Gyles I

The smell of Willowdael had changed. Hearthfires burned, and the familiar bite of woodsmoke cut the sweet musk of fresh-turned soil. Still, the air was foul.

It hung heavy on the day of steel, like a whisper at the edge of hearing. Gyles paced the shore as the morning's fog slithered through the willows. He swept a wary eye over the open water, waiting. But no ships broke the sea-line, and he knew not whether for good or ill.

He had scarcely counted seven years when the galleys first blackened the horizon. The reek of tarred hulls washed over him like a wave. He didn't quite understand the look on his father's face, but he was certain of one thing; home was no longer safe. There would be no hiding, not anymore.

He'd armored himself in prayer. Four long months passed before mercy answered his plea; the ships turned away, and the soldiers with them. The seasons turned from winter to summer and back again, some twenty and six times since. It smelt now like it did then.

He cast a final look at the line between sky and sea. Then he turned, and started back up the road.

"He's come at last, and no mistake!" Beckett called as he approached. The man's croft lay tucked on the eastern coast of Boot Island, far from the village. Beside the farmstead lay a stretch of tilled earth, a little dock, and a stable scarce fit for three horses. Gyles had small need of the work, in truth; his wants were few. Still, he was glad for the company. "Strayed from the road again?"

Gyles nodded.

"And?"

"No ships today."

Beckett narrowed his gaze. "They've not missed a day in months." He blinked, as if to banish the shadow from his mind. "Poor weather's delayed them, or mayhap they've had their fill of our timber. No matter. If the storm comes, we'll weather it in company."

If the storm comes, Gyles thought bitterly. It had come already, on a clear morning in spring. The days had stretched long as the trillium bloomed, but with light came a new darkness. As before, Azaran warships swept down upon the skiffs of the smallport like herons upon minnows.

"We've hard reaping today," said Beckett with a clap of Gyles' shoulder, putting an end to his brooding. "Come morning, we'll bring in the apples from the old tree, and Alyce'll set to her sweetwork."

Gyles found his man in a cheerful mood, and he took heart. He could muster no such courage. Beckett was but a few years older than himself, yet he was graced with the temperament of a man well beyond his years. He'd affected a beard to make himself look the part, and Gyles had made his peace with it.

Beckett handed him a scythe, its blade peppered with rust, grip spoilt by sweat. He toiled with the farmer as he had done a hundred times before, like a song well-practiced. The sun raised red upon them, and their arms flushed as they cut, weighed, bundled. At last they straightened their wiry frames, satisfied.

Alyce crossed the field as the sun reached its zenith. She tugged off a pair of leather gloves and tucked them into the folds of her apron, then dusted herself with calloused hands. "The horses are fed and watered, dear. Always pleased to see you Gyles. How grows the garden?"

"Slowly," said Gyles. "Sage balks in the shade, but parsley at least keeps his vigor. They have their tempers, my children."

She smiled. "So they do." Eyeing Beckett's pitted scythe, she added, "Should you be making for the market, dear, do stop by Gregor’s. We’ll be needing a new set before winter sets in."

"That might prove a challenge, dove," said Beck. "No ships today. No steel."

"And how do we know this?"

Beckett leaned on his scythe and tipped the handle toward Gyles with a grin.

She turned to him and said, "Don't tell me you're back to old habits?"

"Can't seem to shake the draw," said Gyles.

She frowned, then waved it off. "Even so. Might be there's enough steel for a pair of hooks. Take Gyles with you, dear. The islefolk are uneasy enough without such strange happenings."

“You heard the lady," said Beckett with a toothy grin. "Seems I've need of a squire! Come,” he clapped Gyles on the shoulder, “and I’ll double your barley for the day.”

The request was harmless enough, but Gyles clenched his jaw all the same. It had been some time since he walked among the islefolk. The clatter of sabatons made him feel a boy again, small and afraid.

"You'll be alright?" Alyce's voice cut through his thoughts.

He smiled. "No ships means no soldiers, my lady, and my beds can bide a few hours. To the market, then," he said with grim resolve.

"See that you two look after each other."

Beck bade farewell to his wife with a kiss upon her cheek, and the two men followed the little river downstream. The gentle murmur of water guided them through field and forest, past the heart of the isle. They crossed veins of freshwater streams that cut the land and breathed clouds of mist into the crisp autumn air.

All around them, nurtured by the fertile valleys and wetlands, willows thrived. Their slender trunks swayed as if to draw breath, and their boughs trailed behind to whisper to each other. The trees were kin to the willowfolk; they bent in times of turmoil, but stood unbroken after all.

