Free The Warrior King: Book Three of the Seer King Trilogy by Chris Bunch Page A

smiles, then vanished.
    As I said, I’d seen the little cast flags before. Sorcerers by the dozens, little more than village mountebanks, really, haunted the army camps, in spite of the provosts’ best attempts to chase them away. They’d pose a recruit, cast a spell, and trap the moment in a flag, or a toy dagger or small horse, with a bit of the recruit’s spittle or blood. Naturally, the young soldier would pay well for this, and somehow it would get its way to the ones he loved.
    I wondered where in Maisir these boys had died. Penda? On the
suebi
? Irthing? Jarrah? Sidor? Or in some nameless swamp, in a flurried skirmish that left two or three bodies sprawled in the mud or the snow?
    And what of their Da and Ma? Why’d they leave everything? Had they word their sons were sore wounded in some hospital, left the land, and been snared in the web of war? No one but Irisu knew, Irisu and Saionji perhaps. I shivered, and the thunder rumbled more loudly.
    But I took my pots and spices and left the farm, finding poor shelter in a grove of trees half a mile distant. I don’t believe in ghosts, but that farmhouse was haunted.
    • • •
    One day I came on an odd sight. Nine or ten boys, perhaps fourteen to seventeen, all wearing the smock of farmers’ lads, were straggling along the road, behind a man wearing the old, banned uniform of the Imperial Army. I puzzled at this imposter as he came closer, and he hailed me cheerfully.
    Rather doubtfully I returned the greeting, and introduced myself using some name or other I made up on the moment.
    “I’m Color-Sergeant Tagagne, once Third Imperial Guards Corps, now serving the emperor directly,” he boomed.
    “And how might that be?”
    “Wait a moment, and I’ll tell you.” He turned to the boys. “You men, fall out around me. We’ll take a breather here before we go on.”
    The young men gratefully found a bit of shade under the roadside trees, close enough to hear our conversation.
    “Color-Sergeant?” I said doubtfully. “But the emperor’s army’s been dissolved and its men sent home.”
    “By who? The shit-for-brains who call themselves the Grand Council? By that homicidal fuck behind them who sits the throne in Maisir? Since when does the emperor listen to lickspittles like them?”
    I nodded agreement, and perhaps a bit of a smile came.
    “You look to have been one who served the emperor,” Tagagne said.
    “I was.”
    “For how long?”
    I could have told him the truth, that I was Laish Tenedos’s first follower. “For a long time.”
    “In Maisir?”
    I nodded once more.
    “Ah, that was terrible, terrible,” he sighed. “But by Saionji, we fought well.”
    I noted a couple of the farmboys shuddered at the death-goddess’s name.
    “We did,” I said. “But they fought better.”
    “The hells they did,” he said, a bit angry. “There were just more of them than we could kill. Otherwise, we’d be in Jarrah, wearing silk uniforms and each of us ruling a province.”
    “But we aren’t.”
    “But we will be again,” Tagagne said. “That’s why these brave boys have taken the emperor’s coin. We’re heading for … for where I’m not supposed to say, and join the new army. We’re getting ready to fight back, proud again under the Emperor Tenedos’s banner,” he said, “and drive those jerk-off Councilors out of Nicias, and the mongrels who call themselves Peace Guardians into the Latane.
    “Those we don’t hang from the nearest tree first.”
    A couple of the boys grinned tightly at that idea, and I smiled as well. “Those bastards could do with more than a bit of hanging, I’ll agree.”
    “Then come help us,” Tagagne said. “You don’t appear crippled. Come back to the colors, lad, for there’s still fighting to be done, and Numantia to be won back.”
    “No,” I said. “I’m my own master now and want to keep it that way.”
    Tagagne shook his head. “I’ll not wave a white feather at you nor curse a man who