Fallen Eagle

4th Week of July, 1460

Sweat clung to Theodorus’s back, soaking through linen and gathering along the curve of his spine. Each drop shifted with Boudicca’s trot, a damp reminder that the day had been too long.

They reached Mikros Elos close to nightfall, though only because daylight in the Crimean summer lingered. The scene that greeted them was one of desperation.

A clod of villagers hung around the stout central building that had to be the granary, moving listlessly to and from the northern stretch of wet land.

Near what passed for the local chapel, Theodorus spotted fresh holes cut into the earth. An old priest led a group in prayer around those holes, some weeping openly, others standing with dry eyes and moving lips, all of them scraping together whatever strength remained through prayer.

They were graves, dozens of them.

One lone man knelt apart from the prayers by the granary, unmoving, folded in on himself.

Theodorus lifted a hand, signaling his riders to hold back, then guided Boudicca forward alone. “Pantelis,” he greeted, disentangling himself from the saddle and dropping to the ground.

The old headman stared up at the fading sky with a half-dazed look, one eye swollen nearly shut beneath a darkening bruise. Dried blood marked the corner of his mouth. Pantelis was all bone, spite, and endurance. Seeing him hollowed out like this meant something inside him had broken.

“What happened?” Theodorus asked softly.

Pantelis turned his head by a fraction. His gaze struggled to find him, then recognition came with something close to horror.

“You…” Pantelis rasped. “What did you do?”

Theodorus went still. “Me?”

Pantelis lurched forward on all fours, hands clawing at the dirt before catching in Theodorus’s clothing. He hauled himself up by the fabric, eyes wide and bloodshot, trembling with grief and fury.

“You did this!” he shouted.

It was an incredible breach of propriety, and grounds for immediate execution if Theodorus wished to make an example of him. His men reacted accordingly at once.

Christos thundered forward and dropped from his horse, glaive already in hand. “Unhand him immediately,” he ordered, the blade angled so Pantelis’s neck would be the first thing it found if the old man refused. “I won’t ask twice, old man.”

Theodorus ignored the outrage behind him and caught Pantelis by the arms instead, holding him steady enough to force their eyes to meet. His own gaze hardened into silver, enough to cut through the old man’s panic.

“Calm down, Pantelis,” he said.

Pantelis seemed to remember where he was, and who he had put his hands on. The pressure in his fists loosened, though he did not quite let go.

“He was here for you,” Pantelis said, still shell-shocked.

Theodorus frowned. “Who?”

“Your brother.” He whispered.

Theodorus froze in place. The word struck clean through him.

“A Sideris always pays his debts in iron and blood.” A thin rivulet of blood escaped from the corner of Pantelis's mouth as he relayed Georgius's message to him. “And yours have come due.”

For a long stretch, Theodorus had no answer. Georgius had returned, and of course, he had chosen the worst possible time to do so.

Christos seized Pantelis and pulled him back, placing himself between the headman and Theodorus. The glaive shifted again, ready for a final answer, but Theodorus caught Christos by the shoulder before the man could turn old grief into a corpse.

“Enough,” he said.

Christos halted, though every line of him looked eager to argue. Theodorus stepped around him and looked down at Pantelis, the shock in his chest hardening into something cold.

“Tell me everything that happened,” Theodorus demanded.

There was no softness left in his tone now. Only authority, and the promise that someone would pay for what had been done here.

…

When Zeno arrived at Mikro Elos’s granary, night had already settled over the village.

The reinforced double doors groaned inward, letting in a strip of moonlight and the cooler air beyond. “Greetings, gentlemen,” he said as he stepped inside, surprising the armed men gathered around the room.

“My Lord,” they greeted, cutting hasty bows as hands shifted away from sword hilts and spear hafts.

Theodorus had turned the granary into a temporary command center with the few officials he had brought on the hard ride north. The raised floor still smelled faintly of grain dust and fresh-cut timber, though most of the sacks were gone now, leaving too much empty space against the walls. A few lamps burned on hooks and barrel tops, their flames twitching. For the last several hours, they had been questioning survivors, comparing accounts, and trying to hash out the faint outline of something resembling a plan.

“Did you journey through the night, my Lord?” Stathis asked.

As one of the few captains of Suyren’s army, Stathis had made a point of being present despite the myriad duties he had abandoned on the drop of a hat. His surprise was justified. Theodorus had left almost as soon as the report reached him, gathering a small party of riders and driving them through the countryside as quickly as allowable. Even then, he had barely arrived before sundown.

Zeno had received even less warning and must have departed later. Yet here he stood.

