Free The Dread Wyrm (Traitor Son Cycle) by Miles Cameron

“Don’t worry, he loves being told when he’s posturing,” he said.
    Instead of rising to the quip, Ser Gabriel smiled. “In fact, Master Smythe warned me pretty carefully. I cannot claim this one, and thus I’ll try not to be insufferably glad that a powerful mage-warrior couldn’t even get a view of our column.” He was silent a moment. “We’ll bury Spiro in the morning, and then, I’m afraid, we’ll march the whole company over his grave.”
    Ser Bescanon had fought the Wild most of his youth, but he was shocked. “That’s desecration!” he said.
    The captain shrugged. “Less a desecration than having something dig his corpse up and eat it,” he said. “We’re in the Wild. Let’s keep that in mind.”
    “I miss Morea already,” Ser Michael said. “Everyone remember how we said fighting in Morea was dull? We were fools.”
    The next morning arrived earlier than anyone wanted. And Sauce began to see that Ser Bescanon might have talents in Bad Tom’s direction after all. He had the entire quarter guard out and moving through camp, waking everyone. The captain’s trumpeter sounded the call every minute for ten minutes, and the woods rang with his trumpet. It was freezing cold; wooden buckets had a rime of frost, and the horse lines were horse-huddles.
    It was not their first day on the road, but it was the earliest start with all the new recruits. Tents were slow coming down. Ser Gavin, temporarily in charge of his brother’s household, had trouble finding enough spare bodies to get his brother’s great pavilion packed, and Mag had to shriek like a hen wife to get
her
wagons packed. The sun climbed in the sky, and Count Zac emerged from Father Arnaud’s tent pale and shaken.
    Sauce threw her arms around him. “I thought you were fucking
dead
,” she said.
    “Me, too,” Zac admitted. “I owe Kostas the shaman. Big time.”
    Father Arnaud smiled at them both. And then they sensed his attention leaving them, and they both turned.
    A flight of faeries emerged out of the morning mist. They flitted about the clearing, moving rapidly from point to point like cats sniffing out a new house.
    Eventually they gathered into a cloud of colours, a ball of darting and moving shapes. The ball moved cohesively across the clearing.
    No one moved.
    Bad Tom was standing while his squire—Danald Beartooth—laced his byrnie.
    The faerie swarm floated to a stop in front of Bad Tom.
    “
We were Hector
,” they said.
“We remember. We do not forget.
”
    Tom flinched. “Hector?” he asked.
    Just for a moment, the swarm took the shape of the dead Drover, Hector Lachlan.
“
We remember
,
”
they said.
    Bad Tom watched them. “I remember, too,” he said.
    “We wait for you,”
they said. “
We remember. You are the sword.”
    Tom drew the great sword by his side with a ferocious fluidity, but as quick as he was, the whole cloud of faerie folk was faster.
    His sword glowed in red and green and blue like the shimmer of a peacock. “I’ll be right here waiting for you,” he said. “Come and try me.”
    The faeries seemed to sigh. “
The day cometh, man. You are the sword. We remember.”
    And then they flitted away, each one going in a different direction, exploding outwards into the new day.
    One faery, bolder than the others, circled close. But, alone, its voice was so quiet that only Tom could hear it.
    “
We will be there for you,”
he said, and flitted away.
    Mag looked at Sauce. “I used to love them, as a child. I cried when I realized what they are.”
    Sauce was still locked in an embrace with her lover. “What, then?” she asked.
    “The soul vultures,” Mag said grimly.
    The captain had to ride out and direct the turn-over of the camp-guards to the outriders himself—too many new officers and too many new people. He, too, missed Gelfred.
    A league farther on the road, they passed Gilson’s Hole, a break in the road. The road here had once crossed the wetlands of a large marsh on a