Lord Gregory sat atop his mount cursing his fortune. Before him, where he would have crossed the shallows to the western bank of the Leif Greyn River, was a stretch of raging rapids that churned and thrashed with the full force of the spring thaw behind it. He was left with two choices now. He could either backtrack up into the mountains and go west, crossing the hundreds of streams, trickles and creeks that combined to make the powerful flow before him, or he could go south into Wildermont and hope that Harrap and Condlin Skyler had been exaggerating the amount of death and destruction they had found there. Even as that thought formed in his mind he dismissed it. He knew that Harrap and Condlin had most likely told him exactly what they had seen and heard. He also knew that, if the bridge that crossed over into Westland was really destroyed, his decision here and now would determine how long it would take him to finally make it back home. If I even have a home left, he thought to himself. Had he been younger or even healthier, he would have already been working his way back up into the mountains. Maybe it was good that he was half crippled and weary of backtracking. If Westland really had been taken over, he knew he would find no welcome there, but still he had to go look for his wife. Finding her was all that he lived for.
He took a deep breath and spurred his horse southward along the eastern bank of the churning flow. He knew that there were a few smaller towns and a dozen villages south of Castlemont along the river-Low Crossing, Seareach, and others. The Leif Greyn River split at Seareach. Maybe he could find a boat there and take the Westland flow to Settsted stronghold. There he could at least learn of his friend and peer, Lord Ellrich’s fate.
Lord Ellrich’s stronghold held the main barracks for the river guard. If the zard had come up from the marsh, Settsted would have fallen first. Maybe he should try to find a boat to Southport instead. No king or queen or invader of any sort would destroy the trade center of the kingdom they were taking over. Southport was Westland’s biggest port. Shipping trade with all of the east, the Isle of Salazar and the other southern islands took place there. It was also a place where Lord Gregory could probably blend in with the populace.
A boat from Seareach to Southport then, he decided. He had enough gold in his saddlebags to buy his own ship. A chunk of raw gold ore the size of a man’s head was left in one of Mikahl’s packs, along with a fat sack of Westland coin. He’d taken the coins and with a dull axe, had broken a fist sized chunk off of the other. What he’d left behind was easily twice as much as he’d taken. Mikahl and Hyden would understand, he knew, so he didn’t feel guilty for helping himself.
A day later, he saw the tip of the Summer’s Day Spire jutting up over the ridge ahead of him. That afternoon, when he topped the ridge, he saw the whole flooded bulk of the Leif Greyn Valley. The Spire looked to be rising up out of a great lake.
“It’s cleansing itself,” he said aloud, and with some amazement. All of the dead bodies and burning wagons and deserted pavilions that he had seen as Vaegon the elf and Hyden Skyler helped him away from his routed camp were under water now. Hopefully the carnage was being washed down the river into O’Dakahn or the marshes.
It took the rest of that day, and two more, to get to the city of High Crossing. Normally it would have only taken a day, but he had been forced to skirt the flooded valley. At least the High Crossing bridge was still intact. It didn’t cross the Leif Greyn River, though. It spanned the Everflow River as it came out of the Evermore Forest to join with the Leif Greyn.
No toll-taker stepped out of the little house on the other side of the bridge when he crossed it. That alone confirmed most everything that Halden Skyler’s sons had told him. He didn’t have to look upon the nearly deserted rows of buildings that lined the streets beyond the bridge. He didn’t have to see and smell the bones and thawing remains of the corpses that had been haphazardly put into piles and burned before winter set in.
He felt eyes upon him as he rode through the empty town. Suddenly a sharp squeal filled the air and a thin filthy boy came chasing a healthy looking piglet into the road. The boy couldn’t have been ten years old, and he froze in place when he saw Lord Gregory coming. Tears of terror welled up in the boy’s eyes as he darted back into the evening shadows, his piglet forgotten. From somewhere in that direction came a woman’s hushed, but scolding voice. Lord Gregory, saddened by the sight, but uplifted to know that there were some survivors about, spurred his mount onward.
As he left the town of High Crossing behind him, the sun was starting to set. At an abandoned farm set a short distance from the road he holed up in a barn for the night. There was no telling what sort of pilferers and bandits were about. He didn’t want to spend the night out in the open. He thought about sleeping in one of the abandoned inns he had seen, but he would have had to leave his horse outside. What people remained here were desperate and would probably have the poor animal gutted and cooked in the blink of an eye.
