The Dame

THREE

He stumbled through the blinding storm, the cold wind whipping his cloak wide, the persistent snow rushing in around his armor. He stumbled and nearly fell, but knew the group behind him, nearly ninety men, depended on his continuing forward against the harsh elements. He shielded his eyes, futilely, and leaned forward against the wind, driving on.

But the ground gave way before him as he walked right over the edge of a chasm he could not see. His cry diminished as he dropped fifty feet to where the snow and ice cushioned his fall enough so that he did not die immediately. Twisted and broken, unable to draw in enough breath to scream out, he tried to hold faith that his brothers would get to him with their healing stones.

He died alone that night.

“He’s gone over!” a monk had cried when Brother Juniper fell. “Ropes! Brothers! A stone of levitation!”

“Turn east and trek the length of the gorge!” Father De Guilbe ordered, his tone accepting no debate. “Brother Juniper is lost to us, and many more will perish if we do not find shelter from this accursed storm! East, I say, and with all haste!”

They did find shelter, meager though it was, amidst a tumble of boulders and a few thin evergreens. With frozen fingers, the servants of the brothers moved about the area, digging out any piece of wood they could find, breaking branches from the trees. Brother Giavno held his hands in front of his face and blew into them, trying to get feeling back into his fingers. He stood at the back of the camp, a wall of rock climbing up high behind him to the north. Before him, the servants dumped their thin loads of kindling.

Giavno waved the next brother in line over to the latest pile and presented him with two gemstones, serpentine and ruby.

The younger brother placed the ruby down and clutched the serpentine close to his chest, offering prayers to Blessed Abelle and reaching into the gemstone magic until an aura of bluish white light glowed about him. Shield in place, he bent and retrieved the ruby, then thrust his hand into the kindling pile and called forth its fiery properties.

The fingers of pine branches exploded to flames, but they didn’t last and could not fully take hold on the thicker, wet wood. The brother called upon the ruby again and again until finally the flames caught. Still holding the serpentine shield, he left the ruby for Brother Giavno and carried the burning pile to his appointed section of the encampment.

“There is little shelter for the light of our fires,” Brother Giavno warned his only superior among the group, Father Cambelian De Guilbe, a giant of a man, larger than life, standing well over six feet and weighing nearly three hundred pounds. De Guilbe’s girth seemed all the more remarkable because the rest of their group had thinned considerably during the years away from Vanguard and Honce. De Guilbe was almost a decade older than the middle-aged Giavno but possessed of no less vitality. Indeed, with Giavno’s own head more skin than hair, many who regarded the pair could not be certain which was the older. “The hill behind us blocks a view to the north. The chasm to the south perhaps protects us from attack, but the flames we need to stave off the cold this night will be seen for a long way.”

“Yes, yes, I know,” an obviously impatient De Guilbe replied, his tone revealing that this decision had weighed heavily upon him. When word had come of Ancient Badden’s designs over Mithranidoon, a plan that would have wiped out all the communities living in the many islands scattered about the warm waters, De Guilbe determined that this fight was not his. He turned from the barbarians and powries, long his enemies, and their call for unity against Badden and decided that the time had come for his missionary group to return to the south, to Vanguard and the civilized lands of Honce. Away from the warm waters of Mithranidoon for more than two weeks, with no knowledge of what had happened in the brewing fight with Badden, the band of monks had wandered the rugged and broken terrain of Alpinador without much success. They had expected to be in Vanguard by this point, back in Chapel Pellinor, at least, but more than once they had lost days of travel by wandering in circles.

And worse, they had lost ten men to the elements and to monsters. Brother Giavno’s warning recalled a dark night only a week before, when a host of ice trolls had descended upon the band. With magic and fighting skills, the brothers and their servants had driven the foul creatures off but at a cost of three lives and many wounds-so many that the entirety of the next day had been spent using the healing magic of the soul stones.

“Our food stores run low,” Giavno said. “When the storm abates, we must form hunting parties and send them out.”

“You are a beacon of hope on this miserable night,” Father De Guilbe scolded. Brother Giavno went respectfully (and fearfully) silent.

“You still carry the weight of guilt that we did not follow Cormack up the glacier to do battle with the Samhaist ancient,” De Guilbe accused him. “Or is it that you still carry the weight of guilt for the flogging you delivered to the traitor?”

“No, Father,” Giavno denied, his eyes averted.

