Free ALTDORF (The Forest Knights: Book 1) by J. K. Swift

Egyptian, a breed many Franks would consider too light to carry a fully armored man into battle. But Thomas had found Anid to have the perfect combination of strength and fearlessness for the role. And like most Arabian horses, Anid’s speed and endurance was far greater than any destrier Thomas had ever ridden.
    “You remember Zora?” Pirmin asked, his features unreadable in the dim moonlight.
    “Of course,” Thomas said.
    How could he forget? Every couple years Pirmin would bring up his childhood dog and talk about her. Usually when he was drunk. And once again, at the mention of Zora, a wave of exhaustion shot through Thomas’s body as his muscles remembered the long march from Schwyz to the shores of the Mid-Earth Sea.
    A blonde-haired, scowling boy walked beside Thomas and though his words were laced with an accent Thomas struggled to understand, the boy talked enough that Thomas soon grew accustomed to his speech.
    He was older, perhaps eight, but already his stocky build hinted at the massive man he would become. At his side walked the biggest working dog Thomas had ever seen. She was shorthaired and largely black, with a powerful white chest and snout, and a square head with a mask of black surrounding even blacker eyes. She would have been terrifying if it were not for the rust-colored thumbprints above her eyes that softened her expressions. The draft dog was hitched to a cart that she pulled effortlessly with a nonchalant grace, as though trying to pretend it was not there.
    After a grueling three-month journey by land and then sea, the army of children was marching on a dusty road, less than five hours from the gates of Acre, when slavers came for them.
    An avalanche of boulders and smaller rocks careened down the steep hillside, crushing a knight and the handful of children in its path. A deafening rumble echoed all around them and dust billowed up and choked the gorge. Then, a hundred men appeared and swarmed down into the ravine like so many ants, yelling and screaming in various languages.
    All around Thomas was chaos. Dust hung in the air like smoke and children were running, screaming, trying to escape the slavers who seemed to be everywhere with ropes and leather collars. Thomas saw one of the black knights pinned to the ground with a spear, and two more fighting in the distance, several bodies at their feet.
    Thomas pressed his back up against the rock wall of the canyon, trying to disappear, as he watched Zora savage the throat of one of the slavers that moments before had been dragging Pirmin away by his hair. Pirmin snatched up the dead man’s war axe and leveled it at a heavyset man with a full beard and dark, fleshy circles under his eyes who stalked warily towards the snarling dog.
    The man raised a heavy crossbow and shot an iron bolt into Zora’s side, lifting her up and throwing her away from the dead man. She yelped, her feet scrambling briefly to find purchase on the rocky ground before her strength gave out and she toppled over on her side.
    Zora raised her head once weakly to bite at the shaft lodged deep between her ribs. Shaking with the effort, she was unable to reach it, and finally her head dropped hard to the ground, as though it were made of stone. She panted a few times. Then, with a whole-body shudder, she died.
    Pirmin, eyes wide and chest heaving, charged the man with his axe while screaming something in his strange accent that Thomas could not comprehend. The heavy man dropped his crossbow, sidestepped, and caught the axe shaft twisting it out of the young boy’s hands. Then he whipped the butt-end across Pirmin’s face. To the man’s surprise, the enraged boy took the blow, threw his arms around the slaver’s upper legs and drove his head into his stomach, knocking them both to the ground. Pirmin straddled the man and rained blows down upon the man’s face and chest.
    Although big, Pirmin was still just a boy and his adversary outweighed him by at least a hundred and