Dawson McKeege shot the hunched old grump an incredulous look. “They’re all dead,” he said, sweeping his arms out to the smoking ruins that had been a thriving town only a few days before, and raising his voice so that the others of the troupe could hear him well- before the arrival of Dame Gwydre, who was said to be only a few hundred yards away. “How could anyone like this, old fool? Men and women and children of Vanguard, our brethren, our fellows, slaughtered before us by the monstrous plague.”
“Goblins and them wretched blue trolls!” someone shouted from the side.
“Aye, and with Alpinadoran backing, not to doubt!” a third chimed in.
Dawson could only nod. The war had grown all about the northern frontier of Vanguard, and now, if this was any indication, it had snuck in around the edges. For this burned and broken town, Tethmawle by name, sat closer to the Gulf of Corona than to the battlefields in the north.
The sound of approaching horses ended all the chatter, and the fifteen men of the expedition turned as one to regard the procession galloping down the road. The elite guards of Castle Pellinor led the way and took up the rear, sandwiching a trio of monks dressed in their brown robes, a pair of advisors lightly armored and armed, and two women who both seemed at ease on their respective mounts, riding hard and not in the sidesaddle manner, which had become fashionable among the courtesans of the holdings south of the Gulf of Corona. One of those women, the taller of the two, with hair going silver, but her shoulders still tall and straight, held the attention of the onlookers most of all.
“She should not be out of the castle,” Dawson muttered under his breath, and he rubbed his weary eyes and tried to be at ease. He could not, though, and he found himself glancing around nervously, as if expecting a host of goblins and trolls and other monstrosities to swarm down from the tree line and score the ultimate kill in this wretched war.
The procession rambled up to the edge of the town, the soldiers fanning out into defensive positions while the seven dignitaries trotted up to Dawson and the others.
“Milady Gwydre,” Dawson said with a bow to his ruler, his friend.
Gwydre rolled her leg easily over her mount and dropped to the ground, handing the reins to one of the nearby men without a thought. She spent a moment surveying the area, the smoking ruins, the charred bodies and the bloated and stinking corpses of small gray-green goblins and blue-green trolls littered all about the area.
“They fought well,” the old coot near Dawson dared to remark.
Gwydre shot him a glare. “They are all dead?”
“We’ve found none alive,” Dawson confirmed.
“Then it was no small force that came against them,” said Gwydre. “How? How was such a sizable group able to sneak so far south?”
“Samhaist magic,” one of the monks whispered from behind, and all three of the brown-robed brothers launched into quiet prayers to their Blessed Abelle.
Gwydre seemed more annoyed than impressed, and Dawson agreed with her completely.
“It is a wild land, milady,” Dawson said. “We are not populous. Our roads are hardly guarded, and even if they were, a short trek through a forest would bypass any sentries.”
“And their determination is aggravating,” replied Gwydre. She walked past Dawson and motioned for him to follow, then held up her own advisors, even the Lady Darlia, her dearest friend, so that she and Dawson could move off alone.
As always, Dawson was impressed by how in control and command Dame Gwydre remained. She carried an aura of competence around her, one that had initially surprised many of Castle Pellinor’s court. For Gwydre had been just a young girl that quarter of a century before when her father, Laird Gendron, already a widower, had been killed unexpectedly in a fall from his horse while hunting. Gendron, revered by the folk of this northern wilderness known as Vanguard, had held the scattered and disparate communities together with a “warm fist,” as the saying had gone-a saying applied to Gendron, to his father before him, and to his great uncle who had been Laird of Pellinor before that.
“I cannot tolerate this,” Gwydre said, her lips tight, her voice strained. “Chapel Pellinor’s fall has created unrest, and the folk will be all the more unnerved when news of Tethmawle’s fate spreads through forest trails.”
“You fear they will question the fortitude of their dame?” Dawson asked, and Gwydre sucked in her breath and snapped an angry glare at him. But it did not hold, of course, for Dawson McKeege was perhaps the only person in all of Vanguard who could have spoken to Gwydre with that necessary candor.
“Do you remember when Laird Gendron died?” Gwydre asked somberly.
“I was with you when we received the news.”
Gwydre nodded.
“Aye,” said Dawson, taking the cue. “And so began the whispers, the laments of ‘why hadn’t the laird sired a son?‘”
“The lower their voices, the louder they sounded,” Gwydre assured him. “Those voices were part of the reason I so abruptly agreed to marry Peiter.”
The admission didn’t startle Dawson. “He was my friend as he was your husband. I suspect that he, too, heard those whispers, and couldn’t suffer to see his beloved Gwydre so pained.”
“I was a young woman, barely more than a girl,” Gwydre admitted. “And never in my life had I done anything that would have, or should have, inspired their confidence. Even those years later when Peiter died, their doubts about me rightfully lingered.”
“That was fifteen years ago, milady,” Dawson reminded her. “And before your thirtieth birthday. Do you fear that they still doubt you?”
“We are in a desperate war.”
“It is Vanguard! We are always at one war or another. The woods are full of goblins, the coast crawling with powries, the northland thick with trolls, and never in my life have I met a more disagreeable bunch than those Alpinadoran barbarians.”
“This is different, Dawson,” Gwydre said. Her tone quieted the man more than her words. For there lay a truth there that neither could deny. Dame Gwydre had taken a lover, an Abellican brother, and in the two years of her tryst, that particular Church’s stature had grown considerably throughout her holding and by extension, throughout Vanguard-much to the dismay and open anger of the dangerous and powerful Samhaists.
“You fell in love,” Dawson said to her.
“Foolishly. I placed my heart above my responsibilities, and all the land suffers for it.”
“Those same Churches were going to fight, with or without your actions,” Dawson argued. “As they fight a proxy war through the lairds in the South, where, it is said, three hundred men die every day.”
Dame Gwydre nodded and couldn’t deny the truth of Dawson’s claims, for indeed, this same battle for religious supremacy over the folk of Honce was playing out throughout the Holdings of Honce Proper. There, the fight between Abellican and Samhaist was shielded from view behind the fa$cLade of the warring lairds Delaval and Ethelbert, but it was no less real and no less fierce.
In the South, the Abellicans were clearly winning, for their gemstone magic, both healing and destructive powers, was coveted by the many lairds feuding for dominance. In the quieter North, where few Abellicans and fewer gemstones haunted the wild land, the Samhaists had found refuge, so they had believed. Tied to the seasons and the world and the animals great and small through wise and ancient traditions, Samhaist wisdom served Vanguardsmen well indeed.
But then Dame Gwydre had fallen in love with an Abellican brother.
“There will be more Tethmawles,” Dame Gwydre said solemnly. “One community after another will be sacked.”
“I beg you not to tell that to your subjects, milady.”
Gwydre shook her head to deny the dryness of Dawson’s remark, and that action conferred to Dawson that she wasn’t being melodramatic. She knew that she was losing to the hordes from the North, the legions of Ancient Badden.