Kings of the Wyld Read online

  Clay rolled his eyes. You walked into that one, he told himself. Then again, it was nice to catch a glimpse of Gabe’s old self-assurance beneath the humble façade. There may be a blade beneath that rust, after all.

  “That’s where I saw Rose last,” said Gabriel, and just like that a sombre cloud returned to darken his mood. “She came to visit on her way out west. I tried to talk her out of going and we ended up getting into this huge fight over it. We yelled at each other half the night, and when I woke up she was gone.” He shook his head, chewing his bottom lip and squinting at nothing in particular. “I wish …” he said, and left it at that. Eventually, he asked, “What about you? What was the plan before I came along and fucked it all up?”

  Clay shrugged. “Well, we’re hoping to send Tally to school in Oddsford when she’s old enough. After that … Ginny and I were thinking of selling the house, opening up a place of our own somewhere.”

  “You mean like an inn?” asked Gabriel.

  Clay nodded. “Two stories, a stable out back, maybe a smithy so we can shoe horses and repair tools …”

  Gabriel scratched at the back of head. “School in Oddsford, an inn of your own … who knew standing a wall paid so well? Maybe I should ask the Sergeant for a job when we get back. I’ve always thought I looked pretty dashing in a helmet …”

  “Ginny trades horses,” Clay divulged. “She brings home five times the coin I do.”

  “Ah. You’re a lucky man,” he said, glancing over. “Gods, your very own inn! I can see it now: Blackheart mounted on the wall, Ginny pouring drinks behind the bar, and old Clay Cooper sitting by the fire, telling any with an ear to listen how we had to walk uphill in the snow to slay dragons back in our day.”

  Clay chuckled, swatting at a wasp buzzing in front of his eyes. Considering that most dragons he’d ever heard of lived on the tops of mountains, walking uphill in the snow in order to kill one seemed like a forgone conclusion. He was pondering this when Gabriel stopped so abruptly Clay nearly ran him over. He was about to ask why when he took note of where they were.

  Beside the road, the remnants of a modest house lay overgrown by decades of tangled brush and waist-high yellow grass. An arching oak grew among the ruins, shedding a steady rain of vibrant orange leaves. Its grasping roots curled around soot-blackened stones as though attempting to drag them, season by turning season, into the ground below.

  It had been several years since Clay had last laid eyes on what remained of his childhood home. He rarely had cause to travel this far south of town, and even then he tended to ignore it, or avoid the place altogether. Standing here now, Clay told himself he couldn’t smell ash on the breeze, or feel the heat of flames buffeting his face. He couldn’t hear the screams, or the dull slap of pummeling fists—not really—but he remembered them vividly. He could feel those memories clutching at him like roots, threatening to pull him under.

  He nearly jumped when Gabe laid a hand on his shoulder. “Sorry,” Clay mumbled distractedly, “I …”

  “You should go see her,” said Gabriel.

  Clay sighed, staring at the ruins. His eyes tracked the spinning descent of leaves, falling like embers toward the shaded earth. Another wasp, or the same one, droned in the air around his head. “I won’t be long,” he said finally.

  Gabriel’s assuring smile came and fled like a gust of wind. “I’ll wait here.”

  Clay’s father had been a logger by trade, though he would often brag of his brief stint as a mercenary. Leif and the Woodsmen were a band of little renown until they’d taken down a banderhobb that had been snatching children outside Willow’s Watch. Unfortunately, the creature’s acid bile did a number on the frontman’s legs, and Leif was left crippled, unable to walk without a stumbling limp. His band, known afterward as simply the Woodsmen, rose to fame without him.

  Clay’s mother, Talia, had supervised the kitchen at the King’s Head. She was an artist when it came to food, and her husband often complained she provided better meals for strangers than she did for her own family. On one such occasion, she pointed out that Leif spent more time drinking at the pub than he did with his son. This was her way of calling him a drunk without actually calling him a drunk, and though Leif wasn’t quick enough to catch her subtlety he didn’t much care for her tone, so he hit her.

  Rankled by his wife’s words, Leif had brought his son with him to the woods the following day. It was bright and cold—a winter wind had come prowling down the mountains and turned the leaves crisp, so they crackled beneath Clay’s boots as he scampered along behind his father.

