Two Heirs (The Marmoros Trilogy Book 1) (11 page)

“Thank you, Falaise. I will bring him back to you. But you remember I said earlier, there would be costs and there would be consequences?”

“I remember you saying it but I’m not sure what you meant by it.”

“If I go in there and rough up a not insignificant number of his soldiers, together with his tax collector and then deprive him of some eighty odd boys that he is expecting to see in Paelis, I fear that Duke Henry is going to be more than a little put out. He is going to send more troops, probably a lot more troops and with orders not to be so nice next time. The village cannot still be here when they arrive.”

“My people are used to moving on at short notice, David. They have had to do it many times before.”

“Then you had better prepare them to do so again because all hell is going to break loose when I come back with those boys.”

“Tomorrow, I will tell all the people who need to be told. Or at least, their wives,” she smiled.

“Thank you. And there is something I need you to do for me now.”

“Anything.”

“Jeren almost certainly does not know his father is dead. And he only knows me, or at least my men, as the bandits who kidnapped his mother. If I approach him without proof, he will likely accuse me of lying and jump to all sorts of unfortunate conclusions. I need some sort of token to show him. I also will need a letter from you explaining what has happened and stating explicitly that I am now working for you and that I’m not one of the bad guys anymore.”

“I have his father’s ring here which Jeren will recognise and if you would be kind enough to provide me with writing materials, I will draft the letter immediately.”

David nodded to Leyla who scurried away into the back of the tent.

“Thank you, Falaise. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I must go and talk to the men about tomorrow. Marta, we will be breaking camp at dawn. I want to move the camp to the other side of the village and then the men and I will be riding on.”

Marta nodded her agreement to this.

“Falaise, when you ride back to the village, Kemon will ride alongside you. Tomorrow, while I’m sure he will try to be his usual inconspicuous self, he will be very close at hand. If there is any problem, you can trust him implicitly. He’s a good man.”

Chapter 6

It was the white room again. No visual clues as to where he was but always the voices murmuring in the background. He strained his ears to listen.

“What do we tell him about the mission?”

“The absolute minimum. He’ll have to know the objective of course but not the significance of the target.”

“How will he recognise…?”

“He’ll have to have that as part of the mission objective.”

“What about his other… abilities?”

“Tricky. We’ll suppress what we can of his technical knowledge and training but we have to leave him something in order to do his job. We’ll just graft a new skill set on top that’s appropriate to the environment.”

“Will it work?”

“Absolutely. He won’t know he’s not native… at first.”

“At first?”

“Depends how long he’s down there. Over an extended period, there’s a risk that some of the suppressed memories may leak back to the surface. If he suffers any breakthrough, it’s the telepathy area where it’s most likely to occur.”

The white dreams had come back again and David woke in a sweat before dawn. Carefully extracting himself from between Mo and Leyla, he quickly dressed and pulled a cloak around his shoulders against the chill of the pre-dawn air. Stepping outside to clear his head, he did the rounds of the sentries, stopping to exchange a few words with each as he passed.

As he approached the final post, he met Feynor doing the rounds from the opposite direction. “You should be resting, my friend.”

“As should you, milord. Busy day today.”

“Will it be action today, milord?” the sentry put in.

David smiled. “Don’t be too eager. I won’t know until we get there and I can see how the land lies. We need to take them by surprise and, if we can’t ambush them during the day, then it’ll have to be a night attack.”

They all fell silent at that. A night attack always carried increased risk of casualties in the confusion; of friend striking friend instead of the enemy. They had discussed the options for a couple of hours the previous evening until David had dismissed them to get some rest. There was nothing more to be done until he could see the land and choose where to fight.

At the urging of his officers, he had appointed another lieutenant, Jorgen, to take charge of the spearmen and those others who did not fit easily into one of the more specialist categories. The move had been welcomed by the men as Jorgen was a popular figure in the camp, full of good humour and as strong as an ox.

