A Dog Among Princes
Chapter 14
“Are you ready?” Judeau held onto the rope. This was crazy. It was dangerous and Casca was probably going to get hurt doing it. How she’d even rigged the stupid thing was beyond him. She said something about Guts having come up with it years ago but that certainly didn’t do anything for his confidence.
“Let them down!” She gripped her sword in preparation. He pulled the rope and the logs fell, swinging towards her. She dodged one, cutting through a second and knocking the third out of her way with a well placed strike of the pommel. The fourth was headed right towards her head. She bent backwards and the log took a strand of her hair with it. She intercepted the first again, cutting it out of the air, broke the third in half with a second smash, and stopped the fourth in place with a lunge, forcing her blade into the wood. She’d improved. She wiped the sweat from her face. “You know, I thought it was weird when Guts suggested it but his training methods are effective.” Judeau couldn’t help but agree. It was almost scary.
“That kid he’s training is going to be an absolute monster.”
“God yeah, I wouldn’t want to run into him on the battlefield in ten years.” She laughed and summer came early. “What are you staring at?”
“Nothing! Just wondering how you rigged all this.”
“Well half the difficulty was getting the wood. Guts insisted this whole thing works best if you fell the tree with a sword.” Well that would explain why her back looked so much stronger. “He said he used to do it with full sized ones, but he told me it’d be better for my training goals to stick to saplings. I want to stay as light and flexible as possible. It’s my best advantage over those two.” He still didn’t quite understand what had made her want to join the tournament, but she was out of her room. She was active again and she was happy. Judeau wouldn’t interrogate anything beyond that. She was standing on her own two feet again. That was enough.
She hadn’t told Judeau what was happening with Griffith. It wasn’t her place to tell. It also wasn’t his responsibility to fix. He was a capable warrior, yes, but between them there was no contest. Casca was far better. She didn’t look down on him or anything, it was just an objective fact. It was the duty of the strong to protect those weaker. She would do her duty. None of them would die under her watch. She had to get stronger, to be not just a sword but a shield. She was beginning to understand the difference. The sword could protect provided its wielder was sufficiently skilled. It required an even hand to guide it and could not stand on its own. But a shield could be used to protect anyone. Its power stood on its own, one merely needed to get behind it. Casca didn’t need Griffith’s guiding hand anymore. She had decided for herself that The Band was worth protecting.
Well, what was left of it anyway. Even Rickert had found a job apprenticing with a local silversmith. He enjoyed the work, but apparently wanted to find another master to pursue bladesmithing. Even in the old days he’d been one of the only ones around the camp that seemed to actually enjoy the arduous process of maintaining weapons. She’d often find him with his crossbow in pieces, examining the complex mechanisms and how the pieces fit together. Corkus had opened a tavern just outside the city center. He’d insisted it was a “classy joint” and banned Guts almost immediately, but that hadn’t lasted particularly long. The food wasn’t great but it also wasn’t terrible either, so it had become the venue of choice for old members of the band to meet up and reminisce. Pippin was apparently working on a chronicle of the Band’s exploits. Although he was so quiet in person, his prose was surprisingly strong from what Casca had read. Pippin had a talent for observation, cutting deeply to the heart of who each of them were with relatively few words. He also exhibited an immense talent for illumination. He worked largely in black ink, rather than the brightly colored inks of most illuminated texts, but his careful and expressive line-work and fastidious attention to detail was unlike anything she’d ever seen. And here she was, practicing the sword as usual. But now she had a goal.
The King had said the tournament was mainly a way for him to scout new knights. Being a mercenary was all well and good, but being a knight meant land, a title, and most importantly, steady pay. Sure she could probably just ask Guts to put in a word for her but her pride wouldn’t allow her to. She wouldn’t bow and scrape to her oldest rival just to gain a position she was confident she could win for herself. Sure Guts and Griffith had been training but it was mostly to prepare them to fight against each other. Specifically in a long drawn out endurance match from which no clear victor would emerge. Something closer to gladiatorial pageantry than an actual fight. Casca was training to win.
“Do you want to break for lunch?” Judeau asked.
“I should probably get this thing set up again first. You go on ahead. Meet you at Corkus’s?”
“It’s a date.” He paused for a second and the tips of his ears turned red. “Er well, you know what I mean.” He was getting worse at hiding it. Casca picked a piece of kindling off the ground. She wouldn’t be opposed if it was a date. She could actually talk to him like a person, instead of feeling like she was a scene partner for somebody else’s monologue. And he was cute, even if he didn’t think so. He wasn’t a statuesque pretty boy like Griffith nor did he possess Guts’s feral grace, but that was precisely it. With his freckles and sun-bleached hair you could mistake him for any other farm boy, until he pinned your ass to the wall with his knives. He had a good sense of humor and a slightly crooked smile and shared her bad habit of putting literally anyone else’s needs before his own. It could work, provided he ever asked her out. For now she just smiled as he left. He’d work up the courage eventually.
It took Casca longer than she’d expected to clean up the broken logs and re-rig everything. By the time she was done she was famished. Maybe she’d pick up a snack on her way to meet Judeau. She heard a rustling noise. Maybe Judeau had come back looking for her? A chill ran down her spin. That wasn’t Judeau.
“The king of Midland has released his hounds. The Falcon shall not go unpunished for his desertion. The borders already burn with the flame of evil. Beware the soldiers of the hand!” The voice echoed as if coming from the inside of a helmet. She spun around, catching a glimpse of a skeletal horse before it disappeared. Shit! What the hell was that?! She started running for the tavern. She was going to have to cancel that date.