“Once I heard the news, I could not stay away.” Riding by scraps of daylight and a full moon was dangerous business on Theodoro’s poor country roads, where a wrong turn could put a man in a ditch or lead him into forested blackness until dawn. Zeno looked none the worse for it. He wore the gold and blue of House Makris, with a heavy dark cloak fastened over a fitted tunic overlaid with a thin, if elaborate, gambeson. Only the loose affair of his usually lustrous hair showed anything was amiss.

“Matters of security that endanger my subjects are paramount to me,” Zeno held Theodorus’s gaze as he spoke. After their heart-to-heart conversation, there was warmth there, but the meaning was plain enough. He would not allow himself to be set aside while Theodorus handled the crisis and negotiations around him.

“What is the situation?” Zeno asked, the demand wrapped in courtly manners but unmistakable all the same.

Stathis answered promptly. “A group of roughly two dozen armed men attacked Mikros Elos shortly after dawn today. They ransacked the granary, killed several dozen villagers, and burned the northern fields to the ground.”

He gestured to the rough map spread across the table. It had been stitched from old leather and marked with charcoal, and looked wholly unreliable to Theodorus’s modern eyes, but it was still the best they had in this unsurveyed area in the north.

“They approached from the northern highlands,” Stathis continued. “They were mounted, organized, and brisk about their business. Crucially, they struck shortly after our grain shipment arrived, then took what they could carry.”

The room seemed to cool by a few degrees. Zeno’s expression hardened into something properly severe.

Timing like that meant either insider knowledge or a plot long enough in the making to involve careful watching. Neither was comforting. Both suggested an enemy with more sense than the average starving cutthroat, someone capable of gathering intelligence and acting on it decisively.

“The villagers recognized some of the men involved,” Stathis said, his voice lowering. “Former villagers. Men who fled and turned to banditry.”

A heaviness settled over the granary. For some men, banditry was an easy choice, a way to live by a knife rather than a plough. For most, it was a desperate one. Made by one bad harvest or too little coin. That sons of the Principality had turned against its own villages said more about Theodoro’s condition than anyone in the room wished to say aloud.

“That would explain how they knew where to strike from,” Zeno said.

He eased himself into the chair closest to Theodorus, then dragged it just far enough to sit exactly beside him at the head of the table.

“And how to flee without leaving easy tracks for us to follow,” Stathis agreed. “We already had scouts fan out along the periphery. The tracks point due north at first, but they split in the woods, double back on themselves, and cross streams wherever possible. They knew what they were doing. I’m not sure we can even follow them.”

“We already did,” a voice rasped from the dark beyond the double doors.

They creaked open again, and a lean, wiry twig of a man stepped through as if the night itself had pushed him inside. Gerasimos looked half-carved from old bark and scarred leather. Only his eyes seemed a world apart, a sharp emerald green that missed very little.

"They went due west," the old hunter reported. He seemed to possess a knack for showing up at the exact moment his answers were required.

“Then we have to give chase,” Christos declared, heaving his great body up from the stool that looked entirely too small for him.

“In the dead of night?” Gerasimos hacked out a weary laugh. “Are you daft, boy?”

Christos stiffened, as if a rabbit caught in a snare.

“I spent all the daylight I had piecing together the true trail from the false ones,” Gerasimos went on, crossing the room without the slightest concern for the solemnity of the gathering. “And all I managed for my trouble was to learn they followed the stream to ruin whatever tracks they left behind. By tomorrow, there will be precious little worth following. It will be slow, but I can take us through it.”

He dropped into the nearest chair with a tired groan, mud still clinging to the hem of his cloak and the leather around his boots dark from water. If he noticed the impropriety of lounging in the middle of a war council, he showed no sign of caring.

“They managed to lead me on a merry chase, I’ll give them that.” For all his mumbling, he had a small, satisfied smile on his face. As if acknowledging a worthy opponent.

“We can still try to follow it tomorrow,” Christos said, more awkward now that his declaration had been turned into a foolish mistake. “Even if the trail is faint.”

“It is a trap.”

It was the first time Theodorus had spoken during the meeting, and the effect was immediate. The room stilled around him.

“I will make something plain now. If we treat them like common outlaws, we will lose.”

“Why do you say that?” Zeno asked, frowning at the dour certainty in Theodorus’s voice.

When Theodorus did not answer, Stathis took up the thread. “The villagers also reported on the man who led the assault…”

He hesitated. It was a rare thing for the quiet captain, and that alone drew Zeno’s eye to him. He glanced toward Theodorus, who made no move to stop him.

“Georgius Sideris led them.”

Zeno took a full moment to process the name. For a man like him, that pause was almost an eternity, and it showed just how deeply the news had caught him wrong-footed.

“Your brother?” he asked, turning to Theodorus with open disbelief.

