Knight's Struggle Read online

  The woods people, former outlaws and bandits, had literally come in from the cold. They were descendants of those who were evicted from their villages because they couldn’t, or wouldn’t, meet the high production quotas demanded by Protector Lungu and his father before him.

  For several generations, they made their living by raiding the tribute shipments that ran up and down the Toll Road. The road connected the four independent Protectorates, of which Lungu sat nearly in the middle of a hundred-square-mile area.

  Astrid sat down on a bench built around the second of three fireplaces that ran down the middle of the Longhouse. She had a good view of the eastern pair of double doors. She’d come through the western doors that faced the training grounds that once that was the village square.

  Elder Popova, the village leader, wasn’t happy about losing the public square to military training. Vinnie had promised her a new square. Astrid shook her head when her second-in-command had promised that.

  With everything else they had to do, she wondered how Vinnie would fill that promise. But, if her trusted friend made a promise, she had to help honor it. That’s how trust and leadership worked. If Vinnie said it was important, it was. They didn’t argue that much about things like that.

  Astrid didn’t have mind powers like Gormer, but when Vinnie walked through the door just as she thought of him, she wondered for a second if she might have.

  The huge man lumbered over and sat opposite her. The wooden plank of the bench groaned in protest as it accepted his weight.

  “Good morning,” he said, with a jowl-shaking smile.

  He set his ever-present rucksack beside him and pulled out a hunk of smoked deer meat. Vinnie always had food. He never explained exactly why, but Astrid got the impression that his form of magic required calories. He was ravenous after using his powers. Besides, he really seemed to enjoy food in general.

  The woods people had taken to feeding him whenever they could. He was like a friendly bear or family pet. Vinnie had been working closely with the woods people, getting them organized. It was because of him that they had extra food to share. It had not always been so for them.

  “Hello, Vinnie,” Astrid replied.

  She sipped at her herbal tea. This morning, she allowed herself to have a bit of honey with it. She’d already had an omelet prepared for her by a volunteer cook at the kitchen that took up the entire southern wall of the longhouse.

  The village had grown so busy that communal meals made the most sense. People could come through at designated times, grab a quick meal, then get to work. Astrid scheduled the meeting after the fighters had eaten their late breakfast. They’d have a couple of hours of free time before they went on patrol or guard duty rotation.

  A minute or two later, Tarkon came in from the icy courtyard. He moved over to the table still huddled against the cold. Ice was already melting from his furs.

  The stoic Monk of the Forge, jumped up when a huge, hairy spider plopped down on the table between them. A restrained cry of fright creaked in his throat. Astrid tried not to laugh when Moxy lunged forward and gently scooped up the spider.

  “Don’t you smash another one of my babies,” Moxy said, letting the spider crawl up her arm.

  Tarkon shuddered. “Your ‘babies’ breed like mice and eat their mates,” he said.

  Moxy threw back her head and laughed her tinkling, wind chime laugh.

  “Well,” Moxy said, allowing her sharp claws to extend from her fingertips. “My people often eat their mates when we’re done with them.” She opened her mouth wide and snapped her teeth together.

  Tarkon smiled in spite of himself and beamed at his lover. He has it bad, Astrid thought. Who would blame him?

  The Forge Monk lowered himself back down to the table as Moxy used her claws to scramble up the stone chimney that went through the thick timber roof. She gently put the spider back in its home among the beams.

  “How is the silk farming going?” Vinnie called up to Moxy as she hung from a beam.

  She jumped back down from a dozen feet above and landed on the stamped-earth floor in a crouch. “My spiders are producing very well,” Moxy said. “I collected enough silk last night to spin another couple yards of cloth.”

  “You have amazing skills, Moxy,” Vinnie replied. “I didn’t think it was possible to collect spider webs the same way you collect silk from moths.”

