Walking slowly up the stairs, Elbana felt the weight of her armor with every step. Olun, Ol, had told her that Harred would be in the single room at the very top of these stairs, and that if she wanted to talk with him before midnight, she would have to go to him.
Elbana wanted nothing more than to just go to her bed, and get up in the morning, then leave at first light without ever having asked her former captain for help. The idea that the help wasn’t for herself was the only thing that made this course of action even slightly palatable.
But something being edible didn’t necessarily make it an easy meal.
Another step, pushing herself against all of the grave force that held people to the face of Thach, which she now was feeling that it may have taken a special interest in her. Another hand-length farther from the ground floor, and then another.
Soon enough, no matter how long and arduous these last few steps felt, she had reached the third floor landing, and stood in a small squared off room at the very top of the stairs. A small door to her left had a wavering light shimmering under the bottom edge.
Proof of the presence of a candle, if not an entire lantern.
Raising her hand to know, she was surprised and halted by a soft voice from the other side of the door.
“Come in, ‘Banny.” Just that.
Well, Elbana thought, he knows I’m here. Not just that somebody is here, but me…
Turning the latch, she pushed the door open, and moved past the threshold into a well lit room taking up the majority of the top of the building, with windows facing out toward the only approach to the inn. The large windows had actual glass. Each heavy wooden frame had been broken up into smaller wooden square frames, and each one had a thick pane of clear glass. The overall effect was of the night time world outside the inn being cut up into small images, little framed paintings of the world, broken down into digestible bites, and then displayed on three large walls.
She stared out at the moonlit world, half glimpsed forms in blues and blacks, grays and greens, all sliding onto and about one another as a light breeze moved the trees, and the small circles of lantern light around the base of the inn and its stable creating isolated ponds of gold in the otherwise darkened night.
“It can be beautiful if you allow yourself to let go of your need for sunlight.”
The voice shocked Elbana. She swiftly turned to the form of the tall man who had sat in near invisibility in his motionless silence.
Looking at the man who had helped to shape her into the warrior and officer she had grown into, Elbana could see how the intervening years had worn away at the mountainous man that Harred Clach had once been.
Wearing a finely made robe of thick fabric, Harred sat in a plainly made wooden chair that entirely lacked the finely detailed and frenzied carvings that marked all of the chairs she had seen down in the common room of the inn. His once broad shoulders now sloped downward with age, and the scarred arms that protruded from the sleeves of his fine woolen robe, while still covered with ropy muscle, were now thin where once they had been as heavy and thick as most other men’s legs.
Harred’s own legs were crossed at the ankles as they stuck out below his robes.Elbana tried not to stare. Harred’s left foot was encased in a knitted sock that was thicker than it had any need to be. And crossed over the left ankle was a thick, stained wooden leg ending in a fancy bit of carving that mimicked the natural foot that had been lost on a battlefield now forgotten by most some ages well before Elbana herself had been born.
Hitching her eyes up to his head, his white beard, much like that of Ol’s, was well tended and trimmed, but no longer had even a trace of the coppery red he had once been known for. The tips of his mustache had been twirled up into deceptively happy little peaks. His pate now shone naked in the lantern light, without a trace of stubble that might indicate the ability to still produce any hair, broad, and as smooth as lakewater on a windless day. Wide nose, still the crooked mess she had remembered, and the scars of his right cheek given to him by a bladed gauntlet long ago began to turn and twist slightly as the old man attempted a smile at his once protege.
This room at the top of the inn, with its wealth of glazed windows making up three of the walls, had become Harred’s living quarters, and like those of his command tents he had lived in during that long ago past life they had once shared, it was a tidy, almost severe, space. It contained a bed, being made up of a camp bed frame resting on what looked like two squat, ironbound chests, a table holding a few books and ledgers, there were three lanterns hanging from the rafters, and as she looked up, several bundles of weapons wrapped an hung in between the rafters. And finally, the chair in which Harred now sat.
Her eyes finally back onto her former mentor, his scarred face smiling serenely up at her, she asked, “How have you been?”
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
He barked out a laugh at this. “It’s been more than a decade, and ‘How have you been?’ is what springs from your mouth?”
Before she could answer he continued, “I would have thought you might have asked me ‘Where is the rest of the warband buried?’ or ‘How did you get back to Rhiada?’ But never would I have thought you would ask me ‘How have you been?’”
His smile, Elbana saw, didn’t quite make it all the way up to his eyes. And those eyes, a dark hazel, almost brown so common to Ocre men, looked like they had not suffered a smile in years.
