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  Altogether, a score or so of the Free, and three hundred awaiting them in the valley below. It would be brutal, Yulan knew. But they should win. If his people were better than Callotec’s – and they were – they would win. If Kerig was strong – and he was – they would win.

  He reached down and freed his knife from its sheath on his calf. He held the tip of the blade poised above the ball of his thumb and watched Hamdan. He felt his heartbeat, marking off the moments. Pacing out this last little stretch of quiet. It paced, and paced. Slowly.

  Hamdan, without looking round, raised one hand and gave a casual, almost dainty, beckoning flutter of his fingers. Yulan sank the point of his knife into his thumb. Blood swelled out, a delicate red orb. He returned the knife to its place; sucked away the blood. Then kicked his heels into his horse’s flank.

  Yulan and the riders crested the skyline in the same moment that the archers’ first arrows took to the air. The fifteen horsemen plunged down the slope, loosing screams to sharpen the pounding of hoofs. It was like falling, Yulan thought; plummeting like a stooping hawk.

  They came so fast, so sudden, that heads were still turning, weapons still being drawn, alarms still being cried, as the fifteen crashed into the side of the long three hundred.

  By Brian Ruckley

  The Godless World

  Winterbirth

  Bloodheir

  Fall of Thanes

  The Edinburgh Dead

  The Free

  COPYRIGHT

  Published by Orbit

  978-1-4055-1876-5

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2014 by Brian Ruckley

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  Excerpt from Promise of Blood by Brian McClellan

  Copyright © by 2010 by Brian McClellan

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

  The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

  ORBIT

  Little, Brown Book Group

  100 Victoria Embankment

  London, EC4Y 0DY

  www.littlebrown.co.uk

  www.hachette.co.uk

  The Free

  Table of Contents

  By Brian Ruckley

  COPYRIGHT

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  PART ONE

  1: When Drann Was Seven

  2: Late To The War

  3: Desert Lions, More Likely

  4: The Bloody Man

  5: Blood And Gold

  6: On The Road To Harvekka

  7: House-Dog’s Puppy

  8: Feet In Water

  9: The Clamour, That Permanence

  10: The Seventeenth Captain Of The Free

  PART TWO

  11: When Drann Was Eleven

  12: The Mistress Always Wins At Land

  13: Ifs Are Hares

  14: Take My Son

  15: Hope On The Air Yet

  16: Simple Men Doing Needful Things

  17: Two Ends To A Spear

  18: Oh, Joy

  19: The Long Three Hundred

  20: The School’s Butcher

  21: The Eye Of The Bereaved

  22: When Yulan Was Not Yet Captain Of The Free

  23: A Killer In The Heart

  24: A Hundred Thousand Wings

  25: The Castle At Haut Terpen

  26: A Still Greater Weapon

  27: Permanence

  PART THREE

  28: When Drann Was Seventeen

  29: Three Doves

  30: Dog-Lord

  31: The Doves Had Come

  32: The First Day At Towers’ Shadow

  33: The Second Day At Towers’ Shadow

  34: The Store Of Time

  35: Witness

  36: And Still They Came

  37: Fools

  38: The Kingshouse

  39: Came The Winter

  40: In Embrace

  41: Free

  Acknowledgements

  extras

  about the author

  if you enjoyed

  Advertisement

  For Chieftain, Dave, Dougie and Alan

  Partners in pretending, many years ago.

  Maybe this is one result of all that pretending.

  Every man is condemned to freedom.

  Jean-Paul Sartre

  PART ONE

  1

  When Drann Was Seven

  When Drann was seven, his grandmother Emmin – they called her, out of her earshot, Old Emmin to distinguish her from Drann’s similarly named sister – sat him down and told him a story. He liked it when she did that. She had more learning, and better words, than the rest of them. The family had come upon thinner times since Old Emmin’s youth, and none of them had matched her schooling. She often whispered to him that he was smarter than the rest of them, which naturally pleased the young him no end.

  The story she told him was, more or less, this:

  When I was young (Old Emmin said) the Empire, those makers and keepers and lovers of orphans, thought they might have for themselves the Tormond Valley, that’s just three hills over from here. It was as green a stretch of land as you could imagine, back then. Full of fat cattle and fat folk. And gold to be panned from some of the hillside streams, too, which made it a place any lord’d like to call his own.

  So the Emperor thought he’d have it, since our Regent Queen, Amyllis, was young and this Hommetic Kingdom she ruled even younger. Perhaps a bit soft, a bit weak. That’s the way emperors and their like think. They’d have come sooner, if they’d not been busy with a thirty-year war a thousand miles away. A lucky thirty years for us.

