At last, as the summer was ending, the tension in the village finally broke. It happened while Saul and Brand were working through a sparring session together in the small training area outside Saul’s hut.
This was little more than a cleared space of packed earth at the entrance of the hut, but they called it their training yard. Exercises there had become their regular activity in the mornings.
The night before, Saul had achieved Level 11. Unlike the previous milestone level, not much had changed, but he felt refreshed and alert this morning, strong and swift and ready to handle whatever life threw at him. It had taken all summer to build enough XP to achieve the level up, since there had been little to do beyond training, but he was glad to have gotten that far at least. With the arsenal of magic he’d achieved so far, he did not need anything new, and he was content to take a little time to master what spells he already had.
There was a chill that morning, the air cooling fast as the summer drew to a close. Brand and Saul’s breath steamed in the air as they moved through their drills and proceeded to free sparring.
The two fought with wooden staffs, and Saul had just delivered a stinging blow to Brand’s upper left arm which the young man had not quite managed to fully parry. Brand leaped back and was about to counterattack when they both stopped, looking up as they heard angry shouting from the direction of the blacksmith’s house near the center of the village.
Without a word, the two men exchanged a look and headed toward the sounds. Neither of them dropped their staffs.
The villagers of Harkin’s Holdfast were generally on good terms with one another, and the sound of voices raised in anger was rarely, if ever, heard. Both Saul and Brand felt alarmed at the sound.
Whatever it meant, it was unlikely to be good news.
Brand and Saul arrived in the open space outside the blacksmith’s house at the same time as Zorea and Jerryl. Zorea had been tending to one of the soldiers who had taken a nasty wound to his leg in the course of the skirmish. Jerryl had been spending time with maps and documents in his office in the barracks over recent days and hadn’t been seen much. Now, they both ran into the blacksmith’s square from different sides, Zorea alert and ready for anything, Jerryl looking ragged and underslept, but with his eyes glinting angrily.
The belligerents in the argument were Rork, the village blacksmith, and Sergeant Dryan. The two men stood aggressively close to each other, both red-faced and shouting.
The blacksmith, who towered a full head taller than the sergeant, had balled up his enormous fists at his sides. Dryan’s hand hovered close to his blade.
“Enough of this!” Jerryl snapped, shoving himself in between the two men and forcing them away from each other. “Dryan, back off. Rork, what’s all this about?”
Both men shouted explanations at Captain Jerryl at once. The altercation had quickly drawn a crowd, and the soldiers and the villagers were gathering in the small space.
Saul noticed with alarm that there seemed a distinct separation between the two groups. The soldiers stood together in what was almost a loose fighting formation. Opposite them, the villagers seemed tense and alert, and the few who had been trained to fight by Saul stood watchful and ready at the front of the group.
There were more than a few swords on the belts of the villagers, and their eyes were hard as they looked at the soldiers.
“Enough!” Jerryl shouted. “Dryan, be silent. Rork, calm yourself, please. Let us hear what the trouble is, but quietly, and one at a time.”
“He wants to abandon us!” Dryan shouted into the silence.
“Sergeant Dryan, I ordered you to silence,” Jerryl barked. “One more word without my leave, and you’ll be demoted to the ranks.”
Dryan blanched, stepped back, and stood to attention with his mouth shut. His eyes blazed, but Jerryl’s words had gotten through.
After a moment of glaring at his sergeant, Jerryl nodded and spoke more quietly, “That’s better. Now, Rork…” he said, inviting the blacksmith to speak.
The big man took a long, slow, calming breath and unfurled his hands from his sides. “Well, it’s as Dryan says, Captain Jerryl,” he said, addressing Jerryl respectfully. “We villagers, many of us have decided we want to leave. We’ve lived near enough with the warlocks of the northern mountains for a long time, and sometimes we’ve skirmishes with them, or quarreled with them, but it’s never been like this. After the battle, when they used magic to stop all you soldiers from fighting…well, if it hadn’t been for Saul here, and his young proteges Brand and Zorea, we’d have all been killed, or worse. When you soldiers first came to Harkin’s Holdfast, we felt we would be safe, but we see now we’re caught up in something that threatens to destroy us all. None of us have any desire to be killed to defend this village. We want our homes to be saved, but we don’t want to be enthralled by the warlocks.”
Sergeant Dryan looked like he was about to burst.
Slowly, Jerryl nodded his head and turned to his sergeant. After fixing the man with his eye for a long moment, he gave Dryan permission to speak.
