polisher in the company.

The captain had not sheathed his sword. “Nell—do I gather that you are at leisure?”

Nell’s heart did a back-flip. “Er… yes?” she said.

The captain nodded. “I don’t think I’ve paid enough attention to your training, lass. Have you been practising?”

“Yes, my lord. Sword and poleaxe. Ser Bescanon and Ser Alison. And gymnastika with Ser Alcaeus and swimming with—” She flushed. “With the women.”

The captain nodded. “You relieve my mind, Nell. But I know you took a wound in Morea and I have a mind to be a little more attentive to your life of arms. Draw.”

She had her arming sword on her hip and she took her sword carefully from her scabbard.

She was afraid of the captain at the best of times. She admired him, but he was older, bigger, and he had a temper. And his eyes glowed red when she made him angry or frustrated him.

Standing across the grass from her, he was as tall as Ataelus and his sword seemed huge, but the worst of it was that his eyes weren’t red. They were reptilian.

“I’m going to make some simple attacks,” he said. “Try not to die.” He smiled. “It would take me years to find another page as good as you.”

That cheered her up.

He struck.

She’d gotten into a guard—Ser Alison said always do what you know, and she knew that she liked having her sword out in front of her. In a world where everyone was bigger, stronger and longer limbed than she, Nell had learned that basic centreline guards were for her.

She flicked her blade into
frontale
, crossing the captain’s blade. His wrist was like iron, but she’d swaggered blades with Wilful Murder and Long Paw and even Ranald Lachlan in the practice yards of Morea.

He bounced back and cut again. She made sure to slip her front foot and sure enough, he cut at her leg.

He saluted her. “It’s such a pleasure to find that someone is paying attention.” He cut at her head—left/right in two tempi.

She covered and covered, but the second was sloppy and late.

He did it again, faster. But she was ready and made both covers.

He thrust.

He left the needle sharp point of his arming sword at the laces of her pourpoint. “Up until that point, you were positively excellent, except your sloppy draw.”

All she could think was,
How can anyone be that fast
?

From that point until they were summoned to breakfast, he made her draw her sword and return it without looking at her scabbard. She put the point of her sword through the web of her left thumb and cursed. He made her continue, and she hated him.

Father Arnaud came out in his black pourpoint. It was a handsome garment for a priest sworn to poverty—black wool velvet, closely embroidered in organic curves that emphasized his physique, which was excellent even by the company’s standards.

“You’re my third customer this morning,” the captain joked, waving his sword at his confessor. “Nell, don’t be angry. You are coming along nicely. But if you fumble your draw you never get to test your swordsmanship, because you’re dead. And if you can’t sheath your sword while you watch your opponent—” He shrugged. “You might still be dead.”

Nell bent her knee to the captain. “Thank you, my lord, for the lesson.”

Ser Gabriel nodded his head. “Every morning, now, I think—you and Toby.”

She had moved from anger to floating on a cloud. Praise? For her use of arms? Training with Ser Gabriel his self?

Nell wanted to be a knight. So badly she could taste it. And she knew she’d just moved a rung up that ladder.

“She pricked her hand,” Ser Gabriel said to Father Arnaud.

The priest smiled. It was a happy smile, a joyous smile. “May I see?” he asked.

She held out her hand.

He made a face and said, “
In nomine patris
,” and her hand was whole. Just like that. It didn’t even hurt.

“My God!” she said, shocked.

“Yes,” said Father Arnaud. He beamed.

Breakfast had been called twice, but one of the advantages of being the captain of a rich company of mercenaries is that you know someone will keep your food hot.

“He doesn’t threaten your beliefs?” the captain asked as he stepped to the right, trying to baffle his adversary’s patient attempts to change the tempo.

Father Arnaud smiled. “Not in the least,” he said. “If belief were easy, everyone would do it.”

The captain’s sword flicked out. The two men were wearing steel gauntlets as a concession to the sheer danger of sparring with sharps. Father Arnaud twisted and flicked the captain’s blade up and to his own right but his counter-cut found the captain out of distance.

“He scares the crap out of me,” the captain said. He cut down from a high inside guard—
sopra di braccio
—but it was a feint. Father Arnaud pulled his hand back but the captain’s blade wasn’t there anymore, but describing the almost-lazy arc of an envelopment. Father Arnaud slipped it with a wrist-flick to find that it, too, had been a feint.

