Graves Family/Alinys

The letter arrived a day late, its carrier looking haggard and the pony he rode in on gaunt, mangy and tired. The little beast's head dropped immediately after its cantering stride broke, and it didn't lift it again; bowed, beaten, it just whuffled pathetically at the scraggly yellowed grass beneath the mountains. It would have been a pretty little horse at any other time had the conditions been different: beneath grimed dirt, its coat would have shone dark, black-streaked bay and its hair would have grown out thick and furry in the cooler climates of the north. Its mane, trimmed short, would have ruffed up thick and broom-brush, while its tail would have grown out, hung loose and untamed. It was a stocky little horse.

"How much?" Alinys called out, but the words were ripped away by the wind and the rider gave no indication of having heard her; for the better, perhaps, as she only had some twenty gold left to her name - something she guarded carefully from the men. She doubted, if they had known she could not pay them once they'd entered that daunting, winding, narrow mountain path, that they would follow her north. Already they had braved quite a trek: the rogue City had been under marital law and in the process of a takeover when she'd arrived. Her men had gone largely unnoticed by the denizens, who'd been looted and razed to the ground just days earlier. The pickings, needless to say, had been slim: the most they'd squeezed out of that chaotic place was twenty gold - the same twenty gold she carried with her now - from a dour looking old innkeeper. Even that had been a trial. They'd had to hang the man upside down by his slippers and shake him. The last gold piece he'd even gone so far as to have hidden in his mouth; he would have swallowed it but for Henry - easily the largest man in her unit (who had only failed to make the grade of Captain because he was, coincidently, also the cruelest, crudest, and most careless.) The broad-shouldered behemoth had crouched down and poked his squat, ugly nose right into the innkeeper's face, stuck out a meaty palm, and rumbled: "Spit."

The man on the pony dismounted. What Alinys had mistaken earlier for a quiver, more obviously now a waxed leather scroll case with a corking cap, banged against the man's back as he swung out of stirrup. Her earlier assumption - that he would be as beaten as the mount he'd rode into the ground - here faltered: though tired, and though the man had a day's growth of a bristly black beard on his jaw, he did not look like common peasant stock. He was broad-shouldered and surprisingly pale - though showed the first signs of ugly red sunburns along his arms and face. He paused, fingering the reins of his mount, looped them about his arm and knotted them once (the knot itself showing he was no idiot when it came to horses. She'd seen that sort of tie before.) and then saluted her with a closed fist pressed up against the sweaty, quilted cloth of his tunic.

"Lady Alinys of Graves, I presume?" He asked, his voice slightly lilting and somewhat mocking, then continued - inhaling slowly first, then murmuring: "You're rather hard to find, lady. Several reports: it seems the rest of the nobility from Melodia has joined us, and Sir Valens gathers with them in Eidulb. He mentions in particular a "Sir Crispen" has arrived to join the Northern Expeditionary Force - "

"What," Alinys interrupted the man now, not bothering to ask first for a name, and neither bothering the least bit consideration nor manner - too furious, suddenly, "in the name of whatever damned god you believe in is that bastard doing coming up with us? Maybe they weren't content with ruining Melodia. Goddamned rats, or ticks. Ticks fleeing a rotted, stinking carcass - the selfsame, blood-bloated ticks that killed it in the first place and you stand there placidly and have the gall to tell me this - placidly! You... You bastard!"

The man stared at her for a moment, completely unruffled, then bowed his head slightly - that same slightly mocking smirk plastered on his face - and continued. His voice was soft, cursory polite, and she hated him already.

"...Might I continue, lady Graves?"

When she gave no reply, he did.

"He mentions in particular a "Sir Crispen" has arrived to join the Northern Expeditionary Force and acknowledges several others from the Republic of Melodia come as refugees to this land and seek to join it, as theirs is beset by problems from all sides. There are, furthermore, reports of monsters to the north in the mountains - a noble of Astrum bid me take several copied maps of the area to you, as they might serve you well in the coming travels. I am also bid, by my very father, to come and serve with you in stead of my brother, Captain Hendersen. He is my younger brother, and my father would be sore hurt were he injured in these coming adventures. I will stand in his stead."

Another pause, then:

"You may call me Reikhard. My father also bears my name. Captain Reikhard, if it pleases you, or else I imagine you'll go without, won't you, lady?"

"I hate you, you know that, Captain Reikhard? A single damned slip and I'll have more than your head. Your entire family will rue the day your father decided a mercantile fortune wasn't just good enough for his brood, and aspired to anything more than just another damned peasant wielding a pitchfork in the winter months. Do you understand?" Alinys couldn't think clearly - standing beneath the shadow of those great mountains, with blood pounding in her ears, and staring at this stupidly arrogant commonly born merchant's son.

