The Hour of the Hunt
If his opponent had any sense at all, they would fall back. The ground around Saint-Darge Castle was no place for an attacking force to linger long.
Marquis Crucho intended to hustle them into exactly that retreat. The Marquis had no leisure of his own to spare, either—the soldiers under his command were men who had to be marched straight back to the south.
Let this drag on, and the suspicion will turn on me next.
These days the Emperor looked upon every vassal around him with suspicion. The war had been going badly enough already; Karamaf's disappearance had dealt the decisive blow. Everyone kept their mouths shut, but the truth could hardly be hidden from the high nobles closest to the throne. Among them, word had already begun to spread that Karamaf had fled out of disillusionment with the Emperor.
Thanks to that rumor, the Emperor's suspicion grew only darker.
This had to be finished quickly.
The Abner family's cause is not so righteous. Grant them enough face, and they can be sent home.
But the Marquis did not yet know. He did not know that Saint-Darge Castle had already fallen.
"We were lucky."
At Ulrike's words, everyone seated there nodded—though the Lord of Saint-Darge, for one, saw matters rather differently.
"Even a few days' delay could have been the death of us."
"True enough. If we'd been caught under attack with that fortress still holding out at our backs..."
It was a mercy they had stormed the place so brutally. Any other course, and they might have burned through their pay and walked away with nothing to show for it. The knights and mercenary captains turned their eyes on Johan, and those eyes were full of respect.
Show them a man who could scale a wall with his bare hands and crack a fortress open, and among those who lived and died by the sword, respect was owed. It was that simple.
"Who leads them?"
"Marquis Crucho, they say."
"Shouldn't that man be down south rolling about with the beastfolk? What's he doing crawling all the way up here?"
Ulrike's face twisted with contempt, yet she did not relax. A man like Marquis Crucho carried real weight among the Emperor's vassals—his renown as a commander in the southern Catalia Peninsula was considerable.
"How do you think he'll play it?"
"He'll try to negotiate, won't he? Though from a very poor position."
Laughter rippled across the knights' faces. They knew as well as anyone how thoroughly the advantage had flipped.
Had the castle held, they would have been the ones bargaining from weakness. Not anymore. Now it was the other side with something to lose.
"Lord of Saint-Darge. What do you think?"
"...If you would show mercy, His Majesty will see that you are rewarded for it."
"Is that so?"
Ulrike rose from her seat. A longsword hung from her hand.
"Only I don't need Cardirian's mercy, so what am I to do? No—truth be told, I doubt that man is even capable of mercy. He's lopped off nobles' heads so freely. Who's to say mine wouldn't be next?"
"No, no! You're wrong!"
"Above all, the one who ought to be begging for mercy right now is you—not me. You dared violate the custom of surrender and stage an ambush, and now you speak to me of mercy? Go on, then. Let's see this mercy of Cardirian's!"
"My lady! My la—!"
Even as the words left his mouth, Ulrike swept the castle lord's head from his shoulders. Blood spattered across her face. Her voice came out rough.
"Clean this up. When the Marquis comes, hand him this head. Make sure he hears exactly what this man did."
"Yes."
Johan fished out a handkerchief and offered it to her. Ulrike gave him a long look, something wry flickering in it, then took the cloth and wiped her cheek.
"So... now there's no castle lord either. What sort of negotiation do you suppose they'll attempt?"
"The late lord's kin are still alive, so they'll put them forward and demand the castle back. They'll likely offer a suitable indemnity for it."
"We can simply ignore them. There's no reason to humor that kind of nonsense."
"But we can't dismiss it entirely either. It would stain the Abner family's honor."
Feuds between nobles broke out easily enough, but to kill a castle lord and then seize his castle outright, folding it into their own domain? That would draw wary glances from every neighboring lord. There was no telling the western Abners wouldn't one day do the same to the nobles of the center or the north.
"So you'd have us hand back the castle we bled to take? Madness! This castle must remain in Abner hands no matter what. It's a strategic stronghold, I tell you."
