The New Magic

SWORD DAYS-1

SWORD DAYS

“Only a fool hopes to live forever by escaping his enemies.”

– Viking proverb

Jarrod Torrealday awoke in the pink-gray light of morning, in a comfortable bed high in the great tower at High River Keep, several days' ride from his own castle this time of year. The supple and luxuriously tanned body of Karra Talivel wrapped itself around him tighter, filling the bed with hibiscus and heat. He ran his hand through her hair, a snarl of blonde striped with brown.

“Do you enjoy my hair, lover?” she purred. Her accent was distinctly Faerie, sharp and precise on the consonants and slightly lilting. Exotic to him, even here, a million light-years from home.

“I love your hair,” he told her, kissing her forehead. “But I thought only predators have stripes.”

“I have stripes,” she purred, rolling on top of him, “because I hunt the bravest knights.” With an expert buck of her hips, they were one.

The room shrieked. The bed objected to the injustice. Gods railed from the beams overhead. Worlds ended and began again outside the window.

The Faerie word for mutual release translated to the thunder and the rain.

Grinning, panting, sheathed in candy-scented sweat, Karra rolled off him and dug her head into the pillow, burrowing as she drifted into whatever the Faerie did for sleep. He still wasn’t sure. Eyes open, eyes closed, sitting up, lying down. She had said they didn’t dream; they used downtime for remembering.

She spent a lot of time remembering.

He slipped out of bed, shook off needles of looming winter with a shuddered profanity, and wished for just one glass window. This was fall chill; winter loomed, silver-black and lethal. The bed beckoned.

An absurd strain of symbiosis had developed between them since their first night together at the start of summer. It was a structure he didn’t grasp in its entirety, but it was immediate and effortless, and he shoved aside the occasional digs from his peers about elf magic and illusory charms. Whatever the cause, he was joined at the hip to a feral, magical being, her ferocity kept in check by a fathomless restraint and monastic gentleness which in turn made her what he needed most: a hardened concrete tunnel under the blazing, collapsing house of himself. A place to forget about the string of bodies he’d left behind him across two worlds, now.

So many bodies.

Her arm snaked out to the spot in the bed where he wasn’t.

Jarrod was not particularly tall, but lean and long-limbed despite his size, and hard-shaped with knots of muscle that appeared carved from rock by wind. Between a mat of dark blond dreadlocks and a tight sandy beard resided a pair of powerful eyes, periwinkle in the right light, and a row of perfectly white teeth that many knights here thought smiled too much. A curved scar crossed the muscles of his stomach.

The sky had erupted pink with morning across broken clouds that loomed storm-dappled and dark with cold. He set a log on the coals and blew on it until the fire burst to life.

His armor, a mosaic of bourbon-tanned leather and mail, rested on a mannequin in the corner beneath a banner from the Order of the Stallion, a gold horse’s head over a golden key on a green tapestry. A massive warsword leaned against the armor, out of its scabbard and oiled.

Jarrod began his day as he usually did, dressing himself in the uniform of a knight off-duty, a black tunic with a gold officer’s brocade at the stiff collar and a black velvet overtunic, known colloquially as “warrior blacks.” He slipped his arm through a gold rank braid, tying it to a button atop his left shoulder, and attached the fourragere to his chest with a gold horsehead pin. Above the horsehead, which was roughly the size of a silver dollar, went a smaller pin, also gold: a crossed sword and key, the mark of a Lord Protector, bestowed by the King of Gateskeep for gallantry in defending a member of the royal family.

He buckled on a rapier and its attendant belt, slipping a medical kit in a black leather pouch and a Ka-Bar fighting knife onto it, first.

It was a hell of a sword, a long blade with a breathtaking swept hilt right out of Dumas, the satin-finished cage forged custom by a master smith in northern Maine. One of the last affairs he’d handled before leaving Earth.

Leaving Earth.

The pink-purple moon, down to a sliver as the season ended, peeped through a break in the clouds on the horizon, its lone slender ring canted with oncoming winter. He took a deep breath, as he still did whenever the moon was out.

He’d left Earth.

Not a hundred days ago, he’d rescued Adielle, the princess of Falconsrealm and heir to the throne of Gateskeep, from captivity in the southern nation of Ulorak. He’d also killed Ulorak’s most feared general, along with enough of his small army to stop in its tracks what would have been a costly and ghastly three-front war.

They’d given him an area bigger than Long Island for his troubles, a gorgeous, mountainous region north of here: the Wild River Reach, full of hardscrabble families and the country’s largest silver mine. The king had taken it from the family of the late heir presumptive for colluding with the nation of Ulorak to kick off the short war in the first place.

Jarrod had no idea exactly how rich he was; no one on his staff was capable of counting that high. He owned the mine that produced the silver for the country’s primary coinage, and coins not in circulation were stored in his castle's lowest basements, a fact that no one here at High River ever let him forget.

The wind slipped through the window, bringing a trace of damp dirt and the hint of rain, as if it stormed on the great ringed moon and he could just smell it here if he held perfectly still.

This was Jarrod’s regular trip to the Falconsrealm capital to handle political affairs. He was at High River Keep so often these days that a steward had assigned him this apartment in the princess’s tower, though the staff was evasive as to whether he was renting it, couch-surfing, or whether it came with the Lord Protector gig.