"Crystal, lady."

"Then get out of my sight. See to the men. We're moving out - now."

"Where to, lady?"

"Up. We're climbing those damned mountains. And we're going to loot that golden shrine at the top of the first hill. I hope it's to no god of yours, Captain. He might take offense."

"Lady, if He took offense for every slight from every man or woman - low or high - He would hardly be a god."

The pony whuffled pitifully behind them both. The wind picked up. Feeling suddenly that things had taken a sharp turn for the worse, Alinys forced back a shiver and turned, stalking off.

---

The Shrine hadn't been made of gold after all; it was some sort of bronze, or brass, that glittered prettily but ultimately amounted to little more than nothing. She stood before it, staring over it with the appraising eye of one who had rarely seen its like before, but had heard of it often - critical, cool, crushed. Behind her, burning on pyres, laid eleven of her men. Two more had gone out hours before into the darkness and, after a piercing shriek, had not returned. Pieces of them did: blood, dribbles of gore splashed on the red-and-brown rocks of the mountains. What had started out as a formidable force had been reduced to mere mediocrity. Forty-three men stood wide-eyed around the shrine. Several prayed, others drank and ate what travel rations they had. Still others counted their newly won week's pay. One, alone of all others, watched her.

She hated those eyes on her back.

Captain Reikhard stepped up out of the shadow of the Seeklander's Shrine, arm lifted to shade his eyes against that dim glint of the setting sun that still refracted away from the slanted roof of the small building. It had been tiled once, and thatched once too - and had been patched irregularly between both those improvements with mud and metal slag, and even in some places some sort of granite stone. Beaten panels of yellow-bronze metal, thinly sheeted, panelled the rock. The man's spurs - he'd found them a day earlier in one of the bellies of the strange creatures they'd slain - clacked softly on the floor as he approached Alinys. He lifted his arm, fist closed, then relaxed the palm and laid the hand over her shoulder. If it had meant to have been reassuring, the gesture was lost.

Alinys scowled.

"Lady - lady, it was a victory. We killed eight of theirs, and some, for only eleven of ours. If they were men, then the gods made them in their image: strong, mangled, their faces a ruin - better suited to stories and not to battle, lady, but it was so and was our good fortune that we came out of such a fight with as many alive as we did. None wounded, none captured, praise gods. I will not serve under a coward, nor will I serve under a tyrant. The men do not grudge me my orders, nor I their duty. But they will grow to hate you if you brood over this."

Her scowl deepened, threatened something worse, and her hand ticked to rest uneasily on the hilt of her broadsword. The Captain noticed - he withdrew his hand, stepped back, and cleared his throat softly. That mocking arrogance, though tempered, was ever present. Now he played his hand at politics, and she both admired him and loathed him for it.

"A tyrant. But you would serve under me, correct, if you had sworn to - and it was your duty to. No matter what personal reservations you had?"

"Of course."

Alinys watched the last dying light play over the metal-panelled sides of the Shrine of the Seeklander, and listened to the mournful huff-huff-huff of the beautiful, ragged little bay pony behind her. A sharp, carrying screech cut through the dusk - no owl, eagle, falcon or wolf. Something darker stalked the mountains, chewing on the bodies of her dead men.

Smoke drifted in, burning her eyes and her throat. She inhaled deeply, then sat on the steps of the shrine.

"We'll stay here awhile, Captain. Let the men rest - see if we can't meet up later with the rest of the Expeditionary Force. Those foul creatures stalk the mountains north of us; there's no passage that way. Tell the men - we'll camp here for the night. Take what they can from this place; the gods care nothing for anyone but themselves. We must take what we can, while we can, or it will be taken from us."

"I'll tell the men."

"Then we'll move out."

Reikhard paused, watching this noble born lady mourn, and inwardly he knew it was not for these men of hers - hers, perhaps, but already closer to him than they had ever been to her. She mourned for other men, long dead, on other continents, in other countries and other realms - and far to the southeast, in a place he had only heard of briefly, where she had been happy once.

He snorted, scraped dirty palms against his chaps, then turned and swaggered back to the half-circle of tents.

The men milled about like cattle, spooked by the smell of their comrades burning.

"Listen up! We're camping here! Settle down, but keep packed! Those beasts might return in the night - keep the fires high, and your swords sharp! We'll send them back to whatever hellish crevice they crept from!"

A ragged cheer went up, died, and all was quiet again but for the snap and crackle of dead men.

Captain Reikhard sat among the men and watched.

