Duke Fairchild of the northern Westland town of Greenside wasn’t a child, nor was he fair. He was a tall and lanky hunter, with raptor eyes, and a hooked nose, and he had ranged the Reyhall Forest since he was in swaddling clothes. He was one of Lord Brach’s favorite men, and he was the head of one of the wealthiest, and the most well connected families in all of Westland.
The Duke had deservedly earned the reputation, not of a stalwart nobleman, but of a ruthless interrogator, and a fearless and formidable battlefield warrior. His exploits during the conflict against the half-breed beasts at Coldfrost had earned him the nickname “The Butcher.” In the frigid north, he had served both Lord Brach, and King Balton, extremely well. It was the luck of the gods though, that put the Duke in the position he found himself in now. He was about to be able to earn the favor of the new King and elevate his standing with his liege, Lord Brach, as well.
Back before the Summer’s Day festival, the day after King Balton died, but before the news was made public, the Duke had been summoned to a library room deep inside the walls of Lakeside Castle. He had come to Lakeside with a small group of his men, and a nephew that his wife had elevated to some sort of godly status in her mind. She could have no children of her own, so she latched onto a select few of her sister’s children.
The nephew was an archer. The Duke, at the direction of his wife, and her gaggle of honking sisters, had come to the castle to ask Lord Gregory if the boy could accompany the group going to the Summer’s Day Festival. Of course, there was already an archer of great skill among the Lion Lord’s party. Of course, this outing to the Festival had been planned for months, and of course, this was an inconvenient last minute request. So, of course, a fat pouch of golden lions had been passed to Lord Gregory. The Lion Lord had declined the bribe politely, but did make a suggestion to the surprised Duke. Duke Fairchild passed a far thinner bag of coin to Lord Gregory’s archer, who suddenly decided that he needed an assistant. The nephew was pleased to be hired for the position. Duke Fairchild was pleased to be rid of the boy, and was on his way before anyone could change their mind.
Since the boy was out of his hair now, the Duke wanted to take care of some other business. He dismissed his men to the tavern near the North Road Gate with simple instructions. They were not to get too drunk, and they were to still be at the tavern when he returned from his engagement.
After sneaking through one of the many back entrances into the castle proper, the Duke eased into the secondary dining hall, and scanned the crowded room. It was just before midday, and most of the castle staff were there, taking a meal before going off to serve the nobility. It hadn’t taken him long to spot what he was after. She was a server in the hall, and he wanted her to serve him privately, just like she had served him the last time he had been at Lakeside Castle without his wife. It came as a great shock when his brief conversation with her was interrupted by a nervous young pageboy, sporting the King’s sigil on his breast.
Disgruntled, but not so much as to disregard a Royal Summons, the Duke followed the boy through the castle, wondering the whole way, how his presence had been so quickly discovered.
He had met Lord Gregory in the stable yard as the Summer’s Day party was about to depart, and he had only just left his men. The midday bell hadn’t rung, and he couldn’t fathom how anyone could know he was in the city, much less send a pageboy to summon him in a particular room inside the castle.
As the boy led him deeper and deeper into the castle’s depths, he began to grow nervous. He wondered if some of the things he had done to his captives after the Battle of Coldfrost was coming back to haunt him. Had he offended one of the Greater Lords? He searched his mind for every single encounter he had ever had with King Balton and the favored courtiers. He couldn’t remember ever doing anything that might warrant this strange summons. What made it worse was that all the faces he saw, nobleman and servant alike, all looked sullen. He could tell that something was dreadfully wrong. He only hoped that he wasn’t the cause, or the one who would take the blame, for whatever had happened.
The library room was small and crowded. A candelabrum on a polished oak reading table provided insufficient light. The table was pushed against a desk, and the surfaces of both were covered in open maps. There were four – no, five – men in the room, Duke Fairchild was certain. The only faces that were illuminated in the sparse light, were those of his liege, Lord Brach, and the nearly albino skinned Royal Wizard, Pael. The Duke wondered, when he saw the creepy wizard smiling at him, if the mage had used some sort of devilry to locate him.
The other men in the room were standing out of the candlelight at the back wall. Their faces couldn’t be discerned. This was obviously intentional. They were either observing, or silently guarding. Duke Fairchild knew that they were there whether they wanted him to or not. Their presence only served to put him on the defensive, and his liege, Lord Brach, noticed.
“There’s no time for formalities, Vincent. I can sense your concern,” Lord Brach said. “I trust you can keep the words spoken here to yourself?”
It wasn’t really a question, but the Duke answered with a nod. The two men knew each other as well as any two men possibly could. The trust between them was deep and generations old. Brach often used Fairchild’s skills to extract information from rogues and road bandits, and Duke Fairchild’s stronghold was ideal for housing prisoners, who might suddenly need to disappear from the realm altogether. Duke Fairchild was relieved by the expression on Lord Brach’s face. From it, he could tell that he was not the focus of this strange meeting.
