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