Beckett paused by a spring where the water bubbled up clear as glass. He cupped his hands to drink, and as Gyles crouched beside him, a sudden burst of wings made him start. A covey of partridge broke from the underbrush, the mother and her brood, and scattered into the shadows. The sight brought a smile to his lips.

At the edge of vision, the southern mountains stood like guardians of the isle, capped with snow to herald winter's coming. The white peaks shone bright against autumn's warm tapestry.

Waters, willows, hills. Each spoke to Gyles in their own quiet way. This land endures, they whispered. And he believed them.

"Why do you do it?" Beckett's question cut through his thoughts. "Why do you watch the sea, torture yourself so? You know they're coming, Gyles, the soldiers. Whether today or the morrow."

Gyles considered a moment. "Suppose I take comfort in the knowing, is all. Some small part of this I can take back."

Crossing the river and its banks, the two men came upon the bustling heart of the village. Modest dwellings and thatched cottages lined the streets, and above all stood the old wellhall, a holy place whose steeple pierced the grey mist.

The village thrummed with life. Fishers hauled the day's catch straight from wharf to market, and the air smelled of salt. Fellers trudged by, shoulders bowed under the weight of their great trunks. Women balanced baskets on their hips as they made for the weavers' hall, where tales and gossip spun as freely as twine. And children played at forest's edge, flinging fistfulls of leaves in the wind.

Missing from the throng were the soldiers in their suits of steel. Gone, too, were the guild-scribes, peering from the tops of their rolls of parchment. Their absence might've set Gyles' heart at ease, but with his enemies out of sight, his stomach felt as though it were filled with stones.

The two pressed on to Gregor's workshop, marked by a towering chimney. Save for the wellhall, it was the only such spire in the village, and the old man took no small pride in it. They found him hunched over a grindstone, forehead dewed with sweat, whiskers trimmed short. Gregor had thrown his leather smock over a gray linen shirt streaked with soot. The rasp of steel on stone filled their ears as sparks fell to the floor, and the smithy gave a distracted nod, gaze fixed on the axe atop his wheel.

"Harvest's here at last, Father!" Beckett called over the din. "Three bundles at the usual trade?"

With a final pass over his work, Gregor wiped his brow and set the axe aside. "Aye, young Hayward, for a goodly sum of horseshoes and nails. The lady will be well pleased at boiled grains." The smith straightened, beckoned the two men follow him inside. His dwelling was dark; shelves stacked high with tools and sacks. He reached for a purse on a high ledge and passed it to Beckett. Nail and sheaf exchanged hands as talk turned to days past. Gregor seemed eager to return to his labors, but Beck lingered in the doorway. "What else then?" said the old man.

"I know you're pressed enough for good steel as it is. But the miss and I need two hooks, if you can manage."

Gregor sighed and wiped his hands on a rag. "I'm sorry, young master, but there's been no fresh bars in weeks. I'm afraid there's nothing I can do for you."

Gyles and Beckket exchanged a glance. "Weeks?" said Beckett. "How can that be, with those wretched ships upon our shores day and night?"

The smith shrugged wearily. "Of late, the soldiers keep to themselves, and the trading days grow fewer."

"To what end?"

For a moment, Gregor seemed poised to speak, but perhaps thought better of it. "I would not say."

The air in the room hung still. Gyles tried his best not to dwell on the day's portents, but his imagination betrayed him. Missing ships, missing soldiers. No steel. He prayed the ships had simply departed his home, as they had done so many years before. His heart whispered darker thoughts. "Come now, Beck. We've troubled the man enough for one day," he said as he shuffled his friend out the door.

"Watch yourselves," Gregor called after them. "And mind your tongues! You'd do best not to speak freely of this."

Clouds were gathering overhead when at last they left the home. Islefolk stood frozen in the streets, their eyes fixed on something Gyles could not yet see. He breathed deep, and a sharp scent met his nose. Fire. He shot a glance at Gregor's furnace, but it lay dormant. He turned his head westward, and his eyes met a pillar of black smoke that rose beyond the trees. It billowed and writhed against the leaden sky.

"Beck, look!" He pointed toward the horizon, voice tinged with alarm.

Beckett squinted against the light and shook his head slowly. "The Willowfort... what madness now?"

The plume rose steadily from the quarter of Dun Moeras. The abandoned fortress had long loomed on the island’s western reaches. Time and mind had forgotten its purpose, some military outpost turned the dwelling of miscreants and vagabonds. It was no place for honest folk.

