Free The Ravens of Falkenau & Other Stories by Jo Graham

we will be waiting with horse and steel, and we will drive them back into the sea." He had an old helm made pretty with a white plume, and I could not see his face.
    Behind him, his second rode bareheaded and unshaven, his long red hair caught behind him in a long tail, the same bay as his horse. He winked at me, and I turned my head, but not before I saw him smile.
    "This is Bedwyr son of Griffith," their leader said. He dismounted and saluted my father like a Centurion to a Senator. He was dark and small and with his helmet off was hardly taller than I. "I am Artorius, the nephew of Ambrosius. These are my Companions."
    "Of course they are," I said. "I know my Arrian too."

Small Victories
1800 - 1810 AD
     
    Another story with Dion, almost two thousand years later.   Dion is a small girl, but still absolutely Dion.   And then there is Emrys….   We will see more of these versions of them in my upcoming novel Fortune's Wheel.

    Her name was Victory, and she had never known anything but war. She was a child of the Revolution, born the month that Robespierre was guillotined, and the war had lasted forever.
    When she was small they had lived in a little house in Marseilles. It was on a narrow street, and from the windows of the third floor room where she slept with her older brother and sister you could see the masts of the ships in the harbor moving over the roofs, see the sails catching the wind as they moved out to sea. Her stepmother had always been afraid of a knock on the door. If someone came she would catch at her throat before she went to answer it.
    “She is afraid,” Victory’s older brother told her, “that someone has denounced Papa.”
    She almost didn’t remember the little house. They had moved to a bigger one, on a street where you couldn’t hear the sea. It had carpet on the stairs, and her baby brother was born there.
    Now they lived in a much bigger house, with a park around it and a fountain and lots of grass to play on. There were ten servants and lots of rooms, and her older brother had a pony.
    Papa was still gone. Now they said that he was a hero. For a while everyone said he was going to die, and her stepmother had black dresses made up so that when he did she would have something to wear.
    But then he didn’t die and he came home.
    He looked very thin, and his black hair was streaked with gray at the temples, and he was very glad to see them all. Victory was glad too, even though she was one of the girls in the middle, she and her sister, and not the baby who was cute or her older brother who could ride a horse.
    It was summer, and he hadn’t been home long when they had a party.
    There were big tables set up on the lawn and games for people to play with tenpins. There were some men who played violins and a tent if it was too sunny. Her stepmother rented six peacocks to walk around showing off their feathers.
    Papa thought that was funny. “They just shit everywhere,” he said. “Why do we want that?” But her stepmother thought they were very aristocratic.
    The party was fun. It went on all day, and there were lots of people who came and went. Some of them had children too, though most of them were older. And some of the ladies wanted to pinch her cheeks and say how cute she was, just like a little Catalan shepherdess in her white lawn dress and her bare feet.
    Her stepmother flushed at that and told her sharply to go find her shoes, what was she, a ragamuffin?
    Victory decided that it would be better to stay out of sight for a while, since she’d lost her shoes and didn’t know where they were. Nurse would probably find them eventually. But it might be better not to attract attention until she did.
    She climbed up one of the trees and stayed there, lying on her stomach on a big branch, nibbling on a piece of bread, watching the people down the hill at the party walking around and eating and talking to each other. Two of the peacocks were fighting and the footmen were trying to