Valkyrie's Shadow
Before the Storm: Act 11, Chapter 9

Chapter 9

『We’ve got trouble.』

“No shit.”

From his hiding spot in the windbreak along the road, Reed watched as tongues of flame slowly spread between the thatched rooftops of the nearby village. Normally, an entire village would rally to fight such a blaze, but this particular village’s inhabitants were too busy being killed to do anything about it.

“He gonna make us fight?”

“Maybe,” Reed said.

“They got a Knight. We can’t fight ‘em square.”

“He hasn’t made us fight anyone square yet.”

Reed brushed his fingers through the fletchings sticking out of the quiver at his hip. They hadn’t fought anyone square. Yet.

The way they did things wasn’t much different from the Eight Fingers. Back then, if a Noble wouldn’t give in to them, they’d put on pressure by taking out the people under them. Going against Knights would be something new, though. That was something the Six Arms always insisted on doing.

“Hey, how much do you think that armour is worth?”

Reed glanced at the boy hiding behind the tree next to his.

“Hah? What’re you yappin’ about, Colb?”

“All that fancy shit the Knight’s wearin’. Gotta be worth a lot, yeah?”

This kid…

“One of you’s ready to tuck tail,” Reed grumbled, “and another’s already strippin’ the guy in his head.”

“I bet he’s got a fat purse, too.”

The week’s successes were getting to their heads. Raul didn’t care what they did with the men that they had intercepted, so every ambush resulted in a bunch of free stuff. They didn’t have to pay their dues to the syndicate, either. By the time Raul redeployed them to deal with Laval’s men, half of his gang had a new pair of boots, and they all had enough coin to drink away the rest of the winter.

『I’m sending some villagers your way. Laval’s men are chasing after them.』

“Anyone see ‘em?” Reed called out.

“No.”

“Nope.”

He clutched at his bow as he peered towards the village. People were fleeing in every direction, but he didn’t see the Knight or his men behind any of them.

“There they are! Comin’ out the west side!”

Reed stepped out from his hiding place with a curse.

“Wake up, boys! We’re movin’!”

How’s that sending them our way?

Reed and his group had followed the river across the county, so they were positioned south of the village. It wasn’t as if there was anyone they could voice their protests to, however, so they cut across the field towards the western road at a sprint. As they were making their way, a group of women and children abruptly ran down off the road and into the field in their direction. The Knight reined in his horse on the road and waved his sword in the villagers’ direction.

“Run those rebels down!”

The armsmen jogging after the Knight turned to slide down the grassy shoulder of the road. Reed’s first thought was to find a good position to attack them from, but it wasn’t as if he could hide in a mud puddle.

Well, here goes nothin’...

“Fan out!” Reed shouted before nocking an arrow to his bowstring.

His order was met with looks of panic when the villagers finally noticed them. Much to Reed’s frustration, their pace faltered. Luckily, the armsmen behind them slowed down too.

“Identify yourselves!” One of them demanded.

Reed answered with an arrow to the man’s gut. The other woodsmen joined in his assault, sending their black-fletched missiles zipping past the villagers and into their pursuers. In their confusion over the unexpected attack, the armsmen lost five of their ten men in the field.

“What are you fools doing?!” The infuriated Knight shouted from the road, “Kill those rabble!”

“Hey, Reed.”

“Yeah?”

“I’ve always wondered…what’s a rabble?”

“Dunno.”

Whatever it was, it didn’t change anything for the Knight’s men. Reed and his fellow woodsmen easily kept their distance as they methodically flanked their quarry. Within minutes, the Knight left his men for dead, riding back to the village at a gallop.

“What we gonna do about that Knight?” Colb asked after the last of the armsmen fell.

Reed looked up at the ceiling of low-hanging clouds. Ambushing unsuspecting armsmen in a field was one thing; fighting them in a village was another. He supposed that they would have to leave eventually, but Raul was trying to stop them from doing as much damage as possible.

“Let’s get a closer look,” Reed said. “Might be somthin’ we can do.”

From a distance, it looked like the Knight was calling for the armsmen left behind in the village. By the time Reed and his men reached the settlement’s fenced perimeter, however, only three had responded to the Knight’s shouting.

“Did the villagers get the rest?”

Reed shook his head.

“Don’t see their bodies lyin’ around. Maybe they can’t hear the guy.”

Woodsmen had keener ears than most, so the armsmen might not have heard the Knight over the sound of everything. If that was what was happening, then Reed and his men had a chance.