The wisest course would be to run, thought Gyles. Alas, he had never been able to douse the flame of his curiosities, once it was lit. Beck shared the same affliction, or so Alyce liked to remind them. He exchanged a knowing look with the farmer. In silent agreement, they shouldered their grain and made for the fortress. They took the rumrunners' road through the westwood, a route they had dared not tread before.

The hum of Willowdael grew distant as they made their way through the wood. The smoke was their guide, and its black column grew larger with every step. Overhead, birds wheeled from the path. Gyles took their retreat for an ill omen. The winding trail climbed steadily and led the two men to the very shadow of the fortress, no more than a hundred paces ahead. "We should get off the road," said Gyles, his voice low.

Beckett gave a solemn nod, and the two men vanished into the brush. Shielded by the dense thicket, they climbed the hill that overlooked the crescent bay. As they neared the summit, the cries of battle rose up to meet them. The scene below might've been ripped from the depths of Gyles' nightmares.

A fleet of war galleys held steady in the shallows. Twin banks of oars bristled along their sides, poised to strike water. Their rams were snarling beasts; sirens, krakens, serpents. Ballistae lined the forecastles, and upon their sails, golden hammers were emblazoned over an amethyst canvas.

Gyles recognized the distinct vignette of Azaran soldiers on the beach. Each bore a steel breastplate enameled with violet tendrils, coiled like the vines of clematis. Their helms, crested with purple plumes, quivered in the shifting breeze.

At the base of the fortress, an encampment seethed with activity. Red and gold tents peppered the landscape like an echo of the autumn willows, and a wooden palisade encircled all. A band of fighters mustered from the pavilions, all in ragged leathers. A pitiful assembly, in truth. Yet for all their disarray, each bore a single garment of crimson, bright as blood. "Do you recognize them?" said Gyles.

Beckett’s eyes were wide with awe and dread; he offered no answer. Gyles pressed himself to the earth, as if its embrace might protect him. Even so, as fear churned angrily within his belly, he could not tear his gaze from the dance of life and death below.

The crimson host fought in vain. Their lines buckled under the relentless advance of the soldiers from the beach, who set fire to canvas as they advanced, and soon the sky was black as pitch. The pride of the guildanate made manifest.

Gyles knew little of war, but the fortress doubtless offered the insurgents some advantage. It was not enough. Archers loosed their arrows from the high battlements, yet too few found their marks. Soldiers broke against the red footmen like the tide breaking upon the shore.

The Azarans cut down any man who dared stand at the gate. Gyles turned from the slaughter, his gaze drawn to the galleys offshore. Stones flew from the siege weapons upon their decks and carved a wound in the curtain wall. Purple-plumed warriors flooded the breach.

It seemed to Gyles that the fighting was near its end, until a single redcloak danced through the frontlines, evading sword and spear. He watched as this lone warrior raised her hand above her head, fingers outstretched towards the sky; she buried the other deep in his pocket, groping for something unseen. Gyles could make out the frantic movement of her lips, but she shaped the words in a tongue he could not understand.

Faster than a heartbeat, the cacophony of war was silenced.

Light coiled about the tip of the woman's finger. With the speed and force of lightning, it exploded outward and streaked the sky in a thousand forked veins. The battlefield vanished beneath a cascade of brilliant color, a searing wave that bathed the world in violet. The sound that followed was as a thunderclap from an angry storm, a violent force that shook the very earth.

The blast hurled Gyles backward from the hilltop. He tumbled down and down as the world spun around him, until at last he came to a halt, badly bruised from the tumble. He heard the thump of Beck striking a willow.

"What was that?" Gyles rasped. "What did you see?" He pressed his fingers into his temples as the pain throbbed in his skull.

Beckett groaned, hauled himself upright. "Keepers take us, Hedger," he cursed. "I've seen nothing like it, not in all my years. One thing is certain, that..." He swallowed. "It was no storm of the earth. The Tempest itself hasn't the fury. Oh, keepers' mercy, the grain!"

"Leave it, Beck! We've no part to play here. We should never have come!” Gyles pulled Beckett by the arm, and the two retreated into the wood.

They kept off the road, but near enough to keep their bearings. The sun was low in the sky now, hidden behind the clouds. Their pace was as quick as their hurts would allow, and winces were all that broke the hush of the trees while dusk hastened its approach.

The steady rhythm of marching boots turned their blood to ice. "Down," Gyles hissed, and the two men ducked low.

A horde of soldiers churned the earth of the rumrunners' road, near a hundred strong. Their captains were no knights of olde, but dread figures clad in lamellar pauldrons and pockmarked plate. About each of their necks hung a heavy length of black iron chains.