Cadogan was starting to get a migraine. He was trying to organize a tournament, there was a solar eclipse on the horizon, and now disturbing reports were coming in from the border with Midland. Something was attacking villages. The reports were conflicting, some saying it was a group of knights and others saying it was a massive, ape-like beast with three eyes. This was the last thing he needed. He heard a banging at his door. “Your majesty!” That was Casca! She sounded as if something had disturbed her.
“Come in, the door is unlocked.” She threw the door open. Casca was visibly shaken, her eyes wide with fear and her short hair stuck to her head with sweat.
“I’ve received a warning! I think someone is after Griffith!”
“Hold on now, what’s this about a warning?” She explained what she had seen and heard. “Thank you for bringing this to my attention. The man you saw was an ally, although he is often needlessly vague with his advice.”
“He didn’t seem all that vague to me, more like he was trying to tell me something in a language he didn’t speak very well.”
“You gleaned meaning from that?!”
“Yes, the message was simple enough. The king sent hounds, probably the black dog knights,” she shuddered. She didn’t want to think about the rumors she’d heard about them, “after a Falcon who he wanted to punish for desertion. That matches up neatly with Griffith. They’ve already reached the border, that was self explanatory, and they are somehow in league with the godhand.”
“Black Dog Knights?” Thank god he’d brought her on. He’d never known anyone to so easily decipher one of Gaiseric’s warnings.
“They’re a black knight unit in the traditional sense. They’re not allowed to fly a banner, but everyone knows they fight under Midland’s. If the king wanted somebody dead he would send us. If he wanted them, their families, and their entire village dead, and the land they lived upon to be haunted by their restless souls, he sent the dogs.” Casca said with grim certainty. “If they’re here, you’ve probably already started getting reports.”
“I have.”
“Your majesty, the Black Dog Knights were brutal even among the armies of Midland and Tudor. Your kingdom has been at peace for hundreds of years. With all due respect, your people aren’t prepared for this.”
“I know.”
“Then what do you plan to do?” The king was silent. He didn’t know what to do. His soldiers weren’t equipped for an invasion.
“Let us handle this.” Casca looked him dead in the eyes. “We had just as good a combat record as the Black Dogs. We can protect your people.”
“It’s too close to the eclipse. If anything goes wrong-“
“We’ll be well away from the capital, minimizing the risk to your citizens, your majesty.” He couldn’t help but think of Cerridwyn. Father, I can’t sit idly by while people suffer! They would go even without his approval and they’d die just like she had.
“Alright. But I insist that you bring me along.”
“We won’t be able to guarantee your safety. You understand that right?” The band was made up of young men who’d just barely reached adulthood. They shouldn’t be the ones expected to guarantee his safety.
“I understand.”
Cadogan closed the door to the high parapet behind him. The armor gleamed darkly in the moonlight. He wore gloves as he carefully packed the pieces into a trunk. He hoped he wouldn’t have to use it, but he would rather be safe than sorry.
God it was nice to see some action again! Guts felt like he was going fucking stir crazy in that castle. The circumstances weren’t excellent but then again they never were for this kind of thing. He knew it was terrible, but he chafed against peace. It was probably because he was not yet acclimated to it. The battlefield had been his cradle. Anything else felt strange and dangerous. As if the peace would break at any moment and he’d be shot with a crossbow. He had half a mind to run away in the middle of the night and find the nearest war zone, just to be somewhere things made sense to him again. Where jumping at shadows was an asset rather than something that made people look at you funny. He still felt the violent urges running through his limbs, even as he felt his sword tear his body to shreds.
Guts elected to wear his regular armor, refusing any more ornate armor that an army of smiths tried to foist upon him. He told everyone it was so that he could travel more anonymously. His image had been spread far and wide across the kingdom. Apparently people thought he was handsome? No accounting for taste he supposed. But no, he wore his scratched and dented armor for another reason. He wanted to be recognized. Guts the crown prince was not the savagely violent raid captain of the Band of the Hawk. The raid captain had slain a hundred men, had battled demons and won. He was faceless and nameless. He was nothing but a sword, a body, and a relentless fury. A face would only distract from that. Guts wanted them to see the Captain not him. Let fear do most of the work for him. He’d heard tell of the Black Dog Knights before. He’d need fear on his side to fight them. The leader fought like him apparently. All raw instinct and animal strength. You could only ever win a match between dogs by being the more vicious one.
Griffith studied maps of the area. If Cadogan’s informants were correct, the dogs were headed right through a nearby gorge towards the half dried bed of an ancient lake. Water still pooled for a few inches across it creating an almost mirror-like surface. Griffith couldn’t help but wonder if this was the same place Guts had fallen as a child. He had been so close to finding his remaining family and living a comfortable sheltered life. But then they wouldn’t have met, would they.
They would ambush the soldiers from above as they passed through the gorge, dropping rocks and raining arrows on them. When they ran to escape the attack, two squads of artillery men would be waiting on either end to blast them with cannons and crossbows. Oh how he loved having funding! He hoped they were cavalry. Horses hated the sound of canons. They would throw their riders and trample the fallen in their rush to escape. It made the strategy so much more effective!
He paused for a moment to re-evaluate his thought process. Maybe he was meant to be a demon king. Yikes. Well the plan was sound at least, as long as nothing went catastrophically wrong.