“Yes!” De Guilbe shot back. “Let it wash downstream, Brother Giavno. Cormack was condemned by his own actions. Your arm struck not from personal vengeance but from the demands put upon us as brothers of our beloved Abelle. You struck with righteousness.”

“He was once my friend,” the humble Giavno said simply.

“Of course it pains you, but our road is not easy. Spiritual purity and devotion are oft the harder roads, but it is a course we walk with pride!” He glanced around and gave a helpless little laugh. “Although I admit this Alpinadoran road is at least as confusing! Would that we had an Abelle of a different sort, yes?”

Brother Giavno’s eyes widened at the apparent blasphemy, but Father De Guilbe patted him on the shoulder and chuckled his concerns away. “It is not an easy road we have chosen,” he repeated, “not in body, not in spirit.”

Before Giavno could respond, a brother along the western perimeter of the encampment called out, “Intruders!”

De Guilbe and Giavno rushed down, as did every other member of the group until De Guilbe impatiently waved them back to their posts.

“In the trees!” the monk explained to the leaders when they arrived. He pointed to a small copse of deciduous trees and a few evergreens about twenty yards from the boulder tumble.

De Guilbe stared hard for a short while, believing he noted a form slip through the trees, though he could hardly identify it. He waved several brothers over and handed each a smooth gray stone, a graphite, the stone of lightning.

“All at once,” he explained and held his own hand forward, clenching the largest of the graphite stones. “If it is a troll or goblin scout, then let our barrage ward any others from thinking to come so near. On my count of three.”

“Perhaps it is an ally,” one of the monks replied. “Brother Cormack, or-”

Father De Guilbe fixed him with a withering stare. He most certainly did not want to hear that name with the reverent word brother before it.

De Guilbe looked back to the copse and began counting down. As he finished, ten bolts of lightning reached from the monk line, slashing through the trees, thundering into the snow-covered ground.

“Whoa, now!” came a cry from the north, up the hill below which Giavno and De Guilbe had just been standing. All in the camp turned with a unified gasp to see a man sitting calmly halfway up the rocky, seemingly unclimbable rise. He was dressed in deerskin, a thick brown cloak about his shoulders and upper chest. A tricornered hat, small feather in one side, adorned his head. A stick of some sort, perhaps a bow, rested easily across his lap.

One of the monks near De Guilbe lifted his hand toward the man, as if intending to loose another bolt of lightning.

“Whoa, whoa, young one,” the stranger said, waving his hands defensively and wearing a smirk that showed no fear at all, that almost seemed to mock the impetuous man.

Father De Guilbe slapped the monk’s hand down and stalked up to the stranger, Giavno in his wake. “Who are you, and what business have you with us?” the leader demanded.

“You boys seem a bit lost,” the man replied. “Been watching you for a couple of days now, and I’m guessing that you haven’t any idea where you’re going.”

Father De Guilbe bristled. “We are on our way to Vanguard and Dame Gwydre,” he announced stiffly.

“Oh, I’m not doubting that you know where you want to go,” the man replied. He slapped his hand on his knee and stood up, hooking the bow, for it was indeed a bow, over one shoulder. He eyed the decline before him, then skipped down nimbly and sure-footedly across the snowy and icy stones.

He was not a young man, clearly, his short hair and thick mustache long gone gray, but he moved with the grace of a twenty-year-old. He kept his upper body incredibly still while he moved down the broken path, and his legs seemed too long for his body. He was thin but not skinny and exuded an aura of great strength and power. Monks and attendants shied away from him when he got down from the hill.

“I said that you haven’t an idea of where you’re going,” he finished, coming up before De Guilbe.

“I asked you who you were.”

“I could be asking the same of yourself, since you’re the ones who are out of place here.”

“This is your home?” De Guilbe asked, looking about with mocking doubt.

The man shrugged. “As much as any place could be called that, I expect.”

“And your name?”

The man laughed. “Jameston Sequin,” he replied. “Not that it should mean anything to you.”

“I have never heard of you,” De Guilbe concurred.

“And that pleases me,” Jameston replied. “The fewer of your church who know my name, the happier I am.”

De Guilbe’s face further tightened. “You are a Samhaist.”

“Not in this life, not in the next, if there is a next,” Jameston said with a snort. “And not in the one after that.”

“Then-”

“Then nothing,” Jameston said with finality. “I’m a hunter, and I know this land better than any man alive. You say you want to go to Gwydre, and that’s where I’m going, so you should be glad to see me.”

