The Maiden of Moonfane Forge

Breakfast and the breaking of camp went more slowly than Vetch was happy with. His soldiers moved sluggishly through their tasks, yawning and dragging their feet. This wasn’t what he was used to. Even through complaints and jesting barbs directed at ‘Tarese the Taskmaster’ when she hadn’t been within earshot, the Moonfane Forge garrison had always been sharp and expeditious. Yes, soldiers lost sleep to surprise drills and assignments at odd hours. They were expected to wake early, sometimes after staying out late drinking. There were days when you were dog tired and your leather boots felt like lead weights, but tasks always got done when they needed to get done, and orders were always followed promptly. What was so different between then and now? Was it truly that they had not seen enough real action among their ranks to handle this mission they had set themselves?

If Vetch was being honest with himself, it wasn’t all his soldiers lagging. Neschi, as had become her daily provision, had struck out at sunrise to scout out their path. Oderyk and Mora worked in tandem to finish securing the last of the supplies on the horses, both of them stoic and quiet in their work. Rolande stood watch over Slouk, who stood beside his horse keeping his eyes straight ahead and looking at nothing, as if unwilling to even acknowledge the soldiers around him anymore. Or, perhaps, hoping to provide no reason for them to acknowledge him. It was Renzo and Iannitz who were holding things up. Renzo was slow about readying his horse, swearing and grumbling his way through getting the animal saddled. But, in all fairness, he had slept little, and that was by Vetch’s order. Vetch could not fault the man for bearing the effects of his punishment. He had carried it out without complaint, rising throughout the night to dole out feed for the horses. Despite his surliness, he was being a good soldier, working through exhaustion to follow his orders. Maybe he’d just needed a good punch to the face all along.

Then there was Iannitz. Again, it wasn’t his fault that they waited on him. He had taken it upon himself to shake out a little more food for all the horses before they rode, which was a sound idea, but it meant he was now burdened with re-securing the feed to Mora’s mount, after it had already been packed up earlier. That was another thing Vetch felt he could rightly take partial blame for. If he had better organized the way they broke down camp, or started them earlier after waking, they could have been riding by now. As it was, the sun was well up, and all he could think of was the wheels of the carriages they chased turning, while he and his soldiers stood still.

Suddenly he had the answer to his question. What was different between the way his garrison operated prior to the attack and now?

“Me in command,” he spoke under his breath. The breeze that swept through the eerie woodland carried his words off and tousled his hair. He went to help Iannitz just as Neschi returned leading her horse.

“I think we’re catching up,” she said excitedly, as her lathered horse puffed beside her. “The path starts widening out into a road again, sure to let their carriage move faster, but ...” and she smiled, pushing her tongue into the side of her cheek, “all the wheel and horse tracks are newer, more recent.”

There was a general murmur of eagerness through the ranks. Soldiers mounted up and turned their horses to the trail, Rolande practically shoving Slouk onto his horse through his complaints.

“Wait,” Vetch said, then spoke the command a second time, louder. “Hold, soldiers. Form up.” From wanting them to rush to holding them back, Vetch saw the looks of confusion that passed over a few faces. But they did as ordered, all mustering their mounts into a rough line and giving him their attention. Vetch swung up into his saddle and faced them. “We know the raiders are having no fair time in this damnable forest,” he began.

“Are any of us?” commented Rolande, to the sound of a few grim chuckles.

Vetch smiled wryly. “Sure as shit, we aren’t,” he agreed. “And no reasonable man or woman could’ve expected otherwise. The point is, this raven-haired mage and the town-razing whoresons she commands fled this way out of fear that we might follow. They hoped all this—” he indicated the tangle of trees surrounding them “—would confound us. Well, Neschi said the path opens up again, and we can move faster than any damn carriage. So, we push hard now, but we do so quietly. Keep your eyes peeled and be ready to draw steel at any moment. We kill as many of ‘em as we can and take back what they stole from us. Let’s move, soldiers!”

From then on, it was as if they all were reminded of who and what they were, soldiers before the destruction of their town, soldiers after. As a unit, matching in their black and silver surcoats, the soldiers took up the path again with a purpose. They drove their horses to a steady and unyielding pace and spoke no words between them. The passage of the day was marked only by the beat of hooves on the path and the jingle of tack. As promised, the path widened and became a rough road once again. More than that, the forest, too, began to disentangle itself. The dense, shadowed woods they had endured for days became a patchwork of light and shadow, the trees they passed smaller and set farther apart and no longer choked with hanging mosses and thorny vines. Swatches of blue sky showed above, and there were open spaces of shallower undergrowth and leaf-matter to either side of the trail.

