B3Ch55-Catching up to the Legion (Patreon)

I know a few people aren't happy about the Harold/ Adeline thing. I'm just asking for you to trust the process! _________________________________

They had been running since the gate, and the mountains had not gotten any closer.

Harold set the pace at the front of the column and held it, boots eating the frozen road in a rhythm that never broke. Behind him, a century of knights ran in loose file, mana banked low in their legs so it would last, breath steaming in the gray light. The snow had crusted overnight and it cracked under a hundred pairs of boots like the whole world was made of thin ice. He exulted in it. Sometimes he forgot how beautiful this place was when he was cooped up inside his keep.

But the nail sulked in his chest.

It had been sulking for a month. He'd bonded it in blood and locked it down the same day, and it had spent the winter pressing at him. It wanted blood and every deer they'd startled, every distant shape the scouts flagged and waved past. That one. That one. Why not that one.

He knew he would have to feed it soon.

"How far to the ridgeline?" Mark had come up on his shoulder without Harold hearing him. He wasn't even breathing hard.

"Tonight, if the weather holds." Harold didn't look over. "You could pretend this is costing you something. The men behind you are taking it personally."

"They're knights. They'll live." Mark squinted at the peaks. "Weather's not going to hold, though. Clouds are stacking over the mountains."

"Nope," Harold agreed. "We'll want solid shelter before dark. Then the pass tomorrow, and it's downhill to the legion."

Mark grunted and dropped back into the file.

At this pace he could do this forever. He glanced back to check on Adeline. Her face was scrunched up in effort, though she didn't seem to be struggling nearly as much as he had thought.

Her brown hair was tied up behind her head, and her cloak billowed behind her as she ran. Her freckles stood out starkly as she ran, and his breath caught in his throat as she caught him looking at her. She stuck her tongue out at him as he smiled back.

He had no idea how she was keeping up. He could feel the mana running through her, but she spent the winter behind a desk with a ledger and a cup of coffee. She should have fallen out on day one of the run, but now on day two she was keeping pace just like the knights.

He fell back through the file until he was beside her.

"Ok, I give up," he said.

"Finally," She got the word out on an exhale and didn't waste a second one.

"Adeline," Harold warned.

"I'm fine, Harold." A breath. "I've been running the hills around the Landing for months now. Before the office opened."

"That doesn't explain the mana you're channeling into some kind of perk," he murmured back to her.

She turned her head, just enough to give him a look, and even as tired as she obviously was, she still looked amazing.

"I asked for help from Garrick," she admitted. "I've been out there using their obstacle course, getting beat bloody by them and even joined in on some of their exercises. Learning to push some of my perks." Another breath, ragged now. "Josh built a whole program to teach people that, Harold. You just never checked who signed up."

Harold ran beside her for a while and said nothing. He might have missed that.

"What's the perk?" he asked, curious.

"Second Wind." She almost smiled, or would have if she'd had the air for it. "It was a nothing perk. Just a recovery thing. I got it hauling water the first month, when I was washing Max's clothes." She dragged in another breath. "Turns out if you learn to manipulate it and have the mana to spare, it's actually pretty good. It just costs."

He nodded in understanding. He used to have that perk as well, though it sounded like she had pushed it further than he had. "It couldn't have been easy learning to use that perk like you have."

She smiled brilliantly at him. "It wasn't. I'll tell you more tonight when you make me coffee." She fixed her eyes back on the road. "Now get back up front so your people can stop giving us room and looking at us weird."

Harold looked around and noticed that his guard had given them space to talk as they ran on the cobbled road to the north. Muttering under his breath, he picked up his pace and got back to the front.

But the next mile flowed under his feet a little lighter as he ran. Next to him, Carter had fallen in, snickering to himself.

"Say it," Harold said, "and get it over with."

"Nothing to say, sir." Carter ran a few steps. "Only that I've watched you stare down monsters and not blink, and a woman with a pretty smile just ran you off like a stray dog." He shrugged. "Good to know the range on you."