  What are we looking for? Clay remembered asking.

  And Leif, carrying the axe he sharpened every night before bed, stopped where he was and peered at the trees around them—white birch, red maple, pine still cloaked in green. A weak one, he declared finally. Something that won’t put up a fight.

  Clay had laughed at that. He hated that he’d done so, looking back.

  They found a narrow birch, and Leif put the axe in his hands. He showed Clay how to plant his feet and set his shoulders, how to grip the axe low on the haft and put all his strength into a swing. Clay’s first chop was a feeble thing. It sent a jolt up his arms and left his elbows aching. The birch was barely scratched.

  His father snorted. “Again, boy. Hit it like you hate it.”

  Eventually the tree fell, and Clay got a rough slap on the back for his effort. Leif led him home afterward; the birch was left where it lay.

  And there it remained, though almost forty harsh Agrian winters had come and gone since that brisk autumn day. The tree was white as bone beneath the dappling sunlight. Clay knelt, setting his pack aside and shrugging Blackheart to the ground. The scent of the forest filled his lungs, a comfort. He reached out and placed his hand on the trunk, picking idly at the curling bark, grazing the tips of his fingers over its rough knots and creases.

  No one else besides Gabriel and Ginny knew that Clay had buried his mother here. He had meant to bring Tally around one of these days, but hadn’t quite summoned the courage to do so just yet. His daughter was insatiably curious; she would want to know how her grandmother died, but there were some things a nine-year-old girl had no business knowing.

  There was nothing to mark the grave, no headstone upon which Talia Cooper’s single mourner might lay a wreath, or set a candle. There were only the words be kind carved into the birch’s brittle skin, as if whoever did so had been crying, or a child, or both.

  Chapter Five

  Rocks, Socks, and Sandwiches

  “So where are we headed?” Clay asked, shortly before they were robbed on the road to Conthas.

  “First things first,” said Gabriel. “I need to get Vellichor back.”

  “You sold it, you said?”

  Gabe nodded. “Basically, yeah.”

  Clay could scarcely believe they were having this conversation. Gabe’s old sword, Vellichor, was perhaps the most treasured artifact in all the world. Several thousand years ago (or so the bards generally agreed) a race of rabbit-eared immortals called druins had narrowly escaped the cataclysmic destruction of their own realm by using Vellichor to carve a path into this one, which, at the time, was a land of savage humans and wild monsters. The druins had little trouble subjugating both, and quickly set about establishing a vast empire known as the Dominion.

  The druins were led by their Archon, Vespian, who disappeared into the Heartwyld when the Dominion, many centuries later, was overrun by its own monstrous hordes. When Saga encountered him close to thirty years ago, the Archon had been searching desperately for his estranged son. Shortly after, Clay and his bandmates had found Vespian again—mortally wounded, he’d confessed, by the very son he’d been pursuing. The dying druin had given his sword to Gabriel upon one condition: that Gabe use it to kill him.

  Gabriel did so, and the Archon, with his final breath, had said something too quiet to hear, in a language too ancient to comprehend. Whatever those words were, Clay was fairly certain t
hey hadn’t been Sell this if you need to.

  “Basically?” Clay could feel his anger rising, “So who did you basically sell your magic sword to?” Clay asked, attempting to sound less exasperated than he actually was.

  Gabriel glanced over, obviously embarrassed. “Um … Kal has it.”

  “Kal?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Wait—as in Kallorek? Our old booker, Kallorek? The one Valery—”

  “The one Valery left me for, yes,” Gabe finished. “Thanks for reminding me. And I didn’t exactly sell him the sword. I was into some people for a fair bit of coin, and Kal offered to bail me out, only I had nothing to offer up as collateral. He said the sword would square us up, but that if I ever needed it to come and ask. So I’m gonna go ask.”

  Clay hadn’t seen Kallorek in almost twenty years, and he wouldn’t have said he was looking forward to reacquainting himself with their old booker once again. Kal was loud, brash, and abrasive—sort of like Gabriel, except louder, brasher, and much more abrasive, without Gabe’s natural charm and disarming good looks to offset it all.

