Chapter 19

Selwyn, Barony of Fairshore, River Mark

Baron Quentin Blout rode at the head of his knights, the flat farmlands stretching out before him, golden and rich from the summer rains. They were behind schedule. Today was Pride’s Fall, the day that marked the end of the time of magic, when their powers went awry and split their continent apart, creating the Shattered Lands. He’d hoped to mark the occasion by riding into Kenna and taking the duke’s ancestral seat.

It wouldn’t mark the end of River Mark as a threat, but it would be a good first start and put his name in the running to be elevated to be duke of this region once Aldric’s head was on the block.

That part of the plan was at least still working, even if they were behind schedule. His scouts had reported that the duke’s forces were only a few miles ahead. Technically, they outnumbered Blout’s forces, but where Blout had three hundred sworn knights, fifty archers, and five hundred men-at-arms, his scouts reported that the enemy force of almost fifteen hundred men was made up of less than two dozen knights, a mere hundred professional spearmen, and double the number of archers in his own forces. The rest were apparently conscripts, largely armed with clubs and farming instruments.

Neither side had enough archers to cause any significant damage to the other side, which meant it was going to come to foot soldiers and cavalry, of which he had much more.

“Flat land favors cavalry,” Quentin muttered, more to himself than to the captain riding beside him.

“Indeed, my lord,” the captain replied anyway.

“Get the knights upfront. They have hardly any spearmen. We’ll punch right through them. Three ranks, spread wide. We’ll sweep across their line.”

“Yes, Baro...”

The man’s words were cut off by a shout of warning from off to their left, which quickly echoed, spreading along the line. To the west, coming down the harbor road, was a cloud of dust.

Horsemen. Did Aldric think he had enough men to overwhelm him, or that they would be able to be surprised? This was open farmland, not the forested area they’d had to march through to get here. They could see for miles in every direction.

“Mounted knights, my lord!” A scout shouted as he came riding up ahead of the enemy formation, reining in his horse as he reached the command group. “Maybe twenty total.”

“They mean to hit our back line!” Sir Malcolm said.

“A foolish gesture,” Quentin replied calmly. “Position the spearmen to receive their charge. Two hundred should suffice. Chase them down and finish them off.”

Malcolm saluted and rode to the footman marching with long spears. Experienced and trained men-at-arms, all of them.

“Send word to quicken our advance,” Quentin ordered. “While they waste strength on this diversion, we’ll smash through their center.”

It wouldn’t be long now, Quentin thought. Aldric would be dead, and he would be wreathed in glory.

“The diversion worked, Your Grace,” the farm boy said, panting hard.

“Do you know your numbers? Can you tell me how many went after them?” Aldric asked.

“I ... a lot, my lord.”

Aldric smiled down at the boy. “More than half. Less?”

“More than half, Your Grace.”

“Excellent. Good job. Now run to the far rear and stay safe. Tell your father how proud I am of you,” Aldric said, patting the boy on the shoulder.

The boy gave a large smile before mounting the pony that Aldric had given him for doing this job. It was probably worth more than his family made in a year and would be good for the entire family. Normally, Aldric would never have used a child this way, but he’d been scraping the bottom of the barrel putting together this force. Most of his professionals had already been sent to Twyver and were now fighting a guerrilla war near the Thunderhorn, leaving him with less than two dozen knights and just over a hundred trained men-at-arms. As a result, the rest of his army was made up of farmers and laborers.

And not enough of those.

Aldric looked out across the wheat field at the clouds of dust slowly coming his way. The enemy was technically a smaller force, but they were all armored and trained warriors. Any commander would know that his peasant army would not last five minutes in an open-field battle. His knights, the few he had, had argued for a guerrilla war, like the peasants had used to defeat the crown last spring.

Conventionally, they were right, but Aldric couldn’t let them scour his duchy. Already, they had killed many civilians, razed fields, and put storehouses to the torch. His people would starve during the coming winter if he didn’t stop them. If he didn’t make a stand here.

“Signal the archers, make sure they remember to aim for the spearmen, past the cavalry,” he said to the young man he’d picked to be one of his runners. “Tell them to watch for my signal.”

The boy had shown himself to be smart, have a good memory, and was a hard worker, which is what Aldric needed. If they survived this, he would have to talk with the young man’s family, see to it that he got a position more fitting of his abilities than feeding horses in a small stable.

The enemy was confident. They were marching steadily forward. He could see the banner of Langmere in the center of their line. Blout was a good commander, having served under Gavric in several campaigns. He knew to save the charge until it was close enough to be effective, to not let his cavalry get too far ahead of the rest of the forces.

He was also plodding, preferring the direct approach to scheming. It made him short-sighted. To him, everything was a nail waiting for a hammer. Exactly what made Aldric think this could work.

