Vengeance, Far Son Chapter 1

A mercenary captain, a captured raider, beneath a new red star, heralding a new king.

1.
By Way of Light



Faldashir I

He wasn’t bothered by the red star, no matter what his dream-addled soldiers said. Faldashir peered up into the night sky, and there amidst the spray of pinpoint lights was the gleaming red. Perhaps it was new, perhaps it was not. The moon had yet to rise high above the eastern horizon yet and so the stars showed themselves in pristine darkness.

His swordsmen insisted it was new, though they themselves were no celestial scholars. It could be they never noticed.

Then how did I never notice? Faldashir wondered. Cool night air stirred his long hair as it washed over the highest point of his little land. My castle, he called it, to the laughter of his warriors. In truth, it was little more than a longhouse erected across a hilltop beside a stream that ran down out of the greater forest. But most nights he did come up to the open watchtower and peer out beyond the heavy wooden wall at the foot of the hill, which sheltered his warrior’s homes and the warehouses and workshops. It’s a suitable enough town, for now, he could think to himself, most nights. If he forgot the splendor of his old life.

However, in the five years he’d spent building this place, he’d never before noticed the red star. It didn’t do much but sit out there in the void between worlds. But so did the bandits that stalked the forests, and the foxes who watched the chicken coop.

Faldashir shivered, wracked doubly by the night wind and the dark thought, and drew his cloak about himself. He knew a woman he could ask, but that meant going back home. Better to stay here in my castle.

The sound-pattern of boots thumping on wood declared the visitor to Faldashir. He stepped back from the landing and watched the stair as a burly figure carrying a lantern came into view.

It was his right-hand, Raph. The old man had followed him from home, always confusing the word exile with retired.

“There’s nothing retired about riding into battle with a spear, captain,” Faldashir would tell the man.

Still, Raph emerged, not one bit of his body slowed by the age that showed on his face. Be it silver beard or bald head, each shined as if jealous of the moon. The orange glow of the lantern swept across wrinkles so deep they cast shadows of their own as he held it comfortably at his side, expertly keeping it away from the steady walking-dance of his gray cloak.
Gold light on gray cloak. Faldashir did not fail to see the sign, the reminder.

“Raph,” Faldashir said, and smiled. “What are you doing up here?”

“Can there only be one man in the world who wishes to see the stars?” The old man smiled, showing a gap or two. “Or may I be the second?”

“You’re the second in my command and now you want to be the second star-watcher. Have you no ambitions for first?” Faldashir teased.

Raph shrugged and set his lantern on the ground, just beneath the railing where its light would be most weakest against the sky. “There are benefits to being second. For instance, eating and drinking the spoils brought by the first. Only, you’ve brought nothing. No chicken, no wine. Then, I’ve decided to resign.” And Raph made mock-movement toward drawing and throwing down the sword at his waist.

Faldashir smiled and shook his head. “Rolgo will be so glad.”

“Ugh.”

They stood for a moment, as another surge of wind grabbed at their cloaks, and at Faldashir’s hair, and at most of the warmth in their body. Likely they shared the same thought, that Rolgo was far too reckless a man to lead the whole company. But he was two deaths away from making it happen and so both men fought all the harder, then laughed about it after.

“Keep it patched,” Raph said, wrapping a cut dealt to Faldashir’s arm one day. “Wouldn’t want Rolgo to get any closer, eh?”

All three men laughed about it.

Faldashir turned to his old friend and finally asked, “Is it truly the stars?”

Raph sucked at the tacab leaf in his cheek and shrugged. “Just the one.”

The younger man did not like that answer. Strange ideas moved through men like illness, and Faldashir knew how strange ideas poisoned a mind, and all the thoughts that might come to life from it were poisoned as well. When thoughts became action, the result was hardly good. Faldashir had to be sure.

“You think the red star is new?”

Raph chuckled. “There’s no think about it, lord. I’ve been watching the stars for nigh-on fifty years. I know the Sunset Star, the Forest Eye, all the celestial arrangements. The red has never been there. Not until the end of winter.”

And here, in mid-spring, with everybody outside, was the strange idea taking shape. In fact, Faldashir tried to make a guess at it himself. “Something moving toward us?”

“It wouldn’t be the first,” Raph said, reminding human origin on the world.

In the east, the moon rose ever higher while Faldashir pondered the star.

“Also,” Raph said, “the prisoner is awake.”