Pael looked at Duke Fairchild as if he were studying the inside of his skull. Pael’s gaze was unnerving, but Vincent Fairchild didn’t blanch under the scrutiny. He had committed horrors that were unspeakable. It would take more than the stare of a man, so white that he could’ve been carved out of marble, to unsettle him.
“The King is dead,” Lord Brach said finally. “Poisoned, or magicked; we’re not sure which, but that is not your concern. We’re keeping it quiet for now. I only tell you so that you might see the magnitude of the duty we’re placing upon you.”
“Bring the stableman!” Pael commanded.
The strange wizard had a sinister, giddy quality about him that touched a nerve in the Duke.
Two of the men standing against the back wall stepped forward into the light. Fairchild instantly recognized one of Lord Brach’s personal guards. He acknowledged the man with a nod.
The other was dressed in what were once probably quality working clothes, but were now stained filthy with sweat, vomit, and more than a little blood. The stableman’s face was swollen on one side, as if he held an apple in his cheek. Fairchild saw that there was another man still concealed in the shadows. He silently congratulated himself for counting correctly.
“Last night, while the King lay dying, the King’s Squire, a boy called Mikahl Thayne, made ready for a sizable journey, and then fled the castle,” Lord Brach explained.
Thayne, Fairchild knew, was the name given to bastard born children. Thayne was the god of the needy, the protector of the lost and alone. The Duke filed that bit of information away and continued listening.
“He left sometime in the night after assaulting this man.” Lord Brach indicated the stableman with a look of extreme distaste. “We assume he left through the Northroad Gate. It was the only one open throughout the night.”
Duke Fairchild, at that point, knew what his duty was. He was, after all, a hunter and interrogator. He was glad he had brought Tully and Garth with him on this most fortunate of errands. They were both experienced and loyal men, men who understood how to track and kill the sort of prey they would be after. A look of eagerness and longing crept over Duke Fairchild’s face. The expression was lustful and predatory, like a hungry beast with the scent of blood finding its nostrils. Pael, who had been silently studying the Duke, read the intent in the man’s countenance, and found that he was pleasantly surprised.
“Learn what you can from the stableman, and then dismiss him properly.”
Fairchild hadn’t needed the emphasis on the word “dismiss” to understand his Lord’s meaning, but he nodded for the benefit of the wizard, and the hidden spectator. Lord Brach continued:
“We want this squire alive, if at all possible. His manner of departure, and the timing, suggests that he was involved, and is possibly carrying a message to an unknown party. We would like to know who that someone is, no matter what the cost.”
“Bring him alive!” Pael commanded then, his eyes conveying an intensity that Fairchild understood completely. “No matter what his condition is, if he is alive and can speak, I will be able to leech his mind of the knowledge we seek!”
“I understand,” Fairchild told them, with more than a little eagerness showing in his voice. “If it pleases milord, can your man escort the stableman back to the stable? I would do so myself, but it seems that time is of the essence here. I have other preparations to make, and men to round up and outfit before I get to him.”
With a nod, Lord Brach granted the request. Duke Fairchild was turning toward the door to leave, when a voice he recognized right away, caught him short.
“Your diligence in this matter will be well remembered,” Prince Glendar said from the shadows. Duke Fairchild smiled to himself. King Glendar, he corrected his thought, and continued on with his duty with that much more fervor.
After he had exacted what information he could from the stableman, and cleaned the blood and skin from his dagger, Duke Fairchild met his men at the Northroad Gate. The trio of night watchmen his men had cornered seemed annoyed at being rousted this early in the day. They grew quite cooperative, and obedient, however, after the Duke threw all ten of the stableman’s bloody fingers in the dirt at their feet.
No one had left through the gate after dark, they all agreed. And only a single wagon, and later a lone post rider had entered. Duke Fairchild knew from experience that the watchmen were telling the truth, so he left them and moved on.
The next morning, on the Northroad, just south of Crossington, Duke Fairchild found a farmer who had heard, but hadn’t seen, two horses galloping towards the crossroads two nights previous in the pre-dawn hours. The Duke split his men then, and sent them to all of the farmhouses that were close enough to the road to hear a passerby. By midday, the first man’s story had been confirmed by a man who claimed he had seen a post rider, with a pack horse, galloping eastward on the cutoff road away from Crossington. It was no post rider Fairchild knew, and for the first time on this new hunt, he felt like he had the true scent of his prey.
Duke Fairchild didn’t believe in luck, he believed he was a favorite of the gods, so he credited them as the cause of his recent good fortune. When one of the two extra men he had hired in Crossington was relieving himself at the side of the Midway Passage Road, and heard the distant sound of a man groaning, the Duke’s faith in his gods was confirmed.