  From what little Clay knew of the booker’s sordid past, Kal had been a goon-for-hire on the streets of Conthas before trying his hand at booking, which, it turned out, he had a knack for. It had been Kallorek who had introduced them to Matrick and convinced Ganelon to join the band, Kallorek who booked the gig that led them to Moog. If not for Kal, there’d have been no Saga.

  Still, the man was as mean as a murlog with a mouth full of nails.

  Clay wondered if Valery knew yet that Rose had gone to Castia. He hoped so, for Gabriel’s sake. If there was anything scarier than a Heartwyld Horde, the wrath of a vengeful ex-wife might just be it.

  “So how about the others?” Clay asked. “Have you talked to Moog about this? Or Ganelon?”

  Gabriel shook his head. “I came to you first. Figured you and I together would have an easier time getting the rest of them on board. They trust you, Clay. More than they trust me, anyway. This isn’t the first time I’ve tried to re-form Saga, remember.”

  “Yeah, well, you wanted us to fight in an arena,” Clay reminded him. “Against the gods-knew-what, with ten thousand people watching.”

  “Twenty thousand,” Gabe amended.

  “But what for? What’s the point?”

  “I don’t know!” said Gabriel. “That’s just how it’s done these days. People want excitement. They want blood. They want to see their heroes in action, not just hear about it from some bard who’s probably making up half the story anyway.”

  Clay could only shake his head in disbelief. Didn’t people know that stories, and the legends that inevitably sprang from them, were the best part? The gods knew that bards weren’t good for much besides getting themselves killed and telling lies, but they were undoubtedly masters of both. Clay had lost count of the times he’d bumbled his way through a messy, bloody, terrifying brawl, only to hear a bard convince a crowded tavern it had been the greatest, most glorious battle ever waged between man and beast.

  In stories there were marches without weeping foot sores, swordfights without septic wounds that killed heroes in their sleep. In stories, when a giant was slain, it toppled thunderously to the ground. In reality, a giant died much the same way anything else did: screaming and shitting itself.

  A part of Clay had always suspected the world beyond Coverdale was worsening day by day, but since he hadn’t planned on having much to do with the outside world—aside from pouring drinks and renting beds to folk passing through—he really hadn’t bothered to care. But now that he was rushing headlong back into it … well, he had a feeling things had gotten worse than he’d thought.

  “The point is,” Gabriel went on doggedly, “if you tell the others we can cross the Heartwyld and bring Rose home, they’ll believe you.”

  “If you say so,” Clay said. He saw a bird, or some other bright thing, flit between the trees in his periphery. When he turned to look, though, it was gone. “So what are the others up to?” he asked, eager to change the subject. “I mean besides Matrick, who I assume is still the king of Agria.”

  Before Gabe could answer, a woman sauntered onto the road ahead. Her long brown hair was a mess of loosely bound braids exploding into frizzy tangles. Her clothes were in little better condition, but what they lacked in quality they made up for in quantity, layered upon one another with seemingly no regard for pattern or colour. A longbow was slung over her shoulder, and a single arrow dangled loosely in one hand.

  “Mornin’ boys,” she said. “Lovely day for a stroll, ain’t it?”

  “Or a robbery,” muttered Clay, scanning the forest to either side. Sure enough, he spotted half a dozen others hidden among the trees. All of them women, garbed in the same haphazard fashion as the one who’d blocked their path, and all of them armed, as it were, to the tits.

  “Ya think?” she asked, with the lazy drawl of a Cartean plainswoman. “I prefer rain for a robbery. Not a downpour, mind you—more of a light drizzle. Suits the mood, I think. You ask me, it’s a shame to spoil a sunny day like this with something so crass as petty thievery.” She made a helpless gesture, and then leveled the arrow she was carrying at Clay’s chest. “Yet here we are: pettily thieving.”

  “We have nothing you’d want,” said Gabriel, spreading his hands.

  The brigand flashed a smile. “Oh, we’ll see about that. Now if you’d be so kind as to introduce your weapons to the road and have what’s in those packs out for us to see?”

  Clay complied, flinging the Watchmen’s sword to the ground and upending his pack.