"What about stalling? Whoever comes to the table, we demand an outrageous ransom for the place. In the meantime, the castle is ours to use as we please."
Returning the castle was unthinkable; swallowing it whole, meanwhile, would leave them awkwardly minding everyone else's gaze. Ulrike's vassals threw out one opinion after another, the debate growing heated. On matters like these Johan had little to contribute, so he contented himself with sipping at his cup.
?
Johan turned his head. At the doorway, Suetlg was beckoning him out.
"I saw Lady Ulrike take his head. I knew she would."
"He reaped what he sowed, didn't he?"
"Quite. He did something worth dying for. But where did that handkerchief come from? It hardly suits you."
"Ibelka gave it to me."
"Who is Ibelka?"
"I told you before, didn't I? The maid who served at the manor."
"...Never, ever speak that name in front of Lady Ulrike!"
Suetlg went cold with horror. Just what in the world was this mad knight bastard playing at?
"It's hardly some cheap trinket, you know. I bought it for her with my own money."
"That's not quite what I—never mind. In any case, didn't you order every servant and slave rounded up?"
"I did."
"So I took a look about, and there was one rather peculiar fellow among them. That's why I called you out."
?
"You'll see when you look. Come along, now."
Johan followed Suetlg outside. In the courtyard, the captured servants and slaves were trembling where they huddled.
The one who had committed the crime was the castle lord, but after a fight like this, the headsman's block made no distinction of rank. If Ulrike's mood soured, the whole lot of them would be dragged off in the same ropes.
Fortunately, Ulrike had no appetite for any blood beyond the castle lord's.
"What do you think?"
"About what?"
"That young one there. Doesn't he resemble the castle lord?"
"Hard to say?"
Johan studied a young servant with a skeptical eye. For a servant, the boy's face carried a certain polish—though a fine face hardly proved noble blood. His accent was a commoner's, his movements coarse. This was no one raised to the nobility from the cradle.
"You don't remember the castle lord's face?"
"I beat his in so thoroughly, it's hard to..."
"...I saw the man in his younger days, so I remember. That is the castle lord's face on that boy, no doubt of it."
"Nothing about the way he carries himself says noble, though."
"Could be a baseborn son who was never raised up into the family proper. And from what I hear, the castle lord doted on him strangely."
The fate of bastards who could never be acknowledged into the family was a miserable one. Those few whose parents looked after them were exceptionally lucky; the rest had to scratch out a living on their own. And the unluckiest of all received a visit from an assassin. A spouse's indiscretions might be tolerated, but whelping a child by another was another matter entirely.
Viewed that way, there was nothing strange about the castle lord keeping his own bastard close as a servant. A noble's servant lived better than any serf or freeman could.
The problem was...
"Or he's simply a clever servant who caught his lord's eye. That could be the whole of it."
"True enough. So then—shall we simply cut him down? A dead man makes no trouble."
"There's no need to go so far as... Ah."
A thought flashed through Johan's mind. If a lord died without legitimate issue, couldn't a bastard inherit the fief all the same?
"Is he really a bastard?"
"That part doesn't matter. What matters is that with this as our pretext, the Abner family escapes all blame."
They had executed a castle lord who broke the customs of war, and now they would hand his castle back to his own child, free of charge. It was a justification no one alive could reproach.
Of course, it was pure theater.
The boy would hold not a shred of real power. The Abner family's own men would control the castle and every village around it.
Ulrike stared at Johan, openly surprised.
"Why are you looking at me like that?"
"I didn't know you had schemes like that in you."
"It's nothing, truly. All credit to Suetlg's counsel."
"A sage's counsel isn't given to just anyone—and even when it is, few can make use of it. Yes. Good idea. We'll do exactly that, and we'll do it now. You there! Wash the castle lord's son and dress him up properly."
Whether the boy was truly baseborn changed nothing. Proclaim it loudly enough, make it convincing enough, and it became the truth.
Marquis Crucho felt the breath jam in his throat.
"The castle has fallen?"
