Guardian Last (Lords of Syon Saga Book 2) (11 page)

Twice in as many miles, Colaris had warned them of traffic
approaching on the road, and twice they’d barely slowed and composed themselves
before they were seen.  In the dappled shadows of the trees, their Bremondine
cloaks made them virtually invisible to those who had passed them on the road––farmers,
as it happened in both cases, rather than priests or knights––whose thoughts
had been lost in their own business.  As a result, they’d not much inclined to
notice one more band of travelers. 

The riders could not afford to be memorable, not to anyone
they passed.  For someone to recognize Duke Trocu Damerien was unlikely, given
his rare appearances in public.  But he could not risk it.  Such recognition
would bring questions and the demands of his station from the people of
Durlindale which would delay him.  At worst, it would bring unwanted attention
from those who might wish him harm while he was still too weak to defend
himself. 

Lord Daerwin had clearly written his message to his nephew in
haste, so it had not been terribly clear.  Something about Brannagh being
besieged and a rendezvous in Brannford…  The rest, Trocu already knew. 

He’d smelled Xorden’s ancient and all-but-forgotten stink
all over the disgusting little Hadrian cardinal as soon as he’d entered the
audience chamber at Damerien.  But by that time, Trocu had been all but
incapacitated with protecting those of Brannagh from the plague threatening to
leak in at the edges of his power if his attention so much as wandered.

Five times, only five, he had been able to rally just a bit
of extra strength while still holding off the main body of the plague.  He’d
sought out the traces of B’radik’s power in her priests and lent his own to
help purge the plague from some few of the knights.  Only five.  Without sleep,
without food, as his own strength had begun to fail him, to his sorrow, Damerien
had not been able to save another.  As he’d weakened more and more, he’d
despaired of outliving the plague himself, much less being able to protect
Brannagh much longer. 

So it was in this helpless, nearly dead state that he had
watched as through a fog as his beloved cousin, Lady Renda, Knight Commander of
Brannagh, Hero of the Five Hundred Years War, had bowed to the despicable
Hadrian.  She was unable to see the evil spilling from his features, and so she
had left the assassin alone with the duke.  The cardinal had positively crowed
once she was safely without, for he’d believed her to be the only being in all
Syon strong enough to protect Damerien from him.  Then something amazing had
happened.  While the Keepers frantically pooled their diminished strength to
protect the duke, little Pegrine had appeared between Trocu and the cardinal,
her wooden sword leveled at the Hadrian’s shocked face, with all the power of
the goddess B’radik coursing through her…

The duke’s breath fogged in the predawn cold, and he
shivered. 

“My Lord, how fare you?” asked Nestor quietly.  The ride had
not been easy for the ancient Damerien retainer, and the duke knew the old man would
feel every bounce and jolt of it by morning.  But Nestor looked far more
concerned with Damerien, and for good reason.  But hours before they’d thought
Trocu to be on his deathbed.

Damerien chuckled weakly, rubbing at his aching lower back. 
“Well as can be expected,” he answered, mimicking the old retainer’s habitual
answer.  “Too much time abed, Nestor, and my back has no strength to it. 
There’s no helping that just now.”  He looked around him at the familiar hills
and forests, the ancient farmhouses.  “But at least I don’t have the gout this
time.”

“Aye, my Lord,” laughed Nestor quietly.  “And more’s the
mercy, for all of us.  Your grandfather had quite an excruciating ride into
these very fields twenty years ago.”  The retainer grinned at him. 

He smiled.  Nestor and the other keepers had spent hours
before that ride bolstering Vilmar’s strength so he would fall spectacularly in
battle instead of slipping away in his bed and still have power enough left to
achieve the Succession.

“Aye,” agreed the stable boy Jath with a grin.  “But it was
well worth having to sleep the tenday through just to see the armies rattle the
walls of Durlindale and retake it in the name of Vilmar Damerien.  ‘Vilmar! 
Vilmar!’”

Damerien smiled.  He’d lain on the makeshift travois inside
his pavilion at the edge of that battlefield, cold and still, peeling away his
hold on the ancient flesh he’d filled for decades, while outside, his knights
and farmers continued his assault against Durlindale’s walls. He’d heard their
voices grow quiet, and…there!  The thunderous crash of the siege machines
followed by the crumbling of Durlindale’s wall and a throaty cheer rising from
the men.  Before that miserable, gouty perforated form had breathed its last,
Durlindale had been freed of Kadak’s grasp in his name.  The demon had been
forced into retreat, even if only for the season, but a season had been enough
to build the armies’ strength and let them regroup under B’rada after the Succession…

Vilmar’s had been a worthy death, indeed. 