『Two of Laval’s people are coming around the cottage ahead of you.』

A pair of men in Laval’s checkered blue and green came into view a moment later. The sacks in their hands didn’t do anything to stop the arrows that found them. Colb stepped up to one of the bodies, nudging one of the bags on the ground with the toe of his boot. A mix of iron tools, pots, and copper coins spilt onto the glass with a metallic clatter.

“Looks like they’re lootin’ the place before it burns down–”

The youth gawked as a naked girl ran screaming by. The armsman chasing after her sprouted three arrows.

“And rapin’,” Reed spat.

“What’s new?” Another woodsman said.

Reed grunted in response. The Azerlisian Marches had been the way it was for as long as anyone could remember. You could work for the Nobility or the Eight Fingers. Either way, you were scum. Anyone who wasn’t scum didn’t survive.

“Spread out,” Reed said. “Hunt these idiots down.”

Idiots didn’t survive, either…at least the idiots without wealth, power, or connections to shield them. Never mind having your pants down in the middle of an attack; it wasn’t a good idea to plunder a place when the people living there were still around.

Reed remained alert as he stalked the village lanes. Going by the Knight’s repeated calls for his men to return to him, he was oblivious to what was going on despite just being ambushed outside of the village.

『One of Laval’s men just entered the building you’re walking behind.』

He paused to look around before pulling himself atop the nearby cottage. The muffled sounds of wooden furniture being overturned under his feet confirmed Raul’s report. Reed peeked over the rooftop to see if anyone was on the other side, but the only thing that greeted his vision was a muddy path strewn with corpses and debris.

It wasn’t an unfamiliar sight, though the scale of it felt wasteful. The Eight Fingers often publicly killed stubborn opposition to encourage cooperation from everyone else, but every person who died meant one less to exploit.

The racket of ransacking beneath him ceased. He stepped up into a half-crouch, balancing himself on the roof’s timbers as he waited for the armsman to emerge. His mark didn’t even bother looking around when he stepped out of the cottage, walking straight across the lane to kick down the door of the next building. Reed loosed an arrow into the man’s back as he stepped over the door frame, and then planted another for good measure as the loot-crazed armsman toppled into the home.

What does that bring us up to?

Raul mentioned that around two dozen armsmen were accompanying the Knight, so they were about half done, numbers-wise. He still wasn’t sure what they would do about the Knight, however. They couldn’t let him escape, but the plate-clad thug was as strong as several armsmen on his own.

『Close on the village centre. Don’t let yourselves be seen.』

Oh boy. Here we go…

Reed took a deep breath before sneaking his way deeper into the village. The Knight’s shouts had grown infrequent as time passed, but, as Reed drew closer, it seemed that the Knight’s calls to his men had been replaced by complaints about them.

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“Where are those lazy louts? It’s nearly been five minutes!”

“Should we go look for ‘em, Sir?”

“No! Keep an eye on the surroundings: there are rebels everywhere!”

In the clearing that amounted to the village square, the Knight sat astride his horse with four armsmen standing around him. A few dozen villagers stood nearby, likely those who had decided that running away would mark them as guilty in the eyes of Laval’s men. Reed doubted that their show of loyalty mattered to the Knight beyond being conveniently on hand when he finally decided to kill them.

“Sir Eliot, please let us put out these fires. The whole village will burn down at this rate!”

The man who spoke looked better fed than the other villagers, so Reed figured he was the local magistrate. Whatever he was, however, his pleas were still met with a condescending sneer.

“It’s the least you deserve for harbouring rebels and vagrants,” Sir Eliot replied before raising his voice. “If anyone moves, they will be cut down where they stand!”

“But our stores are at risk!” The magistrate raised his hands in an emphatic plea, “How will we survive to the harvest if–”

The man’s words transformed into a gurgle as the Knight’s sword opened him from shoulder to throat. All around them, the villagers stared in horrified silence while the magistrate thrashed in agony on the ground before lying still.

『Take them down!』

Reed’s hands moved before he could even think about what Raul’s words meant. Even so, his attack wasn’t the first to land. All at once, his men appeared from the nearby rooftops and around the corners of cottages, sending arrows at the Knight and his men from all sides. Reed’s attack struck the Knight’s mount, which reared back and sent Sir Eliot tumbling to the mud.

“You bastard!”

A man from the crowd ran forward and chopped at the prone Knight with an iron hoe. Sir Eliot raised a gauntleted hand to stave off the attack, but the defenceless-looking gesture only set off the rest of the villagers. A wave of men and women surged forward, setting upon Laval’s men in a storm of angry curses.

