Edric the Younger of Gildynaepple sat atop his horse with a scowl on his face and the smell of manure in his nose. He rode in full kit–little more than a green and gold brigandine with leather pants overtop mail breeches–and held the hilt of his sword, desperately hoping some of the local barbarians might make a scene. But the savages were sparse and never so much as met his gaze. Frightened, he expected. Why wouldn’t they be? Edric may not have been a knight, but he would be soon. Yes, very soon, no longer than two years, less if he trained just a tad harder.
But that was when he was at home in his uncle’s castle, training with the master-of-arms Edric the Senior. A sharp man, and a fine warrior, but unambitious. Edric would have surpassed his father already and collected his knighthood, if not the injury two years past when he fell from his horse during a joust. Now he was here, in this backwater land filled with nothing but destitute migrants and barbarians, all so that some upjumped lord might “host” his dull witted cousin. That would double the time until his knighthood, he guessed.
Edirc spat. The thought of the Lord of Lyonpool angered him still. Go and guard your cousin’s chastity, his father had told him. Edric didn’t give half a shit about her chastity, if she even still had it to begin with. He suspected she didn’t–there’d be too many rumors about some of the older men-at-arms giving her a visit some years ago, though he imagined his uncle and father didn’t know–and even with her chastity intact she wasn’t worth much, being a lowly Baron’s third daughter.
Pulling hard on the reins until his horse whined in protest, he stopped. Ahead was the Lord of Lyonpool’s manor. Not the old one, which was no manor at all, but the one freshly built and so freshly painted you could smell it on the wind. Pitiful, Edric thought. Even the new manor was nothing much; four-stories high and some hundred feet wide, it was the largest building in Lyonpool by an order of magnitude, save the Guild. Yet, despite the comparative impressiveness, it was smaller still than some of the larger businesses in Gildynaepple, not to mention his Lord uncle’s own manor which towered over all in Gildynaepple.
Yes, he thought, this Lord of Lyonpool was about right for his cousin. He had met the man only once, upon his first arriving here in these squalid lands, and he knew at once he would never come to like the man. Broad as a barn and tall as a tree, the Lord Lyonpool was certainly a large figure. Intimidating, even, if you allowed such things to affect you. But, Edric surmised, there wasn’t much more to the man. He was a mage through and through, and mages could be beaten with a quick attack. A group of them, well, that was difficult, but a single mage? Edric wasn’t sure how many he could safely fight, but he was certain this one he could take.
He turned from the manor and went down the hill, toward the lake, feeling the heat of anger in his face. His hand clutched at the hilt of his sword, squeezing around it until the leather of his gloves squeaked against the leather of the hilt and his knuckles cracked.
“Damnit, uncle,” he said.
Edric dismounted a short ways from the lake’s edge and hobbled the rest of the way. His right ankle throbbed with pain as he limped; a holdover from the fall, though one he expected to heal any day now. Even today, he told himself, it was better than it had been the week before.
At the lake’s edge he stared down into the water, watching his own murky reflection. It was not an unhandsome face, or so he believed–his hair was a solid dark-brown and neatly combed, his face clean shaven, his jaw powerful, his eyes piercing–yet there was something in it that angered him. And when that anger finally boiled over he smacked at the water with his hand and his reflection was gone, turned to dark splashing waves that he turned from before they could become still once more.
“I should go to meet him,” he said, defeated. The request still needed to be made, and he couldn’t make it if he refused to speak with the man.
Hobbling painfully back to his horse, he mounted again and headed back up the hill to the manor until he saw its doors open. From within came the Baron Lyonpool, who appeared massive even from a distance, as well as a small, ethereally white woman. A woman he knew to be the only knight in the barony.
Edric watched them idle along the curving streets. His eyes missed nothing of the Dame Amice’s motions. He saw every step, every opening of her mouth to speak and every tilt of her head as she gazed up into the Baron’s face.
Spinning his horse around, he coaxed it back towards the lake, his head suddenly aching as if it had been split in two. “Damnit all,” he said, peering out across the great Chaudlac. He had to go. Rather, he could not stay here, by the lake, ruminating.
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Turning his horse around once more, Edric ascended the hill, heading toward the Baron’s favorite location: the racing stables.
Standing outside, his hand on the stable door, Edric waited. Inside he could hear muffled voices and the sound of a horse in pain. Doubt began to creep into his mind. Come back later, he thought, but that only made him grit his teeth. He wasn’t a coward. The request needed to be made.