  “Well,” Moxy replied. “My people just kind of know this stuff. We’re not sure how. We just accept it. But not every spider can make spinnable thread. I was lucky to find these guys when I did. They just need the right home and a lot of encouragement to spin threads that I can use.”

  “And they need to eat a lot of their husbands,” Tarkon said with a shiver.

  “Are you scared I’ll eat you?” Moxy asked.

  “Sometimes, yes,” Tarkon said matter-of-factly.

  Astrid shook her head. “Tarkon, I’ve seen you face a barrage of crossbow bolts without so much as a flinch. But spiders and a hundred-pound woman make you come unglued.”

  “That’s right,” Tarkon said. “My fears are perfectly healthy.”

  It was still odd to see Tarkon smile. When they first met, Astrid thought he was the most dour person she’d ever come across. In a few months, he’d moved up to at least the third most .

  Gormer swept into the longhouse as they all laughed at Tarkon’s expense.

  “What did I miss?” Gormer asked, removing his goatskin gloves and rubbing his hands together.

  “Spiders,” Moxy said. “And Tarkon’s unreasonable fear of them.”

  “I’m with him on that,” Gormer said. “Too many up there. They’re starting to come down to this level.”

  “They’re hungry,” Moxy said.

  “I can’t grow flies fast enough for them to eat,” Vinnie added. “It’s hard to keep the fly cages warm.”

  “Fly farms,” Gormer said with a shake of his head, “to feed a herd of spiders. You people are fucking weird.”

  “Says the man who can make people see him as a bear,” Tarkon said.

  “Only when I’m lucky,” Gormer replied. “And it almost kills me.”

  “Your training is coming along. You found the guard’s family,” Astrid said.

  Gormer looked down at the table. “His name was Arthur,” he said. “He didn't have to die.”

  Astrid felt a pang. The man had sacrificed himself for a cause. That had to be answered.

  “It wasn’t your fault,” Vinnie said.

  “Yeah, but if I could use my magic properly, I could have sensed the trap. We might have saved him.”

  “We all bear responsibility,” Astrid said. “We will make this right.”

  “You can’t make it right,” said a voice over Astrid’s shoulder. “You’re talking about my husband, and now I am a widow.” The wife of the dead informant happened to be walking by.

  “I’m so sorry, Margaret,” Astrid said.

  “I know,” Margaret replied. “I’m sorry. I just get so angry. I wonder what this is for. I mean, I know the Protector is dirty, and he has to be stopped, but…”

  “I misspoke,” Astrid said. “You’re right. There is no way to make his death right. But it does mean something. I can promise you that.”

  “What does it mean?” Margaret asked with a touch of both anger and hope.

  Astrid replied, “It means that he is not alone in knowing that Lungu and people like him must be stopped.”

  “I’m really trying,” Margaret said with a quiver in her voice.

  “I know you are,” Astrid said. “You’re safe here and more than welcome.”

  Margaret managed a smile and walked off to go help in the kitchen.

  Just then, the former Assessor Pleth came through the east doors. Astrid hardly recognized him these days. He was a man transformed—bearded and twenty pounds lighter. The village couldn’t believe it either.

  Just a few months before, he was one of the most hated men in the village. A
s an Assessor, Pleth abused his authority to overestimate Argan’s tribute. He was overcharging the village and selling the excess on the black market.

  The authorities caught him and evicted his entire family from their home as punishment. One of Astrid’s patrols found him on the Toll Road and brought him in for questioning. Astrid was ready to kill him herself until she found out exactly why Pleth did what he did.

  He was a fool, and he was a criminal. But the only reason he was stealing from the village was that he was desperate to save the life of his son. His youngest boy, Adi, suffered from seizures. Pleth was so blinded by fear that he kept himself in denial of the real harm he caused to Argan.

  Adi’s seizures were getting worse and killing him slowly. Astrid had no trouble killing people who needed it, but Pleth was a special kind of idiot that fell into a troublesome gray area. He was trying to earn money to pay a healer for a cure. The problem was that the healer lived in the Fortress Wards and charged a small fortune.