This morning’s florid shade of hell involved a meeting with several lords from the Shieldlands, who would be airing grievances about Jarrod’s proposed moratorium on scutage, the practice of sending paid mercenaries to fulfill the tours of duty expected from knights and lords in the king’s service.

Their problem, as Jarrod understood it, was that the lords would send mercenaries to castle duty in their own knights’ stead, instead of staffing their castles with mercenaries and sending their knights. As Jarrod had noted, often out loud, most of the mercenaries were cut-rate thugs with inferior gear, surpassed on every level by even the teenaged goons that the border lords knighted. If the lords didn’t want the mercenaries, Jarrod argued time and again, why should the king?

This was what the day was going to be about. He had a plan. He had notes tucked in his shirt. He was ready for this.

He closed the door behind him and stepped onto the landing.

A haggard soldier rounded the stairs with one of the chamberlains just as he turned, and several aspects were wrong with it all at once. He wasn’t wearing the pin of The Reach knights—a tower with a wave about to batter it—though he had his goatee in fine braids, the style of men of The Reach. The lack of a chivalric pin meant he was a soldier, not a knight or a rider for an order, and he wasn't a soldier Jarrod recognized, although Jarrod's castle garrison was fewer than sixty troops in total and he was pretty sure he knew them all.

It was at least a five-day ride from The Reach to High River Keep this time of year, and about to become much longer as the snows came. The soldier’s eyes sagged in a wind-burned face. He had his helmet under his arm and he hadn’t brushed the mud from his boots, so whatever he had to say, he hadn’t stopped for breakfast or even a drink first.

A good man on a horse, sent from an outlying garrison, and sent fast.

“Lord Protector?” the soldier asked, as the chamberlain pointed to Jarrod.

Jarrod grumbled. One constant between worlds, he’d found, was that only trouble knocks before breakfast. “Can I help you?”

“I hope so, my lord,” said the soldier. “The Hillwhites have just taken The Reach.”

“You can ask him yourself,” Princess Adielle was saying as Jarrod entered the audience chamber.

The royal audience chamber was on the eighth floor of the highest tower, and decorated in banners and tapestries, with the two largest on the wall framing either side of a polished wooden throne with a gilded cushion: the green banner of the kingdom of Gateskeep with its gold skeleton key, and next to it, the banner of the principality of Falconsrealm, sky-blue with a diving bird of prey in black.

Flames snapped and echoed from two large fireplaces along the curving outer wall, and the ceiling hung with fat candles in chandeliers lit even in the daylight. Along the walls between the windows hung the smaller banners of the various chivalric orders, including Jarrod’s own. The wooden floor was splintery timbers inlaid with stone in the diving-falcon sigil.

Princess Adielle Riongoran-Thurdin stood before her throne. Slightly taller than Jarrod and appearing much younger, her eyes were bright blue and slightly watery, and she maintained a poise and grace that made Jarrod have to catch his breath sometimes. She wore a long blonde braid and layered dresses in the Falconsrealm manner in shades of blue with gold embroidery, along with a gray wolfskin mantle over her shoulders, several beaded necklaces in bright colors, and a sword at her side in a silver-embossed scabbard.

Jarrod knew the sword; he’d given it to her. It had started life on Earth as a leaf spring on a 1971 Cadillac, rescued from a scrapyard and reborn through heat and hammering as a late-medieval arming sword, gleaming, sure, and deadly.

Two Falconsrealm knights in heavy black hauberks flanked the room, their helmets on the ends of each table in puddles of mail. Jarrod recognized one from fight practice. New to the castle, he was young, aggressive, and stalk-thin, with a tight, clean jaw and narrow eyes. Jarrod remembered that he had good instincts, but he still needed help with his footwork.

The other was Lady Aveth from the Order of the Star, a broad woman, wide-faced beneath a dark bowl haircut. She’d fought beside Jarrod and Carter against Elgast’s men a hundred days ago, a sergeant for the Order of the Stallion at the time but knighted to the Order of the Star for it and given the moniker Lady Aveth the Fearless. The Star was a top-tier unit composed of the most elite members of the royal orders, rough and dangerous riders responsible for finding lost travelers in a world made of monsters. It was exhausting, perilous, scary work, and knights of the Star often vanished without a trace. She nodded to Jarrod.

The soldier who’d come up to get Jarrod took a position near the door, pulled on his helmet, and rested both his hands on his sword handle.

Jarrod’s eyes flicked around the room. It was quiet and still, which Jarrod knew was not good in a royal audience chamber, ordinarily a place rife with bustle and scribes. That the knights were armored was much, much less good.

He now knew enough about armor to know that knights didn’t walk around the garrison in full war gear. Armor is uncomfortable, and it causes ringworm, and it gives you a headache, and nobody talks to you for long because armor stinks. Even knights specifically tasked with standing watch wore as little armor as they could get away with. Padded jacks were acceptable, as a shirt of mail could be thrown on in a crisis, and some mercenaries working scutage might own little more than a jack and a leather helmet anyway.

Further, Falconsrealm was not at war. High River Keep’s vantage point overlooking a crescent of a lake far below meant that any knight would have had plenty of warning to get their armor on, or more armor, if needed.