The next day, a great troll found them in the pass at midday.

They heard it first, a grinding boom that came up through the soles of their boots before it reached their ears, and then the thing itself came around the shoulder of the mountain and stopped in the middle of the only path through. The road through here had never been finished. Monsters came down out of the high passes to test the fort at the mouths, and no work crew lasted long enough to lay the last stretch.

Harold had fought trolls. He'd killed hill trolls and forest trolls and watched his knights tear into them on the trip here. Those had been the size of houses.

This was the size of the hill the house sat on.

It stood where the pass narrowed to a throat of black rock, thirty feet if it was an inch, its hide gone gray and plated and lichened over like it had grown up out of the mountain and only lately decided to walk. One arm dragged a club that had started life as a tree. Its eyes found the column, small and stupid and patient, and it took a step that shook grit down the cliff faces on either side.

The century stopped without an order. A few of the knights spread wide on reflex, hands going to weapons, and Carter drew breath to start giving orders while Jack spun an axe in his hand.

"Form up, hold the—"

"Stand down," Harold said.

Carter shut his mouth. Jack stopped mid-spin. Carter, coming up the file at a run, stopped too, one hand still on his sword, and looked at the troll, and then at Harold.

There'd been a time they would have argued. Carter especially. They didn't argue anymore, though.

Not since the morning a month back when the guard had only barely been able to stop him in the madness the Nail had driven him into. And now he could feel it pulsing in his chest. It knew what he intended, and his breath quickened as his body thrummed with mana.

He quickly checked the system panel for the Bloodless Nail relic.

The Bloodless NailRelic of the Deep Dark — Bonded (Permanent)

Bound in blood to Harold James Calder. It cannot be drawn out, unbonded, or destroyed while the host draws breath. 

Sanguine EdgeThe bearer's attacks gain a vampiric aspect.

The Owner's MercyThe bearer heals as the Nail wills it from its stored life force, and death comes slow and grudging so long as the relic is fed.

The HungerThe Nail feeds on blood and misery and is never full.When you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back.

The panel read like something scratched on a dungeon wall by a very unhappy man. But he could feel the hunger of the Nail as the troll roared at them. It had behaved so far, so it was time to reward it.

"Keep them back," Harold said to Carter, already walking.

"Understood." Carter paused as he considered his next words. "Harold."

He paused.

"That's a big one," Carter hedged. It was as close as Carter came to asking a man to be careful.

"Yeeep. Piece of cake," Harold said, and started drawing the mana up.

He ran through his mana exercises, forced mana into himself past the point of comfort, and kept going. His mana was dense now, and the quality was past the point where his old mana used to be. It packed into his legs, his arms, his chest until his skin hummed and his teeth ached and the snow hissed faintly under his boots where the heat came off him. He held it there, past what his body wanted to hold, and ignored the pain. Then he let it go.

He crossed the pass fast enough that some of his own guard lost him. One moment he was at the head of the column, the next a smear of motion across the black rock, and he drew the bastard sword that grumpy dwarf had forged to replace his old sword. The troll never got its club down properly. Harold took its leg off at the knee in a single pass, and the mana along the blade barely shivered doing it. He'd known the troll had to be rare-tier at least. Its hide and mana should have been thick enough to stop a ballista bolt. But it didn't turn the sword. It sliced through it like water, and he skidded to a stop twenty feet on, turned, and shot back.

The troll bellowed and started to fall, and then, faster than anything that size had a right to move, swung the club at him. Harold ducked under it, felt it part his hair, and came up inside its reach. Its whole body flushed a deep furnace red as the rage took it, and the stump of its leg began to knit, new muscle crawling out to rebuild what he'd taken.

Slower than it should have. His mana had infected the wound, and it was fouling the regeneration like grit in a gear.

Harold took the other leg off at the same joint.

The troll dropped to its knees, and one huge arm shot out to catch itself against the rock, and Harold sheared through that too. The sword went through troll bone and troll muscle so easily, and some part of Harold was distinctly delighted.

