B3Ch54-Goodbyes (Patreon)

I'm glad the last chapter was received so well. That one was rough to write but now getting into the northern campaign. I think this book will end around the politics surrounding the northern campaign. Maybe attacking the goblin city. Then the next book will be the velthari and the upgrade to city. I'm struggling with keeping the book moving and making sure there's enough detail about how it's developing. ____________________________________________________________________

The legion had marched north a month ago.

Harold had watched them go from the same roof he'd nearly torn apart, bonding the nail, a long dark column bleeding out of the Landing's north gate into the snow, Hale at the head of it and the whole weight of the county's soldiery behind him. They had a hard couple of months of marching to reach the middle of the Blackjaws, and Harold had stayed behind to prepare the county for his absence.

Now it was his turn, and he was going the fast way.

He would be running to catch up. Light kit, his guard, and a few others who could keep pace. He'd catch the tail of the legion somewhere on the northern road and come into the Blackjaws with them before the thaw brought the lords into the summit. Over a hundred soft commitments. Fifty-something firm, and climbing every week now that the approaching Velthari spring attack was getting closer.

He came down into the courtyard in his travel gear expecting to find his escort and a groom or two.

He found half the people he loved in the world instead.

They'd turned out into the cold to see him off. Beth and Josh. Caldwell with his coat buttoned up to his throat. Margaret, sharp as a blade in the gray light. Mark and Evan. Bram Ironhold, taking up the space of two men and grinning like a deranged man. Bethel at the edge of it all with her cane, watching. And off to the side, standing at a formal, correct distance with his hands folded, Lord Henri.

Harold stopped on the bottom step and took them in.

And then he saw Adeline, and he almost tripped.

She was in travel clothes. Thick wool, broken-in boots, a pack already dressed and waiting against the wall behind her. Her son Max stood beside her holding a smaller bundle, and she watched Harold come down the steps with the braced expression of a woman who had already had this argument in her head and won it.

"No," Harold said. “No, there’s no way.”

"Good morning to you too, my lord."

"Adeline. What the hell are you doing?"

She lifted one finger and pointed it at his chest like she meant to drive it through him. "You are a Count. You are going to a summit of every proud, prickly, small-minded lord on this peninsula, and you will be expected to arrive with a staff." Her chin came up. "The idiots in the legion cannot be trusted to run your correspondence, mind your appointments, or stop you from saying the true thing when the useful thing would serve better. I'm coming with you."

Alarm shot through him. What the hell is she thinking? This was going to be dangerous.

He crossed the last of the distance between them without quite deciding to. "What are you doing?" he said again, low. "You know how dangerous this is going to be."

Adeline set a hand flat against his chest, not pushing him away, exactly, just holding the space between them, and behind her Josh let out a whistle and grinned.

"I lost one husband to these wars," she said; there was no accusation in it. "Gods help me, I actually got a new prospect a little bit trained up —" the word made his ears warm — "and the first thing that happens is he rides off to another one. Not this time." She looked at him then, and under the fierceness there was something that was almost pity. "This time I'm coming. And trust me. You're going to need me."

"Adeline—"

"It's going to be politics, Harold. You are very good at a great many things. You are not good at that, and you know it, and you're going to need me in that room."

He tried the only card he had left.

"What about Max?" He replied weakly.

Caldwell stepped in before the boy could open his mouth, one hand landing on Max's shoulder. "He'll stay with my wife and me. He gets on with my lot, and it'll do the older ones good to have someone to boss for a change." He glanced down at the bundle the boy was holding, which had just shifted and made an irritable clicking sound. "And that bird of his at the Mews will keep every child in my house in line better than I ever have."

Harold breathed out through his nose. He was losing this.

"The run," he said, mustering the last of it. "We're moving fast. Hard pace, all day, for weeks. How are you going to keep up?"

Adeline arched one eyebrow at him. Then she reached up and patted him twice on the chest, gentle, almost fond, and said, "You're a lovely man, Harold, and I like what we have. Don't go ruining it just yet."

Bram's laugh came out of him like a rockfall. "HA! Give it up, Count — she had you the moment she packed the bag! Best surrender early and keep your dignity!" Josh doubled over next to him, wheezing, and the two of them held each other up.

Harold looked at the sky for a moment. “Gods help me,” he muttered. 

"Fine," he said. "Fine."

