CHAPTER THREE - GLIMMER VALE
Julian limped back to the ambush site and found Raedrick tying up the bandit Julian kicked at the beginning of the fray. He didn’t have a scratch on him, naturally. As Julian approached, Raedrick looked up and, upon seeing his condition, winced.
“You look like hell.”
“Feel like it, too,” Julian said. “Where did you go?”
“This guy hightailed it. You looked like you had things under control, so I went after him.”
“Don’t do that again. I really could have used the help.”
Raedrick gave him a long, searching look, then nodded. “Sorry.”
Hobbling over to his horse, Julian fished through the saddlebags until he found his medical supplies. Consisting of a few rags for bandages and a needle and thread, it wasn’t much, but it would be sufficient for this job. “My leg and thumb are going to need stitches before we move out,” he said.
Raedrick did the stitching once he had the prisoner secured.
Getting stitched up was never a fun experience, but having to lie there without pants in the chilly air just made it worse. The cold numbed Julian’s leg a bit, so the stitching itself wasn’t as unpleasant, but taken as a whole, Julian would have preferred to do the deed in warmth. Fortunately, Raedrick was a good hand with a needle, so before too long he finished stitching and wrapped both wounds in snug bandages. Julian got dressed again and took a few ginger steps. The stitches seemed to hold well, but he would have to take it easy for a few days.
They took a few minutes to search the dead brigands. Julian was not surprised to find they had little money on them. But their armor and weapons were of good quality and would probably fetch a decent price, so he and Raedrick strapped those items down on their horses as well as they could. Their saddlebags were already full, so it was a very awkward packing job, but it would do for a short journey.
“What are we going to do with him?” Julian said, nodding toward their prisoner. “I’d say tie him to a tree and leave him for scavengers.”
The brigand’s eyes widened and he shook his head vigorously, but before he could speak Raedrick beat him to it.
“No. There’s a Constable in Lydelton. He’ll see that justice is done properly.”
Julian frowned. “That’s still a long way.”
“About four, maybe five hours.”
“We’d better get moving then if we want to get there before dark.”
Raedrick nodded. While Julian slowly pulled himself up onto his saddle, his friend fished a length of rope out of his bag and tied one end into a knot around the brigand’s neck. The other end he brought back to Julian. “Do you want the duty?”
Julian grinned and accepted the rope. Removing his baldric, he looped the rope around his saddle horn, making several turns to ensure it was secure. Then he draped the baldric over the saddle horn again and looked back at the brigand. “Hope you are a good runner, friend.”
It was perhaps heartless, but Julian got a lot of satisfaction from the brigand’s terrified expression.
They set off at a slow trot, just barely above a jog, but after a half hour or so Julian heard a thud behind them, and the brigand began screaming. Reining in to a walk, he turned around to find the fellow dragging on the ground behind his horse. Julian rolled his eyes and pulled his horse to a full stop.
“I figured he’d be in better shape,” he quipped to Raedrick, who shrugged. In a louder voice, Julian called back to the brigand, “On your feet! You’re slowing us down!”
The brigand slowly pushed himself upright. It took a while, but Julian figured it was probably difficult with his hands tied behind his back. Beyond that, he was a mess. The right side of his face was scraped and bruised, his clothing was torn in several locations, he had a big red welt around his neck where the rope dug in, and he was panting heavily. Served him right.
As soon as the brigand was up again, Julian spurred the horse forward, at a walk this time. It was slower, but he had no real desire to torture the brigand to death. Killing a man in a stand-up fight was one thing. Dragging him behind a horse? That crossed the line into senseless cruelty.
The road followed the south bank of the river as it made its way east toward the Lake. Though the terrain to their right was mostly rolling hills, the road was, for the most part, level and made for an easy passage. So despite only moving at a quick walk, they made good time.
As they traversed the valley, Julian was again struck by the picturesque nature of the place. Everywhere he looked was another amazing view. When Raedrick told him of his plan to take this route, he had at first scoffed. Lydelton was a flyspeck of a town in the middle of nowhere. Why would anyone want to visit, let alone live there? Now that he had seen the valley, though, he was beginning to understand how it could be appealing.
If only it was warmer.
As advertised from their high vantage point on the flank of the mountain, this part of the valley was mostly rolling grasslands, punctuated every so often with the occasional copse, some large enough to almost be rightly called forests themselves. There was no habitation as yet, but plumes of smoke in the distance announced fires from chimneys or forges.
After a couple hours, they drew near to the spit of mountains they had seen from above. The road became more wandering, to avoid the worst of the hills, as the mountains drew nearer. Until finally there was nothing for it but to go nearly straight up one side of a hill and down the next. The mountains came almost to the river; the main peaks could not have been more than a mile to the south. But from this vantage point, Julian could see that the peaks, which thrust northward from the main range to the south, bent to the east for a while before turning south again.
“The local’s call this area The Hook,” Raedrick said, seeing Julian eyeing the mountains as they rode. “Supposedly if you look at a quality map of this part of the Vale, the line of peaks forms a hook that bends off to the east and makes its own little concealed valley within a valley.”
“Impressive,” Julian replied.
Past The Hook, the land slowly flattened again until, by the time they reached the southeast corner of the lake, the hills were mostly gone. There, they began to see the first farmsteads. A single farmhouse here, a small cluster there, at first they were few and far between, but as the afternoon wore on, they became more frequent. All as he would have expected.
Then, about an hour and a half before sunset, not far from a ford across the river that flowed down to the lake form the mountains to the east, they encountered a farm that had been burned out. It had happened several days earlier based on the lack of smoldering and the general state of the place, but it was clear that the burning was not an accident. The front door was cloven in two as though by an axe or sword. Peeking inside, the remains of a large table had distinctive cut marks, as did one chair that somehow escaped the fire and stood pristinely in the midst of the destruction.
But the confirmation came when they stopped, at Raedrick’s urging, to investigate the ruins more closely. There, within the husk of the burned house, lay two charred bodies: one larger and one small. The larger body, the mother Julian presumed, was clutching the smaller body as though to shield it from the flames and smoke. He supposed the fact that two people perished didn’t rule out an accident. Until they then found a man’s corpse, beheaded with his hands tied behind his back, in a small ditch not far behind the house.
“Hopefully they killed him first,” Raedrick said, his tone carrying the same revulsion that Julian felt. “Can you imagine if they’d made him listen to his wife and child screaming inside the house before finishing him?”
“Who would do this?” Julian asked aloud. He looked back at their prisoner and found him close-mouthed, unwilling to look even in the same general area as the bodies. “Do you know, friend?” Julian asked, tugging at the rope as he did so.
The brigand jerked and turned a baleful eye on him. “Not a clue,” he replied in an oily tone that just screamed the man was lying.
“Oh you know alright,” Julian said. “Friends of yours, weren’t they? Did they brag about it?” Anger began to well up within him and he found his voice rising. “Or did you go along for the ride, to have a little fun? Did you enjoy it, you sick bastard?” He began walking his horse back toward the brigand as he spoke. The brigand’s expression grew frightened, then terrified, as Julian approached.
“Enough, Julian. He’ll get justice from the Constable,” Raedrick growled as he spurred his horse in front of Julian. “Remember?”
Julian took a long, deep breath to get himself back under control. After a moment, he nodded to Raedrick and turned his horse away. “Then let’s get moving. The sooner we dump this fellow off, the better.”
Glimmer Vale is the first book of the Glimmer Vale Chronicles, an ongoing heroic fantasy series set in a world of valor and magic. It will be published here, one chapter per week, on Tuesday.
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