This sword is incredible.

The nail agreed. It shivered in his chest, bright with it, and for once the two of them wanted exactly the same thing.

He walked up to the head. It smelled terrible, and the slate grey of its hide was strewn with blood.

The troll lay moaning on the black rock, legless, one arm gone, and its small eyes rolled toward him and widened. Whatever lived behind them had finally caught up. It was terror, plain and total, and the moaning climbed.

Harold took pity on it.

He put the sword through its skull and into whatever passed for its brain, and that was when he found the last thing the blade could do.

The blood rose.

It ran up the fuller in a thin dark thread, against gravity up the steel and over the guard and up his arm, and the nail behind his breastbone opened like a mouth. He felt it screaming, wordless and victorious, as it pulled the troll's blood the length of his body and drank down everything it could pull.

Then the memories hit.

The troll, young, in a hall of stone so deep it was lit by luminescent crystals. The Troll King's court, somewhere far under the mountains. The troll leaving it, because it wanted to grow, wanted to see. The troll in these passes for years, smashing every human it found, and loving it; humans smashed so well and tasted even better.

Harold breathed out through his nose and tried to push the memory off him. The nail wouldn't let him. It turned the page instead, deliberately, and showed him one more.

The court again. The throne. And on it, catching the light of a crystal, was a gem.

The Nail wanted the gem, and so, all at once, did he. Harold considered it for a moment, then set it aside for later. He could walk back into this memory any time he wanted now. That was what Mens Perfecta was for.

That gem was interesting though; it wasn't something he recognized offhand.

The nail let him, and it finished its meal, and settled contentedly against his sternum. He swore he could feel it purring in his chest.

Behind him, the men had gone quiet as Harold wiped the blade and sheathed it. They'd all seen hard fights, but they had watched the sword empty a troll of its blood, watched the blood climb the steel and vanish into him, and none of them had anything to say about it. One of the younger knights kept his eyes on the cliff face and did not look at the Count, or the sword, or the red still drying on the scabbard.

Then Jack came up on his shoulder.

"You need practice with that thing." He eyed the sword and the ruin of the troll with a professional's flat interest. "You swing a bastard sword like it's a maul. You and me. Tonight."

Harold nodded distractedly. He wasn't really looking at Jack.

He was looking for Adeline, and he found her at the edge of the guard, already looking back at him. She held his eyes a moment, and then she gave him a small, gentle smile.

He might be turning into a monster. But she wasn't afraid of him. Not yet, anyway.

The storm caught them on the far shoulder of the pass, and it screamed down the mountains, driving them into cover.

The snow came sideways, and the temperature dropped hard and fast. Even mana-empowered as they were, the cold still sank into their bones and refused to leave no matter how quickly they moved.

The knights that were acting as scouts found a cave. A wide black mouth in the mountain's flank, a throat of stone that went back forty feet and turned and kept going, but at least it was dry and out of the wind. They got the whole column inside as the light died, and they got fires going immediately in the deep turn where the smoke could find its way out through some crack overhead, and then there was nothing to do but wait out the sky.

It snowed for three days.

The knights did what soldiers do. They slept, and ate, and complained. Somewhere on the first night a man lost three days' pay at dice and announced to the cave that the dice were cursed, and Elroy told him solemnly that the mountain was cursed, the whole mountain, and he'd best hand his coin to someone who could bear the burden. Somewhere in the second day a song started up in the deep of the cave, and Harold recognized the tune as the one his adventurers had made up about Henri and decided he didn't need to know the new verses. Jack produced a set of pipes from somewhere, threatened to play them, and was talked out of it by what sounded like the entire century at once.

Harold sat at the mouth of the cave where the cold was, drinking his coffee. He liked it that way as the snow howled outside and the cup was hot in his hands. He watched the snow come down. He was eager to get going, but he knew this was no weather to march in.

Adeline came and sat down beside him the first night.