  The girl whistled, stepping close to examine the contents. “Ooooh, socks and sandwiches! It’s our lucky day, girls! Come collect!” A chorus of hoots and howls answered from the trees, and her women poured onto the road like a pack of patchwork coyotes. They circled the two men, making threatening gestures with knives and spears and half-drawn bows. Gabriel, flinching with every feinted thrust, turned his own pack upside down.

  To Clay’s surprise, it wasn’t empty. To the surprise of everyone else, it contained only a handful of rocks that clattered to the road at Gabriel’s feet.

  The clamour died almost instantly, and for the first time since she’d appeared the leader of the bandits seemed genuinely displeased.

  “By the Heathen’s hairless balls!” she swore, kicking one of the stones in the grass beside the road. Gabriel started forward as if he meant to dive after it, but the woman’s glare stopped him cold. “Rocks? Are you bloody serious? Can’t be sapphires, or rubies, or fat silver ignits.”

  “Ingots,” Clay mumbled, but the woman wasn’t listening.

  “The gods forbid we waylay some fool with a pack full of diamonds, oh no! But rocks! And socks! And … what’s that there on those sandwiches?”

  “Ham.”

  “Ham,” the woman growled, as though uttering the name of a bitter enemy. Her knuckles went white on the haft of her bow.

  “What about that there shield?” asked one of the bandits. She pointed to Blackheart with the tip of her spear.

  “Looks fancy,” said another. “Probably worth a courtmark or two.”

  Clay didn’t bother addressing them. Instead, he fixed his gaze on their leader. “The shield’s not going anywhere,” he said.

  The woman blinked. “Ain’t it now?” She stepped around him, holding her bow like a walking stick and casting one more disdainful glance at Gabriel’s pitiful pile of stones. “Last I checked you weren’t in no position to … to …” She trailed off. “Well, I’ll be a kobold’s cock ring—is that what I think it is?”

  “Depends what you think it is,” Clay answered.

  “I think it’s the shield what belongs to the one they call Slowhand, also known as Clay Cooper,” she said. “I think it’s godsdamned Blackheart!”

  “Well, in that case you’re right,” Clay said. It had been years since anyone had called him Slowhand, a nickname he’d earned thanks to his propensity for getting hit
first in almost every fight.

  “So it is fancy,” exclaimed the bandit who’d suggested so earlier. “We’ll have it off ya, then.” She reached for it, and Clay said a prayer in his head to whichever of Grandual’s gods was in charge of forgiving men who broke women’s wrists before punching them in the throat.

  “Leave it be,” said the woman in charge.

  For a moment the two bandits glared at each other, like predators standing off over a fresh kill, but eventually the leader prevailed, forcing the other to look sullenly away.

  “This shield,” she explained, “was hewn from the heart of a vicious old treant who killed a thousand men before this one”—she pointed at Clay, nearly jabbing his eye out with the arrow in her hand—“chopped him to firewood. This here is Slowhand Clay Cooper. He’s a real live hero!”

  “And we don’t rob heroes?” one of the bandits said.

  “Of course we rob heroes,” said the woman, and with the tip of her arrow sliced neatly through the purse at Clay’s waist. Twenty silver coins spilled onto the dusty road, and the bandits scrambled to recover them.

  The woman raised her voice to a pitch fit for proselytizing. “A sandwich belongs to whoever eats it; a sock to whoever wears it; a coin to whoever has it to spend. But some things are not for the taking. Like this.” She grazed her fingers across Blackheart’s blistered surface as though laying hands on the tomb of someone sacred. “This here belongs to Clay Cooper and none other, and I’ll grow a tail out my arse before I stoop so low as to rob him of that.”

  She stepped away, shouldering her bow and resuming her place on the road ahead. “Sock up, girls!” she yelled, and the bandits leapt to action, pulling off boots and pulling Ginny’s handmade socks over whatever they were already wearing. After that they divvied out the sandwiches, then scurried back to the edge of the woods.

  One of them plucked up Clay’s sword as she went. “Does this belong to Clay Cooper?” she asked.

  “Not anymore,” said the leader.

  Gabriel watched the brigands disperse with obvious relief. The leader, looking at Clay, jutted her chin in his direction. “Who’s this tagalong, eh?”