That white haired witch
in her icy northern hole
is the reason there’s no warmth
in the Bitterland Hold.
Captain Moyle looked down the twisting trail and wondered what was taking so long. Duke Martin’s mercenaries were supposed to attack at dusk. He glanced back over his shoulder at the blazing fire in the center of the camp. The smell of the haulers’ stew was savory enough to draw a clan of rock trolls down out of the higher hills. Moyle hoped the duke’s men would arrive soon and kill the slaver and his bunch. He wanted this over.
Who could blame the duke for wanting vengeance? Moyle thought. He knew he wouldn’t have waited this long to kill a man who bedded his wife. The way the duchess humiliated the duke after being caught, Moyle figured she would soon fall from her window, or choke on a piece of fishbone, if not just disappear altogether.
Moyle patted the dust off of his blue uniform and thought back to the previous night when he had slowed the caravan’s descent long enough for the mercenaries to pass them on a lower trail. He was sure they’d gotten by. Hell, they should be coming up the road at them like a pack of bandits any moment.
Moyle wondered if they were just waiting for full darkness so they wouldn’t be recognized. It wouldn’t do for word of the feigned bandit attack to be linked back to the Duke of Highlake. The duke was already on shaky ground with Parydon royalty. After six years at his post, a safe trade route into, and out of, the mountains hadn’t been established. The Highlake Stronghold was secure. The duke had worked the kingdom’s prisoners to supreme effect while building an imposing wall around the entire Highlake Valley, but the trolls and giants hadn’t been beaten back in any meaningful way.
The giants and trolls foolish enough to venture close to the barrier usually only lived long enough to warn their fellows away from the spear launchers and longbows of the Wall Guard. The duke’s inability… no, Captain Moyle decided, inability was the wrong word. The duke was able, and if given enough slaves and soldiers he could easily secure the passage. It was the duke’s lack of enthusiasm, or maybe his downright lack of respect for King Oakarm’s wishes, that kept the passage from being turned into a prosperous avenue of commerce.
At the moment, the passage was only prosperous for the duke and his cronies. The remote location of the ore-rich valley where the stronghold stood made traversing it next to impossible, and made it more than a little inconvenient for the kingdom to impose its will. Duke Martin exploited this fact, and the orders he was given sometimes left Captain Moyle a little unsettled.
Slowing a typical caravan so that bandits could attack was one thing. The stolen goods always found their way back to Highlake and the bandits who were sometimes captured ended up slaving on the wall. Captain Moyle’s pocket was lined with quality coins. Very few lives were lost and the thieves usually only made away with a small portion of cargo before being beaten back. This fiasco was an entirely different matter. He was about to be party to the outright murder of four slaves, not to mention anyone who got in the way of the slaughter.
Amden would fight fiercely to protect his property, and the lard-assed guards would try to fight as well. Moyle’s head was about to be on the line for the duke. Now the anticipation of the attack had him wishing he had declined to participate. When this was done, he would either become one of Duke Martin’s most trusted men, or a total liability.
Gallarael couldn’t believe her mother had sent her on this horrid journey to buy the pretty slave man back from the marketers in Andwyn. The guards, the slave driver, and even the two skinny slaves had been leering at her the whole way out of the mountains. What lechers, she thought. She could understand them ogling if she were dressed in her normal fashion, but in a roughspun smock, with her dirty face under the hood no less, they should not have been attracted to her. At least none of them had badgered her or given her grief. Thankfully, the one-handed whore was keeping them satisfied. Gallarael thought about flipping her hood back and ordering Captain Moyle to take his men back to the stronghold. She would relish the look on his smug face when he realized he was in the company of his liege’s daughter. The sharp remarks he had made over her lagging pace the day before would cause his bowels to ice over. Had he known who she was, he would have offered her his mount and trotted along beside her like some hungry dog.
“Where has your prize gotten off too?” Amden asked Gallarael quietly. “I have not seen him since he returned from digging the shit p… Since he returned from digging the latrine, my lady.”
“Shhhhh,” she hissed. “No ‘my ladies’ out here, fool.” She looked around the camp. The half-moon didn’t go far toward illuminating the space, and the dying fire served only to throw shadows about like skittering spirits. “I don’t see him, either.” She stood. “We wouldn’t even have to be out here in the wild if you had done what my mother asked you to.”
“The orders of a duke outweigh the secret requests of a duchess.” He stood beside her and looked around. “I’m already disobeying your father’s orders by conspiring with you and your mother. It could cost me my freedom.”
