Chapter 4 A Brutal March
A Brutal March
Lord Niel of Mount Eyron, traitor to the crown of Enar, was beginning to suspect the Maker hated him. On a deep, personal level. He’d never been a pious man, but surely he’d been punished enough in his life already. Hadn’t he?
An icy blast of wind snapped snow from the boughs of the firs straight into his face.
He tucked his gloved hands beneath his armpits to warm them, bent his head forward against the sting of the gale, and kept trudging across the snow-covered, rocky landscape of the lower Kettalist mountain range.
They’d lost all but one of the horses. Only a quarter of the men he’d marched west were coming home with him now.
Behind him, his surviving soldiers were finally silent.
He wasn’t sure he trusted that silence. For four days they’d done nothing but complain, and with good cause. Either they’d grown so cold and weak they wouldn’t make it much further, or they’d finally decided to mutiny and were biding their time.
A throat cleared next to him.
“My Lord Eyron.”
Niel blinked in surprise. Focused on the bone-cutting chill and thinking about the soldiers, he hadn’t even noticed Kerr coming up beside him.
That was bad. Niel couldn’t afford to be daydreaming, not in enemy territory: he needed to be alert at all times.
Chiding himself, he gave Kerr an inquiring look.
The captain was dressed like Niel, his heavy fur cloak belted up to keep it from dragging through the snow, draped over dark layers of padding and armor that made them stand out terribly against the white snowfall.
Kerr was a lean man in his thirties, big-nosed and lightly freckled, who’d proven himself in battle any number of times.
A lock of his blonde hair peeked out from beneath his cap.
“The men are weary. They need to rest.”
“We don’t stop until dark,” Niel growled, trudging on. They had too much ground to cover. And for all he knew his loyalist brother Corin’s army was on their heels, about to catch up to Niel's band of traitors.
“They won’t make it much further without a break,” Kerr continued patiently.
“At this rate we’ll never make it back to Eyron,” Niel muttered. He waited halfheartedly for Kerr to insist they would, but the captain didn’t respond.
Niel knew it was beginning to look hopeless.
There was too much ground left to cover, all of it difficult and prone to storms. Supplies were dwindling, and game was scarce.
He paused and turned, studying the troops behind him.
The men were strung out through the forested slope, some barely visible, a dusting of snow covering their clothes.
The remaining messenger birds huddled in their travel cage on the pack pony’s back, feathers puffed up.
Seeing their lord commander stop, two soldiers carrying a stretcher with their injured comrade hurriedly set down the weight to rest their arms. Another soldier paused to lean against a naked oak.
He could see the exhaustion in their eyes.
It mirrored his own. How long until they had no choice but to abandon their wounded and eat their few remaining animals?
The messengers birds were the only way he still had of getting in touch with his father and with the armies of Aronthia, the northern kingdom Niel’s father had traitorously allied with against their own kingdom of Enar.
Only three months had passed since Niel’s family split in half. Niel’s father, the Duke of Mount Eyron, had declared war on his own sister, the Queen of Enar. Niel’s brother, Corin, had renounced Mount Eyron to side with the Queen.
Niel did not mind being on opposite sides of a war from his brother and his aunt. He hated them both.
His father had sent Niel west, against Niel’s protests, to break the city of Ironcliff. If Niel captured the city, his father’s northern allies could send soldiers down through the coastal path that Ironcliff guarded, and into the kingdom of Enar.
They needed that pass to win the war. A dense mountain range divided the two countries, making it impossible to cross an army over the border in most places.
Bringing soldiers down by ship wasn’t an option, not so long as Niel’s cousin Hark was at sea, using his old blood magic to spin brutal storm after brutal storm north.
But Niel had failed at his task. Ironcliff was too well guarded, and the soldiers his father gave him were in poor condition, half-fed and barely trained.
It was a disgrace, the way his father treated the men.
But no matter how bad a hand he’d been dealt, the defeat would fall on Niel’s shoulders, and Niel would take the whipping.
So he had taken too long to accept defeat.
He’d remained camped outside of Ironcliff city in a bitter standoff against his brother Corin, who now led the Queen’s armies.
Brother against brother. Like it had always been. And Corin had won. Like he always fucking did.
The delay might have been fine, in an ordinary year.
Only, it was not an ordinary year. All of cousin Hark’s weather-working had ruined Niel’s odds of retreat.
Instead of the usual early fall drifts that came in the mountains, the first winter blizzard arrived a month early.
With Corin the asshole blocking their retreat along the coastal path from both the north and the south, Niel’s men had no choice but to fight their way up into the mountains through snow and ice and cold to reach one of the more treacherous passes.
A mile away from it, they’d found the path choked by snows so heavy the only way through was to tunnel—an endeavor they didn’t have the time or strength to attempt. The high peaks were unreachable, the passes snowed in. It was too late. They had no choice but to turn back.
It was typical of an encounter with his brother. Niel never had the fucking strong position.
So here they were. A forced march through an endless winter storm, on slopes so rocky and dangerous they’d lost fifteen men to the mountains already, praying they could cut a path to Mount Eyron before another blizzard buried them entirely or before his brother’s army caught up to them.
At this point he didn’t even know if Corin was still pursuing them or if his brother had turned back.
Niel was tempted to throw himself off one of the cliffs and put an end to the shame that dragged like a stone in his heart, but that would leave his men in even worse shape than they were already in.
He would not abandon them until they were safe. He’d lost too many already.
Kerr paused beside Niel, but the captain didn’t say another word.
He only gazed blandly at the soldiers, betraying no thought, making no further request of his commander.
Niel sighed heavily. He already knew Kerr’s advice: call a rest for the men.
Kerr was a better commander than him, even if the captain was too loyal to admit it.