“Now,” Aldric said, and a man next to him began waving a large flag.

A simple signal, but it worked. Moments later, arrows began to arch into the sky. Not many. He only had about a hundred men who had any skill with a bow. The flight of arrows was not as ... controlled as he would have liked. A good portion landed short, a few hitting among the knights, although it looked to have injured only one of their horses. More landed beyond the men-at-arms, in between the archers and spearmen. Half, however, landed among the spearmen themselves. It wasn’t going to be enough to stop them, but it caused some casualties, and every dead attacker was one less man they’d have to face.

The arrows also seemed to work as a signal for Blout’s forces; their knights surged forward, beginning their charge, while their archers let loose their own fewer, but much more accurate, flight of arrows, which fell mostly among the mass of commoners.

Men screamed as shafts punched into soft, unarmored flesh, going down grasping at their wounds. Aldric felt badly for the men who’d volunteered, in most cases, to defend their homes. Felt badly but did nothing. Men died in battle and none of them deserved it. The enemy did not have enough archers to change the course of this battle, and enough of the commoners lived in the city behind him or were in the path of this army that they would not run. Not with their loved ones on the line.

“They’re not slowing,” Sir Malvan said, one of the handful of knights he’d held back for this.

Alyssa had insisted he keep some men with him as protection. Besides, even if this worked, they would have the remaining spearmen to deal with.

“They don’t think they have to,” he said, not taking his eyes off the mass of horses and men charging toward them.

Hundreds of armored knights. It was a terrifying sight. The distance continued to close. Fifty yards. Twenty yards. Ten yards.

And then complete chaos erupted as the first row of knights hit the wide covered trench hastily dug in the tilled earth, the soil with the wheat lifted out and then placed over woven sticks to make it seem, from a distance, as if the field were still intact, a solid row of wheat.

As hooves hit the thin covering of woven sticks and reeds, overlaid with dirt, the earth opened up and swallowed them whole, horses and armored men crashed into a pit filled with wooden and metal stakes driven deep into the ground. Screams filled the air, drowning out those of the men injured by arrows, as horses and knights died.

It didn’t stop with the first line. Horses at a gallop can’t stop suddenly. There was too much weight and too much momentum, and they were riding tightly packed, as traditional doctrine proscribed. The second line, and then the third, plunged into the pit. A handful managed to stop in time, but that was it. Three hundred knights had become four.

A devastating loss.

“Torches,” Aldric yelled.

The spikes were only the first part of the trap. The ground around the torches wasn’t just dirty. Layer after layer of canvas sacks had been laid on the ground, soaked for a day in the rendered fat of nettlefish. The large, carnivorous fish were found in the frozen sea and waters around Alchmara and the Icelands, and one of their major imports.

All but the stubborn Northmen found the fish to be nearly inedible and hunting them could be dangerous, with their rows of razor-sharp teeth, but they had other uses. To survive the frigid temperatures of those northern waters, they had a thick, oily fat layer that, when rendered down, could burn for hours and was used for lighting and even heating across the Shattered Lands because of how hot it burned.

Two of his men-at-arms tossed torches into either end of the trench. The highly flammable oil caught instantly in a great whooshing sound. All those standing closest to the trench had to take several steps back as an inferno that felt as if it emanated from the depths of the underworld itself leaped from the pit, the screams becoming screechings as horses and men in heavy armor were burned alive.

A few managed to climb out of the pit, burned but alive, only to find dozens of commoners with spears and heavy hammers who began to beat the burned knights to death.

None made it out of the charnel house.

As soon as the fire was lit, Aldric screamed, “CHARGE!”

Aside from the hundred men tasked with keeping anyone from escaping the pit, his assembled army screamed as one and split in two segments, one half running around the left side of the pit and the other running around the right side, swarming toward the now backpedaling and terrified men-at-arms who’d just seen the large assembly of knights killed in a matter of seconds.

The commoners avoided the four armored men on horseback who’d avoided the pit, charging the men-at-arms and archers, as they’d been instructed. Blout’s distinctive plumed helm identified him as one of the four armored men, and Aldric spurred his horse forward, around the pit and toward him.

Aldric had never liked Blout. A cruel, vindictive man who saw his people as nothing more than one more resource to be used up and disposed of, rather than people he served. He had led the attack on Twyver and the atrocities that had followed there. Only a handful of accounts had come back from the city once it had fallen to the crown’s forces, but word of mass executions and deportation of women and children over the river to who knows where had been reported.

Now that he had the man in front of him, Aldric did not plan on allowing him to escape the field.

Aldric spurred his horse toward him, cutting through the one knight who tried to get between them. Quite literally cutting through him, the Sword of the Whittons tearing through breastplate, flesh, and bone all the same, barely giving any resistance, the man’s torso sliding away from the rest of him above the navel, and falling off the horse, his face locked in a silent scream.

