“What do you mean, ‘It?’” asked Trey.
Frampt refilled his goblet and quaffed it down like it was ale. “What I mean, Sir, is that whatever did that wasn’t human.”
“How is it that you’re so certain?” Paladin Schirmer voiced his concerns. “Did you see this thing yourself? It reminds me too much of the old Duke’s hunts. A hundred animals killed and butchered in a single night. A dozen horses and as many skilled skinners is all the pagans would need to do the same.”
“No, Paladin. They would need more than that to do what they did, what little I saw. And if I’d seen more than that, I’d be dead. You see, I thought I was doing something brave. The men were too afraid to check inside the sheds and houses, so I ducked inside myself to save them the dread. And that’s when I heard it, some kind of shriek, like a woman screaming after her stolen babe. I thought at first that it was a survivor, some poor woman come home after the raid, but by the time I poked my head outside a mist had rolled in. I could still here that banshee screaming, but I couldn’t see a hand in front of my face, so thick was the fog. Then the horses whinnied, and the men were mostly quiet but for a few green lads asking what in Hell that awful howling was. If I’d been there, I’d have told them to shut up and ride out. Maybe more would have lived, but I wasn’t there when the screaming started, men’s screams, the kind you hear after a battle when you can’t tell your friends from your enemies dying all around you.
“I bolted, tried to get to my horse but couldn’t find it in the mist. I couldn’t see a thing, but I can tell you paladins that the air was thick with the smell of piss and blood. There weren’t screams anymore, just this eerie silence and the clopping of horse hooves in the mud. Eventually I found a mount, but I found the corpses first—naked and unarmoured, stripped right down to the muscle. I swore to the Lord and rode harder away from there than I’ve ever rode before. I caught up with a few of the lads on the high road, they were all that was left. We never went back…never even gave our brothers a proper burial.”
“Thank you, Elder Frampt,” interjected the commander. The senior cleric bowed and sunk into his chair. Pyke looked to the Cross. “What is your assessment, Captain?”
“Of your massacre in the mist? It sounds to me like poor coordination, morale, and leadership. What else would you call a quarter of the men bolting before the skirmish begins?”
“You’re not convinced, then?”
Trey scowled at the cleric glowering at him. “No, Commander, I’m not. I’ve heard similar stories from my own squire, and they turned out to be naught but mere birds and brackdragons.”
Jael balked at the thought of a mere brackdragon, but agreed with her captain all the same. It seemed to her Troy felt the same way. He was studying the surface of the table as if it were a map, his cool blue eyes darting between stands of matted, brown hair. After a moment’s contemplation, he raised his freckled nose and said, “Whatever the threat is, they’re using the ground against you. You’ll need to cut back the forest around these villages, drain the swamps, make it into proper farmland. As it sounds now, these pagans can sit right on top of you—strike at the perfect instant, like when the mist rolls in.”
“Thank you, Sir,” Pyke replied, “That would work well somewhere like the Summerlands, and we’ve considered it ourselves, but the people here live off the wood and bark for barter. Cutting back the forest would be like cutting off their lifeblood.”
“An attack then,” proposed Gildmane.
The commander agreed. “That has been our thought as well, but some of us wanted to determine if there might not be a better option. Elder Lloyd?” Pyke nodded to one of the senior clerics who rose and bowed. He was an old man, older than his commander, knit with wrinkles and a snowy tonsure. He spoke with a tone unwavering.
“I wish, my good sirs, the situation were simple enough for a counter-raid. It is unfortunately not. We’ve known for some years the location of the pagan den. It would have been easy for us to raze it, but the place is practically a village, and most of it denizens aren’t pagan blood. They’re run-aways and apostates from the local farms and estates. Youths, women and children. Even their fighting men are hardly more than lads, no older than your squires. This isn’t like Quiet Harbor and the Wild Isle. These are our own kin, misguided, but they are ours.”
“Our kin are the men they slaughtered!” Frampt spat.
“And when we slaughter them, what will wash the blood from our hands?”
“Don’t try your hypocrisy with me, Stone-Slayer. Your hands are bloodier than all of ours.”
“Elder Lloyd, was it?” Troy interrupted, “If I may ask, what do you suggest if not to rout them out?”
The cleric frowned and answered, “My hope was that if the Cross brought enough men that we could try and capture the village. Convert them like we did the rest of the west, like the Guard did down in Babylon. But…” He sat back down, leaving his thought unfinished.
Trey finished it for him. “But we haven’t brought many men, only what we could spare. And you might not have heard out here in the woods,