De Guilbe glanced over at Brother Giavno, who shrugged, unable to deny that they could indeed use some help in navigating their way from this inhospitable land.

“I’ll take you, monk,” Jameston offered. He looked over at the copse of trees, one of which was still showing small flickers of flame from the lightning barrage. “But only if you promise to stop scarring my home.”

J

ust a few miles to the west of De Guilbe’s group, Bransen’s band of six unusual characters settled in for the night. They had found a small hollow between two large stones. The two powries of the team had gone to work immediately widening it, mudding and blocking any creases, cracks, and openings. Now the six-three men, a woman, and the powrie pair-settled in quite comfortably. The industrious dwarves had even constructed a chimney of sorts to keep the smoke out of their impromptu chamber.

They had left the glacier above Mithranidoon a full week after the departure of Father De Guilbe and his monks, after the fall of Ancient Badden and the sorting that needed to be done in the aftermath. Little fighting had been required after Badden’s fall, for most of his minions, including the many Samhaist priests who had come into his call, had fled at his demise. These six, along with Milkeila’s barbarian tribe and the other powries of Mithranidoon, had remained in the ice castle the ancient had constructed, awaiting an attack. No other priests of Badden’s Samhaist order had arrived, however. The trolls, giants, and goblins brought together under the power of the great and evil man had simply dispersed to the mountains with his fall.

Still, there had been much to do. Ancient Badden had constructed his grand ice palace through the earth magic of Mithranidoon, digging a deep well to access that power directly. Day after day after his fall, the shamans of Milkeila’s Alpinadoran tribes had worked tirelessly to close that conduit of power, to heal the wound Badden had inflicted upon the glacier, the lake, the earth itself. There also remained the disposition of Badden’s prisoners, of which Jond had been one. Of the others, more than fifty in number, some had seemed capable of making the journey south with the winter coming on in full, but others obviously could not have survived.

And so it had been decided that just this one band of outcasts, unaffiliated any longer with the church or the tribe or the clan, would make the arduous and dangerous trip to Dame Gwydre in the hopes of securing a rescue caravan in the spring. Until then, the other survivors of the ancient’s insanity would live on Chapel Island, the now vacated land where Cormack’s Abellican brethren had built their home.

It fell on this group, now taken to calling themselves Six Cogs One, to relay the tidings to the people of Vanguard and to find the resolution.

“You should return with the caravan in the spring,” Bransen said to Milkeila as they discussed the tasks before them again that night in the hollow.

The woman shook her head.

“Don’t overestimate the generosity of Yan Ossum,” Cormack answered for her, using the proper title of Milkeila’s tribe. “They understand that in agreeing to bring the refugees from Vanguard to Chapel Isle they are threatening their very way of life.”

“Longer than our memories have we lived on Mithranidoon,” Milkeila added. “Only rarely have outsiders come to our shores, as with the brothers of Abelle a few short years ago. Now we have invited strangers to settle upon our waters, perhaps to learn our ways, and then they will be allowed to leave. I am amazed that Teydru and the others agreed to this-I think it an impulsive decision made in the glow of Ancient Badden’s fall.”

“The fall and, therefore, the salvation of all who dwell on Mithranidoon,” Bransen reminded.

“Yach, but that Badden would’ve washed them all away,” Mcwigik put in.

“All true, but there is no doubt in my mind that the shamans and elders will come to recognize the danger of their decision,” said Milkeila.

“You do not believe they would hurt the refugees?” Bransen asked.

“No,” Cormack insisted before Milkeila could answer. “They are honorable to a fault. They would not bring such dishonor and treachery upon themselves.”

“But they will not be pleased at the arrival of the caravan from Vanguard in the spring, should it ever actually arrive,” said Milkeila. “And I would not have myself associated with that troubling spectacle any more than I would now. I will not return to Mithranidoon, likely not for the rest of my life.”

Bransen, having no argument, simply nodded.

“But me and me friend’re going back, and might be in the spring,” Mcwigik said. “Soon as we find a place for our kin away from that lake, we’ll go and fetch ’em.”

“Yach, and hopin’ it’ll be a place back on the Julianthes,” Mcwigik’s powrie sidekick Bikelbrin added. “Back to the dark sea, at least.”

