The Maiden of Moonfane Forge

Vetch was only partially aware of the order he himself had given, to take the man back to the town’s jail and lock him back up until they could decide what should be done with him. He had sat in the chair left there by the guardsman as Ennric had questioned the man further. All he seemed to know beyond what he’d already told them was that the carriage carrying Marigold had left headed in the direction of the East Gate. After telling them that, there had been more pleading from the wretch to be let free, that they had no right to hold him there any longer. Ennric had put a quick halt to those declarations. They had provided him with clean water and found a townsperson willing to sit and guard him on the promise of a meal and ale to be sent there later. Then, they had left.

“I think he’s certainly a liar,” Ennric mused quietly. “And a thief, too. But no more than that. You look at that sorry wastrel and tell me he’s anything akin to the people we fought yesterday. I don’t see it.”

They sat together now in one of the remaining taverns with the least fire damage to it. By some coincidence, it was the same one the scrawny man back in the jail cell had broken the window out of during a drunken brawl the day he’d arrived in town. An entire outside corner of the building had been scorched by flames, and the place still carried the reek of smoke, but the inside had been preserved—along with its food stores and ale casks—and was doing good business as a result. Through a kind of gauzy shroud of despair, Vetch had only vaguely been aware of Ennric ordering food and ale for them, and then the both of them sitting down at a damaged table in the lantern-lit main room. A number of townsfolk populated other tables, but few were those who spoke above quiet commiseration. Most just silently nursed their drinks, some also nursing wounds.

Vetch stared at the now boarded-up window and said nothing. He had not touched his food. It smelled like ash to him, and he knew it would taste the same. It was only by clutching the handle of his ale mug so tightly his knuckles turned white that he held back the outpouring of grief that squeezed at his heart with cold fingers. Lily ... dead. He would never see her again. Never again would he hear her laugh, or feel that thrill whenever she turned her sparkling hazel eyes upon him. The thousands of smiles and conversations and moments together that he had just assumed there would be between them for many years to come, gone. Lily, gone. There would be no more. Tears threatened Vetch’s eyes yet again, as they had innumerous times since he’d first had to swallow that hard reality. He wanted only to return to his bed in the cold, empty barracks and weep himself to sleep and never wake up. For what world would he ever want to wake to again that did not contain Lily?

“Who were those raiders? Where did they come from?”

Ennric voiced the questions and Vetch realized he had missed an entire chunk of the conversation to his own desolate withdrawal. It was like having a blindfold removed and finding he was in a different section of town entirely than where he had believed he was. That thought only recalled him to the fact that nothing of his town looked the way he’d known it to anymore. Ennric tapped Vetch’s fingers with his empty mug. When Vetch finally looked across the table at him, the old man raised his bushy gray eyebrows. Vetch shook his head.

“I don’t know,” he answered in a voice pitched low. “I saw no crests, no colors, no insignias.”

Ennric exhaled through his nose, nodded. “Nor I.” He scratched delicately at the stitched gash on his head, then grimaced as his fingernail inadvertently caught at the wound’s edge. He put his weathered hand back down on the table. “Foreigners?”

Vetch thought about it and then shook his head in ignorance. “Could be. Some of them looked it. But I could understand the speech of those I heard speak. I couldn’t say.”

“I heard a few different accents. A few were maybe northern men. But it all was a lot of chaos, wasn’t it?” The old soldier knit his brow and clenched his eyes shut momentarily, resisting the urge to scratch at his wound again. “I saw a lot of different qualities of armor, different types of weapons. Sellswords would be my best guess. It didn’t look like one unified force, did it? Then there’s the relation to the livestock thieves. Was it all the same people?” The old veteran reeled off these questions as if asking them would help with divining the answers. “And where did they go? They all left in different directions. So, where would they all be bound for now? Or did they simply disband?”