Faldashir’s spirits plummeted, then. He rubbed at the bandage on his arm, at the cut dealt by the very man shackled further down the hill. “I suppose we must speak to him, eh?”

Raph shrugged. “Or kill him.”

“Not yet.” Faldashir strode toward the steps, leaving his second-in-command to pick up the lantern and follow.
The longhouse yard had no curtain wall, just yet. Instead the yard stood open and the stables offered the night the smell of hay and the soft sounds of sleeping horses. Their attendants had gone inside to help with the communal dinner, and Faldashir ached to leave behind the scents of chicken and wine. Indeed, both would cross plates in abundance, after the battle from the night before. It had only truly ended just after dawn, and the return journey from the coast was heavy with disquiet.

The coast-raiders had never massed in such force before.

So Faldashir stepped heavily over cropped grass toward the single-floor holding house built against the edge of the flat-topped hill. Any prisoner who escaped could either run toward the longhouse and its warriors, or else flee the other way and fall over the edge of the cliff.

A single man stood at the heavy iron-crossed door.
Tetzin, who’s slanted eyes gleamed in Raph’s lantern light, stood up straighter as his captain approached. The man was only a couple years younger than Faldashir, but a little taller and far wider in the shoulder. Dark eyes noticed things that others did not, and
so the man was always Faldashir’s outrider. Sadly, he lost the coin toss to Rolgo, and so stood watch at the door.

“Captain,” Tetzin gave the calm-salute, the brief clasping of his captain’s forearm. Then the hand settled on the sunburst disc-guard of his curved sword sheathed in its burnt-orange lacquered scabbard. “The man demands to be released. I told him no.”
He said it with a sense of humor, Faldashir was sure, but the man did not smile. Raph chuckled, though.

“We’ll see if he does a better job convincing me,” Faldashir said. He pointed to the door. “Won’t you?”

Tetzin reached for a pocket within the open lapel of his heavy jacket. A dark archer’s glove contrasted with the clean laced shirt, though no quiver jutted wood and feathers above his dark close-cut hair. He produced a key and unlatched the door, and when he pulled it open he moved with it, ever ensuring his gaze did not leave the widening gap.

Faldashir rested a hand on his own double-edged broadsword, though in truth a dagger would be better suited for the tight quarters.

Raph stepped first into the small hut, hung his lantern on a peg sticking from the support beam. Faldashir followed, rolling his shoulders as he passed Tetzin, who followed him in. Their boots scraped on thick wooden floors.

Their prisoner sat back against the half-log wall, perhaps unknowing that a cliff dropped behind him. Shackles looped through the one gap in the wall, where iron chains pulled against the one full log built into the wall. Cool air slipped into the small space, foul smells slipped out, and the heavy trunk held strong against any pulling of the chains.

A much nicer holding cell than the dungeons back home, Faldashir had thought, when the place was built.
The prisoner stood awkwardly as they entered. He gave the chains one tug, but the trunk held firm. He peered at each man with blue eyes ringed in blue runic markings. He was balding, though young, and his breeches were soaked in blood down one leg, where Rolgo had cut him even as he tried to escape. The leg trembled as he came to full height, and the man grit fine teeth.

Finally, he seemed to realize Faldashir was the leader. “Why am I alive?” His voice shook, but whether it was fear or rage, Faldashir could not tell. Already, sweat popped out on the man’s skin and in his faint hair, to shine in the lantern light.

“Because dead men can’t tell me what your leader wants.” Faldashir leaned against the post, opposite side the lantern. He pulled the cloak away from his sword and let the man’s eyes fix on the silver-wrapped scabbard, then went on. “I’ve always dealt with crews like yours. You come onto Vansaster-controlled lands and you murder and rape and burn, you plunder and you piss. And if you escape its to your single ship that flies no banner and you sail away to lands unknown. But that changed with winter’s end.”

Faldashir watched the man for a long moment. At his sides, Raph and Tetzin stood silent. The raider only gulped, and dripped sweat, and trembled on his injured leg. Clearly, the raider wasn’t ready to talk. So Faldashir went on.

“Now you arrive on multitude ships. Now you spend so long on your raids that village-folk escape and what they tell me and others is that your crews are looking for someone. You line these people up and look at them and ask questions. And I know that you grand assortment of mongrel crews are connected because now you wear a sigil.”