Alinys stood at the foot of the Shrine of Seeklander and - in vain - listened.

The wind picked up, and the cracked grass sawed savage in the breeze.

---

Captain Reikhard trudged along at the head of the column of men; mud-smeared and grimy, he did not so much resemble a man as a moving clod of dirt. Wrapped about a fist were the reins of the little bay pony who walked along at his side, wheezing and snorting, laden with the assorted gear, tents and wooden poles of the camp they'd dismantled nearly half a day ago. Forty men trudged along behind him - five to a row, eight rows deep. Two men ranged on ahead, lightly armored and as skittish as deer, spooking at every noise and rockfall.

The mountain trails were winding and narrow where they existed at all; where they did not the column broke apart and men scrambled on hands and knees to scale the steep, craggy sides of the mountain, over rocks and across windy crevices that, soundless and deep, were bottomless and eternal, deep wounds in the earth where heat churned up, steaming the otherwise cool, windy climate. One man already had nearly been lost to the pocked face of the mountain - walking single-file across one crevice, he'd tripped at the tail end of the line and tumbled into the blackness below, though the rope he'd tied about his waist and to the man infront of him had saved his life, and had come back up out of that darkness with ghastly cuts and burns and bruises. He walked in the middle of the column now, at its dead center, with a staggering limp.

The pony balked suddenly, shying from a gray shadow on the rocks, and Reikhard swore - with one hand, the reins still wound about his gauntlet, he pulled the little horse's head in sharply and with his other hand he signaled for the group of men to stop: arm lifted over his head, palm fisted, unmoving. He stopped and, at least from the sound of things behind him, the others did as well, if more gradually. Turning, he glanced back over his shoulder and murmured, his voice low:

"Bring the Dame Graves up front. She'll want to see this."

"See what, sir?" The man - he looked young, too young to even shave properly - looked as startled as the pony had and craned his head, trying in vain to see ahead of the Captain and his horse. "I don't see anything." He continued to twist his head about a few more times, storkish, then paled suddenly and, without another word, melted back between the ranks towards where the lady Alinys stood at the near-rear, hand on her swordhilt. A few of the men standing in row with the newly departed boy exchanged looks, but said nothing. Neither did the Captain.

-

The first thing she noticed wasn't the look on the young man's face but the way his hair stuck up - ruddy red, and faintly freckled across the bridge of his nose, and his hair stuck up in greasy tufts, making him look strangely puzzled. It was light-blond and looked to have originally been quite short; she wondered how long he'd served with her to have had it grow out already so far. She'd need to stress order among the men later, certainly.

"Ma'am?"

Alinys blinked - the young man went from pacing towards her to suddenly standing infront of her, wringing his hands awkwardly. Those too drew her attention: stained and gritty, they were bluntly misused and weathered and calloused, hardly hands to fit the still soft, innocent face of this youth. She cleared her throat; after all, it hadn't been so long ago when she was young and stupid.

"What is it?"

"Captain Reikhard, ma'am. He wishes you at the front of the column."

"Did the Captain say why? Or am I to serve at his leisure, now?"

"Uh. He said, ma'am, there was something up there you might want to see. And there is. Or - well, you'll want to have seen it I think before everyone else does, ma'am, if it isn't too big of me to say so. I don't think he meant any disrespect by it."

There was an awkward pause after the young man finished, his ramble trailing off and his eyes egging down to stare at his muddied, beaten boots. She - as she mused privately - would need to see all her men received new boots, or kept theirs in serviceable condition, soon. Men could not march bare-footed for very long without suffering dire consequences and she had no desire to lead an army of cripples of the gates of Darfix.

"Fine. Stay here and take my place; I'll take yours, Milites." When the young man gave her a blank stare, she clarified and then went on, utterly ruthless: "It means 'soldier' - I'm assuming, of course, you aren't just conscripted rabble from Golden Farrow and are worth your salt in a fight. I may be wrong. In fact, judging by that stupid look on your face, I'd go so far as to warrant I am wrong, aren't I, Milites? You're just some dirt-eating peasant's son, who romped with dogs back on the farm, and lamented the day the Duke put forth a call to arms. You'd probably have liked to die on that little farm, wouldn't you, with dull-eyed idiots of your own and a fat, pliant wife to plow when you could, though admittedly I doubt that'd be much, or often. Well, Milites - for that is what you are now, whatever you were before you joined my outfit - let me be frank with you. You will die under my banner. You will die screaming my name, and even after you die your body will belong to me. The gods can have whatever is left of you when I am done with you. And, as hard as it might be to believe now, you will be happy to have served." Alinys paused, gauged the look on the young man's face, then turned without another word and stalked towards the front of the line with her hand resting on her sword's hilt. The young man at her back fell into rank wordlessly; his jaw was tight and his eyes were hard, and the softness was gone in them. There was only despair, rage, and hate. But everyone had to start somewhere.