“I’m going to exercise,” he announced. “And then we’d better start rousing the camp. Cold breakfast today but make sure they all pack some travel rations. It’s going to be a long day.”

***

In the same pale pre-dawn light, two heads peered out from behind a bush at a sentry standing not twenty paces away.

“Why doesn’t he move?” Baltur whispered. “He’s been moving round all night, patrolling the camp and now he suddenly stops dead, right in front of us.”

“Keep your voice down,” Jeren replied. “Some of these old soldiers develop a sixth sense for danger. They don’t know what it is but they know it’s there. Old Marvin told me that once and he fought in Duke Charles’ army for twenty years. There’s no help for it. We’ll have to go round him.”

From a position about fifty paces further back, Jerome watched the interchange with interest. He had declined to leave when the other scouts relieved him in the middle of the night, preferring to rest up and ride out in the morning. That is, until one of the others woke him to say that the boys were on the move. He left the scouts on watch over the camp and silently followed the boys approach.

The boys backed away from the bush and quietly moved around to their right.
“They’re making for the horse lines,”
Jerome suddenly realised.
“Huh, smart kids.”
He moved further round to the right himself which brought him dangerously close to the trail but gave a clear view of the horse lines and the camp beyond.

The boys were now out of sight of the sentry and close to the horses. One or two of them whickered quietly but none showed any alarm.

“I’ll gather up as many of the tether ropes as I can, while you cut the main hitching rope,” Jeren whispered.

Baltur nodded and drew his hunting knife. He moved to the side and started sawing through the thick rope.

“Hey you. What’s going on here? What are you doing there?” The sentry had finally moved but instead of continuing his patrol, he had turned back towards the horse lines. Baltur continued sawing furiously at the hitching rope as the guard rushed over and grabbed him by the shoulder, spinning him round. As he did so, the blade in Baltur’s hand slid, almost of its own volition, under the man’s leather jerkin and into his lower abdomen before breaking off at the hilt.

“Why you little brat. I’m going to do you for that,” he growled as he wrapped two meaty hands round Baltur’s neck. Baltur felt everything going black as the life was being choked out of him until a spray of warm liquid hit him in the face and the pressure on his neck suddenly eased.

He sat down on his arse with a bump as the guard crashed to the ground beside him, blood gushing from a gaping wound in his neck. “Cummon,”
Jeren hissed. “This is no time to be taking a rest. Finish cutting that rope.”

Baltur looked at the sentry with a dazed expression. “My knife’s broken. In him. Is he dead?”

“I sincerely hope so,” Jeren replied. “Here, take my knife. Now get up and finish cutting that rope.”

The horses were whickering anxiously now. “One of the other sentries will hear the noise and be here any minute. We’ll take what horses we can and scatter the rest.”

The hitching rope was down to its last strand and parted easily under Jeren’s blade. Baltur quickly sheathed the knife and ran over to where Jeren was standing with the tether ropes of three horses in each hand. He took three of the ropes and started to look round for a saddle.

“No time,” Jeren said as a shout came from the camp behind them. “We’ll have to ride bareback. All the other horses are loose. They’ve heard us in the camp now, so make as much noise as you can and we’ll drive the loose horses out in front of us.”

The boys jumped on the backs of two of the horses and started shouting and yelling at the tops of their voices. The loose horses, anxious anyway, began panicking and charged down the trail with
the boys galloping after them, still holding their other two horses by the tethers.

Jerome had strung his bow as he watched in amazement the boys despatch the sentry and loose the horses. The camp burst into life with men chasing down the trail after the two boys. He ignored them; men on foot would never catch a galloping horse. But one man stood his ground and was busy stringing a powerful looking longbow. That was the threat, Jerome decided. The boys were well within range of an expert archer.

“
Damn
,” he thought.
“I don’t know what Lord Held will think of this but I can’t let him take those boys down.”