The sword was one of the few true magical weapons found outside the control of the Acolytes, rescued by Aldmore Whitton from the clutches of the purifiers during the Second Alliance of the Ancients, as part of their failed attempt to keep the Alliance holdings on Thay from falling to the growing purifier threat. When Aldmore returned home, instead of turning the stolen artifact back to the Acolytes, he kept it, claiming the ancients had come to him in a dream and told him to keep it, as one of the symbols of House Whitton, to be passed down with the throne, but used by the youngest of the heirs.

Which was convenient seeing as how Aldmore was the youngest of his four brothers.

Aldric had always doubted the truth of that story. It seemed much more reasonable that Aldmore had been captivated by the weapon and decided to keep it for his own and concocted the story to justify it. As far as Aldric could tell, there were others who doubted it, too, which might explain why Aldmore was found poisoned only a year after returning from the Alliance.

The sword, however, stayed with the family, and had passed from generation to generation, ending up in Aldric’s hands when he came of age. He had to admit that it was a fantastic weapon. It never scratched, never tarnished, was completely unbreakable, and the blade had never found a substance it couldn’t cut through.

Not that it was easy to use. The blade had to hit just right to cut through. It was possible for a glancing blow to deflect it. It took training and experience to use it, but with that, it was a powerful weapon.

Aldric planned to prove that again as he pushed his horse toward Baron Blout. Blout recognized it, after seeing his man cut in half. His eyes were wide with fright as Aldric bore down on him.

He swung his sword at Aldric in a wild arc, desperate to push him back, maybe in hopes he could get Aldric to slow down or stop, give him time to get away. That was never going to happen. The ancient sword cleaved through Blout’s weapon, shattering the steel as if it were nothing. Blout staggered, his eyes wide with disbelief.

Aldric didn’t hesitate. He thrust the sword forward, the blade piercing Blout’s chest, sliding easily through the breastplate. The baron gasped, his breath rattling in his throat as he collapsed, sliding off his horse.

The other surviving knights fell almost as quickly, swarmed by Aldric’s knights and stabbed with spears by men-at-arms who followed quickly behind the horses.

“Finish their line!” Aldric shouted, raising his sword and pointing toward the few hundred spearmen and archers left behind.

He didn’t even have to reach their lines. Seeing three hundred knights burn to death and their baron skewered, the soldiers had had enough. They turned and ran before the commoners even got to them, the archers joining the rout.

“Chase them down,” Aldric commanded his remaining knights.

Some would be caught and cut down by the peasants, the remainder were chased by the knights. A few would make it back to what forces remained at Twyver, but Aldric wanted to keep that to a bare handful.

This was not Edmund’s only force south of the Thunderhorn and there would be more battles. Aldric needed to cut down the number of enemy soldiers that survived this battle as much as possible.

The Village of Tarnwick, Barony of Fairshore, River Mark

Caldean cursed his luck. His two hundred men-at-arms, burdened by their mail and spear, trudged through yet another tiny village. This was a wasted effort for his men, instead of being part of the force that got the glory of destroying the rebel forces. They’d been on a wild wyvern chase, as if his men would ever catch up to the dozen or so mounted knights who’d tried to ... he didn’t know what. Flank the baron’s army?

Not that a dozen men could have killed three hundred mounted knights, even if they had been taken by surprise. Better to just fight them off and let them run, rather than try and chase them down.

But the baron had been specific. Capture and kill them. So that is what Caldean had tried to do.

He’d finally called the chase off as a wasted effort after they found the body of what, by his count, was the last of the few crown knights who’d been sent with them to catch the rebel knights. They had found the bodies of their knights scattered for the past two hours, waylaid. In return, he’d only seen two of the enemy knights.

Not a good exchange.

He would be happy when he was back with the army and had seen the last of these poor villages, which seemed all but empty, the peasants probably hiding or run off. He’d been worried as they passed through the first two villages during the chase after the rebel knights, but this was the second village on the way back, and it seemed as abandoned as the rest.

“Sir, can we look around, maybe find some food?” one of his sergeants asked.

“No. I want to get back to the army. Besides, look around. Do you think this place has anything worthwhile to find?”

“They might have some...”

Caldean held up a hand. He didn’t know what, but there was ... something.

“On guard...”

His words to his men were cut off by a sudden crashing noise as every door around them smashed open, making a warning redundant. Peasants poured from every doorway and alley brandishing clubs and farming tools, dozens from every building, surrounding his men, clubbing and stabbing them.

Caldean got his sword out just in time to block the thrust from a man with a pitchfork, slashing him across the chest. Many of his men, carrying long spears unusable in these tight quarters, didn’t have the same chance, dying before they could react. The rest dropped their spears and desperately grasped for the swords at their sides.