“Where to, then, for any of us?” Cormack asked, drawing all eyes his way. “You, Bransen, will find your wife, and Gwydre promised you that her Writ of Passage will allow you to go wherever you will, but what’s in store for Milkeila and me? What for the powries, whatever their desires? We know where we are going now, to Dame Gwydre, but what about tomorrow’s journey?”

“Wherever the Father of Chapel Pellinor tells me to go,” Brother Jond said with a little laugh.

Bransen tightened up at the reminder that his friend Jond had ties greater than their road-sewn bonds.

“It is so much easier when you bear no responsibility for your road, true?” Cormack asked playfully. Bransen noted that the former monk was looking directly at him as he spoke.

“Sometimes, Broth… Cormack,” Jond corrected himself, echoing that helpless laugh. “And sometimes it is a burden, truly.”

“Perhaps our roads will stay as one, then,” said Milkeila. “I would enjoy that.”

“Not mine,” Bransen said immediately and definitively. “With the fall of Badden, my indenture is ended and my road is my own to choose.”

“And you would not choose to be with us?” asked Jond. “You wound me, friend.”

“No, it is not-” Bransen started to explain, but he noted Jond’s mischievous grin and knew the blind man was playing him here. “I miss my wife,” he finished simply.

“I can understand that, certainly,” said Cormack, who was now staring at Milkeila intently, a look Bransen understood, recognizing that he wore that same mask of desire and longing whenever he looked upon Cadayle.

Cadayle! She filled the young man’s thoughts then, more fully than any time since his departure for Alpinador. His anticipation grew by the moment as he sat there in the comfortable hollow. All he longed for was to be in Cadayle’s arms once more.

Soon, he knew. Soon.

I left the injured woman with some friends in Alpinador,” Jameston Sequin explained to Dame Gwydre only four days after he had met with De Guilbe’s party. With the scout leading them, the troupe had made great time moving into Vanguard and to Gwydre’s castle in Pellinor.

Eager for news from the front, Gwydre had wasted no time in summoning Jameston to her court. When he had arrived, Gwydre had immediately shuffled Father De Guilbe and Brother Giavno, along with the other brothers of Abelle in attendance (including the father of Chapel Pellinor and her own lover, Alandrais), off to the side of the room.

Her smile had drooped with Jameston’s every word as the man recounted his short time with her strike force, ending in a disastrous fight with a troll prisoner caravan, when, seemingly, it had all come undone. When, Jameston believed, Bransen and Jond and the others had been fully defeated.

By Jameston’s grim account, it seemed certain that Ancient Badden had won.

“I went back toward the glacier, but just a few miles,” Jameston explained. “Badden surrounded himself with many powerful minions-giants, even. I couldn’t get near the place.”

“But you do not know if they are dead?” Gwydre asked, obviously uncomfortably. Beside her, Dawson McKeege put a comforting hand on her shoulder to steady her.

“Only poor old Crait, and a fine fighter he was,” said Jameston. “And that strange younger fighter, the one in black.”

“Bransen,” said Gwydre. “The Highwayman.”

Jameston nodded. “Not sure if he’s dead, but it seems as if he got hit on the head, and hard. He could hardly walk as the trolls led them off. I doubt he made it alive to the glacier.”

“That’d be a terrible loss for us,” said Dawson, who had brought Bransen to Vanguard to fight for Gwydre’s cause.

“He is alive, or was, when we left Lake Mithranidoon,” Father De Guilbe interrupted. It was obvious that the man had been waiting for an opportunity to jump in ever since Jameston had entered the room.

“What do you know of it?” Dame Gwydre asked.

“As I was explaining before we were sent aside,” De Guilbe began peevishly, “we left the lake because word came to us of the designs of this very same Ancient Badden. Word from this man, this Highwayman, as you call him. So, yes, Dame Gwydre, he survived to the glacier, at least. If we’re to believe the word of our fallen brethren, he also survived a fall from the glacier.”

“The Highwayman came to enlist you against Ancient Badden?” Gwydre asked incredulously.

“He came to warn us that Ancient Badden meant to destroy everyone living on the islands across the lake,” Father De Guilbe carefully equivocated. “And so we left, as my directives clearly demand.”

“You did not go and do battle with Badden?”

De Guilbe bristled. “It is not my place.”

“So who or what are we to blame for this new alliance between Abellicans and Samhaists?” Dawson McKeege asked sharply.

