The Pen and the Sword (Destiny's Crucible Book 2) (30 page)

As
mayor of Lanwith, Dwelfin Camron spent entirely too much time dealing with
minutiae—or so he told himself—ever since being appointed to the post by Hetman
Moreland fourteen years ago. His wife knew better. Daily involvement in
numerous community issues was her husband’s greatest pleasure. Whether because
he enjoyed the feeling of authority it gave, or because he truly was
conscientious about the people of Lanwith, even his wife was never sure. Either
way, he performed well enough that the position had remained Dwelfin’s these
many years. His tenure was about to end.

Twelve-year-old
Mylin Naernwill brought water to his father and two older brothers working in
their farm’s wheat field. They were a mile from the edge of Lanwith and had
been at work before sunrise. Although farming was constant hard work, it was the
only life Mylin knew, and he couldn’t imagine any other. Everyone in the family
knew that one day Mylin would leave to start his own farm. The eldest brother
would inherit the family farm, once the father died, and would be obligated to
help Mylin and the middle brother in starting out on their own. His mother and
two sisters, one older and one younger than Mylin, were at the farmhouse doing
what women do while men did what men did. His older brother would never inherit
the farm.

Tilda
Purcells hadn’t needed to come to Lanwith that day. The real purpose of the
trip was to get her niece Anarynd Moreland out and about for a few hours.
Tilda’s oldest sister, Anarynd’s mother, Gwenda, was far too timid, as far as
Tilda was concerned. Tilda wished that Gwenda asserted herself more. Men might
be ordained by God to be the head of the family, but that didn’t mean women
didn’t have the right to respect and their opinions listened to. Of course,
being fair to her sister, Tilda had to admit it was easy to give advice since
she wasn’t married to Brym Moreland and didn’t have to deal with that ass every
day.
Tilda never forgot to give thanksgiving at Godsday services for her
own husband. Of the four sisters in the family, Tilda considered herself the
most fortunate in husbands, although her sister Glynas’s husband, Balamus,
compared well.

The
current discord in Gwenda’s family originated from Anarynd’s refusal several
months previously to be courted by the oldest son of an elderly boyerman, the
son a widower with two daughters. While Brym thought the marriage would be
advantageous to the family, Anarynd took one look at the squat, snaggle-toothed,
balding man of forty-six years and walked out of the first meeting arranged by
Brym, who had predictably exploded at Anarynd after making profuse apologies to
the would-be suitor.

Relations
between father and daughter had never been warm, and when Brym retaliated by
refusing Anarynd permission to attend Maera’s wedding, the ensuing screaming
match between both parties reverberated throughout the family. Anarynd hadn’t
spoken to her father for several months and swore she never would again.

It
had been Glynas who convinced Anarynd to meet the latest potential suitor in
the vain hope of improving family relations. Surprising all, including Anarynd,
was that the young man who visited was pleasant and earnest. Not the husband of
her dreams, but she was tired to the bone of being shopped around by her
father. Harwyn Moreland was a distant cousin, third or fourth removed, and the
second son of a boyerman of an eastern Moreland district. The eldest son had
been married to two women during a ten-year period, and neither marriage had produced
a child. Thus, it was likely the second son or one of his sons would eventually
become boyerman. The district was prosperous and Harwyn’s family wealthy in
lands and herds, so a marriage promised significant coin and animal stock to
Brym Moreland.

Anarynd’s
ability to refuse numerous potential husbands was as far as she could go. She’d
known she’d have to eventually accept one of them, and whether it was Harwyn himself
who convinced her or her weariness of the process and family tension, even she
wasn’t sure. While nothing was official yet, Anarynd told Harwyn privately that
she was favorably inclined. A visit to Harwyn’s family was arranged, and, if it
went well, Anarynd foresaw a marriage within a few months, one where she would
be out of her father’s control, and Maera would be there.

