The Old Hound

The Falcon's Children, Chapter 22

The snow had ceased, but only for a time. The sweet, brisk taste of it still hung in the frosty air, and the looming clouds above the Three Horns promised another fall before night. For now, though, a patch of blue sky had opened above the battlements, and the rays of a cold sun glinted on the drifts and icicles and dark mountain stone.

From where he stood, on the walls of Caldmark, Varelis bar Veruna could see to where the empire ended. The fortress held the wide pass that led out from Lake Sacrifice, through the northern Guardians, and then down into the great prairie that stretched all the way to the glaciers and escarpments that the Druanni and Kadoli called mezza’Mehuset, the bastion of the gods. On a clear day from Caldmark’s battlements some keen-eyed legionnaires claimed to see a dark line where those ranges and ice floes began, but on Veruna’s map the escarpment lay five hundred leagues north, and even at the fortress’s height no man’s eye could leap that gap.

What the eye could reach was the Whiteflood, the Uadogan’a to the tribes, the wide, looping, lazy river that ran through the prairie as far east and west as any explorer could follow or mapmaker could chart. That was where the empire’s northern border lay, according to a treaty that sat somewhere in the archives in Rendale’s Castle, with the signature of Jonthen II and the marks of five clan-chiefs affixed. But all those chiefs were almost a century dead, so the parchment’s only value was in the facts on the ground that it memorialized: Both the borderforts along the Whiteflood’s southern bank and the understanding that while herders might bring their aurochs into the southern reaches of the prairie unmolested, if a large-enough armed party of tribesmen crossed the river, they would be met by the legions and destroyed.

This reality did not make the frontier safe, because small parties could easily raid south — especially in winter when the Whiteflood froze. Jonthen had hoped to open the prairie to greater settlement, to estates instead of farms and towns instead of villages, and at that he had mostly failed, as had his successors in more desultory campaigns. There were settlers up here, but not many, not more than five thousand scattered across the vast terrain, and it wasn’t land that legionnaires wanted for their service or the newly-ennobled requested for their fiefs.

So the soldiers up here, in Caldmark and the further forts, were mostly still charged with protecting the lands to their south — Orison and Sacrifice and the gold roads and Rendale, and the Ysani lowlands to the west — from the spears of ambitious clan-chiefs. The prairie still felt like wilderness; on maps the empire ended at the river, but when you stood on the battlements of Caldmark you felt that All Narsil really ended at your back. And in the winter you felt it more starkly — that the fortress in the pass was like a sentry at the door, letting the empire sleep safely until spring.

Or wake to civil war, Veruna thought unhappily.

Pter bobbed up beside him, then, his beard slightly less precise than usual and dark hollows beneath his almond eyes. “M’lord?" he said gently, “will you come down? They are ready for you.”

Veruna lifted a finger to his lips, and the other man fell silent. The wind was rising, keening against the pitted stone, and together they stared out, across the snowswept landscape, toward where the Whiteflood coiled its way across the prairie, a frozen serpent on the grass. Below them the land was hilly, bearded by firs that still showed hints of green beneath the snowfall. A flock of crows burst from one of these hillsides, a dark seething mass that swirled and scudded south, passing high over the fortress with raucous cries that, for a moment, drowned out the whining of the wind.

“It’s always beautiful,” Pter said.

“Beautiful but deadly,” The Old Hound replied. “Before everything went upside down I had word from Fort Ahferth that their patrols were following a band headed southeast of them, toward Megger’s Town. Sounded like small fry, but that’s how we lost those brave boys at Anahwen two years ago …”

“Anbaris is a solid officer and Ahferth’s well-garrisoned. They’ll see the winter through just fine. Can’t worry about them now; other things to think about for us.”

The general laughed sourly. “Like a coronation, you think? A bit of pomp and circumstance to place House of Verna on the Falcon Throne? Well, maybe. Maybe.”

Pter rubbed at his face, worrying at the mole that stood out brown against his pocked flesh. “One step at a time, don’t you think, m’lord?”

“And perhaps it will just be Varelis, First of that Name, if the boy Padrec executes Cresseda before we get there.” He spat sourly into a hummock of snow, staining it with flecks of yellow. “It was not not supposed to go like this, you know.”

“It might not be too late to back away. . .”

“Oh, come! Come! Pter, it is far and away too late. I’ve resisted arrest, locked up a loyal servant of the crown, and proven that my soldiers are more loyal to me than to the boy Padrec. You really think they’ll let me slip into exile now? I’m a dangerous man ….”

He was not a traitor. Not a traitor, but a loyalist — loyal like his fathers to an Argosa that was more his motherland than this vast unwieldy thing called “Narsil,” loyal to a ducal house that had always kept its promises to his family, to his blood. He had sworn oaths, secret, fervent oaths that superseded the oaths of the legions. And he had always told himself that if the day came for action, for making good on those secret oaths, the whole empire would benefit as well.

Always — but especially in recent years, especially during the Brethon adventure and his sovereign’s palpable decline.

He sighed heavily and turned to lean against the parapet, looking up the shape of Caldmark, his home these last three years. The keep was Mandoran, smooth and cannily fashioned; the outer walls were built more crudely, from black granite hauled from quarries hidden in the forested hills, and in summer the fortress was a dark scar against the green landscape, a stern sentinel above the blue of Lake Sacrifice.

In winter, though, when the land went bare and then white and Sacrifice froze into a chilly gray — then Caldmark became a grim monarch of the north country, looming over a barren kingdom where crows screamed from fir trees and wolverines spilled rabbit blood across the snow.

“As I said, m’lord, they’re ready,” Pter said hesitantly.

On the towers, the banners, stiffened by frost, thumped against their poles. Narsil's falcon and the white fist on green of Caldmark — and between them, raised by jubilant soldiers just that morning, the red griffin of his own house. For the General! they had shouted. For the Old Hound!

“Eight hundred men of the Falconguard around Rendale, Pter,” he said softly. “A hundred men of the Watch. Maybe two hundred guardsmen for the various houses."

“Probably not enough to hold the city walls,” came the reply. “Not with our three thousand set against them.”

“Five days to reach Rendale, if we push hard.”

“And no one to bring news to his not-yet-majesty Padrec.”

Veruna laughed. It came out as a bark, but then he really was a dog-like man — hard from years of soldiering, but with a thick black beard and shaggy hair and a snout that drooped into a canine softness. His men loved that face, and they loved him. Enough to betray their emperor, it seemed.

“Yes, his highness Padrec, who thought my men would stand by and see me clapped in irons . . . They're good boys, Pter, good boys indeed for what they did this morning.”

Pter nodded. “Most of them have been through blood and fire with you, m’lord.”

“And they'll go through more before this tenday is out. And if Padrec flees south, leaves Rendale, takes the court with him and the dukes, leaves us an empty Castle and capital … our little stab will be civil war, with the house of Verna against the whole empire, and us all alone here in the north.”

The other man shrugged. “It’s the road we've been given, m’lord. And Padrec won't flee — we'll be near the gates before he knows we're coming."

Veruna nodded tightly. “Right you are. That's the spirit — it’ll all be over before the next thaw! So — all’s ready, then? Warrimer and everyone that stood with him locked away and comfortable? And the boys are marshaled?"

“They await your command, sir.”

The sun had gone, the Old Hound realized, and now the stormheads were closer. It was time to be gone — time to toss the dice.

“Well, let's be off, then,” he said, and they went down together to the parade ground and the waiting legions.