The stable door felt a hundred pounds heavier than expected and opened with the slow, creaking squeal of hinges. Two pairs of eyes settled on him as he entered. Edric shivered.
“My lord,” he said, bowing.
“What can I do for you?” Alden asked, a tinge of annoyance showing through. That, in turn, annoyed Edric, but he tried not to show it.
“Have I interrupted?” The horses were half-frightened, but otherwise unharmed as far as Edric could see. They were fine racing horses, too, with there being a storocc, a cwicwrot, and a merehors. But it was the fourth that Edric lingered on, the limber horse whose stall Lord Lyonpool stood within. He had heard it was an old and aging horse, unfit to mix with the others, but the horse he saw now, though of an unfamiliar breed, had all the markers of a young, well exercised racing horse. Did he switch them?
“You have, but it matters not. What do you need?”
“I’ve come to make a request,” Edric said. “I hear that Lyonpool’s villages are still being beset by brigands.”
Alden’s frown grew markedly darker. “You’ve heard right.”
“Excellent. No, apologies my lord, that is ill news. But, if I am to be frank, I’ve found myself lacking in purpose of late, and so I’ve come to request that you allow me to handle these brigands of yours for you.”
Alden slid through the stable’s low doors. Up close, looking up, Edric could see what he hadn’t seen before. Beneath the baron’s silk shirt was muscle, of a variety that made him question where it came from. Not hard work, he suspected, though he couldn’t figure out why he thought that.
The baron glowered down at him with an angry scowl, and Edric supposed he should have been afraid. “What makes you think you can find them?” Alden asked.
“Did my lord uncle not tell you? Ah, well, he is that sort. The issue, my lord, is not in finding them, necessarily, but in applying pressure. These brigands attack because they know they can set sail on Chaudlac lake and be long gone before you even hear word. But, if I were to have ten men—”
“I don’t have ten men to spare,” Alden said.
“Five, then. Five men, plus myself, sailing–”
“I don’t have a boat to spare,” Alden said.
Edric tightened his hands into fists. “Then we’ll ride. Along the shore, following the road, from village to village. These attacks, were they in the night or during the day?”
“Night,” Alden replied.
“Then we’ll travel by night and sleep during the day. Two will ride carrying lit lanterns that might draw their attention. The other four will ride some twenty paces behind, keeping watch of the lake and the other two, in case they might be attacked. With luck we’ll find these brigands and sort them out. Without it, we might deter them from a village or two. And, in the worst case, we’ll die, but not without cutting their numbers.”
Not that I’d lose, Edric added silently.
“I have misgivings,” Alden said, “that six men traveling together can deter a mobile force of more than twenty men.”
Edric smiled. “I don’t intend for us to go it alone the whole way, my lord. We’ll recruit men and horses from the villages as we go, enough to swell our numbers up to something halfway respectable. These villagers, they won’t be able fighters, aye, but the pirates won’t know that. All they’ll know is that the nights are filled with patrols.”
“Sailing is faster than riding,” Alden replied instantly. “They’ll see you going one way and start heading in the other. That’s not saving my villages, only picking which gets to remain without violence.”
“But it’s something, my lord,” Edric protested. Not that this pompous tower of meat understood that. What had he done since it all started, truly? He had men, he had horses, and he had magic. Yet it was not an army that strained his resources, not an invasion of Hilvan soldiers that burned his villages, but a merry band of landless brutes numbering no more than thirty, by all rumors.
Maybe the Baron saw into his mind, because his attitude eased somewhat. “Fine,” Alden said. “Five men, horse, equipment, and whatever else you need. Amice will see to it.”
Edric looked to Amice, finally remembering she was there. In the light of the stables she looked almost like a ghost with her pale skin. The kind of ghost, Edric thought, that lured men out of their homes at night never to be seen again. There was that level of danger about her.
“I’ll need five horses. If I give these Chanat savages of yours anything, it’s that they breed good horses, but I’ll take whatever’s on offer. And I’ll need five swords, at least, plus spears. Bows, arrows, mail, helmets…full kit for the lot of us, honestly, if it can be spared. And food and water, enough to make it six days of riding and back.”
Alden cut him off. “She’ll see to it, I said.”
Amice approached him and before he knew it he was stepping back away from her.
“Follow,” she said, and he shivered. He didn’t need to be told twice.