Theodorus nodded once, still staring down at the map. His mind had already gone far beyond the granary, beyond the lamplight and grain dust, trying to divine what plan could come next.

“Why?” Zeno tried to ask gently, though the kindness strained at the edges.

After their heart-to-heart, he had become far more willing to meet Theodorus halfway. Even so, this newest turn seemed determined to test the limits of his self-control.

“My father split his lands between his three children,” Theodorus said, attempting to keep his voice even. “That inevitably led to an inheritance dispute. I helped my eldest brother lay siege to Georgius’s holding. We succeeded, but Georgius escaped.”

His face darkened at the memory of the manor. And the smoke.

He still saw the charred remains of the children trapped inside so that Georgius could buy himself time to vanish.

Their black bones visited his nightmares with terrible regularity.

“I had hoped he moved on, joined a mercenary company, perhaps. I did not know he had turned to banditry.” Theodorus’s expression hardened. “He has nothing to lose but a deep grudge to nurse. If he is leading the bandits, then we have to treat this as a serious threat.”

“He has a military background, then?” Zeno asked, shaking his head slightly in exasperation. Each answered question only made the situation worse.

Theodorus nodded. “Even under siege and outnumbered, he managed to poison the river our army used for supply. He is also a capable warrior. And ruthless. Entirely ruthless.” And that changed the equation entirely.

Bandit gangs and peasant uprisings were usually less fearsome than they appeared. Most lacked experienced command, discipline, or proper equipment, and were predictably disorderly.

Georgius altered that. If he had brought even a small cadre of surviving retainers from the siege, men still loyal to him and armed with swords and decent horses, then the bandits were no longer merely desperate villagers with stolen blades. They were a weapon someone had taken the time to sharpen.

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“How long ago was this siege?” Zeno asked.

“February,” Theodorus answered. “Nearly half a year ago.” It felt like an eternity ago now.

“Damnation,” Zeno cursed quietly. “That gave him time to hammer some discipline into the bandits and take firm control of them.”

“It also explains why they have been so successful in recent months,” Stathis said. “Evading Nomikos’s grasp, terrorizing merchant caravans, vanishing before anyone could bring them to battle.”

Theodorus remembered from his time as an aide hearing that Apostolos had been charged with catching the outlaws and bringing them to justice. He also remembered that the effort had produced very little. Now he understood why.

“The mass desertions in the villages were also a result of that success,” Zeno laid out the bleak logic with growing distaste. “Their thefts rose sharply while the Principality was embroiled in civil war. They had nearly a month of impunity to steal coin and food, stockpile what they took, and attract desperate men made only more desperate by their own raids.”

It was a vicious cycle, and a heartless one. The bandits created the hunger that drove frightened villagers into their ranks, then fed those new recruits with the plunder taken from the next village.

It was the exact sort of heartless thing Georgius would excel at.

“None of the why matters now,” Theodorus said, cutting across the discussion sharply. “Only how to fix it.”

The intent in his voice snapped the men’s focus back into place.

Zeno nodded to him. “How many do we think are on their side?” he asked, settling into the role of commander with ease.

The question was directed at Charilaos, a newly promoted sergeant tasked with profiling the bandit threat. Theodorus and Zeno had both been aware of the potential danger of the bandit threat long before Mikros Elos burned. While the militia were being hammered into something resembling order, Charilaos had been gathering reports from headmen, merchants, and hunters, trying to paint a picture of their activities, of any potential patterns.

“Our latest information from outlying headmen and theft reports suggests they could be as many as two hundred,” Charilaos said.

Low whistles moved around the room. Two hundred was an enormous number for a half-deserted pastoral countryside, though well within reason when you accounted for the men who had evaded the Adanis’s conscription, the deserters who followed the northern defeat, and the frightened, starving villagers who had slipped into the hills.

“But the information is patchy at best,” Charilaos cautioned. “Much of it is hearsay, repeated by men who heard it from someone else. What we do know is that they likely have several bases of operation spread through the highlands, and that they are not all gathered in one place. There is no other way to explain the number of strikes they carried out across Theodoro during the month of the rebellion, when they were most active.”

“That means they are decentralized and dispersed,” Zeno said, thinking aloud. “Likely not all acting in tandem. Cut off the head of the snake, and the rest may scatter.”

“We know at least one likely location where they might keep a major base,” Theodorus said, mind already looking past the map and into the campaign ahead. “When I served as an aide in Suyren, I went through old patrol records and bandit sightings to estimate a probable hideout.”

“And I am confident in about half a dozen smaller campsites or shelters they are known to use,” Charilaos added.

The Theodoran patrols through the north had not been aimless. They had been sent through the most suspicious stretches of woodland, ravine, and highland track, partly to show the Crown’s presence and partly to help Charilaos stitch together the outline of the bandit network.