Pain-stricken eyes darted to the sigil marked across Faldashir’s light white tunic. The Golden Eye, stitched across Faldashir’s broad chest, peered back. A sigil of his own, laid claim to by no other man or woman. He unclasped his cloak and let it fall to the floor, never straightening from the support post. Now the threaded gold shimmered free and clear in the lantern light, so that the man could ignore it no more. The raider seemed to whimper, and he leaned back against the wall, almost throwing himself. His leg, at least, did not quiver so much.

“Now you see,” Faldashir said, baring his teeth, “why your own sigil might be of interest to me.”

The man wore a plain linen shirt, having been stripped of his leather vest and his bracers. Painted crudely across the front of this shirt seemed to be a red eye. It looked very close to Faldadshir’s own Golden.

“Who has raised themselves in opposition against me?” Faldashir asked quietly.

The raider said nothing. He only peered at the golden Eye as if it would give him the answer. He looked to Raph and Tetzin, but they offered no help, either. Then he closed his eyes, shook his head.

When Faldashir’s patience nearly reached its end, the raider spoke.

“He calls himself, now, a king.”

Now? Surely, the raider did not mean Tygoll Thornigann, who had called himself King for three hundred years. Nor could it be any heir of his, for he had only daughters.

“A captain with a high view, then?” Faldashir asked. “What connection has he to me?”

The man barked a laugh and opened his eyes. “If I talk, I will die.”

Faldashir shrugged. “If I take you out that door and lead you around back and push, you will die. And you’ll have a long drop to think about your decisions.” Tetzin stepped toward the man, who twisted away from his reaching hands and wept all the while.

“Hold, Tet,” Faldashir said. The game was fun, a little. “Do you want to talk, criminal?”

The man groaned, deep in his throat, even as Tetzin stepped back. He righted himself and looked around, and still found no saviors. “You are not my king’s target. He cares nothing for your golden eye, save for frustration that he always finds it peering at him from the battlefield.”

“Ha! The battlefield. I think you mean the streets where people live their lives, the crops where people feed their cattle and grow their crops.” Indeed, Faldashir had men ranging all over the lands south of his hill, and they went with the Golden Eye painted on their shield, sewn into their jackets and stitched into their cloaks. “I won’t stop, just because your king is frustrated. What province does he come from, anyway? Your kind always come from the south, yet none of the southern provinces have rebelled against the House Thornigann.” Your kind, as if these raider crews were not a mix of people. Some were the shorter pale men of Brettica, or the tall yet sturdy people of Tetzin’s homeland, Sendgrig, or even the dark-skinned folk of Numessa in the north. He’d rarely heard the raiders speak, though, and this man at least grew up in Brettica, by his accent.
“King of the Sea, for now,” was all the raider said.
“None but the planet rules the sea,” Tetzin said, suddenly. He held to his sword with both hands, though it stayed sheathed.

The raider did not look at him. He looked at no-one.
Faldashir stepped closer, eased Tetzin back with a hand. “Tell me one more thing. This question you ask the village-folk, before you kill them...what does it mean? ‘Where is the gold-scarred boy?’” The question haunted Faldashir. How could it be anybody but him?
The raider finally met his eyes. “We don’t know. Our king commands us, and we obey. We can’t be sure we have the boy until we find him.” Then, his eyes flicked once more to the Golden Eye on Faldashir’s chest.

“Then I want to meet your king,” Faldashir decided. To his right, Raph shot him a sharp look. He did not deign to smooth it, even as Faldashir went on. “If I’m speaking to a man who can tell me nothing useful and yet wants to live, then I will give you your life in exchange for meeting your king. I will deliver you straight to him, then he and I will talk. I’ll even tell him just how unhelpful you were. Perhaps, then, he’ll spare you. That,” Faldashir held a hand toward the window, and slowly lowered it, and mimicked with breath the rushing of wind, “or you can regret refusing me, all the way down.” He slammed his hand into the other palm, and the raider flinched at the crack.

“I suppose I have no choice…” The corners of his criminal lips waggled up and down in terrified weeping.

“No choice, but perhaps some brains, and a chance at life.” Faldashir stepped away from the raider. “Unless you force me to meet you on the field of battle again.” One glance at the raider’s slashed leg, then he turned away. Raph and Tetzin followed him out, reclaiming the lantern and leaving their prisoner again in darkness.
“What madness is this!” Raph hissed as the door closed.

Faldashir clapped Tetzin on the arm. “Back to your position, please, I’ll have you relieved in an hour.” Tetzin nodded and planted his feet beside the door. Faldashir felt the man’s gaze on his back as he and Raph strode toward the longhouse.