It
had taken extensive persuasion for Brym to allow Anarynd to accompany her aunt
to Lanwith. Tilda’s argument was that keeping the girl cooped up wouldn’t
improve their relationship, and now that the girl seemed favorably inclined to
a marriage, it would be smart of Brym to relax how sternly he treated her.

Anarynd
had become surprisingly strong-willed the last few years, a development Brym
blamed on the influence of that damned Keelan daughter. He’d never approved of
the friendship between the two young girls. However, even with long-standing
animosity between Moreland and Keelan, it hadn’t been feasible to prevent their
communications and yearly visits. After all, a hetman was still a hetman, even
if from a despised clan.

Tilda
and Anarynd arrived in Lanwith by carriage just before noon. They left the
driver with the carriage and strolled through the town, browsing the shops and the
stalls. Maybe Anarynd would find something Tilda could buy her to improve her
mood. It was  a kind and thoughtful invitation by a concerned aunt—but a
fateful invitation.

The
Naernwill farm was the closest to Lanwith and in the path of the Eywellese. The
terrain between Allensford and Lanwith discouraged farming, and the Eywellese
moved too fast for warnings to reach Lanwith. Mylin was the first to notice
something out of the ordinary.

“Look,
Father. What’s that? A storm coming?”

The
father looked up to see a dust cloud rising from behind a hill on the road that
ran next to the farm. There was no wind. The four of them stared, as the cloud
grew. Only when the first riders appeared over the crest of the hill a half-mile
away did he recognize a large body of riders moving fast. He had a bad feeling
and ordered his sons to run back to the farmhouse.

Mylin
didn’t understand what was happening, only that his father and his brothers
were grim and his mother and sisters frightened. He protested at first when his
father told him to take his six-year-old sister into the brush fifty yards
behind the house, as a precaution. Mylin grabbed his crying sister, and they
ran into the brush and lay down, with Mylin peeking back toward the house.

By
now, an endless stream of riders poured over the hills. As the lead riders
passed the edge of their land a hundred yards away, a dozen riders peeled off
the main body and galloped toward the house. Mylin could hear his father yell.

Everyone
ran for the woods east of the house. His father and brothers carried muskets.
His father stopped and fired at the lead riders, one of whom pitched backward
out of his saddle. His father was reloading when a rider passed him, swung a
sword, and suddenly his father lay on the ground. None of the family reached
the woods. Both brothers fell. His mother and his older sister were knocked off
their feet. Men leaped from their horses to tie the hands of both. Several men
talked for a moment, then one drew a knife and ran it over his mother’s throat.
His sister screamed and sagged. The men tied her feet, threw her on the back of
another rider’s saddle, and rode to the column of riders. Several other men
came out of the house carrying family possessions, then the first flames
followed.

Mylin
kept still. His family had run
away
from where he and his sister hid, to
draw the men away. His mind froze with what he’d witnessed. In less than three
minutes his entire world had died, except for the little girl whose head he
hugged against his body, so she hadn’t seen what had transpired. The last he’d
seen of his other sister was her being unceremoniously tossed from the saddle
into a wagon at the column’s end.

Dwelfin
Camron’s first hint of anything out of the ordinary was when he heard shouting
in the street. He walked to the door of the mayor’s office, a small room
attached to his leather-making shop. He didn’t immediately recognize the man
shouting and pointing to the south end of Lanwith’s main street. Others also
shouted and ran.

What?
What’s going on
?
Then he thought he heard the word
Eywell
.
Eywell
?

“Dwelfin!”
shouted one of his workers. “He says it’s the Eywellese! Hundreds of them!
Coming fast behind him!”

Camron
stood shocked for several seconds.
Eywellese? Eywellese!! Oh, my Merciful
God! Are they attacking here
! There had been unspecific reports from
Moreland City to be on alert for any sightings of Eywellese or Narthani, but
nothing like this! On occasion, he had thought perhaps the town should make
some plans in case of serious threats, then something else always seemed more
urgent than vague threats about something the likes of which hadn’t happened in
Moreland Province for generations.