As he lay in the barn struggling to find sleep, his heart grew heavier. Throughout the day the signs of war had become apparent, making him wonder just how bad off his homeland might be. Was Lady Trella even alive? He had to find out.
Westland couldn’t be as desolate as High Crossing, could it? It could, he decided, but he knew that it wasn’t. Instead of being empty and void of life, it was now full of skeeks and barbaric breed giants. The strand of hope he held for his Lady Trella was growing thinner, but he refused to let it go.
He could picture her in his mind as she had been when he’d left her at the stronghold in Lake Bottom: the yellow dress with the sky blue ribbons, the sparkling of her sapphire eyes as she kissed him goodbye.
King Balton had called on him. It was supposed to be a relatively short journey, a trip around Lion Lake to Lakeside Castle, then two weeks at the Summer’s Day competition, but when Lord Gregory arrived, King Balton was on his deathbed. He’d been poisoned and knew exactly who his murderer was. Secret orders were given, then at the festival all the hells broke loose.
Lord Gregory had wanted to stay with his king, root out those responsible, and deliver them to the noose, or better yet, to the headsman’s axe, but King Balton had told him no.
“Go to Summer’s Day,” he’d said. “Take good men, men that you trust. Mikahl will need you. You know who he truly is. He’ll have my sword, and he’ll be scared. You’ll find him in the Giant Mountains looking for the Southern Guardian, but go to the competitions first and participate as if nothing is amiss. It’s imperative that the cause of my death remain between us. If they know that you know I’ve been poisoned, they will try to kill you too, and Mikahl needs your help far more than the rope needs necks.”
Lord Gregory had passed Mikahl in the hallway outside the King’s chambers after that conversation. The young man looked troubled, as if he already knew some of what was happening. Lord Gregory remembered looking into Mikahl’s eyes then and seeing King Balton in them. He understood now that Balton had known that his son, Prince Glendar, would bring the kingdom down. There was no way Glendar could ever have Ironspike. Mikahl was the intended heir to Westland. Mikahl’s heart was true, and humble, and fierce. Mikahl would have to pick up all the pieces now. Lord Gregory only hoped that the boy was still alive. Why the Giant King had sent him off to Highwander where the Witch Queen ruled, he couldn’t understand. He could remember clearly her Blacksword warriors cutting down his men while he lay helpless. If he couldn’t find Lady Trella, Highwander was his next destination.
In the morning, while rummaging through the barn, he found a crossbow and a handful of dull, but usable steel-tipped bolts for it. Before he had taken his injuries, he had been quite handy with the sword, but now his body felt a hundred years old. He could wield his blade if he had to, and he still wore it at his hip, but the crossbow would make even a well armored bandit wary of him.
He saw no bandits that day. He did see a herder with seven goats out in a soggy green field, and a man on the wall of a keep that sat a good distance off the road. He saw a few folk who looked to be planting corn or maybe wheat behind a mule-drawn plow too. When he passed they huddled together and stared at him as if he had a golden horn sticking out of the top of his head. When he finally came into the outskirts of what used to be the city of Castlemont he saw nothing but destruction.
Half a hundred proud towers had once reached toward the heavens from the base of the city. Now there was nothing but ruin, a stubbed tower here, the taller stump of one over there, and a few other broken structures jutted up from the rubble like broken teeth. Lord Gregory figured that winter had preserved some of the meat of the dead, for hundreds of thousands of carrion birds swarmed over the piles of brick and stone and fractured wooden beams looking for another meal. It was the idea of what had happened here, more than the smell of rot in the air that made his stomach turn. He couldn’t understand how Pael and King Glendar could have orchestrated such total destruction.
He had no doubt now that Valleya had fallen as well. Dreen had naught but a clay brick wall around it. If that’s where the Westland army had gone, then they had taken it.
Why would they sack Wildermont and not try to hold it, though? Glendar probably had no idea that Westland would fall behind him, so he hadn’t been concerned with guarding his rear. But still, any good military tactician would want to hold the source of more than half the realm’s supply of iron ore. It just didn’t make any sense not to.
Thoughts of King Glendar, and more specifically of his beloved Westland, began to consume Lord Gregory. He spurred his horse southward, stealing glances across the river between the crumbled buildings on his right. In places he could see the wide, powerful flow and his homeland across its span.