They found a trail leading north into the Reyhall Forest that was as obvious as a cobbled road. They found a dying bandit there, who confirmed that it had been a King’s man who had pig stuck his inner thigh and left him for dead. After torturing the man for all the information he was worth, Duke Fairchild slit his throat, and ordered Garth, Tully, and the two extra men he hired to get rid of the two bodies. He then lit a fire and camped in the same place Mikahl had only nights before.
The Duke started growing confident then: the gods had smiled upon him again. They continually led him in the right direction. It was like Coldfrost, he mused, when all those feral half breed giants had confessed to the things he needed them to confess to. Lord Brach and old Lord Finn had praised him. His victims always told him what he needed them to say when he pressured them properly. It never occurred to him then, or even now, that the tortured almost always end up saying what the torturer wanted to hear, if only to quicken their own death.
Sitting there in the woods at Mikahl’s camp, the Duke had become so confident, that he never even questioned how a lowly squire could’ve killed two hardened road bandits all by himself. Garth, Tully, and the other two men wondered about that though. In their mind’s eye, their prey suddenly seemed a little more formidable than merely a simple spoiled castle boy.
The next afternoon, when they came into the clearing where the half eaten carcass of the giant skinless lizard lay, they were attacked by a greedy pack of wolves. One of the men’s horses was dragged down, and while he was pinned beneath it, the wolves set upon him. Tully killed two of them with his well placed arrows. The Duke killed two more with his sword, while trying to save the pinned man. He rode into the fray, fearlessly hacking and slashing, with little or no concern for his own safety, but it was wasted bravado. The hungry wolves tore the man to pieces. Garth had to run down the other hired man when he tried to flee, but he still managed to trample a wolf under his horse’s hooves as he did so. The dozen or so wolves that remained, reluctantly scattered, and skulked away. One wolf turned and growled at them, as if to rally his pack-mates for another attack, but one of Tully’s arrows nipped it, and sent them all darting back into the forest.
Duke Fairchild wiped the blood from his blade, and sheathed it. He dismounted his horse, dragged the hired man out of his saddle, and knocked him to his knees, with a brutal blow to the temple. He almost killed the man then and there, but to Garth and Tully’s disappointment, he made the man gather up all of the arrows from the area around his half eaten comrade.
Tully went with him, and filched the dead man’s pockets and pouches. The man’s saddle bags were next. Tully stopped pilfering only long enough to waggle one of the corpse’s severed hands at the craven man.
Garth and Tully had been reminded of their liege lord’s strength and fearlessness, when he rode into the pack of wolves without a care. They were then reminded quite brutally of his ruthlessness, when, after the craven man handed Tully back his arrows, the Duke ran his sword through his stomach and rode away, leaving him to die slowly in the field. He would still be bleeding out when the wolves returned. Garth and Tully would’ve had full confidence in the Duke’s plan to catch up to, and overtake, their prey, had they not found the old sword protruding proudly up out of the huge, dead lizard’s throat. It shone in the sun like a cross rising out of a sea of reddish brown death. After confirming that it was standard Westland issue, they decided that the lowly squire they were after might be more of a predator than Duke Fairchild himself.
The three of them made good time then, because the trail wasn’t all that hard to follow. That night, Garth and Tully took turns leading the horses on foot by lantern light. The next morning, they learned just how close they were to catching their quarry, when they came upon a newly deserted camp. They started stalking then, gaining on the squire slowly. The Duke decided to wait until the boy made camp that night. They would take him in his sleep. They learned from the tracks at the camp that there were two men. Duke Fairchild hoped that it was the squire and the conspirator that Lord Brach and King Glendar wanted to learn more about.
Thoughts of praise and grandeur carried the Duke through the long day, but he was never distracted from the scent of his prey. He felt certain that the gods had led him to this very moment in time. A place where he could do what he loved to do, while raising his standing with his liege lord, and gaining the favor of the new King of Westland. He had no doubts that when the boy and his companion finally bedded down for the night, he and his men would overtake them; but as nightfall came and the darkness deepened, he began to wonder.
They dared not light the lantern. They were too close now. The Duke didn’t want to spook his quarry. Knowing that the squire couldn’t move any faster through the darkness than they could, they pressed on. Fairchild had Tully dismount and lead them on foot. The Duke was still reveling in the greatness this capture would bring him, when Tully stopped, and bent down to retrieve something shiny he saw on the ground. The horrible, primal yell the man made when the iron jaws of Loudin’s trap snapped shut on his arm, carried a long way through the forest night.
The bone chilling scream frightened every living thing to silence, but the sound that threatened to scare the trees up out of their roots was the low, menacing growl of rage, that rose up from deep inside of the Coldfrost Butcher.