At the fore of the grim procession strode a figure larger than the rest, shoulders swathed in a cloak of black feathers. The men flocked to him like ravens in an unkindness, their self-satisfied squaks matched only by the chorus of sabatons on the forest floor.

Gyles could scarcely breathe until the soldiers were beyond sight. Only when the discord was at last swallowed by the wood did he release a ragged breath. He turned to Beckett; the color had gone from the farmer's face. Gyles swallowed hard and helped him to his feet. Not a word passed between them while they closed in on the village.

Their hurried pace faltered as they neared the square. Gyles breath hitched, and his jaw went slack. From the heart of the village, a second column of smoke twisted toward the sky; thick, black, and angrier than the first. A living, vengeful thing, clawing at the heavens. "Could be Gregor," he muttered, but the words rang hollow.

"He never works past dusk," said Beckett.

Gyles pushed aside the branches blocking his view with trembling fingers. The village came into sight, and the ground tilted beneath him.

Willowdael was burning.

Flames ravaged rooftops, leaping hungrily from one thatched eave to the next. Smoke choked the air, thick with the stench of charred timber. The smell of blood lurked below.

Bodies of islefolk lay strewn across the square. They were lifeless, broken and abandoned as childrens' toys. Gyles gaze darted from body to body until it found a young girl, crumpled by the wellhall. It was Maren, the fisher Willem's daughter, her auburn hair caked in blood and dirt. He hadn't seen her in months. She could not have counted but ten winters in all her life.

For an instant, he felt nothing at all. He did not shed a tear, for the weight of the world was a dam. Should he crack, the flood would come.

Beckett's eyes swept the square, then fixed at last on Gregor's home. Gyles followed close behind his desperate sprint to the smith's cottage, one of the few yet spared by the rising inferno. The door hung ajar, splintered and torn from its hinges.

Inside, Gregor lay motionless. His eyes stared vacantly at the ceiling, unseeing, his axe just out of reach.

"He fought, Gyles," Beckett hissed through clenched teeth. "And where were we? Hiding in the hills! Cowards, both!"

Smoke snaked in through the doorway, and Gyles' lungs began to itch. "There's nothing we could've done, Beck. We're no soldiers." He shot a hand to his heaving chest; his eyes burned, and he spat as the smoke thickened.

For a moment, neither man dared to move. Gyles knew they had but moments before the fumes took them, but he would not permit his legs to abandon Gregor's body.

Beck shattered their trance. "Alyce."

He bolted from the home, and Gyles followed without a thought. Their hurried steps crescendoed into a frantic sprint as they followed the little river back toward the farm. Alyce is a clever woman, Gyles assured himself. She'll hide, or hear them coming and fly. She'll be alright.

Night had fallen by the time they reached Beckett's farm. The field, once alive with the promise of the harvest, stretched out before them as a wasteland of salted earth. Whatever fires had ravaged it were spent, leaving only ash and soot in their wake.

Among the blackened field, Alyce lay still.

Beck staggered toward her. His knees buckled, and he collapsed beside her body. Gently, he cupped her face, smoothed her brittle hair. "Alyce, my dove," he whispered.

Silence.

Then a sound broke from Beckett's chest, low and gutteral, until it rose up into a keening wail that tore through the night.

Gyles stood dumbly. He reached out to touch Beck's shoulder, and stood wordless with his friend for a time. His shock curdled into dread. "We mustn’t stay here."

Beckett did not move. His cries rang through the fields, raw and broken. Too loud, thought Gyles. Vultures come only for the dead, but the raven and his flock may come for us yet.

“Beck!" Gyles' voice sharpened. "We can’t stay here. Do you still have that dory?”

When Beckett didn't answer, Gyles grabbed him by the shoulders and pulled. With a wrenching effort, he tore him from Alyce's body. Beckett fought him to the last; his fingers clawed at her as though his touch might bring her back.

"Come on!" Gyles barked. "We'll die if we stay!"

He heaved Beckett to his feet and threw one of the man's arms around his shoulders. Together, they stumbled toward the pier behind the barn. Charred earth crunched underfoot.

At the dock, Gyles set Beck down as gently as his shaking hands would allow. In the black of night, he wrestled with the rope that bound their escape. Finally he freed the skiff from its moorings. "Come on," he said as he lifted Beckett into the boat.

Gyles climbed aboard and pushed them off. The dory drifted into the black abyss as he took up the oars, and the waves lapped softly against the hull. Beckett hung his head, silent and low. Gyles looked back at the isle, and his eyes met two twin lights that burned weakly in the night; one from the crescent bay, the other from the square.

At last, he felt the tears come, hot as they traced paths down his smoke-streaked face.

Darkness took them as Willowdael faded from view.