  Anyhap, the Emperor sent two hundred Orphanidons – all feathers and plate and lances, those fierce boys – and an army, and called the valley a part of his landright. Done, and done, you might think. But not.

  The Regent Queen came to the top of Haut Law, to a place where a stream sprang and ran on down into the Tormond. She brought with her a thing that nobody knew then, but which we call the Bereaved now. A Permanence. A terrible thing. It sat in the grass, at the very spot where the brook was born from the ground. The Queen bade a Schoolman whisper into its ear, and he did.

  The Bereaved wept. Black tears. Stinking tears. They trickled down its face and fell, one by one, into the water. That done, Amyllis took the Bereaved back to the palace by the lake and had the School hide it away in their keep, where it hides still.

  And the Bereaved’s tears flowed down from the Haut Law into the valley, and plague took all the lands of the Tormond. The grass withered, the trees broke, the soil sickened. The people died, with their guts bleeding and their skin boiling and the nails rotting out of their fingers. When they tried to flee into our lands, they found the Queen’s men barring their way with arrow and sword.

  So they ran, instead, alongside the Emperor’s proud army back whence it had come, and carried the plague with them into the lands of the Orphans. Thousands upon thousands died. More folk than you’ve ever seen, or ever will see. They went down like scythed grain. You could smell their dying and their burning even here, for weeks. Made me ill, like I’d not been before.

  When the dying was done, the Regent Queen sent word to the Emperor, and said: “I have done this thing that you might know, and remember: set but one finger upon us, or that which is now ours, and we shall have away your entire arm, unto the very gristle of your shoulder joint.”

  And that’s w
hy, little Drann, even now it’s those thieving, shit-hearted Hommetic bastards who rule over the Tormond – wasteland that it is – and over us, and not the mad Empire of Orphans.

  Drann always enjoyed the stories Old Emmin told him. They were much more interesting than anything his parents let him hear. They fed his dreams and his fancies.

  2

  Late To The War

  Seventeen-year-old Drann blinked. At first his vision was messy, as if water was running over his open eyes. He blinked again and it cleared. He found he was looking at an ant, clambering on the stem of a drooping flower, only a finger or two from his face. It was brandishing its hair-thin front legs in search of something else to climb. To hold on to. A tiny black ant. Drann watched it, and wondered why he was lying here with his face resting on grass, down with the ants and the flowers. It felt a good place to be – comfortable – but also strange.

  There were indistinct sounds coming to him, he could not tell whether through the air or from the soft ground beneath his ear. Thumps and bumps; voices that though oddly dulled and muffled carried alarm and anger. He frowned at that, still watching the ant. And the frown set loose heavy pulses of pain in his head, and cleared his hearing.

  “Get up, you dung-bred shirker!’ someone was shouting at him.

  Drann rolled on to his shoulder, struggling to lift his lead-heavy head. He was in a wood. There was a man standing over him, shouting at him. A man flushed with fury, spittle at his lips. Stocky, pepper-haired, pepper-bearded. Older than Drann’s father.

  “Take up your spear and fight or I’ll gut you myself.”

  The man had a sword in hand, a shield on his arm. He flourished the blade in the direction of Drann’s stomach. This was Creel of Mondoon, Drann thought dreamily as he stared at the dancing point of the sword. Why would a lord – a famed, fierce lord at that – be talking to him? That was a thing that had no place in the world.

  “Wipe the blood from your brow and get on your feet, farm boy,” Creel snarled and swept away, stamping amongst the trees, shouting over his shoulder. “They’ll be on us again, and if I’m dying today it’ll not be because you’re too bone-frit to stand up.”

  Blood? Drann thought numbly. He touched a fingertip to his forehead. It came away wet. Sticky. Blood, right enough. And the sight of it snapped him back to his senses, to his memories. To the awareness that he, and Creel, and all of them, were indeed well set to die today.

  “I’m not afraid,” Drann muttered as he staggered up, though the lord of Mondoon was already gone. “I hit my head, that’s all. I’m not afraid.”

  Drann had come late to the war, and thought he would have no great part in it because of that. He found himself upon the winning side, yet he had killed no one, fought in no battles. He could not decide whether he should regret that or not. It felt a cowardly kind of vengeance to have exacted upon the tyrant and his legions of taxers, usurers, confiscators. By the time Drann finally took up his father’s spear, and walked away from the village in search of an army to join, others had – it turned out – already bought his revenge for him with their lives, and all but won his freedom from the Hommetic yoke. He had paid no price save bruises and blisters.