Adeline inclined her head with the serene grace of a woman accepting a surrender she had negotiated in advance, and turned and knelt with Max.

Beth had come forward while he was busy being defeated, and she stood with one hand resting low on the round of her belly, heavy under her coat now.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I'm going to miss the baby."

"You'd better not miss anything worse than that." Beth reached out and pulled him into a fierce hug. "You just make sure you make it back. We'll keep this place standing while you're gone. It's what we do."

Josh, still recovering, thumped him on the shoulder hard enough to rock him. "Bring me something back," he said. "Maybe some expensive new northern liquor, so don't cheap out on me." He was grinning. "Just — yeah. Come back and put it on the shelf yourself, okay." 

Harold hugged him fiercely. “I’ll miss you too.”

Then Margaret.

She came forward composed, and she said, "Don't let Marcus talk you into anything dumb," and then her voice cracked.

She sniffed, once, sharp and furious at herself, and the perfect administrator's mask slipped sideways and showed the woman under it.

It had been happening since Hale left, and Harold knew why. They'd been married three weeks now. A small, almost secret thing: a handful of people at a ledge two days' ride from the Landing that the two of them had found months back while running scenarios for Garrick's scouts, high on a shoulder of rock with the whole basin laid out gold beneath it. Harold had quietly asked Beth to form a plot that took in the ledge and the meadow below, signed the deed over to them as a wedding gift, and watched Margaret stare at the paper a long while before she could say a word. Now her husband was up a frozen road with an army, and she was crying in a courtyard and hating it.

Harold pulled her into a gentle hug.

"Don't scheme too hard while I'm gone," he murmured into her hair. "And do me a favor. Make sure Henri doesn't die in one of your schemes. I have plans for him."

She slapped his chest, a wet laugh breaking out of her. "You take care of yourself. I don't — I don't even know why I'm crying, this is ridiculous, God knows you've got enough trouble hanging off you already—"

He grinned, and because she was still slapping at him and swearing, he tightened his arms and lifted her clean off the cobbles and swung her once around, the most feared spymaster on the peninsula, and she smacked him harder.

"Put me down, you brute—"

He set her back on her feet. Her eyes were bright, and her nose was pink. She looked absolutely murderous, and he loved her.

"Hale's been good for you," he said. "I'm happy for you both. Truly."

She composed herself back into a person of consequence with visible effort and jabbed a finger at him in place of a reply, which he understood perfectly.

Mark and Evan next.

The two of them had run themselves ragged all winter turning the guild into something that could actually feed a campaign: muster rolls, supply contracts, the whole adventurer machine pointed north. Only Mark was going. Evan was staying to keep the rest of it turning.

Harold clasped Evan's forearm and pulled him in.

"Keep them out of trouble, huh."

"Don't come back in a box." Evan thumped his back once and stepped clear, blunt as ever. "We’ll survive down here without your lordship."

Mark was already grinning past both of them, packed and rocking on his heels like a man waiting for a gate to open. "Are you kidding? Every lord on the peninsula in one valley." He rubbed his hands together. "I've got three deals half-cooked before we're even out of the county, Harold. This isn't a summit. This is the best place to sell some of the stuff I’ve collected. I’m going to be rich."

Then Caldwell.

"Sorry about leaving you holding this place down again," Harold said.

Caldwell rolled his eyes toward the heavens. "Somebody in this county has to be organized. God knows it isn't going to be any of you." But he stepped into the hug and gave it back, and when Harold said, "I'm sorry I'm going to miss the third one," Caldwell only waved a hand.

"I understand. Duty calls." He said it lightly. Then he hesitated, and the lightness went out of him. And he knew what was coming; Caldwell had been carrying it a long time.

"One thing," Caldwell said. "That first time. When you called on me, in my warehouse, before any of this." He turned his coin over once in his fingers. "You told me you knew what happened to me. After we all arrived here. My first — my other time through."

Harold smiled and nodded. He'd wondered when Caldwell would finally ask.

Caldwell's jaw worked. "What happened?"

Harold breathed in, and the memory appeared sharply within his mind. His mental perk was perfect for this kind of thing.