“We haven’t many more options, do we?” Faldashir asked. “If there is a new king, and we bring his crown and his head to Tygoll, we could be paid enough gold to give this place a proper chance. Or we keep fighting raiding parties until winter, at which point they’ll likely only grow, as they did this time.”

“But do you actually expect to meet this king? On any grounds benefiting others? Won’t you at least call on your father for help?”

Faldshir spun on the old man, who did not blanch against the younger man. “That, I will not do! Not while we are so strong.” He tugged his gray cloak around himself. “And no, I don’t expect to meet this king. But I’m very curious where this raider will lead us. Can this man out-think me? Mm, I expect not.” Faldashir ran a hand across his mustache and the strip of hair leading down his chin. He looked to the cell. “But he won’t lead us in circles. He must know we’ll grow weary and take his head. What then? Perhaps something, Raph. Tomorrow, we find out.”

“Tomorrow? Can’t we give the men a rest?”

Faldashir knew his own eyes were ringed with dark bruising weariness. “No. We are still strong, and these people are still raiding. We need to stop them from finding this gold-scarred boy.”

He saw the trepidation in Raph’s tired eyes. He knew his old mentor’s thoughts, of the days when they lived in a stone castle, of the days when they fought rarely and ate hearty meals and practiced their combat arts on wide parade fields, ashine in gold-painted plate beneath the White Tree of House Vansaster.

“Tomorrow,” Faldashir repeated, and buried the dull ache he held at all times for home.



Faldashir ignored the heavy scent of chicken and ale and wine and horrid unwashed men as he made his way through the longhouse. Men raised clay flagons and shouted to him to him. He smiled and nodded where he could but otherwise went about his business. When he passed by the braziers men saw his face in the bloody light and quieted, just for a moment, then turned to each other to keep the celebration alive.
Many of these men were farmers, townsfolk, wanderers. They signed onto his company because he treated him as equal part fighter and workmen, and that reflected in their work. Some of them were given the jobs that required helping a farmer build a shed or pick their fields. Some were given the jobs that commanded they went to battle against bandits, rivals, or these raider crews. They brought back the money and a writ of payment, and Faldashir took three-tenths. Then they returned to their house on the hill below.

And so on days like these when glorious battle sees them victorious, and they arrive home armed in new gear and carrying jewels that each man sell at market for eight-tenths the profit, they rejoiced and they reveled and they slept it off the next day.

Faldashir did not look forward to the moment when he told them that they’d march again on the morrow.

Perhaps it was a task for Raph.

He came to one of the guest rooms at the back of the longhouse, and knocked on the door.

“Yes,” came the light voice, barely rising above the tumult at Faldashir’s back.

He opened the door and stepped aside, and when he closed it he found the room cast in darkness.

“No light?”

“I was trying to sleep, my lord.”

A dim shape sat on the edge of a cot made of strong timber and stretched leather. Quilts did little to soften those things, unfortunately. The boy’s head tilted up at him, and blond hair crossed the beams of moonlight coming through a high window. Through the window, Faldashir could not see the strange red star.
He must be wearing his face wrap.

“Are you ready to tell me,” Faldashir said, “who you are?”

The voice shook. “No, sir. I don’t remember anything. Nothing but my name: Damanul.”

“And fear.” He’d said much the same the day before, when he’d come wandering out of the forest.

“I think I was running. But from what...I don’t know.”

Faldashir frowned for the boy’s plight. But now it seemed the raiders wanted him, and that settled a new unease within him. They might not go so far for a common escaped boy. Did that make this one, then, some pirate-prince?

“We’ll find your home, and your parents. We’ll put the word out, and get you back. Rest well, Damanul.” Unseen eyes fixed on Faldashir for a long moment, and the only sound to come from that dim shape was a sniffle.

Faldashir left the room shivering, and closed the door on the boy. He must have been wearing the wrap across his face, for his scars did not glow in the darkness.
**

LUDNIR I

Well, he was a prisoner once more.

Ludnir’s hands hung above his head, chained to a log in the wall. Not the most ramshackle prison he’d ever faced.

The slash in his leg ached horribly, and his wrists dripped blood down his forearms, even dripped now and then onto his face. They mixed with old tears, and there was some shame in that, but better tears than piss.