“That’s it,” he said with the captain’s sword at his chest. “Now I know
you are the spawn of Satan. No mortal man can use a double envelopment with a war sword.”

The captain laughed so hard he had to go down on one knee. “You should fight my brother,” he said, breathing like a smith’s bellows. “They must have searched your entire order for a man so good with both weapons and flattery,” he wheezed. “Hah!” He laughed again. “It was pretty good. I was afraid… I don’t know.”

“You are a curious man,” Father Arnaud said. “You were afraid that I would be hurt by your friend the dragon. Instead, he healed me, and in more than just my own powers.”

Gabriel sat back on his heels. “I’m glad. Let’s eat.”

They walked companionably into the common room. There were boards laid on a trestles and long benches and boxes, and grey-clad drovers sat intermixed with the knights and archers of the company. It was warm, and there was food—piles of cut bacon in big, deep wooden bowls cut from tree burls, and bread fried in fat with egg on it; good maple syrup in pitchers, buttermilk and hot wine and sassafras tea. Again, the inn staff moved like the professionals they were—huge wooden platters of food emerged from the kitchens to replace those emptied by guests—hot wine was produced, and honey.

There was a hush when the captain came into the hall, and then everyone went back to eating. The captain sat at a table with Father Arnaud, Sauce, and Ser Alcaeus. Bad Tom paused to talk to a drover and then came and settled next to Sauce, making the bench creak.

“Well?” Tom asked.

Gabriel shook his head. “We have to be very careful about our talking,” he said.

“Do you trust him?” Sauce asked with a head jerk to indicate the absent Wyrm.

Gabriel wrinkled his nose as if he smelled something bad and shook his head rapidly. He pulled a knife and a pricker from his baselard sheath and began to eat.

Tom nodded. “I need to move while the weather holds,” he said. “My lads will be that sorry to miss another night here, but I have—” He shrugged. “Three thousand head or more for Harndon. Last year the whole herd went to Lissen Carak. And the army.”

Gabriel didn’t quite look up, but their eyes met. “You’re going to Lissen Carak and then to Harndon? Yes?”

Tom frowned. “If I can find a buyer at Southford, I’m of a mind to sell him part of the herd for Lissen Carak—for the fair.”

“I need you at Ser James’s council,” the captain said.

Tom was entirely reasonable. “I wouldn’t miss it. But that’s Albinkirk, and I don’ need to risk me beasties one league west o’ the fords.” He leaned
forward. “Keeper says there’s daemons in the woods and the Huran are moving.”

Ser Gabriel’s smile was thin. “Then we should probably stop talking and get a move on. Corporals and above, outside in the yard. Then we move.”

His authority was so palpable that Ser Gavin almost saluted his brother.

Armoured and ready to ride, Sauce stood by her horse in her ancient arming jacket, the one she’d stopped wearing almost a year before. She’d been forced into it this morning because her new, beautiful scarlet arming coat with its finely worked grommets and fancy quilting had torn—two grommets ripped clean through by the lace that held her right arm harness. The old one was smelly and too tight and crisp with old sweat on old leather and linen so filthy it felt like felt.

She mused on the feeling. Considering, as she munched an apple still hale after a winter in the inn’s cellars, that she’d once been used to clothes this filthy; she’d once been quite a tough thing, and now she chafed, her shoulders unused to the rough fabric.

“I’m getting soft,” she said.

Mag was already up in her wagon seat, high above Sauce. “Don’t you believe it, my sweet,” Mag muttered. “What you are getting is
older
.”

Sauce winced.

Mag was sewing away at her nice arming coat, and Sauce, who was virtually blind to both
ops
and
potentia
was still able to feel the strength of the older woman’s working, the way a blindfolded prisoner might feel the kiss of the sun.

Around them, one by one, the knights and men-at-arms of the company came out of the common room, paid their tabs and tallies at a long table set in the yard for the purpose and went to get the last points tied on their harnesses, or to get a strap or buckle looked at.