Niel had been trained to fight alone. And he’d made one bad decision after another in the past three months, expecting the poor, half-starved soldiers to keep up with his endurance and match his skill.
“Half hour rest,” Niel called gruffly, pitching his voice to carry.
He let his heavy pack fall off his back.
It thudded into the snow. Niel watched as the men slumped down; one fell to his knees.
The hollow in Niel’s gut widened as he watched them.
“I’m going to scout ahead, find the easiest path,” Niel informed the captain.
They’d reached such a point of exhaustion that they didn’t bother with scouts anymore normally.
What was the point? Death surrounded them on all sides.
“I’ll watch your back,” Kerr offered.
“Someone ought to make sure they don’t mutiny,” Niel joked grimly. Kerr only shrugged.
“Think they’re too tired for that, my lord. You shouldn’t go alone.”
Niel snorted. He turned back east, the way they were heading, and began to trudge. At least he didn’t have to worry about getting lost, with the snow keeping a tally of their every move that made them horribly easy to track, if his brother Corin was still following them.
He heard Kerr following behind him, the snow crunching beneath each step of their boots.
The forest here was savage and wild. It didn’t belong to the immortal Hulder, but it was full of monstrous folk all the same. In that way it was familiar to Niel. He’d grown up in the Kettalist, after all, higher up on the slopes than he dared lead his men now, where the air was thin.
“In all truth, Kerr,” Niel said, once they were out of earshot of the soldiers. “The men. Do they have it in them to make it to Eyron?”
Kerr sighed.
“Not all of them,” the captain admitted quietly. “Not if these storms keep up.”
“And how many days until they try to kill me in my sleep?” he joked.
“Well…” Kerr started awkwardly. Niel paused in a small clearing to peer up the slope, wondering if they could cut a course higher. “They like you, my lord. You are kinder to them than your father. I doubt any of them wish for your head.”
Kinder than Niel’s father was a meaningless statement. A blizzard was kinder than the Duke of Eyron. So was a knife. So was an irate dragon or a hungry nix.
“But?” Niel asked, as he turned back east and kept trudging.
“They fear you are too freshly knighted,” Kerr said softly. “They are cold, hungry. They fear they will not make it home.”
“Tell me something I don’t know,” Niel muttered.
“What is the plan, my lord?” Kerr asked. The captain cleared his throat. “Pardon my insolence, but do you even know where we are?”
They’d reached a shallow cliff, where the ground before them abruptly fell away.
Tricked by the glaring white-on-white of the snow, Niel realized it only when he was a foot away from the edge.
He quickly stepped back, throwing a hand out to Kerr to warn him.
The drop was a dozen feet or more. Niel glanced up the slope again, trying to judge by the size of the trees how far they’d have to go to get around the ravine.
That was when he saw a flash of rich plum purple flicking between the dark shapes of the giant mountain firs, down in the ravine.
With a quick hand signal to Kerr, Niel pressed himself down to the ground so he’d be out of sight.
Kerr followed. With snow brushing his chin, Niel peered below into the ravine.
The rider was a noblewoman, her elaborate purple gown hitched up over her bare thighs—didn’t she know what stockings were?
—despite the freezing weather, cold enough to literally kill a man.
Her skin was pale; her hair long, thick, and black, flying out behind her as her dapple-gray horse skidded down the slopes.
She was riding too fast for him to get an impression of her face.
She’d injure her horse with how treacherous the terrain was.
They weren’t in the wilderness anymore. Not if a woman dressed as foolishly as that was riding about.
Niel quickly scanned the terrain for signs of any other movement.
Surely, in mountains as dangerous as this, she’d be with an escort.
It wasn’t as though she were armed and armored herself.
Finding no other signs of life, apart from an eagle flying overhead, Niel slowly pushed himself up.
Snow clung to him as he worked his way carefully along the ravine’s ridge in the direction the rider had gone.
Kerr followed him to an overview, where the mountain and the forests sloped sharply away beneath them to reveal a valley beyond.
There, in a wide, distant clearing, a small town nestled against a stone castle with a tall, fortified wall.
Pillars of smoke rose from the houses’ chimneys to blend into the gray sky above.
From the highest point of the castle’s keep, a blue flag with a black charge fluttered in the wind.
“Blackfell,” Niel informed Kerr, recognizing the heraldic colors even though he couldn’t make out the shape of the black Kettalist fir he knew was displayed on the blue field. Inwardly, he cursed. He’d thought they were at least a day’s march further east. Were they really moving that slowly?
“Should we head further up slope, then?” Kerr suggested.
If they were this close to the lowland of Enar, the odds of the Queen’s soldiers catching them were higher. The storms were pushing them further and further down the slopes as they made their way east to the safety of Mount Eyron.
Niel stared at the castle. He knew his hold on his men was slipping.
The worse the storms grew, the fewer of them would survive to make it back home before the true cold of winter set in.
It was still early fall; the brutal Kettalist mountains had far worse to throw at them.
Castle Blackfell had secure walls, ones that would be hard to crack.
It was a small, old castle, built in the days before Enar was a unified country, before Niel’s ancestors had come down from the Kettalist on dragonback to conquer the Hulder courts and the petty human kingdoms strung throughout the cradle.
And the castle would likely be well-stocked against the coming cold.
In fact, a few days of feasts, medicine, and roaring fires might be enough to get his men back to marching shape.
“I’ve changed my mind. The men need better rest than a half hour in the snow,” Niel said. “Blackfell ought to provide it.”
“A castle?” Kerr said, disbelief in his voice. Niel turned and began to trudge back through the deep snow to where they’d left the men, his mind churning through plans of how to conquer Blackfell. “My lord, the men aren’t in fighting shape…”
“They don’t need to be,” Niel said. “I work better alone anyhow.”