The
street turned into a chaotic churning of people, running from shops, running to
shops, running to look for relatives, or running nowhere specific because they
didn’t know what else to do. Camron and his family—himself, his wife, and their
last child—lived behind the shop.  The others lived elsewhere in Lanwith or
outside the town. Mayor or not, he thought first of his family and ran around
the shop to their house. His wife had just come out the door, her look
questioning the uproar, when he yelled, “Into the root cellar!” When she didn’t
immediately respond, he shoved her roughly back into the house. “It’s the
Eywellese! We have to hide!” They pulled a rug off the cover to the root cellar
under the kitchen. His wife climbed down the ladder, then he handed her their
seven-year-old daughter and followed down the steps. He draped the rug over the
cellar cover, then lowered it, trying to arrange it so that when he finished lowering
the cover, folds in the rug didn’t give away their hiding place.

Brother
Skanston moved from one cluster of boys to another. The boys within each
cluster were at approximately the same stage in their education. With the boys’
ages from six to eleven and years of classroom from their first to sixth, there
were no common lessons except for readings and lessons from the
Word
.
Within each group, an older boy helped the younger ones. The abbey lay too far
from town to hear the chaos that erupted with the rider bringing the warning, yet
although the town had not begun emergency preparations, the abbey had kept
aware of ongoing events and cautions shared among abbeys over most of
Caedellium. The few brothers and sisters in the Lanwith abbey had discussed the
only two priorities they saw as important. One was to protect any patients or
students within the abbey, and second, to save what they could of the abbey’s
library, especially the older and irreplaceable volumes.

By
chance, a brother had started cleaning the abbey bell tower when he heard
musket fire from the town. Heavy musket fire. From the hilltop where the abbey
sat and higher yet from the bell tower, he saw a mass of horsemen flowing into
the town from the south, with another group circling to the north end of the
town. While his vision was becoming progressively worse with close objects, his
distant vision was still intact. He saw people fleeing on horseback, in wagons,
and on foot in all directions, some being ridden down by riders with lances and
swords.

By
pre-arrangement, he struck the single gong in the tower. No one knew why the
abbey bell tower had a gong, the origin lost in the abbey’s past. Since it was
otherwise not used, it became the signal to implement the emergency plan. Discipline
took over. The abbey staff and everyone within the building moved to assigned
emergency tasks: taking books to the deep cellars under the abbey, where they
would be safe even if the abbey burned to the ground; bringing wagons to load
patients; and Brother Skanston taking any students out the side gate, past the
vegetable garden, and into dense reeds along the nearby stream. Only the last
effort proved fully successful, although, of the fifteen students, eleven would
be orphans by sunset.

Tilda
Purcells and Anarynd Moreland exchanged opinions on which scarves best matched
Anarynd’s dress of several blue shades she thought went well with her blonde
hair and fair complexion. Tilda was in her late thirties, a mother of five, and
as lively as her sister Gwenda was not. The two women had laughingly discussed
which scarf would most annoy Anarynd’s father, when suddenly shouting started.
The shopkeeper went outside while they continued browsing, only to return
moments later, screaming, “It’s the Eywellese coming! Run!”

The
shopkeeper ran out the back. Tilda grabbed Anarynd’s hand and rushed outside to
the street chaos and the first sounds of musket fire.

“Quick!
To the carriage!” They ran the hundred yards to find their driver nowhere to be
seen. “Get in!” Tilda shrieked. She pulled up her skirt and climbed into the
driver’s box. Anarynd had barely gotten into the passenger compartment when,
with a yell and a crack of the whip, the carriage lurched forward. Anarynd fell
onto the floor of the carriage, then righted herself as they raced in the
opposite direction from musket fire. Tilda was experienced in driving horses, though
not at the speed they were going, and she lost control of the horses.