“You took taxes from us every year, even when we were gonna starve!”

“My boy didn’t die at Katze for this!”

“Fuck you, and fuck Laval!”

The pair of armsmen who hadn’t immediately been taken down by Reed’s men were pummelled to the ground by the mass of angry Farmers. Sir Eliot’s armoured form vanished from sight as he was swarmed.

“Get back, you filthy peasants!”

It wasn’t exactly the smartest thing to say. There was an occasional cry of pain as someone in the angry mob was wounded, but there was little that the Knight could do about his inevitable fate. By the time the villagers’ anger was spent, many sported cuts and bruises. Sir Eliot, on the other hand, resembled little more than a bloodied piece of scrap on the ground.

Guess we’re done here.

Reed rose to his feet with a sigh of relief. When they had arrived too late to prepare their ambush, he couldn’t see how they could win outnumbered over two-to-one.

“Hey! What are you standing there for?”

He turned just in time to catch the wooden bucket that came flying in his direction. The woman who had tossed it at him answered his confusion with a no-nonsense look.

“We ain’t feedin’ ya for nothin’,” she told him. “Get ta helpin’!”

The woman motioned urgently for him to follow. She must have mistaken him for one of the many vagrants who had taken refuge across the March.

Reed begrudgingly followed the stout woman, waiting for an opportunity to slip away. Unfortunately, before he could, he ended up in a line of men and women transferring buckets filled with water between a flooded ditch and the burning section of the village. Colb waved him over to his spot in the line.

“They caught ya too, huh?”

A disinterested grunt was his only response. It looked like most of his men had been swept up in the firefighting efforts. As if to spite the villagers, the skies above quickly cleared to present a cheery azure sky. The sun was nearly to the horizon when their efforts finally came to an end, leaving half of the village a ruin of ash and charred timber frames. It was only then that the villagers could spare the time to see to their dead.

It was also then that concerned villagers from the surrounding countryside started to arrive. To a man, their eyes widened as they walked into the scene of carnage, destruction, and mourning.

“What in the gods’ names happened here?” The leader of a group arriving from the north asked.

“It was Laval’s men,” one of the villagers answered, his voice tight with grief and rage. “That bastard Sir Eliot came and started puttin’ families to the torch.”

“What! Why?!”

“They called ‘em oathbreakers. Oathbreakers for not wantin’ to feed their souls to the Sorcerer King! Said that the oathbreakers’ women and children were oathbreakers just like them!”

“They set their houses on fire with them still inside!” Another man raised his voice angrily.

Looks of horror filled the new arrivals’ expressions.

“But…but…that’s evil! No decent man’d do that.”

“Decent?” A villager snarled, “The magistrate got his throat cut for wantin’ to save the village. We all got called rebels for bein’ in the same village and helpin’ those poor folks from the north.”

An unsettled silence fell over the village square. There probably wasn’t a person present who didn’t understand the implications of what had happened. Every village had men fleeing from the levy, and every village in Laval County was likely providing food and shelter to vagrants in exchange for their labour in the spring.

“Wh-What do we do?” One of the outsiders asked fearfully, “Laval’ll have us all for rebels!”

“The Nobles will send more men,” another said gravely, “we’ll be burnt out of our farms!”

“Burnt alive, more likely,” one of the villagers said. “Or cut down in the fields.”

Worried whispering wove its way through the crowd. They faced a grim future where death by the sword or death by starvation and exposure were the only options.

Not that their worries mattered any to Reed. It helped that he knew that the Nobles wouldn’t be able to do anything about their ‘rebellion’ any time soon.

“What right do they have?”

The crowd fell silent. Many turned their heads to look at an elderly man standing on the fringes.

“What right do they have?” The elder said again, “Our families have always farmed these lands. Our fathers; our father’s fathers – we’ve all been here for just as long as Laval! We always paid our taxes. We gave our sons to the levy. We never swore to sacrifice our souls!”

“That’s right!”

“Laval has no right!”

“Laval was supposed to protect us – he attacked us instead! Laval’s the oathbreaker!”

Reed glanced warily about himself as the atmosphere of hostility against House Laval rapidly mounted. He hoped it wouldn’t mean more work.

“The Lord’s bound to send more men,” one of the villagers said.

“Let ‘im,” another said as he sent a pointed look at the mangled ruin of Sir Eliot. “We’ll give ‘em another taste of our hospitality.”

The sentiment was met with grim nods and angry mutters.

“It’s not enough. They burned half our stores and they’ll send sneaks to finish the job.”