-

"She doesn't look like she's in a good mood," one of the men who stood near Reikhard remarked, and ducked his head as Dame Graves approached. The Captain had to agree; she looked as moody as she had ever been, and he couldn't honestly fathom why. He'd heard a few of the key points to the tongue lashing she'd delivered the boy who'd gone to call her up along the line, and to him it had come as a bit of a shock - he had certainly never heard her that dark before, not openly to the men, and wondered if the mountains weren't getting to her after all. It was unlike her to be so violent and mean-spirited; depressed, perhaps, but not this. "Might wanna guard those balls, sir. She's looking like she's out for blood this evening. Gonna tear them off, chew them up and - " The man went quiet as the young woman shot him a positively venomous look, and looked as if he'd just swallowed his tongue.

Stepping up, Reikhard defused the situation with an easy grin; it was common speculation among the men now that they'd shared more than a tent on the trek up the mountains, though it couldn't be farther from the truth. He really wasn't interested in the noblewoman as she was - bitter, dark, angry, spiteful - and he was certain she wasn't the least bit interested in him, either. No, she was still devoted to something either long past or long dead - he couldn't tell which and, quite frankly, didn't care enough to waste more time on determining which of the two it was himself.

"Dame - this way, if you would. I thought you might like to see this before I have it cleaned up and thrown off the trail; it was a vulture, I think, at some point in time - oh, and if you're squeamish, I'd suggest you not breathe in too deeply. The smell's gone a bit ripe by now, lady."

-

"Oh? I can't smell anything." Alinys appraised the captain coolly, having already dismissed the other soldier from her mind, then drew her broadsword. It'd suffered its share of dings and battering since Lasanar, had nearly been reforged twice, and the leather on its hilts was worn thin and sweat-stained. Salt had licked at that iron; ate its usefulness away. Still - she was fond of it. It had served her faithfully in its time, when she's actually deigned to fight alongside the men. "Dust, perhaps." Where Reikhard had indicated, she stepped - not bothering to let him take lead, but pressing on herself. It wasn't far - the smell picked up only several paces away from the main column of men, and further along down the trail she saw it, that queer and monstrous horror. It looked to have once been a vulture - which is to say it had a bald head, ringed about by prickly black quills, and had a long, curving beak. Its body was, in comparison with the rest of it, grossly misproportional: to say it was obese would be an understatement - the body bulged in places, was bursting with pusticles and tumors and large, uneven clots of blood and bile. Its feathers, save for along its wings, had all been stripped to the self-same dark, bristling quills. It had no tail but for a fleshy stub, and its claws were long, sharp, and sharply-curved. It had four taloned claws - two blunt ones protruded from its chest in a cruel parody of hands. It had no proper eyes: skin covered the sockets and dark shapes twitched back and forth beneath them.

The only truly familiar (and therefore most comforting) thing about it was, ironically, the intestines bursting out of the deep hack in its sour belly. They festered with flies and stunk, blue-and-purple coils looped about one another like rope, in the dull warmth of the mountains.

"One of the scouts reports it attacked him - he returned not an hour ago, but only mentioned it now. He dispatched it with a slice of his shortsword," Alinys watched as the captain stepped forwards and pointed with his own blade, tracing without touching the deep rent in the strange creature's belly. "And then proceeded to continue scouting. No reports of any further troubles, though he mentions the knight Valens seems to have overtaken us in the night, and travels on ahead of us some hours in advance.

"Dame?"

Alinys had sunk gracelessly into a crouch a few steps back away from the dead thing and, as gracelessly as she had collapsed, managed only a short "I'mgonnabesick." before she was. The dead vulture's eyes seemed to follow her under those thin flaps of skin, black and mocking, as she emptied her stomach of the past day's rations - bread, salted jerky, some souring wine they'd picked up in one of the mountain villages a day past.

It seemed every time she tried to lift her head and assure the captain she was okay, she vomitted again - those black marble eyes rolling beneath stretched, translucent skin mocking her all the while - until she was gasping nothing but dry heaves and wondered distantly if she'd even ever eaten cornmeal biscuits and gravy, or fish, or mutton on the long trek up. Finally, humiliated and drained, she lifted her head. Reikhard stared down at her, but carefully averted his eyes when she glanced up. The other men had as much courtesy; when she stood shakily, using her sword to push herself back to her feet, no one who'd witnessed her show of weakness even so much as looked her way. No one wanted that revelation: their commander was, no matter wo much armor she donned or how crudely she spoke, still a gentle-born woman.