She moved like every joint in her body had filed a complaint, and she lowered herself onto the stone next to him with the care of someone twice her age, letting out a long breath when she finally got there.

"You have one of the only warm things in this cave," she said, "and you're sitting in the coldest part of it."

"Eh, the cold helps, and I don't feel it as badly as you all do." He poured her a cup without being asked and handed it over. "Careful. It's hot."

"There's a reason I normally make your coffee. You make it too strong." She took it, wrapped both hands around it, drank, grimaced, and drank again.

They sat with it for a while. The fire popped somewhere behind them, and the snow came down in front of them.

"All right," Adeline said eventually. "Tell me about the memory you got." She tipped her head at him. "You stood over that troll and went somewhere for a second."

Harold turned his cup in his hands. "I was hoping for the regeneration perk, but the Nail gave me some kind of memory from it growing up in one of the troll king's courts." He shrugged. "It wanted to show me a gem it found in there. Think it wants me to get it."

Adeline looked at him curiously. "You said it didn't want things like that. It hungers, right? Why would it want a gem?"

Harold chuckled. "No idea. Maybe it's some kind of blood gem. It wasn't a kind I recognized." He drank. "I'll figure out the gem eventually. Not tonight."

She was quiet a moment; her voice came out a little lower. "Is Max going to be all right back there?"

Harold smiled and snorted. "Too late for regrets. You know Caldwell will take care of him, and it's been hard enough to tear him away from the Mews for his school work." Harold felt his mouth tug. "He's going to come out of this winter half-feral and able to fall off an eagle without crying about it. Margaret checks on him more than she'll admit. He's fine, Adeline."

She let out a breath, and some of the day went out of her with it, and she leaned into his shoulder and stayed there.

Behind them, deeper in the cave, someone lost a hand of cards loudly, and someone else laughed harder than the joke deserved. At the mouth, half a squad stood their watch with their faces to the cold, looking out, and every so often not quite looking back in.

"You know they can hear us," Adeline said.

"They can hear everyone. It's a cave." Harold reached inside his coat and came out with a metal flask, thumbed it open, and tipped a measure of something amber into her cup.

She watched him do it. "Sir. What, exactly, are you doing?"

"Improving it." He put the flask away. "God knows it needs the help. You said so yourself."

Adeline drank, and coughed, and her eyes came up bright. "That is much better coffee."

Harold smiled widely at her. "It's my secret to resisting the cold."

"I know. Pour me more of the not-coffee."

They talked long into the night. He told her about his marriage, years and a life ago.

"We didn’t separate badly," he said. "We both just kinda stopped trying. Then Sarah died, and I stopped being much of a husband to anyone. Stopped being much of anything for a while." He turned the cup in his hands. "It was a long time ago. Doesn't hurt to hold anymore."

She nodded, and maybe she understood. She had lost someone too.“Have you tried to find her again? I’m sure you could,” she asked, looking across the space at him. Harold waggled his hand. “Ehh, I told Margaret where to find her and asked her to make sure she gets taken care of. I’ve no idea if she did or not though. I’m not looking to rekindle anything with her if that’s what you’re asking.” Harold replied as he adjusted. “What about you and Max? How did you meet?”

"Max introduced himself by informing me he was the best-looking man in the caravan," she said. "The worst part was he wasn't wrong, and he knew it, and he was so pleased about it that I hated him for about a week. Our first date we climbed a weatherwood tree together and looked out over the meadow." She almost smiled. "We took the offer to come here after a war took our town. A fresh start, he kept saying. Somewhere nothing had happened yet."

"And then it did," Harold said.

"And then it did." She drank. "That's Gravesend for you. Endless war."

Somewhere during their talk, the cold stopped bothering them. They drank the not-coffee, and they laughed loud enough that the watch at the mouth of the cave gave up trying to hide their own smiles.

Which was, of course, when Elroy and Jenkins wandered over.

Elroy planted himself in front of Harold, crossed his arms, and looked down at him with the gravity of a man about to negotiate a treaty. "Now, my lord. I know you got that big scary nail in your chest now, so don't go trying to suck my blood when I say this." A breath. "But if you hurt Ms. Adeline here, we will be forced to put you down."

