Kings of the Wyld Read online

  Simple words. Kind ones, even. Not the knife he’d been expecting. Not the piercing sword.

  They still hurt, though.

  His daughter insisted on showing him the frogs the moment she came in the door. She spilled them out on the table before her mother could stop her. One of the four, a big yellow bugger with the nubs of wings not yet grown, made a break for freedom. He leapt off onto the floor, but froze when Griff came at him barking. Tally scooped him up and gave him an admonishing smack on the head before setting him back down with the others. He stayed put this time, too dazed or afraid to move.

  “You’ll scrub the table before you go to bed,” Ginny warned.

  Their daughter shrugged. “Yep. Daddy, guess how many frogs I found!”

  “How many?” Clay asked.

  “No, guess!”

  He eyed the four frogs on the table. “Umm … one?”

  “No! More than one!”

  “Hmm … fifty?”

  Tally cackled, moving a hand to head off one of the frogs as it neared the edge of the table. “Not fifty! I got four, silly. Can’t you count?”

  She proceeded, with the glowing pride of a horse trader showing off her stable of prized stallions, to introduce her amphibious prisoners one by one, pointing out the peculiarities of each and announcing them by name. She held the big yellow in two hands and thrust him up for Clay to see.

  “This one is Bert. He’s yellow and Mom says he’ll have wings when he grows up. I got him for Uncle Gabriel.” Tally looked around, as though just now realizing Uncle Gabriel was nowhere in sight. “Where is he, asleep?”

  Clay shared a brief glance with Ginny. “He left. He said to say hello.”

  His daughter frowned. “Is he coming back?”

  Probably never, he thought. “Hopefully,” he said.

  Tally spent a moment digesting this, staring down at the frog in her hands, and then she grinned great big and wide. “Bert will have his wings by then!” she announced, and the nubs on Bert’s back twitched as if in demonstration.

  Ginny came over and smoothed Tally’s hair the same way she did Clay’s. “Okay, whelpling, time for bed. Your friends can wait outside while you sleep.”

  “But, Mom, I’ll lose them,” Tally protested.

  “And you will no doubt find them again tomorrow,” said her mother. “I’m sure they’ll be very happy to see you.”

  Clay laughed and Ginny smiled.

  “They will,” their daughter assured them. One by one she picked up the frogs and walked them outside, bidding them farewell and giving each a kiss on the brow before setting them free. Ginny winced with every kiss; Clay was just glad none of them turned into princes. He’d had enough of company tonight, and there wasn’t stew left anyway.

  After Tally had scrubbed the table clean she left to wash herself. Griff scampered off behind her. Ginny sat down at the table, took one of Clay’s big hands in both of her own, and squeezed. “Tell me,” she said.

  So he told her.

  Tally was asleep. The lantern beside her bed, shuttered by a metal blind cut with star-shaped holes, cast a flickering constellation across the walls. Her hair glimmered in the soft light, veins of her mother’s gold amidst the plain old brown she’d inherited from her father. She had insisted on a story before bed. She wanted dragons, but dragons were forbidden because they gave her nightmares. Tally asked for them anyway, of course. She was brave that way. He offered her mermaids instead, and a hydrake, which he realized midstory was sort of like seven dragons at once, and he hoped she wouldn’t wake up screaming.

  It was a true story for the most part, though Clay embellished it somewhat (told her he himself struck the fatal blow against the hydrake, when in fact it had been Ganelon) and left out a few details his nine-year-old daughter—or her mother, for that matter—didn’t need to know. Suffice it to say the mermaids had been very gracious afterward, which explained Clay’s fairly comprehensive knowledge of the famously mysterious mermaid anatomy. Truth be told, though, he still didn’t quite understand it.

  He let the story trail off when Tally’s breathing deepened to indicate he was speaking only to himself. Now he sat looking at her face—her tiny mouth, her blushing cheeks, her small, porcelain-perfect nose—and marvelled that Clay Cooper, even with Ginny’s evident contribution, could have produced something so extraordinarily beautiful. He reached out, unable to help himself, and took her hand in his own. Her fingers tightened instinctively on his, and he smiled.