"Have the men get rid of it," she croaked out, cursing inwardly at how her voice broke, then wiped an arm across her mouth and sheathed her sword, hoping she looked more confident than she felt. "Push it off the trail. Throw dirt over this place, to try to lessen the stink. And alert the men to march arms ready and keep a constant head count - especially of those at the front or rear."

"Should I tell the men to not eat any of their rations?"

Alinys paused, glancing back to Reikhard - the captain watched her steadily now, no trace of arrogance. The pity, she decided, was worse.

"Why would you do that?"

Reikhard didn't answer. Instead he turned from her and waved over one of the men who'd stood a short ways back from the entire scene, watching it play out with a stoic, stern sort of indifference. Alinys watched quietly, straining to hear what the two said when the man stepped up close and the captain leaned in to murmur softly to the grizzled veteran.

"Tell... stop here for awhile. Dame Graves... bad travel rations," raising his voice, Reikhard added, "likely from that last village. Have each Corporal watch their men for any signs of the sickness. We'll move on in several hours time. Understood?" The grizzled veteran snapped off a smart salute, turned, and trudged back into the ranks of men. Soon - Alinys watched this all unfold with a sudden, strange sense of disattachment - the men had unpacked their gear and several were digging at the outskirts of the crude encampment: a trench latrine. Several others threw up the tents, and one stubbornly dedicated man swore at the wind, trying to start a fire. The wind picked up, blew out another sputter of flame, and the man bellowed. Alinys quirked a slight grin, then felt a chill run down her spine. Turning, she noticed the captain watching her again, his eyes unreadable and his face hard.

"You didn't have to do that, you know, Captain. If Lord Valens already rides on ahead of us - we cannot delay any longer than we already have. Gods curse it, we'll enter the city dusty and tired and spineless. I don't want to look like a coward." She glanced down at her feet, where the vomit still pooled, then grimaced and started to pace from it. Captain Reikhard, his eyes still unreadable, moved easily at her side with all the grace and poise of a predator. She hated him now for how damnably capable he was proving. "I don't want to be a coward, Reikhard. I don't want to be a brigand, or a thief, or an outlaw. I don't want to stare down the backs of our comrades as they race to glory, and hang back like - like some godsdamned weak, baseborn woman chewing her cud in some potted field!" The words, though passionate, were quiet, pitched low to him and only him, angry and shamed and desperately restless. It was as if the knowledge of all her failures weighed more heavily upon her now.

Reikhard said nothing.

"You know," Alinys murmured after a time, unconscious that her stroll took them farther from the column of men, "I once was a priestess. In - another land. I once had faith, and preached to peasantry - all across the lands. I'd sleep in farmhouses, eat their food. Me. And now when I think back on it - that life is gone entirely. I don't even remember the commandments of that religion, and I was the damned one teaching others of it. He was a god of war, though, and I relished the idea of it. All honour and nobility and sacrifice in death. That sort of thing. Ideals. But that wasn't even it. That wasn't it at all." Alinys went quiet, had stopped walking, and considered the sky. High sun was steadily approaching, most welcomed by her and her men even if the warmth it provided was minimal. Few things ever seemed to attack at noon. "He was, of course, an older man. One of their high priests, if not one of the founders - you could say I was young and stupid and impressionable. I was, to a degree. It was easy to fall in and out of things. And the land I fought for had been in a lull for quite some time - nothing to do but that, so I did. Become a priestess, I mean. Not the man. He left, and it might have been for the better. Chances are I would not be here had he stayed. But he left and I tried my hand at preaching, but the peasantry are fickle and cruel - you would not believe how base they are, really, when you come to them and preach your beliefs and eat their bread in their houses. I spent most of those years unconscious or bleeding or limping about. God of War, indeed. And then I came here. Well - other places first, briefly, but then here. Madina. Melodia. And north, to Darfix."

Here she went quiet and glanced aside at Reikhard, who still paced along as quiet as death beside her and looked as steady as ever. "You know - " "Perhaps we should head back, Dame. We'll want to get a move on." The Captain tilted his head slightly, then lifted it as a dark, undulating cry went up throughout the mountains and the hills. Alinys, wordless, nodded.

-

Three days later, Captain Reikhard stumbled away from a battle with blood pouring into his eyes and leaking out of his body, and Dame Alinys turned the remaining five men east. A day after that, they died to a man. Reikhard, beaten and broken and separate of the group, went south. Alinys, however, turned back doggedly north - the little bay pony beneath her, woeful and sad.