“And you object to this course of action, Sergeant?”
“I do,” Dryan said stiffly, then added hastily, “I do, sir. These villagers have no right to leave us in the lurch here like this. Harkin’s Holdfast is more than just a village, it’s more than just their homes. It’s the gateway to the southlands. If the village is taken by the warlocks, they’ll use it as a staging post and flood the rest of Xorn with their foul magic. These villagers are Xornian. They have a duty to their country to stay and defend this village. They have a duty to their queen!”
“And that is where the dispute began, of course,” Jerryl said, his tired face breaking out into a pale smile at last. He sighed deeply, and his shoulders relaxed. “Come, my friends. This is no way for us to behave. If we owe a debt of loyalty to the queen of Xorn, it behooves us to stick together and not fight amongst ourselves. That’s the most important thing.”
“To stick together! That’s what I was saying!” Dryan burst out.
“That’s not what I meant,” Jerryl said sharply. “I mean that we should not be questioning each other’s loyalty. You should not be questioning their loyalty, Sergeant Dryan. If these villagers desire to leave and save themselves, we have no right to stop them, and it’s no stain on their loyalty if they decide to do so.”
He leaned forward and spoke in an undertone that could only be heard by Dryan and the others who stood very near. “Look at them, Dryan. Oldsters, women and children, artisans and crafters and goat herders. You want them to stay here and die for a queen they’ve never known in a castle they’ve never seen? They are not soldiers. They’ve sworn no oath. Be reasonable, man.”
Dryan looked suddenly shamefaced. He had been angry, but Saul could see now that his anger was covering a deeper emotion. The sergeant, never the brightest or most accomplished of men, was simply frightened for his own skin now and was seeing the villagers as one more barrier between himself and a warlock’s blade.
Saul looked at Jerryl and realized the captain saw it, too.
Jerryl nodded slowly, and then, unexpectedly, he turned to Saul. “You’re not a Xornian, Saul. You have no fealty to the kingdom, and yet you stay. What do you think of this dispute?”
Saul looked up over the heads of the gathered villagers, his eyes scanning the darkening woods on top of the northern cliff. He knew that Harkin’s Holdfast was the first link in the chain of events that led to the bloody Faction Wars, but he had not told Jerryl that, nor had he even told Brand and Zorea, though he thought they were figuring it out. He was not about to explain to the villagers the part they played in the path of fate, and yet it was true.
It would be better if the villagers were not here. He made a decision, took a breath, and spoke in a clear voice so that all could hear.
“When the warlocks come,” he said, “they will come in force. The numbers we have here, even if all the villagers stayed and fought, could well not be enough to hold them off. The warlocks will not wait over winter. I think that messengers should be sent to the queen of Xorn asking urgently for reinforcements.”
“We have asked for reinforcements, but they have not come,” Dryan snapped.
“Then, perhaps the sight of a whole village of displaced people will add weight to that argument,” Saul countered. “I say that the villagers should go south, now, as soon as possible, and take word into the lands beyond that Harkin’s Holdfast will fall if it’s not reinforced. With the village on a war footing and only soldiers there, we can prepare it for a defense in a way that would be difficult for civilians if they were to stay.”
“And also,” he added, fixing Dryan with his eyes, “I say this. No man has the right to compel another to stay in a situation like this. You are soldiers, and you have sworn to defend the realm. These civilians have not. We have seen what the warlocks can do to the innocent occupants of the villages they take. They turn them into thralls, doomed to live lives of enslavement to the will of the warlocks. I would not inflict that on anyone.”
“No,” he continued, “I think the villagers should leave with our blessing, and what is more, I think soldiers from the garrison should be sent with them, to help defend them on the road south, with a trustworthy man in charge. And Jerryl should write messages to give to the villagers to bring to the Xornian towns and villages in the south, asking for aid. This should happen as quickly as possible, and then we can transform this village into a fortress.”
Jerryl kept the smile from his mouth, but it reached his eyes. With his speech, Saul had laid the situation out so plainly that none could disagree.
The villagers could leave without shame, and the sergeant and any other men who did not have the stomach for the fight to come could leave as well, as guards for the villagers on the much safer mission to the south.
It might have been hard for Jerryl to convince his men to this way of thinking, but Saul, as an outsider without any loyalties to be torn, could make the argument without bias.
The soldiers nodded in agreement, and Saul saw the villagers relax, too. They had been let off the hook, given a way that they could escape the dangerous situation without breaking their loyalty, and still play an important part in the defense of Xorn against the warlock incursion.