Vetch understood that Ennric was quizzing him, as he’d done frequently back when Vetch had first joined the garrison as a boy, when he was not much younger than Wenzl had been. Wenzl. There was another source of pain Vetch couldn’t quite confront just yet. He knew Ennric was trying to help, trying to force him to find some kind of focus, to think of other things and not dwell on Lily’s death and the deaths of so many of their friends and companions. But Vetch could hardly see the point of it. What did it matter at this point? What was there to be done, even if they had the answers to all these questions? Moonfane Forge was as good as destroyed, its trades laid to waste, livestock dead or fled, townspeople dead, their Barrier gone, their mage gone. Even the heads of their town Council were gone, three of them dead, one still missing. Of the handful of garrison soldiers and town guard left alive, there were too few to do anything or protect anyone. And where were the rest of the soldiers and town guard now, Vetch wondered. Without their captain to guide them, they had been left to their own devices. Soldiers and guards and everyday townsfolk had all been brought level, just a loose assortment of survivors trying to put a town back together when not enough pieces of it remained.

“We got our asses kicked,” Ennric stated bluntly, abandoning his procession of questions when Vetch remained silent. “It’s the worst feeling in the world. You know why they handed it to us so easily?” he asked in a low rumble. “Because those raiders we fought yesterday had seen war. You could see it in their faces. That’s why we lost. They’d seen war and we hadn’t.”

The tavern door opened and closed as a few more patrons arrived looking for food and warmth. The brief rush of cold air from the opened door chilled Vetch’s neck and made him shiver.

“Vetch,” Ennric said, and Vetch looked up again to see Ennric’s one good eye staring at him with brusque intensity. “Don’t give up yet, lad. We’re not dead. Neither is Moonfane Forge. We’re soldiers, and soldiers who make it through a battle alive have not truly lost yet. So don’t you go losing yourself. We have more to do.”

“Maybe,” said Vetch. It was the best he could muster for his friend and mentor. In truth, he felt only hopelessness and despair. He pushed his full ale mug across the table. “You have this one, old man. I’m going to bed.” He stood, but before he could leave, Ennric grabbed his arm.

In a tone pitched for Vetch’s ears only, he said, “Hey, I’m sorry about Lily, boy.”

Vetch stared down at him and then nodded. Ennric let him go and Vetch made his way out the door. Leaving the light and warmth behind felt appropriate. Away from the few remaining lit buildings and street lanterns, the night was cast in monochrome. It had stopped raining, but the breaking up of the clouds overhead seemed only to accentuate the frigid bite in the air. Vetch was unsurprised to find the Barracks mostly dark and almost as cold inside as it was outside. The men’s side was deserted. The garrison’s wounded would be up in the Silversmith’s Council Building, which had been turned into a makeshift infirmary. As for the rest ... Vetch supposed they were out drowning their woes like Ennric, or lodging with friends or family. What point was there staying in the garrison barracks if the garrison itself was all but obliterated, a ship whose rudder and sails had been blasted to matchsticks? Vetch wondered why he was here if that were true.

There was dim light coming from the women’s side of the building. That was all well and good as far as Vetch was concerned. At least he wasn’t the only one who couldn’t bear to go anywhere else this night. He went through the motions of building up a fire in the hearth and undressing as if in a trance. It was when his head was on his pillow and he could lay and watch the firelight dancing on the wall before him that the tears at last came unchecked. His chest felt as if compressed as choking, breathless sobs took hold of him.

Liquid morning sunlight fell directly across Vetch’s face and woke him. How late had he slept? From the angle of the sunlight through the windows, he could tell it was much later than any soldier would be allowed to sleep normally, were there any other soldiers about, even if off duty. His body felt heavy with the exhaustion brought on by grief, and he was still sore all over from the battle. How strange it felt to wake in the long building to silence, without other soldiers clamoring about, or their captain rousing layabouts to their assignments. He lay in bed for a time and cursed wakefulness for subjecting him again to the knowledge of Lily’s death. Again, the tears came, but silently this time. He wondered if anyone had found her body. Had she already been discovered and buried, and he not there to bid her goodbye properly? A thousand thoughts and fears about her passing paraded through his mind, each one more heart-wrenching than the last. He softly cried his way through them until his eyes were dry and red.

With nothing left to shackle him to his bed, instinctively he dragged himself out from underneath his blanket and climbed down to the cold stone floor, and shambled to the privy. When he was finished there, on his way back through the long barracks to his bunk, he saw that someone was asleep in what had been Wenzl’s bunk. That’s who must have fed the fire throughout the night, for it still burned warmly, and Vetch could not recall ever once waking to feed it himself. There was a moment during which he debated with himself between getting dressed or returning to bed. He wasn’t tired anymore. Not truly. Worn, yes, but not tired. Still, he chose to climb back up to his bunk where he lay on his back and stared sightlessly up at the ceiling.