“We should stop soon,” said Nestor, “for the horses’ sake if
not for our own.”

Trocu nodded, looking back toward Brannagh and beyond it,
toward the battle the shadows and disturbing reflections of which he could feel
across the distance, yet he dared not intervene.  Prophecy or no, if the
knights of Brannagh should fail––if Daerwin and Renda should fall in this
battle––he, Trocu Damerien, would again be Syon’s only hope of defense against
what was coming, and if that happened, he would need to have all his strength
and all his wits about him.  He could not afford to turn Xorden’s attention his
way again, not now.

“Sunrise,” murmured Jath, in his dull, distant way, and his
horse danced uneasily beneath him.  “The fires should die down soon.  Having
lost all, they will come this way…”

“Aye,” answered Damerien, “and by then, we hope to be
ready.”  He lowered the hood of his cloak and shook free his dark gold hair,
which had all but completely filled in from the patchy peeling scalp he’d
hooded when they left Castle Damerien.

Above them, Colaris called a warning and swept lower, closer
to the treetops a bit to the south.  They moved into the shadows of the trees
at once.

Suddenly an arrow flew by.  Colaris dodged it neatly and
called off a saucy challenge to the one who had fired it.  Another arrow flew
by, and he dodged it again.  And another.

“Mind the arrows,” Damerien said quietly to Nestor and Jath,
raising his hood again to cover his features, “these hunters have no mind for
where the arrows fall.”  Damerien lifted his falconing gauntlet, and the hawk immediately
dove down to stand on Damerien’s forearm, fluffing his feathers with
indignation at having been fired upon.

“Easy, lad,” soothed Damerien, listening for any more
arrows.  None came.  So they had indeed been aiming at the harrier.  But why? 
Simple malice?  The cruelty of men still amazed him, even after so many
centuries.  He turned to Nestor and Jath.  “Best we keep moving and trust
they’ve lost interest and retired by the time we should meet them, but stay to
the shadows as you can.”

Jath frowned and patted his horse’s neck.  “What if they do
not lose interest, my Lord?”

Damerien shrugged.  “Let us hope for the best and prepare
for the worst.”

Within a mile, they heard voices and saw a team of men
approaching.  Their manner said military, perhaps, possibly a routine patrol,
but definitely not hunters.  Damerien and his men rode slowly, quietly, taking
in as much as they could before making themselves known. 

As they rode closer, Trocu pulled his cloak up closer about
his face.  Theirs were the colors of the Marquess of Moncliff, and they were
looking for something, probably Colaris.  Possibly more.

Perhaps it was the distance from Damerien, or perhaps it was
the marquess’s steadfast refusal to join any fight, even the war against Kadak,
but Damerien had not much trusted the house of Moncliff since he’d first set
them in guardianship over the southern coast.

Over the millennia, Moncliff had always been eliminated
early from consideration for marriage to Brannagh daughters, mostly because of
their lack of solidarity with the other lords of Syon.  This had led to a real
if not official reduction in the marquess’s rank among them, which in turn made
it that much less likely that House Moncliff would ever be able to regain any standing
by marrying a Brannagh daughter.  They were the one noble house of Syon that
had no Damerien blood anywhere in their lineage.

This lack of favor did not go unnoticed by Moncliff, and
neither did the marquess’s petty acts of spite go unmarked by Damerien,
including his blanket refusal to liberate his own city.  Moncliff had not sent
a single soldier to free Durlindale from Kadak’s occupation, insisting that it
was not his war, even while the demon’s army barked at his very gates.

“I know he must have fallen along here,” one of the men was
saying.  While the other eleven rode behind him, he was unmounted, searching
the ground along the road.

One of the others laughed.  “Admit it, you missed.”

“I never miss,” the man snarled.

Colaris kekked softly on the duke’s wrist, and Damerien
smiled.

“Was a fast, wee bird, and you shot wide!”  The oldest man
in the group called with good cheer.  “Come.  Is no shame in missing!”