Once again, Saul’s presence had swayed the tides of fate.
* * *
Within two days, the villagers were ready to travel. They left Harkin’s Holdfast in a long, ragged column laden with their belongings. They looked unhappy and frightened, but they kept their heads up and kept their dignity despite their trouble.
Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.
Saul felt proud of them as he saw them go, with Rork the Blacksmith at their head.
All the villagers had chosen to leave. All, that was, except Zorea and Brand. They stood with him now, watching in silence as the group moved away.
“It’s hard for me to see them go,” Brand said, “but it’s for the best. My parents both died while I was quite young, and the village raised me between them.”
The normally cheerful and jokey young man was unusually solemn, and Saul clapped him firmly on the shoulder. “I’m glad you’re here with me, Brand. It’s a terrible thing when people have to leave their homes because of war, but we’ll be better able to fight the warlocks with the villagers on their way to safety.”
“How long will it take them to deliver the requests for reinforcements, do you think?” Brand asked.
Zorea answered. “It’s hard to say for sure. Xorn is a large realm, and the roads are poor until you get a bit further south. They’ll probably get into the more populous territories within a week or so, and if the soldiers send riders on, the message might reach the queen in a fortnight. How long it will take to muster a force and bring them back is another question. Raptor Riders travel fast, but soldiers on foot will have to march fast for many days to reach us before the snows come. Armies move slow.”
“Don’t I know it,” Saul said thoughtfully, and his two young protegees immediately looked at him with keen interest in their eyes.
Though they now knew the bones of his story, they both were aware that he must have an endless amount of interesting tales to tell of his former life. They were always on the lookout for anything he might tell them about those years.
He grinned. “Perhaps someday, when we have more time, I will tell you the story of how Baraz Karak and I implemented the greatest road-building effort the world had ever seen so that our armies could move rapidly to all corners of the great land of Keldor…but not today.”
They watched the villagers until they were out of sight. The central column was protected by swift-moving raptor outriders, the tall, iridescent steeds moving with their strange, loping gait up and down the line. Each raptor had a Xornian cavalryman on its back.
Captain Jerryl had sent out a strong complement of Raptor Riders to guard the caravan of villagers on the first stages of their journey, but they had orders to return once they were content that the civilians were back in safer territory.
There was also a good company of foot soldiers, and Sergeant Dryan had nominally been given command over this group, but he had not been ordered to return. Instead, his orders were to go to the queen’s castle at Blackrock by the Dragon River in the Borderlands of Xorn to request reinforcements and to stay there once the reinforcements had been detached.
Ostensibly, his role was to act as an ambassador for the interests of the villagers, but Saul knew Jerryl wanted Dryan out of the way. The man had become a liability, and his influence on the soldiers at Harkin’s Holdfast was a bad one.
Saul also knew, because Jerryl had told him in confidence, that there were two other bright young officers who had been ordered to keep an eye on Dryan and make sure he fulfilled his role. They had been given secret messengers for Elman Tell, the queen’s master-at-arms.
Armsmaster Elman was a wise old soldier and a personal friend and mentor to Jerryl in his youth. He could be trusted to listen to the warnings from the north in a way the other of the queen’s courtiers could not.
Saul gazed south after the retreating backs of the villagers, into the far southern haze beyond. There was never much to see in that direction, just a rugged view of broken highland country between the gaps in the mountains, and a gleam of green further off. That way lay what the Xornians called the southlands.
But to Saul, with his intimate knowledge of the layout and geography of the world, Xorn was a relatively small realm. Past the southern borders of Xorn, he knew, lay the whole vast expanse of Keldor, from the Sawtooth Mountains to the great Sea Coast.
Past the Xornian borders, in this new timeline which he now inhabited, lay the many competing kingdoms and factions, dukedoms and warlord territories, principalities and city states and tribal clans which, over the coming years, would descend, season by season, closer and closer to a state of open warfare.
What had, in his past life, been a knowledge of history was now a knowledge of the future. He knew how the warlock rebellion’s destabilizing of the northern borders of Xorn and their massacre of the northern villages triggered the uprising of the Xornian border villages in the south, the massacre of Queen Lylandra of Xorn and her daughter Princess Aleia by the rebels in the throne room at the Blackrock Castle, and how the subsequent Xornian descent into chaos triggered a civil war, which spread like a bloodstain into the lands beyond.