"Y-yes... and they say the castle lord's son has succeeded to his seat."
"What rot is this! The castle lord has no son!"
The castle lord had no children—only kin. Had he died, his brothers should have taken up the succession.
But fury or no fury, the new Lord of Saint-Darge stood on the wall above them, finely dressed and looking down. One glance said it all: a boy who had yet to grow his first whisker.
"You scrape up some stray off the street and set him up there, shameless as you please! You killed the castle lord—did you think such a pretext would wash?"
"The former lord sent a surrender envoy and then sprang an ambush, or so we are given to understand."
Marquis Crucho clenched his jaw until it ached to bursting. His enemy was hoarding legitimate cause with an insolence beyond bearing.
The man had been executed for violating the custom of surrender; the family line had been preserved precisely because they had no wish to extinguish it.
"One does not swap His Imperial Majesty's vassals about as one pleases!"
"By the customary law, by imperial law, by church law—by the law of every realm under heaven—succession belongs to the rightful vassal."
"And was that succession not forced through at the point of a sword?!"
"Then file your petition for trial."
The knight sent as envoy answered with utter shamelessness. Crucho had to choke down the urge to draw steel. File for trial—as if those walls would ever submit themselves to a judgment hall.
Knowing it was hopeless, the Marquis hurled his ultimatum regardless.
"Open the gate! I will look upon this new lord with my own eyes and hear the whole affair from his mouth."
"You mean to strip a vassal of his lawful fief by raw force, here and now? Much as your master so often does?"
"...Guard your tongue. I am not so feeble that I cannot kill one lone envoy!"
"Then do try, if you can. The walls of Saint-Darge are high, and the cold deepens daily. We shall see what you manage from out there."
The envoys withdrew inside, sneering.
And because not a single word of it was untrue, Marquis Crucho despaired.
"So—do you think he pulls back, or comes at us?"
"He'll withdraw, won't he?"
"I'll put my coin on attack."
"Weren't you the one who said he's an experienced commander?"
Ulrike studied Johan. Try as she might, she could not make him fit. It was as if the traits of several different men had all been gathered into a single body.
When he schemed, he might have been some courtier or clerk; but in the field, with that ferocity and that drive, he was a knight among knights. And yet for a knight, his blood ran far too cold.
No knight would ever counsel retreat in a moment like this. It was never a question of high walls or long odds. A knight's honor, his pride, the face he showed the world—such things ran too deep in a knight's blood for any amount of cold arithmetic to cut them out.
A knight who turned tail simply because the odds soured had no reason to call himself a knight at all.
"Because... if I were him, I would have attacked."
Ulrike's guess landed true.
That night, Marquis Crucho gave the order to attack. It was a savage, flailing assault—the desperation of a beast with the spear already in its flank.
And it did not last the week. Before seven days had run their course, the Marquis's army had begun its withdrawal.
"I'm not thinking of taking the Marquis alive."
"For a man with no such designs, your eyes are burning rather fiercely."
Unlike the castle lord, the Marquis came backed by a family fat enough to pay any ransom. He was a hostage who could be bled for gold without end from those southern domains.
Nor was Johan alone in it. The other knights burned with the same hunger, the retreating army already a feast on their tongues.
"Don't overreach. Overreach, and something always tears. I've never yet seen a man who fought the current upstream come to a good end."
"I know. Flowing water never fights for the lead."
"Finely said. Where did you pick that up?"
Johan offered no answer. He took up his spear.
The pursuit force had been raised almost entirely from horse. They would run the enemy down at speed and harry the Marquis's columns like wolves at a flank.
"Sir Johan. Will you take the van?"
The knights offered the place without a word of contest, as though it needed no discussion at all. Watching it, Stefan could not keep the envy from his face.
Johan held no connections in Ulrike's service, and no family stood behind him. Yet on skill alone, every knight there had come to acknowledge him.
Is that what a true knight is?
Johan, posted at the very point, drew his sword. The knights' roar broke like a wave.
The hour of the hunt was at hand.