Chapter 1
In Which Forty Years Have Passed and We Meet a Handsome Knight, the Hero of Our Story, Who Is Over Six Feet Tall and Has Straight Teeth and Nice Hair and Wonderful Musculature and Who Is Only a Little Bit Frightened.
Not Even Frightened, Really, Just Reasonably Worried.
Or Rather, Alert. Yes, Let’s Go with Alert.
I tried to keep my grimace on the inside, and very nearly succeeded.
In a miraculous act of stupidity, the last scouting group had caught a construct and brought it back to the Order outpost. They’d cleared out a pen of unicorns, locking the peevish mounts into their stalls, and tied the thing to a stake typically used for breaking yearlings.
It glowered. Its eyes spat green flames. Hopping on its remaining leg, it swung the stumps of its wing-arms and seethed at us all.
A crowd formed about the pen, men sitting atop the bars to laugh and throw stones. With ale dispersed and skewered rabbit sourced from the kitchen, the scene had a carnival atmosphere.
I was the only one not caught up in the mood.
The construct’s wooden beak jabbed at the air in sudden, unnatural movements that accentuated the artifice of the thing, but that wasn’t the worst of it.
The worst was the way it quieted all of a sudden and looked at us—really looked at us, one by one, as though memorizing our faces.
For what purpose, I couldn’t say—it would be dead and burned by sundown, and had no means of communicating with its comrades.
Still, as those flame-eyes flicked from knight to knight, I found myself shrinking.
And when its eyes met mine, the boiling hatred in them made me cry aloud.
Maybe I fell back a little. Maybe the knights behind me provided support until my knees regained their solidity. Who can say? By the time I was paying attention again, those terrible eyes had moved off me, while the eyes of nearly everyone else turned my way.
“Perhaps Vaillancourt can give it a try?” a voice called out, and cheers rang about me.
“Eh?” I said—and then hands shoved at my back, propelling me toward the pen gate. Finally, my brain translated the crowd’s babbling; they’d been talking about fighting the thing, for sport!
My legs locked, and my heels dug channels into the soil, but my fellow knights were all shouting my name now: “Sir Cameron! Brave Sir Cameron! Cameron the lionheart!”
Warmth bloomed in my chest. I could hardly disappoint my peers, who—doubtless in awe of my size, and my flawless golden curls—had elevated me to a status that frankly, I wasn’t so keen on. “Thank you, thank you,” I said, flashing teeth I knew to be a dazzling white. “But I haven’t a sword!”
Something jabbed at my gut, and reflexively I flinched from it. “Take mine,” said the grinning knight, offering the sword again. This time, I accepted the hilt before he could poke me with it.
“Ah.” Sweat was gathering on my forehead. “That’s so generous, really, but what if I chipped it? I really can’t—”
“No bother.” The knight’s smile was too fierce, and too yellow, and stank of onions. “Chip away.”
“Oh God,” I muttered. A final push sent me stumbling, then a click sounded behind me. I was in the pen. And they had closed the gate. “Gentlemen,” I tried, still holding the sword out for someone to take. “I, ah, love the spirit of this, really, but I don’t have my armour—”
“It doesn’t have any arms,” someone shouted, and laughter rippled through the knights. “You make a good pair!”
“I have an upset stomach!” I cried. “I ate a bad trout. Something might happen!”
“We’ll stay upwind,” another voice called.
Slowly, very slowly, I turned to face the construct. My tight-laced jacket—though it looked fantastic—restricted my motions. The stylish sleeves scarcely allowed me to raise my arms above the shoulders, and they expected me to swing a sword?
I mean, I could. Very well, in fact. Just . . . not now. At any other time, though, certainly.
Shouts rose from behind me, taking on a sharper edge the more I hesitated. The pen, already clipped clean by unicorn teeth and trodden into mud, now contained a small ditch where the construct hopped and twisted and clacked its beak. The thing, in its fury, was digging itself into a hole.
I swallowed and marched forward, stepping around heaps of unicorn dung mottled with flies. Their buzzing reflected the keening in my skull as I drew closer and closer.
Twin green flames fixed on me. A chain hooked through the construct’s gut, the other end securing it firmly to the pole. My sword gave me a longer reach than the beast, but if it were to seize me and close that shear-like beak across my face . . .
Sweat loosened my grip on the sword. I clenched my fingers, determined not to fumble.
“It isn’t worth it,” I mumbled, too quiet for anyone else to hear. “Just leave and be humiliated. This simply is not worth it.”
The construct tilted its head, flames wavering with the motion.
I circled it, eyeing the carved-up soil, judging how much leeway the chain gave. On my third circuit, the construct lunged. I fell backward with a shriek, and scrambled away, scarcely keeping hold of my weapon, while on all sides my fellow knights jeered and hooted.
Standing and brushing myself free of dirt, I smiled and waggled the sword at them. Just to make it clear I was a participant in the fun. Then, the construct twitched a claw—I swung back to it, holding the sword at a practiced angle. Noise no longer carried past the pounding in my ears.
Lunge, and swing. Lunge, and swing. That was all I had to do. “Easy peasy,” I babbled.