Only he knew about the razing of the beautiful merchant city-state of Gyllin, the jewel in the crown of the Riverlands, or of the treachery of the Bloodtakers of Khaliad, the mercenaries who had been hired to defend the Citadel of Guiding Light.
Only he knew how the fall of the Citadel had opened the wide grain producing territories of the east to pillage and plunder. The breadbasket of Keldor, so long protected from harm by the magical prowess of the Bright Dukes.
Only Saul knew of the famine that followed the fall of the grain country, the Thin Years, as they were called, the years of hunger.
That was the legacy with which he’d grown up, and those were the stories he’d been raised with, in the gutters of the coastal city of Delwan.
That was the legacy that had drawn him to Baraz Karak and had caused them to gather military might and set about forging the warring factions into one mighty empire, bringing peace to Keldor and the lands beyond.
This was what Saul was here to stop. Harkin’s Holdfast was the bulwark that would hold that fate back, and Saul was the only person who knew the scale of what was at stake.
“What are you thinking of?” Zorea asked, almost managing to keep the burning curiosity from her voice.
Brand was practically drooling to know what stories of the past Saul was thinking of.
Saul blinked, realizing he’d drifted into reverie, reflecting on his old life and how it tied in with his new one.
“I was thinking of stories,” he said. “Old stories that haven’t happened yet. Come on, let’s go to work.”
* * *
In the days that followed, the wind whirled dry leaves from the forest down onto the village, the rain returned in spits and flurries, and the air grew cold. Harkin’s Holdfast seemed strange and quiet without the chatter and homely sounds of the civilian population. The sky loomed gray and ominous above the forbidding mountains.
Though Jerryl had sent out a fair force with the villagers, the majority of the foot soldiers and a good complement of Raptor Riders remained. The foot soldiers had been placed under the command of Merrick, a young man with potential whom Jerryl had promoted to the role of sergeant now that Dryan had gone.
The Raptor Riders who remained were commanded by their first lieutenant, a grizzled old soldier named Bellow. His voice befitted his name and could carry orders across the din of a battlefield.
The two officers—Lieutenant Bellow and Sergeant Merrick—were expected to work together and command their troops for the defense of the village. Jerryl had also given them explicit orders that Saul should be given complete freedom to act as he saw fit on the preparation of the defenses of the village.
While Jerryl did not force Saul to reveal the truth of his origins to Bellow and Merrick, he insisted on informing his officers that Saul had valuable battle experience and an understanding of siege warfare.
Unlike Dryan with his natural suspicion and obstinacy, both Bellow and Merrick accepted this hard-to-believe statement with good grace and without question.
While the two officers did not explicitly place themselves under Saul’s command, they let him know they had seen what he could do and were happy to follow his directions in preparing the defenses.
“How you have such knowledge is beyond me,” old Lieutenant Bellow said, scratching his gray beard and eyeing Saul thoughtfully with his pale blue eyes, “but I’ve seen your training with the soldiers, and I have no doubt you do have the knowledge and the skills required.”
“Yep, it beats me, too, a man of your age,” Merrick added, “but perhaps you’re older than you look. I’m not going to ask too many questions, but if the Captain trusts you—and I can see he does—then that’s good enough for me.”
“The Raptor Riders will be best deployed as scouts, I think,” Saul said. They were sitting in Jerryl’s command post, studying a detailed map of the village and the surrounding area.
“There’s little danger of an attack from the south, so we have to keep an eye on the woods to the north. It’s in that direction that the warlocks will gather. We don’t want to lose any Raptor Riders. The goal should be to sweep the nearby forest and disrupt the warlocks’ scouting. The less intelligence they can gather, the better.”
“Good,” Bellow said approvingly. “You’re right, that’s the role that my riders will be best placed to play.”
“Excellent,” Saul said. “As for the foot soldiers, Merrick, I think you and your men would be best placed here in the village, with me. We’ll have some building to do. There’s a lot of physical work I’d like to do to make the defense of the village easier when the time comes.”
Merrick, a sharp young man with a bright eye and a perceptive, alert face, looked keenly at Saul and smiled. “Very well,” he said without hesitation. “I’m happy to do what you think best.”
What Saul thought best began with a ditch. “First principle of siege warfare,” he said to Brand, who stood by him, “always have a ditch. Even if you can do nothing else at all, if you can defend from behind a ditch—or better yet, a ditch and a rampart—you’ll have a better chance of killing the enemy before he can get to you.”