Riding at the head of the line, Vetch allowed himself a small smile. An objective was what his soldiers had needed. What all soldiers needed. Once they had been reminded of their target and how close it was—once they could envision drawing their weapons a second time against those who had taken their friends and family members from them, who had burned their homes and laid waste to their farms—everything fell into place and they became not just individual soldiers, but a garrison again. Vetch knew every single one of his people must remember a face, one face amongst all the raiders, that had done them particular wrong, a face that was seared into their memories in the hope that they would meet that villain again and get to pay them back. Vetch was taken back to the day of the raid, how close he had come to death as, battered and bloody, he’d looked up into the face of a man who appeared to command the raiders. Vetch recalled the weathered features and long, dark moustache. Though they had not crossed blades, the man’s disinterested dismissal of Vetch and Neschi as threats had stuck with him like a chicken bone in his gullet.

Vetch’s smile faded, to be replaced with an expression of stony determination. He gave his gelding’s flanks two sharp taps with his heels to spur him to greater speed. “Yah! Let’s go, boy!” he shouted. His horse surged forward, puffing and breathing hard. Vetch heard similar exclamations from his fellow soldiers behind him. The raiders would not escape under cover of darkness this time, not like they had after they’d freed all the yaks and sown chaos throughout Moonfane Forge’s surrounding pastures. This time, he and his soldiers would run them down. And, no matter how the numbers stacked up, they’d give whomever they caught the fight of their lives.

The gelding’s hooves pounded heavy on the road, the wind whipping Vetch’s hair back from his face. No matter the purpose, the ride was exhilarating. Then, strangely, despite how his horse worked and strove, Vetch felt his mount slowing. He tapped his heels again, and again, and still his horse slowed. It slowed and yet only breathed harder. Soon the breaths were coming out in wheezes and, looking down at his laboring mount, Vetch saw foam and drool streaming from his gelding’s mouth. He reined back and the horse came to a staggering stop, almost throwing Vetch. In an instant he was down from his saddle and taking the horse’s muzzle in his hands.

“What’s wrong there, boy?” he asked, frantically checking mouth, nose, and eyes to see what was ailing his animal. It was then that Vetch glanced back down the road and saw that he had left the other soldiers behind. Far down the road, they, too, had all dismounted, were waving and shouting for his attention. It took a moment for understanding to dawn on Vetch. They hadn’t been sharing in his exclamation, not joining in his war cry. They had been calling for him to stop, trying to halt him. But why? Vetch’s horse staggered in place and nearly bowled him over. He caught up the reins and tried to turn him back and walk him to the other soldiers. The horse stubbornly stood his place, wheezing through labored breaths, before lifting his tail and defecating a liquid foulness that splattered on the road.

Another shout went up from his fellow soldiers back down the road. When Vetch looked, a rider broke free of them, his horse running hard up the road directly at Vetch, hooves pounding the dirt as if devils chased it. Vetch only had seconds to recognize the man and what was happening. Slouk.

“No ... No!” Vetch shouted. He drew his sword and put himself in the middle of the road, practically daring Slouk to run him down if he had the balls. He readied himself, raised his blade. He’d never cut down a passing horse before, but he would, and if Slouk broke his neck in the fall, then so be it.

But at the last second, Slouk pulled hard to the side on his reins. Vetch saw the whites of the horse’s eyes as it swung its path desperately to one side of the road, narrowly avoiding crashing through Vetch and his horse on the way by. Vetch swung his sword, but it cut only air behind the horse’s streaming tail. And then Slouk was by them and as good as gone, pounding his way wildly up the road.

Vetch stabbed the point of his sword into the dirt and stared unblinking after the traitorous man. “Damn you!” he shouted impotently. “Damn you, you bastard!”

Before he disappeared around a bend in the road, Slouk had the gall to take a look back. His dark eyes locked with Vetch’s for a split second before he was gone. His expression had been blank, unreadable.

Vetch sheathed his sword and stared, powerless. Knowing not what else to do, he returned to his horse and attempted to soothe the poor beast. “Come on, boy, shh shh shh ...” he whispered, willing calmness to carry through his voice, even as the bile rose within him. Vetch knew, even before he caught up his horse’s reins and coaxed him into a slow walk back to the other soldiers—even before he saw their horses ailing in the same way, a couple already lying on the ground struggling to breathe—he knew who had done this.

“You fucking fool!” Mora yelled, as Vetch approached. Her anger wasn’t directed at him. She shouted at Iannitz, her face only inches from his as the boy quailed before her.