“We already won’t survive to the next harvest as it is. We need to do something!”

“I say we take back our taxes! Laval has to pay!”

By that point, the villagers were so worked up that any idea probably sounded like a good one. Maybe this one was. With so many of House Laval’s Knights and armsmen dealt with, the town might not have enough men to deal with an angry mob.

Hell, the townsfolk might even join in on the fun.

Count Laval’s ruthless methods didn’t make him very popular, after all. As amusing as it might be, however, he had no desire to be caught up in the mess.

“Colb,” he said in a low voice, “let’s get goin’.”

“Where to?” The youth asked.

“Somewhere other than here,” Reed answered. “This smells like all kinds of trouble.”

He made eye contact with his men scattered throughout the crowd, nodding once before slowly making his way out of the village square. Someone grabbed him by his elbow when he was nearly in the clear.

“You’re him, aren’t you?”

Against his better judgement, Reed looked over his shoulder. Hanging onto his arm was a young woman from the village, whose expression brightened when his eyes met hers.

“I knew it!” She said, “Ma, look! It’s really him!”

Reed resisted the urge to cringe away as the woman gestured excitedly. Not only did a dumpy housewife come out to join them, but the commotion attracted the attention of the nearest villagers.

“Who’s that?”

“Must be one of them drifters.”

“Don’t look like much.”

What’d I do to deserve this?

“Don’t you start with yer mockin’,” the young woman said. “The gods sent ‘im to save us!”

“What’re you on about, girl?”

Reed wasn’t sure he wanted to know. It was normal to be religious, but some crazy people turned it into a whole other thing.

“I ain’t crazy!” The young woman said, “We all heard it! When we were runnin’ from Sir Eliot and his men, a voice told us to go into the field. Everyone who didn’t listen got run down by that bastard Knight. All o’ the armsmen he sent into the field to get us were killed by this man!”

As the woman spoke, more and more people turned their attention towards him. Reed gave his arm an experimental tug, but the woman was stuck fast. A low murmur filled the air as the woman’s story was discussed.

“She said the gods spoke to her.”

“I didn’t hear no gods.”

“What do the gods sound like?”

“Holy?”

“Why would the gods speak to us now?”

“…what do you think, Marly?”

“Me?”

“Yeah. You went to temple school, right? What you have to say ‘bout all this?”

All eyes went to a skinny, sunbaked man standing not far from Reed. The man crossed his arms, sucking in his lower lip and furrowing his brow in deep thought. Everyone fell silent, awaiting his response.

“There must be a reason for it,” he said at long last.

The crowd burst into excited chatter.

“He’s right!”

“The gods have a plan for us!”

Reed shifted on his feet, the sensation of an itch that couldn’t be scratched settling over him. What would the villagers say if he told them that the gods’ plans came from the back of a Skeletal Dragon flying in the skies over their heads? Not that he could talk about it. Raul said that the Sorcerous Kingdom’s involvement in what was going on was supposed to be a secret. Reed wasn’t dumb enough to see how much of a secret it was supposed to be.

“What do we do now?”

“Yes, tell us what to do!”

He felt another tug on his arm. The young woman looked up at him with glistening eyes.

“What are the gods sayin’?” She asked.

You’re the one claimin’ that the gods spoke to you!

As a general rule, Reed did his best to stay away from crazy women. With so many eyes now on him, however, he couldn’t escape or let her question go unanswered.

“You should probably focus on replacing the food that you lost,” he half-mumbled.

That seemed like a safe enough response. Count Laval’s initial moves had been taken care of. The Noble wouldn’t get another chance before the war with the Sorcerous Kingdom started. Rather than trying to get revenge on Laval for attacking their village, the villagers’ energy would be better spent foraging for food. Spring was close, and with it would come new growth that could sustain them until the harvest.

“It’s just like we said! Laval must pay!”

“The gods will it!”

“Divine wrath will fall on House Laval!”

“Spread the word! Laval will fall!”

Reed sighed.

Well, it isn’t as if they don’t deserve it.

Only scum survived in the Azerlisian Marches. To thrive, you had to be something worse than that, and House Laval was one of the most prominent noble houses in the March. In the eyes of the villagers, the death of the Knight and his men stood as proof of divine providence – or just weakness, if one was more practical about it – and now they dared to dream of revisiting the long history of wrongs they had suffered under House Laval’s rule.

As the people’s fervour rose around him, Reed glanced up at the heavens. He could only hope that ‘the gods’ had a plan in store for them.

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