“This is my mother’s scheme, slaver.” She spoke from under her hood. “Make no mistake about it.” She had to struggle to keep her voice down. From somewhere at the high side of the camp a long, loud snore sputtered away and then resumed its rhythm.
“If it’s your mother’s dealing, why did you stop me from whipping the cur bastard earlier?”
She said the first thing that came to mind, but she knew that she’d stopped the whip because she didn’t want to see such a beautiful man scarred. “Because it’s cruel.”
“Cruel?” Amden laughed. “Cruel is the way your mother disgraced your father over him. She should have nev-” His words were cut off as an arrow struck him in the head.
It looked to Gallarael as if the shaft had pierced the man’s skull, but Amden cursed and ducked away, grabbing at it. Gallarael screamed, bringing her two personal guards out of their slumber and to the ready. In a pair of heartbeats she was pinned beneath one of them while the other took up a defensive position over them and called out into the night.
“Cease your attack!” he yelled. “Do you dare bring harm upon Princess Gallarael, the daughter of the Duke of Highlake? The king’s own-” The man stumbled back and tumbled over Gallarael and whoever was holding her down. An arrow was sticking out of his chest. Frothy bubbles of blood hissed and sputtered as he inhaled.
Captain Moyle heard the man’s proclamation and recognized the voice as that of Sterven Trent, the head of the duchess’s personal guard attachment. He knew he was in a serious mess now. Sterven’s presence only proved that Princess Gallarael was among them. The girl had to be protected at all costs. It wouldn’t matter to Duke Martin if every member of the caravan was killed as long as Gallarael was spared. He realized, as an arrow sped past his ear, humming like an angry hornet, that the attack on them was coming from everywhere, not just near where the slaves were encamped. Moyle suddenly feared that the duke hadn’t intended for any of them to survive, not even him. Still, the urge to protect the princess overrode his instinctual desire to flee and survive. He started toward the campfire where he had last seen the robed woman he now knew was the princess. The grunts and yells of men being murdered in their half-sleep filled the night. Ahead of him, Amden Gore was on his knees with an arrow protruding out of his temple. The man’s face and shoulder were covered in blood. One of the travelers lay twitching in a sprawl nearby as his life’s blood pulsed out.
Another arrow went whizzing past and Moyle crouched low so that he could huddle in the shadows.
“Gallarael,” he hissed. “It’s Captain Moyle. Tell me where you are and I will-” His voice was drowned out by the high-pitched, keening howl of a troll. A chorus of barking cries replied to their alpha. A horse whinnied, then screamed in terror, the sound ending in a sickening wet rip. One of the haulkats roared out, then another. The loud, ferocious sound drowned out everything else. The foot travelers, haulers, and the few caravan guards who were still alive all bungled about in chaos.
Captain Moyle looked toward the campfire just in time to see a head-sized rock smash into Amden Gore’s shoulder. The man was knocked into the fire and a swarm of firefly sparks went twirling up, lighting the campsite in an eerie orange glow.
A man the captain didn’t know, one of the bandits, he presumed, staggered and fell into the erratic light. One of his arms was a ruin of meat dangling from a protruding piece of shattered bone. From behind the man, the shadowy form of a rock troll scrabbled out of the darkness on all fours. It snatched him by the ankle, and dragged him screaming back into the night.
Captain Moyle darted toward the group of travelers by the fire. One of them was trying to get out from under the corpse draped over him. Amden Gore’s clothes were flaming now, and the sizzling smell of roasting meat was drawing the trolls closer to the fire.
In a flare of fiery light from the renewed blaze, Moyle saw a disheveled fan of golden hair at the bottom of the pile, just as a pair of fleeing horses leapt the heap and knocked him to the ground. A trio of howling trolls followed right behind the animals. Luckily, the captain had tumbled into the half-opened flap of one of the traveler’s tents. A young blacksmith’s apprentice, a boy not yet old enough to grow a beard, huddled in teary-eyed terror over his dead master. He gave a yelp and pushed himself into the corner of the canvas shelter.
“Shhhhh,” Moyle hissed with an index finger pressed to his lips. Seeing that it wasn’t a bandit or a troll coming for him, the boy heaved a sigh of relief. Moyle forced a reassuring smile and peeped back out where he had seen Gallarael’s golden locks splayed across the dirt. A cold shiver ran down his spine as something big and covered in fur stepped down just inches from his face. After it moved on, he swallowed his heart back down into his body. Where Gallarael had lain, under a pile of robed travelers, a single arrow-riddled body remained.
In the long silence that followed the attack, only the sound of Amden Gore’s fat sizzling on the fire, and the sickening noise of the trolls ripping and munching the flesh of the others, was left to fill the cloying night.