"You did well," he said, shaking his head. "You were one of the very few who earned a gold-ranked starter stele for your settlement. You took it up into the far northwest, right up into the mountains. Snow country, brutal winters, the sort of place most people avoided. And you turned your area into a regional powerhouse. You were the only reliable source of half a dozen rare resources on the whole continent, because you were the only lunatic who'd planted his flag where they grew." His smile warmed. "You helped me out of a hole more than once, actually. When I needed something exotic for a project and had nowhere else to get it, there was always a Caldwell caravan that could be persuaded, for a frankly obscene price."

Caldwell almost smiled at that.

Then Harold's face changed, and Caldwell's smile went with it.

"But the mana kept rising," Harold said quietly. "And the region you'd built your fortune on woke up. Things that had been sleeping under the snow for a very long time opened their eyes. Dragons, Caldwell. Among other things. You'd built your whole life inside what turned out to be an end-game zone that hadn't come online yet. You made a fortune right up until the day it killed you."

Caldwell's frustration built across his face, muscle by muscle, and then, because he was Caldwell, it resolved into a grim, disgusted nod. "Yes," he said. "That does sound exactly like something I would do."

He looked at Harold in the eyes, and this time the question came out flat and steady and terrible.

"My wife?"

Harold shook his head, slowly. "As far as I ever learned, a dragon razed the city. I'm sorry. Everyone inside the walls died."

Caldwell's mouth pressed into a thin, flat line. He nodded. And when he spoke, his voice had gotten quieter.

"That is not going to happen again," he said. "You tell me what you need, Harold. Whatever it is. I'll make it happen."

Harold pulled him back into the hug, and held it. "You're a good man, Caldwell. Your wife is a lucky woman."

"Ah." Caldwell cleared his throat, recovering himself, and there was almost a smile again. "You just make sure you look after Adeline out there. She's had a harder road than she lets on."

Harold glanced sideways to where Adeline was crouched in front of her son, her hands on his shoulders, saying something that made the boy stand up straighter. He honestly could not have said, if pressed, when the two of them had agreed to be whatever they were becoming. It had simply happened somewhere in the long gray middle of the winter, in the space between a ledger and a cup of terrible coffee, without either of them ever declaring it.

"I'm not even sure when that started," he admitted.

Caldwell chuckled, low and knowing. "That's how it always goes with the good ones. And she's got a good head on her. Better than yours, most days." He clapped Harold's arm. "Go on."

Which left Bethel.

She came to him last, her cane stamping its slow certain rhythm on the cobblestones, and the others gave her room without being asked. Harold bent to embrace the old woman, and her hand came up first and cupped his cheek, dry and light as a leaf.

It came up through her palm before he was ready for it. For a moment he was simply at rest, and something unclenched in him and he had to lock his knees to keep standing. He did not, quite, weep.

Bethel smiled up at him, kind and clear-eyed.

"You've gotten better, child," she said softly. "I can feel it. You've made a kind of peace with your past. Most don’t manage it at all."

Then her smile faded.

"But be wary of that thing in your chest." Her fingers pressed harder against his cheek, and her gaze dropped to the space beneath his sternum as if she could look straight through the bone. "I can feel it in there with you. It hungers, Harold. It is nothing but hunger." A shudder went through her small frame. Her eyes went wide and her breath caught, and for the space of a heartbeat the old woman was afraid in a way Harold had never seen from her. Then it passed, and she was only Bethel again, looking up at him.

Harold glanced down at his own chest, then back to her, and nodded.

"We have an agreement," he said. "It and I. I'll give it what it wants. And in return, it's going to help me get what I want."

Bethel's hand did not leave his cheek, but her voice went fierce, almost pleading. "And what does it want, child? What have you promised that evil thing?"

Harold did not soften it, and he did not look away. The Count of the Basin came forward in his place. The courtyard seemed to drop a degree.

"Blood and misery, Bethel," he said. "That's all it's ever wanted. So that's what I'm going to give it." His voice did not waver. "Endless blood and misery."

For a moment no one in the courtyard said anything at all.

Then Bethel patted his cheek once, gently, the way you'd gentle a horse that had shown you its teeth, and let her hand fall, and the ordinary morning came rushing back in around them: Bram hauling a pack up onto one shoulder with a grunt, a groom bringing up the rest, Adeline straightening from her son with her chin set and her eyes on the north road.

"Well then," the old woman said, and there was grief in it, and love. "You'd best be about it. Go and be what they need you to be. And come back to us as much of yourself as you can manage."

Harold kissed the top of her head, and shouldered his pack, and went to join the war.