The construct darted forward, its foul beak stretched in a silent scream. A non-silent scream tore from my own throat. I lunged and swung, impact jarring my elbow.
The construct’s head bounced, twice, before rolling to a stop before my feet. As I stared, the green glow of its eyes faded.
“Oh.” I took quick steps backward, away from the broken thing. Belatedly, it occurred to me that I should wave at the crowd and have them cheer. I held the sword high, where it vibrated with my arm’s trembling. “Huzzah!”
If I didn’t know better, I’d say the men looked disappointed.
“Let’s go,” someone muttered, and the crowd began to disperse, knights hopping from their bars and tossing rabbit skewers.
It didn’t take long for the area to clear—except for the knight who’d lent me his sword, who waited, palm out.
When I placed it in his hands with gracious thanks, he simply grunted and left.
Which left me alone in the pen with the decapitated construct.
Deprived of life, it looked no more dangerous than firewood.
Yet I could still make out the contours of its empty eye sockets and the gape of its beak.
I shrugged off my unease and left, unhooking the gate with only minor difficulty.
“They called me a lion,” I muttered, as I followed my stomach to the dining hall.
“That was nice. I am a bit of a lion, aren’t I? ”
The long, dreary room was already full by the time I filed in, the torchlight flickering with the force of the noise. I slid in beside Sir Babbet, whose silence I could usually rely on. It’d be best if my jangled nerves weren’t rubbed upon any further, at least for the evening.
“Lads.” I nodded in greeting, then leaned over to grasp a plate of roast beast. My fingers brushed the edges of it but couldn’t quite hook on. “Could someone, ah . . .”
A thickset knight pushed the dish toward me with enough force that I flinched. “Sir Cameron,” he boomed. “I caught your performance.”
“Thank you!” I said, before realizing that he’d forgotten to add a compliment.
The knight chewed slowly, flecks of meat occasionally making their way down his chin. “Anyway. Didn’t think we’d be seeing you today.”
“Oh? Why is that, Sir Galahad?”
A nasal voice pitched in from across the table. “When battles brew, you always seem to go missing.”
“Do I?” I filled my plate carefully with slices of roast griffin-duck. The gravy dripped abominably, and I was wearing my best jacket—a scarlet that set off the rosiness of my cheeks, slashed along the sleeves to reveal an underlayer of Vaillancourt gold. “Anyway, who’s fighting?”
A hush fell over the table, and too many heads once again turned my way.
“Cameron,” called that nasal voice again. “We are. With the mad sorcerer.”
I craned my neck until I found the source: Sir Regulus, gravy dripping down his fingers, and splashed liberally through his curling mustache. “Good God, man.” He laughed in a spray of meat. “Did you not know?”
“I only meant”—my face warmed, but my smile remained unwavering—“that I did not know whose squadron had been, ah, singled out for the honour.”
“No one knows.” He shrugged broadly. “But with Elders here, something must be going down. I hear your elf’s been walking about with them.”
“Glenda? She mentioned a meeting, but—”
“Then you don’t know anything?”
“No,” I started—but in confirming my ignorance, I lost their attention. Sir Regulus turned to shout at another arriving knight, and voices rose in an impenetrable wall.
I sliced the griffin-duck into smaller and smaller ribbons while I waited for the noise to subside. A battle . . . usually, I was more on top of those.
Granted, my best source of information had recently been slain in combat: Sir Hamlin, who’d put up a great show of ‘Oh but we can’t do that, we’re both men,’ only to stick his hand down my breeches behind the unicorn stable.
A bead of sweat trickled down the tip of my nose to splatter among the desecrated meat on my plate.
I’d been sent here by my father with the expectation that I fall in combat, joining Sir Hamlin, and Sir Wilkin, and Sir Xiu, and .
. . whoever else numbered among my dead comrades.
Too many to have them memorized. God bless them, and all.
Point was, avoiding that particular fate had become a full-time job.
“Lads,” I said, standing with a screech of my chair, “it’s been a pleasure, but I do think that I, ah, have somewhere else to be.”
Sir Babbet leaned to look at my plate. “Did you even eat any of that?”
“What?”
“Your food.”
“What about it?” I tapped impatiently on the head of my chair. “Look, I’d love to chat, let’s catch up some other time, but for now I’ve got to go. Alright?”
His face screwed up in a sort of bafflement, but I was already on my way.
My first thought was Glenda—but no, she’d still be in her meeting. I sometimes bribed the outpost scribe for intel, but then, the Elders had commandeered him for notetaking, hadn’t they?
Paralyzed by my lack of options, I sprawled across a bench in the common room beneath the banner of the Vaillancourt lion.
We’d eaten while the sun was still high in the sky, so the room remained muggy with warmth.
Even as I plotted, even as stress ate at me like hunger—as a matter of fact, it probably was hunger—I couldn’t help but succumb to the heat. My eyelids grew heavy, and I yawned.
“Cameron.”
I nearly fell off the bench. “Glenda! You’re back! How was the meeting?”
The elf stood too close, her blue face twisted into a strange expression. “Pack your things,” she said. “We have to go. Now.”