“I see that,” Brand said. “A ditch puts you above your enemy, and means he has to put himself below you before he can get to you, but we have the palisade wall already. We can put men on top of that, surely, to achieve the same effect?”
“In this situation,” Saul said, “the palisade wall is the last line of defense. At the moment, however, it’s also the first and only line. When the warlocks come, they will come in waves across this open ground up to the palisade. The harder we can make it for them to reach us, the fewer of them there will be when they reach the wall. Ditches, Brand. Ditches.”
So, they dug. The foot soldiers set to work near the wall, casting the earth up to create a series of ditches and ramparts. Saul went a bit farther out and put his new Builder class Earthshift spell to use.
It was simple once he got the hang of it. He cast the spell, focusing on a piece of ground near to him, and the effect was remarkable.
The spell acted like a shovel a yard across and a yard deep and pushed into the ground as if wielded by a giant. After the first few attempts, Saul found that he could quickly dig and create the required ditch and ramparts himself, using only the Earthshift spell.
The new magic was further enhanced by the fact that it could be used double the number of times per cooldown compared to any other spell. With the recent upgrades that had improved his cooldown timer, he could cast Earthshift ten times every five minutes.
When he’d gotten the hang of this, he called Merrick over and redeployed the foot soldiers to other work, since he could do the same amount of digging in half the time. He kept a team of foot soldiers with him. Their job was to tamp the earth of the ramparts down as Saul lifted it out of the ditch, but the rest of the soldiers were now deployed in gathering wood.
This they hauled down in great bundles from the surrounding forest. The task was laborious but needed doing.
They filled the ditches with sharpened stakes and bundles of dry firewood, then set to dragging hay from the storage buildings in the village out to cover the ditches. The straw would have been used as winter feed for the goats of the Harkin’s Holdfast herders, but the goats had gone with the villagers, and the hay would act both as fuel for the ditch fires and some protection from the rain.
Saul wanted oil to use as an accelerant for the flames, but it was in short supply. What they did have were a few barrels of refined oil that had been brought by the soldiers to burn in lamps. Saul brought them up to the palisade wall, and had the soldiers set to creating fire arrows. He might be able to use his own magic to set fire to the ditch defenses, but he did not want to rely on this alone when the battle began.
After ten days, the defenses were nearly complete. Several of the smaller buildings nearest the palisade had been deconstructed. Their timber was stacked at various points along the internal wall, to be used to reinforce the palisade and the gate in case of a breach.
At the end of two weeks, Captain Jerryl and the Raptor Riders returned, riding hard to reach the village in the mid-morning. While the others took their raptors back to the stables, Jerryl found Saul and immediately asked for a tour of the new defenses.
“This is very good work,” Jerryl said, once he’d inspected the ditches, the ramparts, the preparations for reinforcing the wall, and the fire arrows. “Have the scouts in the forest reported any warlock activity?”
“They have intercepted a few scouts,” Saul said, “and one party who went a little deeper into the forest surprised a larger group of warlocks and a company of thralls, but the warlocks fled, and the riders had orders not to engage them. It certainly would seem that the warlocks are preparing an attack, and that they’re sending scouts to the village to try and gain an understanding of our preparedness.”
“I won’t risk losing raptors to skirmishes in the woods,” Jerryl said. “You did well to make sure they knew they were not expected to engage. But if we can keep the screen of raptors in the woods to disrupt the enemy scouts, they will hopefully not know exactly how well prepared we are before they attack. I will give orders that the raptors are to stay in the woods until the last possible moment.”
“It will not be long now,” Saul said. He knew his history, and though the story of exactly what had happened at the fall of Harkin’s Holdfast was not clear, as there had been no survivors, he knew that in his old timeline the village had fallen at the start of winter, and by spring a host of warlocks had descended on Xorn.
Jerryl looked up. That day, the sky was an iron gray blanket on all sides. The air was still and cold.
“You’re right, Saul,” he said, “The warlocks will wait until the first snow begins to fall, since that is when their powers are strongest, but they won’t wait longer than that. Once the winter really begins to bite, they will need to take cover and wait it out the same as everyone else. No, they’ll want to take the village before the snows fall deeply so they can settle in here and prepare to attack southward in the spring.”
The captain’s eyes moved up to look at the thick forest north of the village.
“They’ll be out there,” he said. “They’ll be out there in force. It won’t be long until the blow falls, and when it does, Grimdir will throw everything he’s got at us.”