“Alliance and enmity have degrees in between, friend,” said De Guilbe. “And we were ignorant of your current struggles with Ancient Badden and his followers, or of any edict from Father Premujon of Chapel Pellinor or Father Artolivan of Chapel Abelle decreeing that the Brothers of Abelle were at war with the Samhaists. We have been on the roads of Alpinador for years. It was not my place to go and start such a war.”

“Surely you could have found your answers from the Highwayman!” Dawson protested.

“Who came to us with a traitor to our order!” De Guilbe shot right back.

“Who came to you with information enough to send you running to the south!” said Dawson.

“Enough!” Dame Gwydre interrupted.

“Makes me miss the birdsong and chirping toads,” Jameston mumbled. Gwydre shot him a sly twinkle to let him know that she didn’t disagree, for she, too, would surely have preferred a walk in the forest to this inane bickering.

“So at least we know that the Highwayman survived the ordeal of the troll capture,” Gwydre recounted to Jameston. “To your great surprise.”

“I’m not arguing.”

“And he returned to do battle with Badden?” Gwydre asked De Guilbe.

“As far as I know,” he said stiffly.

“Could you elaborate?” There was no missing the sharp edge creeping into Gwydre’s tone or her weariness at De Guilbe’s annoying verbal dance.

“He went with the traitor to our order and his woman, a barbarian girl,” the large monk grudgingly explained.

“Ah, then, not to wonder why you kicked him out of your church,” Jameston interjected. Gwydre hushed him with a look.

“Her people were joining in the battle, as were the powries of Mithranidoon,” Brother Giavno interjected. Father De Guilbe shot a threatening glare of his own to back the monk down.

“Truly?” asked Gwydre. “Then there is hope.”

“They are all dead,” De Guilbe stated flatly.

Gwydre arched an eyebrow. “You know this? Or you presume?”

The large monk shrugged impatiently.

Gwydre nodded and turned back to Jameston.

“Any odds for armies going against Badden aren’t good odds,” the scout reminded.

“But the Highwayman had already been up there, so he knew…”

Jameston’s laugh cut her short, and she stared at him, seeming less than amused.

“Your pardon,” the scout said with a low bow, even bringing his hat down to arm’s length to sweep it across the floor. “I’m always enamored of Dame Gwydre’s optimism. Sure but you are a warm ray of sunshine on a dark forest trail.”

“Take care in how you address the Dame of Vanguard,” Father Premujon warned, which only made Jameston chuckle harder.

“Then we can hope,” said Gwydre. She put her hand familiarly and warmly on the strong shoulder of tall Jameston Sequin, much to the annoyance of Premujon and every other Abellican brother in the room. “Then we can hope.”

“Always that,” Jameston replied.

They didn’t have to wait long for their hopes to be fulfilled, for word rang out later that same afternoon of more travelers coming down the northern road. The alarms sounded loud and clear long before this second group neared the town, for among its ranks were reportedly at least two powries and a tall man wearing the beret of a bloody-cap dwarf.

Many people went into the streets to await the arrival, and Dame Gwydre and her entourage moved to the front of that throng. Soldiers and scouts slipped out all about the town perimeter, watching, their elm bows drawn and ready.

The approaching band came into view at last, over a rise to the north, and many in the crowd gasped, “powries,” at the unusual sight. But Dame Gwydre was not looking at the bloody-cap dwarves. She was smiling, her eyes on Bransen the Highwayman and on Brother Jond beside him. She led the gathering right out of the gates, doing all she could to stop herself from breaking into a full run at the very welcome sight.

“We feared you dead!” she said when she stood before the band of six. Gwydre gasped then, and so did others around her, noting the garish wound on the face of the beloved Jond. Immediately a group rushed from Father Premujon’s ranks to attend to the man.

“Yach, but so did we,” said one of the dwarves, and he and his fellow laughed.

“Ancient Badden hoped that to be the case, I assure you,” said the Highwayman. He rolled his sack off his shoulder and dumped its gruesome contents-the ancient’s head-onto the ground before Dame Gwydre.

More gasps arose and several wails of protest.

“Remove that wretched thing!” one man demanded.

But Gwydre held up her hand to silence them. “Truly, I have never seen a more beautiful thing in all my life.”

“Let it thaw a bit so ye can enjoy the stink of it, as well,” advised the same powrie. Again he and his friend exploded into laughter.

Dame Gwydre looked from one to the other curiously, then stared hard at Bransen.

“We have a lot to talk about,” the Highwayman admitted sheepishly.