  Her eyes fluttered open. “Daddy?”

  “Yes, angel?”

  “Is Rosie going to be okay?”

  His heart froze. His mouth opened and closed as his mind groped for a suitable response. “You were listening earlier?” he asked. But of course she’d been. Eavesdropping had become a favourite habit of hers since overhearing him and Ginny whispering one night that they were getting her a pony for her birthday.

  His daughter nodded sleepily. “She’s in trouble, right? Is she going to be okay?”

  “I don’t know,” Clay answered. Yes, he should have said. Of course she is. You could lie to children if it did them good, couldn’t you?

  “But Uncle Gabe is going to save her,” Tally mumbled. Her eyes drooped shut, and Clay hesitated a moment, hoping she had fallen back asleep. “Right?” she asked, eyes open again.

  This time the lie was ready. “That’s right, honey.”

  “Good,” she said. “But you’re not going with him?”

  “No,” he said softly. “I’m not.”

  “But you would come if it was me, right, Daddy? If I was trapped by bad guys far away? You would come and save me?”

  There was an ache in his chest, a seething rot that might have been shame, or sorrow, or sickening remorse, and was probably all three. He was thinking of Gabriel’s broken smile, the words his oldest friend had uttered before walking out.

  You’re a good man, Clay Cooper.

  “If it was you,” he said in a voice still fierce for how quietly it spoke, “then nothing in the world could stop me.”

  Tally smiled and tightened her tiny grip. “You should save Rosie too, then,” she said.

  And just like that he cracked. Clamped his teeth shut on a sob that threatened to choke him, closed his eyes against the well of tears, too late.

  Clay had not always been a good man, but he was certainly trying. He’d curbed his tendency toward violence by signing on with the Watch and using his particularly limited skill set for the greater good. He did his best to be a man worthy of a woman like Ginny, and of their daughter, his darling girl, who was his most precious legacy, the speck of gold siphoned from the clouded river of his soul.

  But there were … measures of goodness, he figured. You could set one thing against another and find that one, if only by the weight of a feather, came out heavier. And that was just it, wasn’t it? To make a choice between the two—the right choice—was a burden few had the strength to shoulder.

  To sit idly by—no matter the reason—while his oldest, most cherished friend lost the only thing he’d ever truly loved wasn’t what a good man did. Whatever else he knew, Clay knew that.

  And his daughter knew it, too.

  “Daddy,” she asked, her brow furrowed, “why are you crying?”

  He imagined the smile he put on looked something like the one Gabe had been wearing earlier on the outside step, brittle and broken and sad. “Because,” he said, “I’m going to miss you very much.”

  Chapter Four

  Hitting the Road

  He said good-bye to Ginny on the hill that overlooked the farm. Clay figured she would wave him off at the door, or turn back where the lane ended and the long road began, and he’d dreaded the moment like a man waiting for the black-hooded executioner to wave him onstage—Your turn, pal! But instead she led him on, speaking quietly of small things as they walked hand in hand up the slope. Before long he was nodding away, chuckling at something he wouldn’t be able to recall when he tried to lat
er that night, and had very nearly forgotten he might never hear her voice again, or see her hair catch fire in the morning sun, as it did when they reached the summit and saw the world span gold and green beyond it.

  Hours earlier, both of them still awake in the grey dark before dawn, Ginny had warned him she wouldn’t cry when she said good-bye, said it wasn’t in her nature, and that it didn’t mean she would miss him any less. But on the hill at sunrise, after telling him again what a good man he was, she went ahead and wept anyway, and so did he. When their tears dried she took his face in both hands and looked hard into his eyes. “Come home to me, Clay Cooper,” she told him.

  Come home to me.

  Now that he would remember, right up to the end.

  Gabriel hadn’t rented a room above the King’s Head, but the barkeep, Shep, who was such a permanent fixture behind the wood Clay sometimes wondered if the man even had legs, mentioned he’d offered an empty stable to a shabby old bard in exchange for a few stories. “And bloody good ones,” Shep added, rinsing out pitchers in a sink of cloudy water. “Friends becoming enemies, enemies becoming friends. Described a dragon so real you’d have thought he fought the thing himself! Sad stories, too. Real poignant stuff. Bugger even made himself cry a few times.”