Ser Dagon La Forêt paused by Sauce’s horse. He was shifting uncomfortably inside his new six-piece breastplate. He settled it on his hips and winced. He gave Sauce a rueful smile. “Must we ride in harness every day? Couldn’t we let some of the bruises heal?”

Sauce was pleased at some remove to know that she wasn’t the only one bitching.

Ser George sighed. “If there’s a safer place in all Nova Terra than the country around the Inn of Dorling,” he said.

Mag laughed and nodded her agreement. “Only a fool would come inside the Circle of the Wyrm,” she said.

The Wyrm of Ercch—sometimes known as Master Smythe—held a territory many leagues across, centred on the white-topped Mons Draconis. The drovers and the inn lived within the Wyrm’s claim, and prospered. Travellers were seldom disturbed, although a few faint-hearted souls claimed to have seen a flying creature as big as a ship and refused to pass
that way again. Merchants, on the other hand, always travelled across the Wyrm’s dominion.

Sauce handed her apple core to her riding horse. “By all accounts, the Outwallers came right up the stream and hit the drovers—inside the circle,” she said.

Ser Dagon grimaced.

“Company’s never been ambushed,” said an archer, the master tailor, Hans Gropf. He was standing with his palfrey to hand and two small boys waxing his leather gear at his feet.

Ser Dagon nodded his acknowledgement.

“Company’s only four years old,” Wilful Murder muttered. He stood in the middle of the yard, watching everyone with his mad eyes. He was holding all the horses—Nell’s job, but he liked the chit and she’d run off to get her boy onto the right pony, or somesuch. “Lots o’ time to get bounced and massacred. When we get soft. Mark my words.”

Ser Dagon shook his head. “Well—I’ll just suffer in silence, then.”

“If’n we start any later, we might as well wait ’til tomorrow,” Wilful Murder muttered, loudly enough to wake the dead.

Sauce saw the captain, standing in the inn door. Bad Tom came out and embraced the innkeeper’s eldest, Sarah, his dead brother’s wife. It was quite an embrace. Some of the pages looked away, and some whooped.

Mag’s head turned, and Sauce saw her searching the baggage train—all apparently a chaos of horses and wagons and donkeys and wicker baskets. Looking for her daughter Sukey. Who had been Tom’s lover for a year and more, and now was publicly displaced.

The captain—Gabriel, as he now was called—materialized at her elbow, as the bastard had the habit of doing, with Ser Michael and Ser Bescanon at his heels. Just looking at him made her smile.

“Where’s the good count?” Ser Gabriel asked.

“We had a trifling disagreement,” Sauce said in a put-on version of the genteel accent. “He’s off grooming his vanity.”

Ser Gabriel’s face twitched but gave no more away. “Sauce, will you take your banda and cover the baggage train?”

Sauce nodded.

Ser Gavin walked up. Apples were the fashion of the day, and he tossed one to his brother. “Can we get moving?” he said impatiently.

Tom appeared. If he was concerned that he had just publicly humiliated the daughter of the most powerful sorceress in a hundred leagues, he gave no sign. “You called?” he asked.

The captain nodded. “You’re not my
primus pilus,
” he said. “You’re the Drover. I can’t order you into my line of march.”

Tom laughed. “Nah—never think it. I’ll follow you. The fewkin’ sheep are so slow I’d just as soon butcher the lot.”

The captain nodded sharply, all business. “Right, then.” He looked
around for Count Zac, found him, and beckoned him. When the short easterner rode up, the captain bowed, since, technically, he and Zac were peers. Zac returned the bow. He glared at Sauce.

Mag narrowed her eyes at Tom.

Ser Dagon smiled innocently at Ser Gavin. Ser Gavin, who was particularly eager to reach his lady love at Lissen Carak, shifted uncomfortably, as if by moving his hips he could get the column moving.

The captain sounded remarkably like himself. “Friends,” he said, “I begin to suspect that if I don’t offer you a constant diet of danger and drama, you go and manufacture it for yourselves.” He looked around. “Very well—Count Zac, if you will be pleased to lead the way. Ser Michael with me, then Gavin, and then Ser Dagon followed by Ser Bescanon. Baggage last, covered by Ser Alison. The drove brings up the rear. They’ll raise a lot of dust, and we don’t want to be the drag.”