  Creel of Mondoon was not Drann’s lord, but his motley army had been the closest to hand when Drann finally went in search of the war, and amidst the chaos few people cared about such niceties as fealties and duties. Certainly Drann did not. He cared only that someone – anyone – gave him the chance to let loose some part of the angers that had gathered themselves in him. If they were not given some channel to flow down, he felt they might burst him.

  So he had marched south, one more insignificant pair of feet amongst the many following Creel, and realised that the war was melting away even as he thought himself walking into it. The armies of the King crumbled, their vigour spent in battles fought before Drann had even left his home. The rebels – Creel’s great column and all the others – roamed freely, widely, and found nothing to oppose them save a few stubborn towns with desperate garrisons, a hundred little bands of warriors-turned-bandits. And not once had Drann needed his father’s spear for anything other than leaning on, or rapping against his feet to knock mud or manure from his boots.

  Until today. Until he had the misfortune to be one of the two dozen levymen sent out from the camp with Creel and his guards to climb a hill a quarter-day’s march away. At the time, it had seemed like a piece of good luck, not ill. He had spent the previous half a day and half a night pounding stakes around Creel of Mondoon’s camp – to guard against an attack that no one actually believed would come – and had nothing to look forward to but more of the same hand-blistering work. Anything was more appealing than that prospect.

  Why that particular hill needed climbing, Drann had no idea, of course, though one of the other levies said that on a clear day you might see Armadell-on-Lake from there. Perhaps Creel just wanted to see the King’s city, and know there was no longer any King within its walls. All Drann cared about was that, as far as he knew, no one in his village had ever set eyes upon Armadell-on-Lake. It would give him a small tale to tell upon his return, though not quite of the glorious sort he had imagined himself recounting.

  Not to be, it seemed. Not even that small tale, of climbing a hill.

  Back on his feet, Drann found his legs soft and loose. He had to press one hand against a tree trunk to avoid a prompt return to the grass and the company of ants. He had been running, he remembered. They all had. Even Creel and those of his household warriors still alive, since their horses had been watering along the stream when the attack began and were all dead or taken or scattered. Running up through the sparse, dry woodlands fringing the valley.

  There had been a scream, back down the slope, and Drann had turned his head to look. Seen nothing but the silent trees, and turned back just in time to run into a low branch. A thick, solid branch gnarled with knots and burrs. He remembered the blow, and then the ant climbing the flower right there in front of his blinking eyes.

  Drann did not know who the attackers were. One of those thousand little bands of bandits, most likely, except that there was nothing little about this band. They had come flooding down the hillside, churning and splashing their way across the stream, howling like dogs. Some of Creel’s stern warriors had stood and fought, cutting down the first ten, dozen, of the raiders as they breasted the near bank of the watercourse, but there were too many.

  It had been the lord of Mondoon himself who roared: “Into the woods, into the woods!”

  And in the woods, it had been worse. Creel and his trained men – those still alive – stayed close together, climbing up and away from the killing ground by the stream. Drann’s fellow levymen scattered. He saw some of them casting aside their weapons to unburden their flight. He saw others, not far behind him, overrun by their ragged pursuers, pulled down and speared or beaten. His heart punched hard and fast against his ribs. He heard the scream, turned to look, and ran into the branch.

  Now, he staggered after Creel’s disappearing form. With legs enfeebled, and a dizzying throb in his head, the slope seemed steeper than ever. There was, at least, not much undergrowth. Just thin open woodland stretching up towards the higher ground. He had lied to Creel, Drann realised: he was afraid. He must be, for there was nothing in his mind but the anticipation of a hard, sharp blow to his back. He did not know quite what it would feel like, to be speared, but he knew he would fall, and that was what he expected, and imagined, as he laboured up towards the end of the woods. The vision of that fall, with a spear point in his back, crowded everything else out from his thoughts. That must be fear.

  When the trees at last gave way and Drann came blundering out into brighter light and open ground, he dared for a moment to pause and to look around him. Creel and his guards were pounding on and up over the thin grass, making for a rocky knoll at the summit. Over to Drann’s left another couple of levymen – not much older than him – spilled out of the trees. One of them fell; th
e second stopped and made to help him to his feet but then thought better of it and turned away again. Too late, for their pursuers came rushing up, yelping and hollering, and hacked them both down.

  Drann felt sick, from exhaustion, from horror or terror; he did not know which. There was shouting close behind him, in the woods. He fled from it, making for the lord of Mondoon and that jagged, ragged hump of bare rock upon which he was arraying his last ten or so defenders. It was the only place that looked even remotely like sanctuary, for a farm boy who knew he could not run much further.

  “Set your feet to these rocks and yield not a pace,” Creel was growling as Drann fell amongst the grim-faced warriors of the lord’s household. “Running’ll not save you now. Only thing that might is finding some iron in your heart.”