A wooden tower rose up from the Westland bank where the destroyed crossing bridge still stuck out like some fancy half-finished dock. Men were pulling lines in from it as if it were just that. Other men were on the tower, and there were people moving about beneath it as well. Behind them, the city of Locar seemed to be carrying about life as if nothing had changed. Dull gray smears of smoke still lifted toward the sky, and the occasional clang of tack and the faint smell of cooking meat carried in the air. It all looked pretty normal and hopeful, but only for a moment. Lord Gregory then saw a giant breed beast being pulled in a huge wagon carriage by a dozen men. Climbing to the top of a pile and squinting with his hand visored at his brow, Lord Gregory watched as the driver, a man, lashed at the pullers with a whip until they quickened their pace and disappeared beyond some buildings. Fluttering up on the wooden tower, and from several other places across the river in Westland, was an unfamiliar banner: three yellow lightning bolts crossing in the middle on a field of black.
Lord Gregory reckoned it looked like a wicked golden snowflake.
Enslaved Westlanders, breed giants loose in Westland, and under the banner of some self-proclaimed Dragon Queen. Lord Gregory shook his head in dismay. King Balton would roll over in his tomb if he knew of this-if he even had a tomb. Lord Gregory, however, was filled with a newfound hope that Lady Trella might have actually survived the Dragon Queen’s invasion. He had to get home and find out if she was all right, but there was no way to cross here. He needed to go south to where the river widened and split, then he had to find a boat to get across.
When he topped the hill that led down into the town of Low Crossing he saw a dozen men loading a flat barge with crates. Suddenly he was feeling uneasy. The pings and clanks of a few smiths’ hammers could be heard, but Lord Gregory didn’t dare stray from the road. On the southern side of a small bridge that crossed a tributary just before it met the main flow, he hurried past four well tended horses tied to the post of a fully operational tavern. As he was about to leave the town behind him, a pair of horsemen came out from behind the last riverfront building and blocked the road. By the insignia on their breastplates he knew they were Dakaneese sell-swords. He had run into them before on the docks of Southport and Portsmouth in Westland, but this wasn’t Westland. Here he was nobody; his lordship meant nothing. He found, as he brought his crossbow to bear on one of the men, that he was more than just a little afraid.
The man he was aiming at spat a thick brown wad of slime from his mouth. “Let him pass,” he said gruffly. “He’s no absconded slave.”
“But Dreg said to stop anyone that looks suspicious,” the other man argued. The conviction in his voice fled when the crossbow moved from the first man to him.
“Look there, Lem, at his hilt. That sword’s worth more than all of your sisters in a bundle. This man ain’t suspicious, Lem, he’s armed,” the first man said. Then to Lord Gregory, he said, “What’re you doing passing through here?”
Lord Gregory’s heart was hammering in his chest. He could barely breathe, but knowing that these men were only second-rate sell-swords he said the first thing that came to his mind and hoped for the best. “Is Dreg paying you enough to mind my business?” He asked the question in a way that suggested not only that he knew who Dreg was, but that he was in the man’s favor. He hoped that the extreme quality of his nervousness didn’t show through his facade of annoyed confidence.
A moment of silence ensued, then the man spat another wad of brown slime from his mouth. He grinned with rotten teeth as he backed his horse away from his companions. “See, Lem,” he said as he motioned for Lord Gregory to pass between them. “He’s not suspicious.”
“Nay, he’s not,” the other man said, his eyes never straying from the crossbow that was still trained on his gut.
As soon as Lord Gregory was out of their sight, he spurred his horse and rode at a mad gallop for a good long while. He thought that this man Dreg might send somebody snooping after him and wanted to put as much distance between him and Low Crossing as he could. He doubted that the two men guarding the road would even say anything about his passing, but he couldn’t be sure. If they did, the fact that they’d noticed the value of his sword meant that men would surely come looking for him sooner or later.
Just before dark he spotted a wagon train approaching from the south. There were three horse-drawn wagons surrounded by at least twenty mounted men. Probably just more sell-swords guarding a cargo, he thought. Not knowing what else to do, he left the road for the hills that rose up off to the east. He hated to leave the road. He was so close to Seareach he could smell the marshes already. Even so, he needed to come up with a story, or a plan, or both. He needed to know what the sell-swords were about, who had hired them, and what the political climate was between the Dragon Queen, the Dakaneese, and those Westlanders who had survived, but he didn’t want to get robbed, captured or killed doing it.