Perhaps it was time he let himself sleep. Perhaps he let the exhaustion take him away from the pain, away from the chains and the wall that dug rows into his back. But then he’d meet his king, and the Sendgrigard man outside his door would be none wiser.

Only me and that cruel mind, locked outside of our bodies. Unpleasant before, worse now. The day had been a horrible failure, with an entire crew fallen to the sword, and the ship engulfed in flames. All without finding the boy, and with Ludnir being the only one who could answer for it….

He jerked against his chains with a gasp. He’d been nodding off. It was so dark, save for distant starlight, that he almost hadn’t noticed. Only when he felt that cold patience on the other side did he jerk away from waiting hands, poised in vicious claw-grip.

Does he know I saw him? Did he see me flee?

All again, Ludnir’s bladder felt full, even as his lips were chapped.

The fear does me no better. He closed his eyes, and that blotted out naught but the stars. Let it happen….Only distantly was he aware that the thought was not his own.

The beating of ocean waves against a cliffside far below became the first sense that assailed Ludnir. Gray skies cast hazy light across the rocky plateau to reveal the dim shapes of rusted weapons and forlorn skeletons. Ahead, on a jutting spur, a seat of corroding iron blazing with flame fooled Ludnir into thinking the sun had given reprieve.

Yet it was just the Summerstar King, seated as he always was in this strange place between minds and out of time. To Ludnir’s blinking eyes, he was nothing but a dark shape seated within the flames, but the hands that held to sharp armrests were not charred. The fingers were long and the skin was broken about the nails. The man was a worker, just as his subjects were. Still, he had an odd dramatic bend to him that always left Ludnir trembling. For he could still feel the man’s eyes gazing at him from the flames.

Ludnir rose, and a clutching skeleton fell away from his throat. As the murky bending logic of dreams dictated, when he looked down at his feet they were bootless and pale and waterlogged. He stepped carefully, unsure if any of the rusted weapons would hurt him; that was the decision of the King, the master of this place.
He looked up at the flames, but they seemed no closer after several steps. The intensity of the gaze held firm.
A tug at his stomach. When he looked down, intestines fell from a fresh wound to spill into the gaping mouth of a skull below. Ludnir screamed and closed his eyes and waited for those dead teeth to snap shut.

But they never did. And then he realized he did not feel pain, despite the state of his body.

He looked up, and suddenly felt the heat of the flames brushing past him as angered wind, and now the burning throne was mere steps away. One pristine finger tapped at the armrest, but the black figure within was motionless. Still, unseen eyes bored into Ludnir
“I understand,” Ludnir ventured. “You show me dead. I am a corpse, in your mind.” The words shuddered in a beating chest. Tears fell down his face, to dry instantly beneath the blast of that throne.

“You should be,” said the Summerstar King. He had the smooth and practiced voice of a townsman, and all the spite and snarl of a vengeful hound. “You alone live, of Turnon’s whole crew. Tell me why.”

The voice did not come from that blackened figure. It sounded right within his ear. Ludnir might have flinched, if he had not so disconnected himself from the tricks of the man in this strange place. It’s all fake. All his whim and will. Still, he trembled.

“The Golden Eye decided they wanted a prisoner,” Ludnir said. He did not pretend to have any dignity, and hardly cared that he felt no more than a scolded boy. The king could bring all the pain of an entire life to bear against him, in this world or the true.

“They asked you questions? They send me ransom for…” a loathsome chuckle sounded within the flames, “...you?”

Ludnir shook his head, even looked away from the flames. A man could only take so much. “Their commander wants to meet you. He knows you’re a king, and I think he means to kill you.”

“So many do, and more yet will.”

“But there’s something else.” Ludnir did not know how the king would like him acknowledging his enemies, and equally he feared if the king did not like him brushing past the topic. “He knows we hunt for the gold-scarred boy. And when he said the name there was something in his eyes….Recognition. He’s not a man who wonders why we’re searching, he’s a man who worries that we’ll find the boy.”

“Ahh….” At that sound, a gust of scorching wind fanned out from the flames. Ludnir winced and closed his eyes.

But that only meant the Summerstar King spoke into his mind.

“Bring this commander of the Golden Eye to me, then. He’ll bring his warriors against me, I’m sure, meanwhile I’ll look into your mind to see where you dwell. Devious counterstrike, my very favorite. Perhaps you surviving was not so foul an accident after all, Ludnir. Bring him out, empty that place, and perhaps we’ll find the gold-scarred boy. Here’s where you shall meet me….”
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