A Circle of Iron

Chapter 2

The broken tower squatted at the edge of a stone road that must have been ancient when the Old Empire was born. The road stretched from the ruined city through sixty miles of forest to the western verge of the Greenwell, where it abruptly ended. Thorn imagined its builders reaching the edge of the great wood and deciding there was no point in going any farther. From what he’d seen of the rest of the world, they might have been right.

In ages past, the tower would have guarded the western approach to the city. Its former glory faded and forgotten, it now served as the only inn to be found in the boomtown that had sprung up at the edge of the fallen city of Eldernost. The establishment was called the Duck, for the simple reason that someone had spiked a wooden mallard into the masonry above the entrance. Thorn had never met anyone would could recall when this had been accomplished, who was responsible, what it might signify, or how the guilty party had come into possession of a wooden mallard.

Thorn and his crew sat at a long table crudely built from wooden planks and bearing the scars of iron knives and heavy tankards. If they could not be found sitting at this table, day or night, it was only because they had run out of sufficient funds to do so, and had been forced into the Greenwell to collect another bounty. Thorn judged it the best spot in the taproom. It was near the wall, along a stretch that remained in sufficient repair to keep the elements off of them. It was close enough to the great hearth to stay warm when the winter chill set in, but not so close as to be baked alive. And it offered a clear angle to the stairs a drunken patron was required to navigate to reach the common sleeping area on the second floor.

None of them spoke. Thorn never had much to say after returning from the forest. He wasn’t sure whether his friends shared his preference for silence or simply followed his lead. There would be time for chatter in the coming days, but for now, he merely wanted to relax and enjoy the pleasant sensation of being alive. He rested an elbow on the table and smoked his pipe and tried very hard to think about nothing.

“Caleb Thorn!” It was a man’s voice raised above the din of the evening crowd. By his tone, it was a man who thought himself quite important. Thorn ignored it and blew a ragged smoke ring at Mara, who scowled and waved the vapors away from her face.

Thorn heard several feet, heavy-shod, march across the room towards them. Still he did not turn. “Thorn,” the man said again, this time right behind him. “The Lord of Eldernost demands an audience.”

“I’d encourage him to take up the lute,” Thorn said. “They say the pipes are easier to master, but I never met a piper I didn’t want to hit. Everybody likes a lute.”

Mara chuckled, and there was a moment of confused silence from the newcomers. The soldier cleared his throat. “He demands an audience with you.”

Finally, Thorn shifted on the bench and looked at the speaker. He was a man-at-arms, younger than Thorn but old enough not to be green, and dressed in the livery of Lord Viorno. He’d heard the soldier’s name a hundred times and couldn’t have called it to mind if someone was torturing him for it. “If I were looking for myself,” he said, “I’d probably check the Duck.”

“What if you were looking for yourself and you got lost?” said Big Odd.

The soldier looked at Odd and back at Thorn. Then his right hand dropped to the hilt of his sword. “My lord wants to talk to you. I’ll either escort you to him, or drag you there in chains.”

Thorn sighed. He drained the last of the ale from his wooden cup and set it back on the table. “I’ll have the escort if those are the choices,” he said, swinging his legs over the bench.

He led the soldiers out and walked down the road to the large red pavilion where Lord Viorno resided on those rare occasions when he visited the town. It was still more of a camp than a proper town, by Thorn’s reckoning, and the Duck was its only permanent structure. With the exception of the tower, a man could choose between some manner of tent or shanty if he needed something over his head. By those modest standards, the lord’s pavilion was a palace. Thorn was just glad Viorno hadn’t gotten around to confiscating the Duck.