“Not for you,” the one in front shot back, “you always
miss.”

The other chuckled.  “So apparently do you, on occasion.  So
let’s be on our way, then. We’ve duties.”

The archer persisted.  “The bird had to fall here, or maybe
it’s stuck in the trees,” he said squinting up through the branches, “but
either way, the poachers are somewhere nearby, and that’s a duty as well.”

Damerien cracked a smile beneath his hood.  That was all? 
They were concerned about poachers?  He relaxed, and on his lead, the three
rode casually into view.

“You there!  Poachers!” the foremost of the marquess’s men
raised his bow.  “Stop and identify yourself!”

“Poachers?”  Nestor slipped slightly ahead of the duke. 
Damerien felt a tingle down his spine as Nestor set a subtle protection over him. 
“Even were we inclined to hunt, lad, we’ve no weapons and no game about us. 
You would be hard pressed to convince any sane person that we are poaching. ”

One of the pack snorted.  “Your man there has a hunting
falcon on his very arm!  The very one we––”

“The very one you were just firing upon,” murmured the duke
beneath his hood, “without regard for the safety of the duke’s roadways?”

“’Tis but a bit of sport, and no harm done,” answered
another of the guards, the youngest of them, before one of his fellows glared
at him.

“This bird is a criminal, the very one we spied hunting just
now afield,” spoke the first, “clearly hunting game for poachers.  None would
hold his death against us.”

Colaris hissed angrily.

“He might.”  Damerien ran a gloved hand over the bird to
calm him.  “But pray, what makes you think he was hunting anything but mice? 
His belly is full, and to my eye, just now he but rode the gusts in the air
with not an eye toward the ground, or surely he’d have seen you sooner.” 

Colaris glared up at him darkly.

“Goodness knows,” Trocu continued, “he barely dodged your arrows. 
A full belly on a hawk will do that, but what it won’t do,” he added with a smile,
“is inspire him to hunt.  Besides, I’ve not seen game worth the taking since we
left the sheriff’s lands.”

“Our game is the best on Syon.”  The men were clearly insulted
for their lord’s sake.  “And poaching is against the marquess’s law.  We’ve a
right to kill poachers.”

One of the other guards nodded.  “And confiscate their
goods.”

“Aye, and bless you for it, lads,” Nestor smiled
generously.  “But you mistake yourselves.  Obviously we are not hunters.  You
have but to look at us to see as much.  We carry no hunting weapons, only
weapons for our own defense against bandits.  My falconer was merely letting my
bird exercise his wings.  It’s been a long journey.”

“Has it, now, old man?  Whence come you?”  He crossed his
arms in challenge.  “Identify yourselves.  Now.”

“Why?  The better to judge our ransom?”  Jath asked, dulling
his gaze across the guards.  Damerien and Nestor exchanged glances.  “Does the
marquess pay you so little that you must seize upon travelers to rob them and
their kin?”

“Have a care, boy!”  The guard afoot snapped at him.  “Mind
your horse doesn’t throw you and crack your head wide open.”

But the leader of the guards answered more gently, marking
the dim look in Jath’s eye. “What an imagination you have for a simpleton.  Now
come, identify yourselves and we won’t have to come to blows.”

Damerien felt a slight draw on his strength.

“No.”

“In case they––“

“No!”

The draw stopped.

“Very well, then, lads, no need to fret,” began Nestor,
easing his tone and words to the accents of the most northern reaches of Syon,
the farthest from these southern lands and least likely to have direct
commerce.  Slowly and subtly, the cloth of his Bremondine cloak tightened its
weave and deepened its colors to the browns and greens of Tremondy as the sun
shifted over it.  “No need to start another war, what.”  He smiled a sneering
little smile.  “If you can bear it, know that I am Vilford, Baron Tremondy,
Hero of Farras and of Durlindale.  And these are my retainers.  Pray, do not
grovel.”

The marquess’s men looked at each other in bafflement.

Damerien smiled beneath his hood.  Brilliant.  He gave a
curt little bob of his head, as did Jath.

“Baron Tremondy’s a damned Bremondine?!” blurted one of the
guards, the youngest of the twelve.

“I beg your pardon!” roared Nestor with genuine offense. 
“You sickly southern worm, you dare speak to your betters thus!”