WardtownA Teer & Kard Story
Glynn Stewart
Wardtown © 2020 Glynn Stewart
Illustration © 2020 Shen Fei
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to any persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
Contents
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Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
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1
“Coral, watch ’em on the left; they’re pushing.”
The only reply Teer got from Coral was a vague wave, but the ranch hand kneed her horse forward in response to his shout. A moment later, the dark-skinned Merik woman with the braided ponytail was bellowing at the cattle who were drifting out of the cluster plodding along the road.
One steer had spotted something at the side of the path and gone to investigate. Cattle being herd creatures, five more had tried to follow him. Coral’s shouting startled them and they fell back into line with the rest of the herd in front of Teer.
The gawky young Merik man, who’d just celebrated his nineteenth turning with the hands he was currently ordering about, watched the herd with a careful eye for a few more blinks, then glanced ahead. The translucent green dome of the ward around Alvid was visible ahead of them.
“Ward coming up,” he shouted. “Watch the cattle; none of ’em like this.”
There was a clear line in the dirt around the rough-packed road to mark the ward too. The other three hands from Hardin’s Ranch would have spotted the ward before they drove the cows through it, but better safe than sorry.
As usual, the lead steers passed through the protective field around the wardtown and spooked. They tried to stop, which risked bringing the entire herd of cattle to a crashing halt that might even kill some of the product.
Coral and Deck were shouting at the recalcitrant beasts, but this turning’s herd was a stubborn bunch of steers. Others were crossing the wardline and none of them were moving forward, the herd threatening the exact crush they couldn’t afford.
Teer did not want to be the one explaining to Hardin, his mother’s husband and the ranch owner, how he’d lost half a dozen steers to an entirely predictable spooking at the wardline.
He drew his quickshooter and fired over the cattle’s heads, the revolver’s crack spooking the entire herd into a rush across the wardline.
“Keep ’em on the line,” he shouted as steers lunged forward, their fear of the gunfire stronger than their fear of the discomfort from crossing the ward. “We know where they’re going. They don’t!”
That got him a laugh from Anthor, the last of the other hands riding with him. All four of them were dressed in much the same sturdy clothing: pants and shirts sewn by Alana, Teer’s mother, from machine-woven cloth made out west in the main cities of the Unity.
All of them were Merik, the dark-skinned people that formed the core of the Unity’s numbers. Most of Alvid’s people would be Merik as well, though there were always some members of the Unity’s other people—except the Unity’s Spehari rulers. Those were far rarer.
Anthor was the oldest of the hands, with at least a dozen turnings on Teer, but he was willing enough to defer to the younger man. A lot of weight came with being the son of the rancher’s wife, even if Teer wasn’t Hardin’s son.
“They’re fine,” Anthor told him, but he put his heels to his own brown mare and rode forward across the wardline.
That left Teer alone at the rear of the herd, shouting at the last few steers to convince them to cross through the vague green light. Then, taking a deep breath, he edged Star, his own mare, across the line.
Every time he entered the wardtown, it sent shivers down his spine. It wasn’t just Alvid, either. The town he’d been born in had been on the coast out west, under the looming shadow of one of the Spehari’s Iron Pillars, but they’d still had a wardstone to protect them from inclement weather.
Once he was in, he was fine, but crossing the wardline always gave him chills.
“Ohlman’s expecting us,” Teer told his team as it became clear they had the cattle inside the ward and headed the right way. “Let’s take ’em down the road to the stockyard. The drivers’ll have a pen waiting for us.”
Getting eighty steers to move in one direction at once is a practiced skill, but Teer and his companions were practiced at it. This was the fourth time Teer had helped bring the cattle down to Alvid to sell to the cattle drive.
It was the first time he’d done so with the general understanding that he was in charge, but that spoke to the slowly changing nature of his role on the ranch. At some point, Teer’s younger half-brother, Alstair, would inherit the business from Hardin.
But Alstair had all of five turnings. Teer had been working on the ranch for as long as Alstair had been alive, and Hardin was mostly recognizing the reality: the hands already looked to the “boss’s wife’s son” for orders if Hardin wasn’t around. Today, that meant Hardin had put him in charge of the team of four selling the cattle.
Getting them through town was the hardest part in many ways, even if it was barely the last mile of the trip.
When the last of the herd finally ran away from Coral flicking it with the end of a rope and into the pen, two of Ohlman’s outriders slammed the gates shut behind them.
“I count hundred eighty-six,” one of the two men, both wildly bearded,