  Also, the ‘healer’ was a complete fraud. She preyed on the wealthy and the poor alike.

  Astrid had mercy on Pleth and spared his life. The village he once doomed to starve over the winter took him in, along with his whole family. They forgave the man who once put them all at grave risk. Astrid was amazed and humbled by Argan village. So was Pleth.

  Shame and guilt are sometimes excellent motivators. The act of extreme mercy and kindness shown to him by the village turned Pleth into one of the hardest workers in town. It also made him kind of annoying. He was so eager to pay for his crimes that he fell all over himself to help.

  The Core gave him a round of reserved ‘good mornings,’ so as not to encourage him.

  It didn’t work.

  “Good morning, Astrid,” Pleth said in formal tones and with a crisp bow of his head. He gave the same greeting to each person at the table.

  Gormer just looked away and gave him a quick wave. He pretended to study the fireplace chimney.

  “Good morning, Pleth,” Astrid said. She was about to ask him about his family because that was only polite. Then, she remembered their last conversation. He had begged her to take part in military training. Astrid tried to dodge him. “We were just about to have a meeting, so…”

  “Oh, of course,” Pleth said. For one hopeful moment, it looked as if he was about to go off to one of the many jobs he took on around the Village. “May I ask if you’ve thought about my request?”

  Astrid palmed her forehead. “Yes, Pleth,” Astrid nearly growled through clenched jaws. She felt as if she’d need to draw from the Well for patience. “I thought about it when we last spoke. I don’t need to give it any more thought. The answer is still no.”

  “You’ve proved yourself beyond what anyone here thought was possible. You’re a hard worker and nobody doubts your commitment to this place and your family. But the fact remains that you are not a fighter. The best place for you to serve is in the workshop making barrels and doing all the rest of the things you do around here to help out.”

  “But, with training—”

  Astrid was about to open her mouth. She was glad when Gormer interrupted her because she was about to shout.

  “Wait a minute, Astrid,” the former con man said. “Let him stay for the first part of this meeting, and I can bring up my agenda item first. I just had an idea.”

  “Oh, mercy,” Astrid said, palming her forehead again. “I’m not sure what bothers me most; your new idea or the fact that our meetings now have ‘agenda items.’”

  Pleth looked so hopeful, Astrid didn’t have the heart to run him off. “Go ahead,” Astrid ordered Gormer. “Let’s hear it.”

  “We’re down an informant. We have no way of getting high-quality, reliable information,” Gormer explained, winding up his sales pitch. “But with my new powers of illusion and Pleth’s general sliminess—”

  “Hey—” Pleth winced as if someone had slapped him lightly.

  “—we can sneak into Keep 52 Ward and get all the information we need,” Gormer continued.

  Pleth’s face drained of blood. Gormer fixed him with a Cheshire Cat grin. “You said you wanted to help, didn’t you?”

  “Yes,” Pleth replied emphatically, but there was also fear in his eyes.

  “How many fucking times do I have to say it?” Astrid said, slapping the table. “It’s not his willingness that’s the problem. I just don’t think he’s cut out for this kind of work!”

  “I’m standing right here,” Pleth said. “Please. I need this.”

  “That’s the other problem,” Astrid said, locking eyes with Pleth. “Guys like you—guys with something to prove—they get themselves killed trying to be heroes. They also tend to get the people around them killed.”

  Gormer just shrugged his shoulders. “People have been trying to kill me since I turned thirteen.” Pleth spent the first half of his working life as one of the most hated men around. “You might not realize it, Astrid, but that gives us a unique skill set.”

  Astrid shook her head and her lips formed a tight, thin line. Gormer was right. They did need spies or informants or both. Just before he got killed, Arthur let them know that Keep 52 was filling up with Estate soldiers. They weren’t using Movers, but it looked like Lungu was pointing serious soldiers their way, and not just the civil guard.

