By the Light of the Moon [Sample]

Chapter 3

Chapter Three

Owain had not owned a horse in a long time. Horses displayed a natural fear of his kind, smelling the wolf through the layers of apparent humanity with ease. They got nervous, pranced around or tried to throw the rider off their back. It was torture to put the beast through this, when he could walk easily on his own strong legs. He enjoyed the feeling of the road under his feet.

The only horses Blaidyn could ride were those bred and broken in one of their camps and settlements, and he hadn't been back to one in many years. Owain was a wanderer, moving from employment to employment, from town to town. He did good work; he was quiet and efficient but not a man to seek approval from humans or his own kind, not a man to ingratiate himself for a better position. He was easy to recommend, a simple man it seemed, without ambition or greed.

The fief was familiar from the songs of his childhood, the stories murmured in his ear when it was time to sleep. Stories of war, of fighting the good fight, of subjugation and freedom. They had taught him pride in being Blaidyn, taught him to have belief in the good. He recognized the landmarks: there was that mountain ridge that looked like a toothy castle in the sky, the deep forest at its feet. And growing closer and closer, the innocuously named Bramble Keep, Rochmond Castle, built on a rock overlooking the fief.

It was an impressive stronghold, hardly a straight wall to be seen; just circling towers and rounded battlements, sturdily built with no clear front to attack. Even now, after a century and a half of peace, it looked as defensible as it must have in wartime, in those bitter last years when the fight had been contained in this very region, battles raging on the very ground upon which he stood; blood-drenched earth. He thought he could smell it still, a copper note in the fertile soil.

As little as he knew about his appointment up at the castle, it had sounded like an easy job. A retirement job, he thought, not without a note of wounded pride. He was too young for one of those. Still, he had spent many years on foreign battlefields, fighting vicious and bloody quarrels over boundaries being drawn a few miles to north or the south, over a river or simply a nobleman's pride. He had seen bodies hacked to pieces, women raped, towns going up in flames and earth salted. He had witnessed friends die as well as enemies, and it was time for a change of pace. At the Bramble Keep, he would be hired for his nose and his speed, not for his hands that could break a man's neck like loaf of warm bread. His warrior pride was wounded, but the rest of his soul was aching for just such a reprieve.

When he begged entry at the drawbridge, it was only after the captain of the guard was called that the doorman pulled up the cast-iron portcullis to admit him, as if that would have kept them safe, had he been intent on harming the Keep.

"Sir Fredrick Clifton," the man introduced himself, "Captain of his Lordship's guard." He was older than Owain, a man past his prime for humans, but he could sense the soldier in him: a brave man who hadn't seen many battles in his life as a backwater guard.

"Owain," he said simply, standing at attention.

Sir Clifton eyed him suspiciously.

"You are the first... the first Blaidyn under his Lordship's command," he said uncomfortably, leading him through the open courtyard. Owain sensed that there were many things he didn't say but that was to be expected. He had learned long ago that humans were as notoriously secretive and polite as they were terrible at either. To a race so dependent on smells and gestures in their communication as his own, humans seemed to interact in an elaborate game of play acting, in which thinly coated lies were exchanged as polite interaction far more often than truths were uttered.

Sir Clifton led him into a study on the ground floor. A window looked out over the narrow moat and toward the mountains, the walls were covered in maps and bookshelves and a floor plan of the Keep was pinned onto the table in the center of the room.