Harold inhaled a mouthful of not-coffee and spat half of it into the snow.

Adeline covered her mouth with her hand, and her shoulders shook, and she didn't defend him, the traitor.

"What," Harold managed, "are you two talking about?"

And Jenkins, who Harold had seen laugh through a goblin ambush, looked more serious than Harold had ever seen him, outside the day Elroy went down in the trial.

"Don't you be hurting Ms. Adeline now." Jenkins didn't blink. "We were friends with Max. I figure he'd have approved of you though."

"Not like he could've stopped him either," Elroy muttered.

Jenkins smacked him across the chest without looking.

Harold set his cup down and stood, and he put a hand on each of their shoulders, and he meant it. "I promise you. I'll take my absolute best care of her. All right?"

Elroy and Jenkins looked at him. Then they looked at each other. Then they gave him, in perfect unison, the flattest stink-eye two grown men had ever produced, and backed away into the cave without another word.

Harold sat back down. Adeline crawled in against his side.

"They came to Max's funeral," she said, as if to explain them. "Used to come check on me at the adventurers' guild after, when I was working the desk. A couple of times a week. Bring me food sometimes."

"Huh." Harold pulled her in against him. "Did they really?"

"Mmm. People write them off because they act like idiots all day." She tucked her head under his jaw. "Max never did. They're good people."

Harold looked into the dark where the two of them had gone. "Hmm."

Then Adeline reached up, took a light hold of his chin, and turned his face down to hers.

"Now," she said. "You said something a minute ago. About taking good care of me."

And she kissed him, and Harold, who had spent a great deal of time being very careful, melted. Her hands began to wander in a direction that was extremely not careful.

"Wait," he said against her mouth. "The guard. There's a whole squad ten feet—"

He turned to look, and they had disappeared.

The mouth of the cave was empty, the watch gone somewhere else, having correctly read the situation, and Adeline was laughing at him, low and warm. Whatever was left of his resistance went with the last of them.

"You forget," she said, "I was a soldier's wife."

They came down out of the pass on the fourth day into thin sun and found the legion exactly where it was supposed to be.

The rearguard saw them first: a scout line strung out across the lower slope, and then a horn, and then the whole long dark column of the county's soldiery halted on the road below, a legion a month into a hard march and looking every day of it. Smoke from a hundred cookfires. Wagons. The ordered chaos of an army that had learned to make and break a camp in its sleep. And walking back up the line toward them came Colonel Hale.

He reined in a few feet off and looked the group over: Harold, Mark, Adeline, and a century of knights who'd clearly had a week. He took in their state.

He grunted, and saluted Harold sharply. "About time you caught up. Guess you got caught in that storm that blew through."

"We found a cave," Harold said. "Warm enough."

Hale's eyes moved to the sword on Harold's back, and the dark stain worked into the leather of the scabbard that no amount of snow had scrubbed out. He said nothing about it. He looked at the knights again, counted them the way an officer counts without seeming to, and came up with the same number that had gone up the pass.

"There's a troll in that pass," he said. "Big one. Rare-tier. Had a man posted at the fort to warn you off it and send you the long way round." He looked back at Harold. "You came down the short way."

“Huh,” Harold said. "A troll? It wasn't there," Harold said.

Mark made a sound that wasn't quite a cough.

Hale looked at him while Mark looked at the mountains.

"Piece of cake," Carter offered, deadpan, from somewhere back in the file.

Hale held Harold's eye a moment. Then he grunted again, approval or the closest thing he issued. He didn't ask how it had gone. He raised an eyebrow at the stained scabbard, and looked back down the hill.

"Well," he said, and turned his horse. "Camp's down the hill. There's warm stew. Get your people warm." He glanced back once, over his shoulder, dry as the road. "Good to have you, Harold. Try not to solve any more of my problems on the way in. Makes the men lazy."