Seareach was the last place he could find a boat to take him swiftly across the river to Settsted. It was less than half a day south. If he had to go farther south than that to find transport, he would have to travel all the way to O’Dakahn and catch a sea ship. That could take weeks.
He found a low place in the hills and dared to light a small fire that night, for it was still chilly, even this far south. The beginnings of a plan began to form in his mind and he fell asleep turning the ideas over and over again.
He woke to the sound of voices-voices far too close to him. He reached slowly-as if he were just shifting his sleeping position-to where he’d lain the crossbow before he’d fallen asleep. It wasn’t there. Panic shot through him, but he didn’t overreact. He saw that the sun had barely reddened in the sky when he cracked open his eyelids. He felt a heavy booted man step close to his head, and could see three others. Two of them had longbows drawn and trained on him.
“Come on man, wake up,” a voice said. “We’ll just have a word or two with you.”
The accent was Dakaneese. The way the man spoke told Gregory that he was no lackey; this was somebody who had authority.
“Who are you?” Lord Gregory asked as he sat up. He was glad he had used his saddlebags for a pillow. Had these men found all of his gold he would already be dead. The thought of the wealth in his packs gave him an idea that added well with the story he had come up with last night.
“You don’t recognize old Dreg?” the man’s tone was full of irony. “My men said that you told them you knew me.”
“You need to hire better men,” Gregory calmly replied. Though he showed no fear outside, inside he felt as if his heart might fail him. “How did you track me at night? My fire was too small to be seen from the road.”
“With sorcery of course,” Dreg said with a nod toward the silhouette of a robed and hooded figure who was sitting on a horse near the other men. “What were you doing up north?”
Gregory sighed. Here it goes, he thought, all or nothing. “I escaped the Dragon Queen’s breed beasts through the Reyhall Forest and wintered in a cavern up in the foothills.”
“You’re high-born, don’t deny it,” accused Dreg. “Is there a reward for you?”
“Reward?” Lord Gregory chuckled nervously. “If there is, it’s not a big one, I assure you.”
“The quality of your steel says otherwise,” Dreg’s tone had become curious. “Where did you come by such a piece?”
“I pulled it off of a body at Summer’s Day,” Lord Gregory lied. In truth his father had given the sword to him, as his father had done before that. It had been in his family since it had been forged nearly three hundred years ago. He didn’t want to lose it, but it wasn’t worth his life.
“I’m a man of inspiration, and I have a weakness for survivors,” Dreg said coolly. “Inspire me to leave you to your fate and I may do so, though I doubt it.”
Dreg would probably let him live if he gave him the sword and some coin, but Lord Gregory had a better idea. “Get me on a boat to Settsted or Southport over in Westland,” he said. “If you do, I’ll make you rich-rich beyond imagining.”
“Granddad’s coin chest? Mam’s jewelry box?” Dreg smirked. “You’ll pay me when we get there? I said inspire me. I’ve heard this drivel hundreds of times. Just last week a man offered me an entire herd of goats to spare his young daughter from my men’s lust. I agreed, and being a man of my word my men never touched the girl. I did though, and after I killed her, we feasted.”
“Still eatin’ them fargin goats,” a man chuckled. Another laughed with him from the darkness.
Lord Gregory reached behind him and pulled his saddle bag to his lap. He heard the laughter suddenly stop as the men around him resituated the aim of their bows. He didn’t stop what he was doing, though, because he knew that Dreg wouldn’t let them shoot him just yet.
“Slowly, man,” Dreg cautioned. “Itchy fingers all around you now.”
“You’d be wiser to let me show you what I’ve got in private,” Lord Gregory said with enough confidence that he saw Dreg considering it.
“And be pricked by some poison dart, or caught up in some ludicrous charm spell. I think not.” Dreg trotted his horse up a little closer. “I could just kill you, fool, and take what you’ve got. Now out with it.”
“Kill me if you like,” Lord Gregory replied boldly. Most, if not all of his confidence had returned. “But if you do, you’ll never know where this came from.” He pulled the fist sized chunk of raw gold ore out of his pack and held it to where it caught the breaking light of dawn. All around him the gasps of Dreg’s men could be clearly heard. Dreg himself let out an audible “Ooh” and his eyes grew as big as coins.
“It appears that I owe you an apology, sir,” Dreg finally said, with some sincerity in his voice. “I have indeed been inspired. Now what was it you said you needed? A boat to Southport? Is there anything else?”