“‘How have you been?’” His Toodveldt accent, a long, lazy drawling that stretched out his vowels in odd ways to her Fastel raised ears. “You act as though we are seeing each other every week, and you’ve just popped by for tea and some biscuits. Are we a pair of old grannies? No. Madam, or should I call you ‘Master’ now ‘Banny? I hear you have not just attained that exalted rank, but have even become the deadly right hand of the new king. But now… you have turned up at my doorstep, and you ask me how have I been.”
He looked down at his hands in his lap then, and his breathing noticeably slowed.
“Master Elbana, I have been retired. I have been a businessman and landowner here in Toodveldt now for a decade. I have been …” He paused for a moment, a dinner guest chewing his portion just that much too long. “I have been here, with Olun. And we have been counting the days since we last rode off to war, and regretting the wars we fought, and missing all of those men and women of the warband. I have been still, if nothing else.”
Elbana looked at Harred, once known to the world as Blood Red Harred Clach, Captain of the Red Stone Mercenary Warband. Close to 500 warriors under his command were the best paid, best trained fighting force on the continent. And now he ran an inn in a small town that had died when the copper mine had run dry. He had not retired, so much as he had pulled his horse over to the roadside, and chose a place to wait for death to catch up to him for all of his many misdeeds.
“Fine, Red. You’re right. It has been too long for me to approach you as an old friend and a neighbor. I’m not here to ask for you to lend me some flour, or to see if I might buy one of your horses to stud one of my mares.” Elbana nodded, and stepped over to his small desk, sliding a mug of cold tea from the edge so she could half lean and half sit on its corner.
He smiled now, honestly, at what he thought looked like her open candor.
“You owe me a favor. I’m here to collect.”
He glanced down at the chests that held up his bed frame, and raised an eyebrow.
“Nothing like that, Red. I need you to train my student. He’s my prize pupil, and he could become, someday, the best close-in fighter I have ever met. But…”
“There is always a ‘but.’ What ‘But’ do we celebrate today?” Red asked her.
“He’s been injured.”
“...injured…?” The old man was looking confused now. “Part of all that noise people talk about happening in the capitol a few months back?”
“He needs someone who has overcome this kind of injury to get him back onto the training yard.” She stared hard at her mentor. Not allowing herself to break eye contact.
“He should retire. Maybe open an inn, if he can afford it, and leave the fighting to others.”
“He cannot just leave everything to open an inn. He has responsibilities. Responsibilities that mean that he needs to have the confidence to lead soldiers, even if he doesn't fight with them, he still needs to be that kind of leader for his people. He needs to know that he could fight if one more body was needed. And his injury has taken that from him. He’s not handling it well.”
“This is your little cub, isn’t it?” Harred asked, a note of doubt in his voice. “This is the boy you left the warband to train?”
She sighed, knowing that he would have figured it out soon enough. But this just felt too soon. And it didn’t matter.
“This inn…” She said, “That is what you have. You take care of the property. You do a little farming. A little brewing. You trade for most of what you need from the towns up and down the Royal Road. And once in a great while, you have a few guests. Just a few. The town is dried up, and there aren’t even enough people to come to the inn for music and a knee-up. No entertainers have stopped here in a year.” The look of simmering anger starting to peak out around the edges of Harred’s calm was telling her how close to outright rage the town’s withering had affected the inn. “This… It’s all you and Ol now have… But,...”
“Oh, there is that elusive ‘but’ again.” He was trying to keep it light.
“BUT…if you promise me a year, I can put a full garrison in the remains of the town.” His eyes lit up at that. “Even send some masons, engineers, and wood workers. Build a new keep, and fortify it. Have a crown smithy open in the keep.”
“This town doesn’t need a keep…”
“It does if I put a full regiment here as a training post for that new garrison.” She was smiling now as he had begun to smile at the idea of the town coming back to life.
“A full…”
“And you will be placed in charge of training them to be better soldiers than any the army of Rhiada has now. Train them as if they are the Red Stone. The town will come back, with a garrison here to train. Ol can run this inn with more regular guests, more regular income. And if you help me now, I will put you in charge of making some of our soldiers better. Give me the year, as the favor you owe me, and I will make certain this town comes back. You will train the soldiers I send you to be more than they could ever be where they are now.”
From around his neck, he pulled a fine black chain. As the chain came out of the front of his robe, Elbana could see the small diamond shape of a chain-cutter arrowhead. The arrowhead itself was as black as the chain that now held it.
She nodded, and from around her own neck, she pulled a similar chain that also sported a black arrowhead.
Neither arrowhead sparkled nor glinted in the flickering of the light of the three lanterns in the small room. Each head looked to drink the very light from the air, if they could.
“And if I cannot train your boy the way he needs?” Red asked his one time pupil.
“Then I will still need you to train the new regiment. Maybe even moreso, if you cannot bring him back to where he needs to be, we might have even more need of a regiment that fights like the Red Stones.”
“It’s that bad, is it…?”