  It was Gabe in the stable, sure enough. The once-lauded hero, who had shared wine with kings (and beds with queens), was curled up around his pack on a pile of piss-soaked hay. He cried out when Clay nudged him awake, as though roused from the clutches of some terrible nightmare—which was very probably the case. He dragged his old friend inside and ordered breakfast for both of them. Gabriel fidgeted till it arrived via one of Shep’s mild, dark-haired daughters and then attacked it as ravenously as he had Ginny’s stew the night before.

  “I brought you some fresh clothes,” Clay said. “And new boots. And when you’re done eating I’ll have Shep fill the tub for you.”

  Gabe grinned crookedly. “That bad, eh?”

  “Pretty bad,” said Clay, and Gabriel winced.

  After that Clay picked slowly at his meal, wondering if maybe he’d done enough. He might just send Gabe on his way with a full stomach and fresh clothes before wandering back home. He could tell Ginny there’d been no trace of his old friend in town, and she’d say Well, at least you tried, and he’d say, Yep, I sure did, and then he’d slip back into bed alongside her, all cozy and warm, then maybe …

  Gabriel was watching him as though Clay’s skull were a fishbowl and his thoughts plain to see swimming round and round. His eyes floated to the heavy-looking pack on the bench across from him, and then to the rim of the great black shield strapped to Clay’s back. Finally he stared down at his empty plate, and after a long silence he sniffed once and swiped a soiled sleeve across his eyes.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  Clay sighed and thought, So much for home. “Don’t mention it,” he said.

  On the way out of Coverdale they stopped by the watch-house so Clay could turn in his greens and inform the Sergeant he was leaving town.

  “Where ya headed?” asked the Sergeant. His real name was a mystery to everyone but his wife, who had died some years earlier and taken the secret to her grave. He was a man of high integrity, little imagination, and indeterminate age, with a face like sun-ravaged leather and an iron-shot moustache; its ends, thick as horse tails, drooped halfway to his waist. As far as anyone knew he’d never served in an actual army, or fought as a mercenary, or done anything but stand guard over Coverdale his entire life.

  In no mood to explain their quest in all its hopeless detail, Clay simply answered, “Castia.”

  The men posted on either side of the gate fairly gasped in surprise, but the Sergeant only stroked his great moustache and stared at Clay through the puckered creases that served him as eyes. “Mmm,” he said. “Long way off.”

  Long way off? The old man might have just remarked that the sun was way up high.

  “Yeah,” Clay replied.

  “I’ll take your greens, then.” The Sergeant held out a callused hand, and Clay passed over his Watchmen’s tunic. He offered up the sword as well, but the old man shook his head. “Keep it.”

  “There’s been folk robbed on the road south,” said one of the guards.

  “And a centaur spotted out by Tassel’s place,” supplied the other.

  “Here.” The Sergeant was thrusting something into Clay’s hands. A brass helmet, shaped like a soup bowl, with a flared nose guard and a leather skullcap sewn inside. The gods knew Clay hated helmets, and this one was uglier than most.

  “Thank you,” he said, and tucked it beneath his arm.

  “Why don’t you put it on,” said Gabriel.

  Clay levelled a baleful glare at his so-called friend. He’d spoken earnestly, but Clay could see the corner of his mouth twitch in wry amusement. Gabriel, too, knew how much Clay despised wearing helmets. “Sorry?” he asked, pretending not to have heard.

  “You should try it on right now,” Gabe urged, and this time his voice betrayed him, skirling up at the end with the effort of keeping a straight face.

  Clay looked around helplessly, but he and Gabe were the only two in on the joke. The men at the gate watched him expectantly. The Sergeant nodded.

  So Clay put the helmet on, shuddering as the sweat-moulded leather settled onto his head. The front guard pressed painfully against his nose, squashing it, and Clay blinked as his eyes adjusted to the bar of black between them.