“What now?”

The question came from Wenzl’s bunk. If Vetch pretended, he could almost imagine it was the voice of a young man, a voice not unlike Wenzl’s. But it wasn’t. Vetch knew this voice.

“Neschi? Why’re you sleeping in here?” He continued to stare up at the ceiling, seeing the same patterns and swirls in the wood ceiling beams that had greeted him each and every morning for years.

“You had more firewood on this side,” came her answer. “And I didn’t like being alone over there.”

Vetch nodded to himself. One soldier had come here to be alone, the other to not be. Ever since he was a child, Vetch had wanted to join the Moonfane Forge garrison. He had wanted to wear the uniform, carry the sword, be a soldier amongst soldiers. Time alone was practically a foreign concept to a soldier. Why he felt the need to be away from everyone just now, he couldn’t say. The garrison was like his family, but most of them were gone now. They had not even a captain to tell them what they should do. How could he decide for himself now? What was there to do? Ennric seemed to think there was something more. And now Neschi had wondered aloud about it, as well. Vetch had not even considered his own options until now. They were there, but everything had heretofore been eclipsed by the loss of Lily. He tried to turn his mind from that for long enough to ponder those other things now. What really was left to tie him to this soldier’s life? To Moonfane Forge? His family had survived the attack. Would they move on or remain here? He had never wanted to be a farmer or a tanner, but he could be. He could lay down his sword and make a new start. No. He still didn’t want to be a farmer or a tanner. He could go for a soldier elsewhere. But who would take him? Who would take on a soldier who had failed to protect his town, who had failed to keep his fellow soldiers alive, or at least been brave enough to die alongside them? Who would want a soldier who had failed to protect his charge, the Maiden of Moonfane Forge, whom he had sworn to guard with his life?

Vetch stared at the ceiling. The patterns in the ceiling beams had not changed in all the years he had been a soldier of Moonfane Forge. They had stayed the same. Had his duties changed, or were they still the same, too? What was it Ennric had said? Something about, if a soldier made it through a battle still alive, then they hadn’t really lost yet. What was to be done with all this grief?

“Neschi?”

“Hm?”

“Who’s left?”

“Huh? What d’ya mean?”

“Of the garrison,” Vetch said, sitting up in his bunk. “How many of us are left, both injured and hale? Do you know?”

“Um ...” Neschi groaned and sat up, too. Half of her face was blotched purple and yellow with bruises from the battle. She rubbed her eyes carefully and then kept them clenched shut as if concentrating. “I saw, I think, eleven or twelve injured in the Silversmith’s Council Building. And Ennric, with his busted arm.”

“What about healthy? You and I could still fight, though we look like hell. Who else?”

Neschi looked at Vetch dubiously, but chuckled all the same. “Dunno who you’d want to fight. But of who could? After you and me? Maybe half a dozen. Rolande and Oderyk are fit. They’d come back here to get pikes and ended up holding the barracks. Mora came through unhurt; saw her at the stables yesterday, or what’s left of the stables. And Iannitz ...” Neschi shook her head and smiled wryly. “Poor sod spent the entire battle pinned beneath a dying yak. His pride’s banged up, but he’s fine otherwise.”

“That’s all? Anyone else?” Vetch asked. He climbed down from his bunk and began to get dressed. He was likely one of the only soldiers whose uniform had made it through the battle unscathed, having been in his townsman’s clothes when the attack began. Those shredded and blood-brittled rags still lay on the floor beside his clothes chest where he’d tossed them the night of the battle.

“Renzo, maybe,” said Neschi. “I saw him yesterday. At a distance. He looked sound, at least. Why? What’re you thinking?”

Vetch cinched his sword belt tight and pushed his hair out of his eyes. “Not sure yet, but do you think you could gather them for me? Anyone who’s still in fighting shape, bring them to Ennric’s place. I’ll meet you there later.”

Neschi eyed him for a moment, then made a scoffing sound and shot him an exaggerated salute. “Whatever you say, Cap’n Vetch. I’ll see if I can hunt ‘em down.”

“Thanks, Neschi. See you there.”