Jeren and Baltur were just approaching his position when he stood out and fired. The target was clear, outlined by the glow of the campfire behind and Jerome’s aim was true. His arrow took the other archer in the throat just as he was nocking his own arrow. The boys looked at him in surprise as they galloped past and then they were gone. Jerome waited a few more seconds until he was sure there was no more immediate threat from the camp and then disappeared into the brush on the side of the trail. He had a long climb back to the other scouts before he could retrieve his horse and try to locate the boys again.

The two boys ran at full stretch for about a league before the horses started to wind and they pulled up to give them a breather. Jeren slid down from the back of his mount and staggered as his knees nearly gave way beneath him. He handed his set of tethers to Baltur before doubling up and vomiting the remains of the rabbit they had eaten for their evening meal. Baltur dismounted himself and tied the horses to a sturdy bush before joining his friend in vomiting up his supper.

“I’ve never killed a man before,” Jeren gasped. “I never knew what it would be like.”

“I’ve never stabbed anyone before,” Baltur replied. “The knife just sort of slid in on its own.”

Jeren looked at his friend. “You look a sight.”

Baltur looked down. His hunting jerkin, new that year, was absolutely sodden with blood. He wiped a hand across his face and that came away smeared with blood. “My mother’s going to kill me when she sees this.”

“Not as much as that soldier was trying to kill you,” Jeren said with a chuckle. The chuckle turned into a laugh and Baltur looked at him for a second before starting to laugh himself. Their laughter fed off each other until both boys had to sit down at the side of the trail and laughed until they cried.

“We did it,” Jeren sobbed. “We bloody well did it.”

“Yes we did,” his friend replied. “And I never even thanked you for saving my life.”

“Well, perhaps you can save mine next time.”

“It’s a deal. But who do you think that archer was?”

“I have no idea,” Jeren admitted. “I have a feeling that I’ve seen him somewhere before but I can’t place him. He certainly wasn’t firing at us, so he must have been firing at the soldiers.”

“So he’s on our side then. Maybe your father sent him.”

“Maybe,” Jeren said doubtfully. “But why only one man. Unless there’s more of them around somewhere that we haven’t seen.”

“Dunno. Anyway what do we do now? What are we going to do with these horses?”

“We keep them,” Jeren said. “They’re not getting these back. They can scour the countryside looking for loose horses but they’re not going to get these back. We have to get them well off the trail somewhere. They’ll have to send searchers out on foot to start with but once they’ve recovered some of the horses they’ll send riders out to find the rest.”

“Up into the hills then. That gully where we ate last night was well hidden but we’ll have to circle around to get back there.”

“Agreed. And we’ll have to cover our tracks as best we can. The horses are spoils of war and I don’t want to lose them now.”

***

David held up his hand to stop the column as one of the scouts on point came trotting round a bend in the trail with a spare horse in tow.

“What happened? Where’s Ash?” he asked anxiously.

“Ash is still on point, milord. But he sent me back with this little beauty. Thought you ought to know like. We heard a noise in the trees off to one side of the trail. When we checked it out we found him standing there. Breathing a little bit hard and a little bit nervy but other than that, he’s fine. Ash said he’s one of Duke Henry’s horses. Recognised the brand.”

“Curious. I wonder what’s happened. It’s very careless of them to lose a horse. Any sign of anyone looking for it?”

“No, nothing, milord. But there’s wagon with what looks like a family of village folk coming down the trail about five minutes behind me.”

“OK, well done. Give the horse to Jaks to look after and get back to join Ash. Feynor, get the men off the trail and out of sight. There’s a family wagon coming down the trail and we don’t want to panic them.”

When the wagon came into view, David could see that it was the same as many of the wagons in the village. Most of them were built to the same design but each family decorated their wagon in their own unique style. A man was sat on the driver’s seat holding the reins to a pair of horses. A woman, probably his wife, sat alongside him and David could see at least a couple of small faces peering out from inside the wagon.

To his surprise, the man reined in the horses as they came up and smiled at him. “You must be Lord Held.”