  “Looks good,” said Gabriel, scratching his nose as an excuse to cover his grin.

  The Sergeant said nothing, but something—a glint in those crow-sharp eyes of his—made Clay wonder if the old man wasn’t fucking with him after all.

  Clay smiled tightly at Gabriel. “Shall we?” he asked.

  They passed beyond the gate. About fifty yards out the path curved south behind a stand of dense green fir. There was a gulch on the far side of the road, and the moment they rounded the bend Clay tore the helmet from his head and sent it spinning out into the sky. It bounced twice on the hillside, careening in a long arc on its rim before skidding to rest. There were numerous others littering the ground around it, rusted by rain, overgrown by lichen, or half buried in the muck. A few were home to some critter or another, and even as the bronze bowl settled on the mud-slick grass a wren landed lightly on its wide rim, deciding then and there it had found a perfect spot to nest.

  Clay and Gabe walked side by side down the dirt path. A forest of tall white birch and squat green alder hedged either side of the road. Both men remained silent for the first while, each lost in the dismal maze of his own mind. Gabriel bore no weapons at all and carried what appeared to be an empty sack. Clay’s own pack was stuffed near to bursting with spare clothes, a warm cloak, several days’ worth of cloth-wrapped lunches, and enough pairs of socks to keep an army’s feet warm. The Watchmen’s sword was belted on his hip, and Blackheart was slung over his right shoulder.

  The shield was named for a rampaging treant who had led a living forest on a monthlong killing spree through southern Agria. Blackheart and his arboreal army had wiped out several villages before laying siege to Hollow Hill. Though a few stalwart defenders remained to protect their homes, Clay and his bandmates had been the only real fighters in town. The ensuing battle, which lasted for almost a week and claimed the life of one of Saga’s numerous unlucky bards, was the subject of more songs than could be sung in a day.

  Clay himself had cut down Blackheart, and from the treant’s corpse had hewn the wood from which he’d fashioned his shield. It had saved his life more times than all his bandmates together, and was Clay’s most cherished possession. Its surface told the story of countless trials: here gouged by the razor claws of a harpy broodmother, there mottled by the acid breath of a mechanized bull. Its weight was a familiar comfort, even if the strap was starting to chafe, and the top lip kept scraping the back of his head, and his shoulders ached like a plough horse hitched to a granite wagon.

  “Ginny s
eems well,” said Gabriel, shattering the long silence between them.

  “Mmm,” said Clay, doing his best to repair it.

  “How old is Tally now?” Gabe pressed. “Seven?”

  “Nine.”

  “Nine!” Gabriel shook his head. “Where did the time go?”

  “Someplace warm,” Clay guessed.

  They trudged on quietly for a while longer, but Clay could see his friend growing restless. Gabriel had never been one for keeping to himself, which was essentially the reason he and Clay had become friends in the first place.

  “You still living in Fivecourt, then?” If they were going to talk, Clay decided, then he could at least steer the subject away from his wife and daughter, whom he was already beginning to miss with a longing he’d never imagined possible.

  “I was,” said Gabriel. “But, well, you know how it is.”

  Clay didn’t know, actually, but he got the sense Gabriel wasn’t planning to elaborate.

  “I left the city maybe two years ago now. I lived in Rainsbrook for a while after that, took on some solo gigs to pay the rent and put food on the table.”

  “Solo gigs?” Clay prompted, shuffling sideways to avoid a treacherous pothole. All through spring and summer wagons burdened with fresh-cut timber ran the road south to Conthas, leaving deep ruts and gaping holes that no one ever bothered to restore.

  “Nothing I couldn’t handle,” Gabe was saying. “A couple of ogres, a barghest, a pack of werewolves that turned out to be, like, seventy years old in human form, so … they went down pretty easy.”

  Clay found himself torn between horror, amusement, and genuine surprise. Generally the closer you got to Fivecourt, which was pretty much the dead centre of Grandual itself, the fewer monsters you tended to find. “I wasn’t aware Rainsbrook had a monster problem,” he said.

  Gabriel’s lips twitched toward a smirk. “Well it doesn’t anymore.”