  She studied Pleth a good long while, then turned her hazel eyes to Gormer. “If you two boneheads really can do the stuff you think you can do, the answer is yes.”

  “I’m on it, Boss,” Gormer said.

  “You won’t regret this,” Pleth said. Before Astrid could tell him she probably would, he walked away.

  “I might use my powers to get inside his wife’s head when he tells her about being a spy,” Gormer said.

  Tarkon just watched Pleth strut out the West doors and into the cold. “The man’s a fool,” he said.

  “Yeah,” Astrid said. “That may be so. But he’s our fool.” She stabbed a finger in Gormer’s face. “You better not bullshit me. If you get him killed, I’m the one who has to tell his family.”

  “Your concern for me is so touching,” Gormer replied.

  “You, I don’t worry about,” Astrid lied. “You have more lives than ten housecats.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Later That Night, On Patrol Outside Argan

  Tarkon hunkered down in the snow blind and adjusted his silk scarf to keep his steamy breath from giving him away. His magic let him focus heat into the metal plates of his Forge Monk armor. Doing so, however, depleted his energy, so he used that option sparingly. He wanted to be ready just in case he had to go into action.

  The scarf covered his secret smile as he thought about Moxy. She’d made the spider silk scarf for him with the very first batch she’d harvested from the creepy creatures she referred to as her “babies.” But the scarf was just an experiment. Being close to the material let him understand its properties. Together, they would be working on creating something far different. He enjoyed merging their respective talents.

  Spider silk turned out to be excellent material. She used a special concoction made from tree roots and pine sap to waterproof the threads before she spun them. He marveled at her skills almost as much as he did her beauty. He never thought he’d feel this way about another person again.

  But now, he had to focus on patrol. That was the only drawback to being in love. It tended to make his mind drift. He’d allowed his thoughts to wander for just a few seconds. Tarkon scolded himself back into alertness.

  An owl called down the path to the east. The pattern told him that meant there would be a shift change.

  He adjusted himself inside the blind and peeked through a thin slit in the frozen wall. The blind was Astrid’s design. She said they’d made guard posts like this in her former home back east.

  The construction started with thatch. They bound together thin sticks and straw and set them on a lean-to frame. The snow did the rest. When the structure was covered in snow, they set
a fire inside the lean-to to melt the snow just enough to seep into the thatch.

  Because it was so cold there in the winter, the melted snow froze again quickly. That turned the thatch walls into solid blocks of ice. From the outside, the blind looked like just another snow drift.

  With the ghillie suits the bandits had made, the people on patrol could blend in with the snow as well as the brush. In the winter, however, it was hard to keep garments white. That’s why it was good that so many people lived in the village now. One of the special skills Astrid had was organizing people and letting them discover they were good at something.

  They had a whole crew of people now, who loved the work of making and maintaining clothes, camouflage suits and armor for what was slowly becoming an army.

  A minute or two after the shift change call, Tarkon saw shadowy figures moving through the woods. He adjusted the pistols at his belt and watched them move from tree-to-tree. Another owl call told him they were friendlies.

  Tarkon took off his gloves and cupped his hands to form the whistle. He hooted back in the pattern that told the others he saw them. Soon, he had company in the blind. He was grateful for the body heat.

  “Report,” Tarkon said in a low voice. Whispers carried farther than low voices. He always found that strange. He chalked it up to just another mystery of stealth.

  The young woman spoke first. She was from Woody’s tribe. Her name was Darla and she always went out on patrol with her younger twin brother, David. They were just twenty. She called him her ‘younger’ brother, because he came into the world just two minutes after her. They made an excellent team. Though he would never tell them, they were two of his favorites. That’s why he was harder on them than most.

  “All clear,” Darla said.

  “Did you check the traps?” Tarkon demanded.

  Darla smiled, and David nodded his head with a serious expression that mirrored Tarkon’s own.

  Darla giggled.