“How was I supposed to know?” he protested pitiably. In his hand, he held a bundle of crushed-up herbs. Around this scene, the other soldiers stood with subdued expressions. The language of their bodies told a story of defeat.

“How? How?!” Mora shouted, the pitch of her usually level voice rising. “Because he was our prisoner, not our damned friend! Did you forget that?” Suddenly, she caught up Iannitz’s wrist, holding it tight as she tore the herbs from his fingers with her other hand, like an irate mother taking a forbidden item away from a protesting child. She held up a pinch of plant matter. “This? Bracken fern!” She threw it angrily on the ground. “And this one—” holding up another pinch of tiny leaves “—yew! And here is buttercup! These are all poisonous to horses, you, you ...” She hurled the rest of her handful of herbs into the dirt and stomped on them to make her point. “Fucking lackwit.”

“He gets it, Mora,” Neschi said, before Vetch could voice the same.

“I-I ... he said these herbs helped a horse’s digestion. He said if I mixed them in with their feed, it’d cure the runs they were having. He knew about horses. I was just following—”

“Following what a lying thief told you to do. And secretively, without the rest of us knowing,” Mora accused him, her voice lowering to a darker anger that was beyond shouting.

“I didn’t think ...” Iannitz went quiet. He stood there in the middle of the road by his prostrate horse, shoulders hunched, eyes down, looking more to Vetch like a distraught and devastated boy than a soldier.

Mora only shook her head. Then, suddenly, she lunged. Yet, before she could strike Iannitz, Neschi caught her up in a bear hug and pulled her back. Mora struggled against Neschi’s wiry strength for only a few seconds before she gave up. Neschi loosened her grip and Mora shoved her away and stormed off to her own horse, which had gone down to its knees. Mora lowered herself down beside the animal and stroked its nose, whispering soft words.

From the moment Vetch had recognized Slouk as the rider making his wild escape, he had put together who was responsible for the horses becoming sick. It had taken only those few seconds to realize it had been some deliberate act by Slouk. That was why the thief had left and returned. That was why he had implored them to feed the horses more often, with fodder that he knew to be tainted. It was undoubtedly to make his escape more complete, to ensure that the soldiers would have no hope of running him down and catching him. He’d be free and clear now.

But to discover that he had done this evil by tricking Iannitz into performing the actual deed of poisoning the horses himself was an added twist of the knife.

“Iannitz,” Vetch said.

“S-sir,” the boy replied and came to attention.

“Slouk told you to put those plants in the horse feed?”

Iannitz looked down. When he answered, his voice was barely audible. “Yes sir.”

“And just now he was preparing to feed them even more of it, to ‘help’ them.” This came from Mora, her words a clear indictment. The anger in her voice did not disguise the pain. She had never looked upon the horses simply as tools of the trade, as many other soldiers did.

For the time being, Vetch let her words slide. He kept his attention on Iannitz, but he raised his voice so everyone else could hear. “And then I followed Slouk’s advice to feed them more often. I gave the order, didn’t I?”

Iannitz looked uncomfortable, at a loss for a response.

“Are all the bags of feed so fouled?” Vetch asked.

Iannitz shook his head. “No sir. Only the last one we’d been feeding them from.”

Vetch stared hard at him for a moment, then nodded. He turned away from Iannitz and made the order for all. “Save which horses we can. Check the rest of the feed to make sure it’s still good.”

“Wasn’t Slouk’s horse carrying the cooking gear before?” asked Rolande. She had pulled the supplies and saddle off of her horse and was going through her things. Her horse looked unsteady on its feet, much like Vetch’s gelding, but in better shape than some of the others. “This bag held salted meat before ... and this one dried lentils.” She held up the bag as if to confirm. In her other hand was the cooking cauldron she’d found in it instead.

“And here are more cooking implements and the bundle of extra arrow shafts his horse had carried,” added Renzo. He stood up from his clearly dead horse and overturned the bag. “Our extra waterskins had been in here before. The thief switched out the tools and things we’d packed on his horse for extra food and water for himself.”

Neschi cursed under her breath. All around Vetch, the soldiers stood dazed as the full extent of the horse thief’s subtle treacheries became apparent. Vetch noticed how Renzo chose not to bring up how this could have all been avoided if Vetch had allowed him to kill Slouk, or even had kept him in bindings and more closely watched him. Vetch had sought to allow Slouk some measure of dignity, and as a result, they were all paying for it. Yet, when he could have injured Vetch the most, Renzo chose to remain quiet. Vetch could not decide if he was thankful for that, or if he wished the man would simply lay into him and say what they all must be thinking—that his poor leadership had cost them their mission. Perhaps, even their lives.