“That gives us somewhere to start,” Zeno said, tapping his fingers against the table. “Make an example out of a handful, and many of the others will think twice. We need to take hold of this quickly, before more villages begin to spiral out of control. Our authority is still too fresh for any slower response.”

Zeno was eager to strike back, and Theodorus could understand it. Uprisings and outlaw bands thrived on momentum. A quick blow could break the story they were telling desperate men, that the Crown was distant, blind, and too occupied to answer.

“Most of these ‘bandits’ are down-on-their-luck villagers,” Zeno explained, the word bandits carrying a faint edge of distaste. “Chasing every frightened fool through the hills would waste men we do not have. Breaking their spirit, however, is something we can potentially do from afar.”

“Fear does not have to be our only weapon,” Theodorus said, bringing a hand to his chin as he followed Zeno’s train of thought. “Most of them left because they feared persecution from us.”

Zeno’s eyes narrowed, interest flaring. “You mean to attack them with kindness, then?”

Theodorus smiled.

It was not a pretty thing.

“Sometimes,” he said menacingly, “that is the greatest weapon of all.”

“No. When the cut comes from above, lift your hands and turn the blade slantwise,” Dad said, bringing up his sword in one smooth motion. The steel settled over him like the roof of a house. “Take it on the flat, close to the strong of the blade, so the blow slides away instead of crushing through you. Like a roof, remember? How many times must I tell you, Georgius?” No matter how many times Dad scolded him, his voice never turned sharp or angry.

The same could not be said for Georgius.

“I know. I’m trying,” he growled. “It. Just. Won’t. Work.”

He shoved his arms up again, trying to make them move as fast as Dad’s had. They didn't. Only burned something fierce as the sword kept tilting wrong, no matter how hard he glared at it. His wrists felt too small to hold it up, which was stupid.

“Maybe it would work better if you used a blade your own size,” Dad said, offhandedly, lowering one hand to Georgius’s height and the other to his forehead as if searching for Georgius up there. “You’re so small I can barely see you,”

“Soon I’ll be just as tall as you,” Georgius said, glowering so hard his cheeks hurt, shaking off his hand.

“Soon? Next week maybe, when you turn eight?” Dad lifted one eyebrow and tapped Georgius’s sword with his own, adding just enough pressure to make the blade wobble.

“Yes!” Georgius shouted, daring him to laugh. “Then I’ll be the one teaching you how to block.”

Dad laughed anyway, a deep, warm sound that filled the courtyard. Then he leaned the smallest bit of strength into his sword, and Georgius felt as if the whole sky had dropped on him. His arms gave out and he hit the ground hard enough to taste dust, spitting it from his mouth while his face went hot with fury.

“Alright, daredevil,” Dad said, still smiling. “But until that day, you are a pipsqueak, and pipsqueaks use what they are given.”

He took Georgius’s sword away as easily as plucking a sweet from a baby, ignoring the beet-red anger on Georgius’s face. In its place, he handed him a smaller, skinnier blade that fit perfectly in Georgius’s palm.

Georgius hated it. It looked like a toothpick.

Real warriors didn’t use little blades like that. Dad didn’t use one, and Georgius wanted a sword Dad’s size, to wield it with Dad’s strength. Then nothing and no one in the world would be able to shove him down.

“Again,” Dad called. It was still kind, but there was something colder under it. Most of the time Dad was smiling and gentle, always quick to praise. During training, though, something else slipped through. It made the stories Georgius heard the guards tell about his days in the capital seem actually true. It was awesome.

Georgius swallowed his rage and raised the little sword again. Then again, and again, until his arms shook and his teeth clenched.

He would endure it. He would endure anything he had to if it meant becoming a warrior like Dad.

“How are my two little warriors doing?” a lilting voice called from the corridor beside the central training courtyard.

“Mom!” Georgius forgot his stance and nearly sprinted toward her before remembering the lesson. He froze with one foot forward, then looked back at Dad.

“Better now that you are here, my darling,” Dad always gave the same answer. He snorted at Georgius’s eager face, then jerked his chin toward her, giving him permission.

Georgius didn’t need to be told twice. He rushed into his mother with enough force to make her laugh, though he slowed at the last moment and wrapped his arms carefully around her belly

“Are you feeling better now?” he asked, looking up at her. “Not sick anymore?” He tried not to show worry, but to be honest it probably slipped through.

“No, not at all, honey. Your little brother has calmed down a little,” his mother said, smiling down at him gently. Her hand slid through his sweat-damp hair, mussing it up. “I hope your father has not been too demanding of you.” Her smile thinned when she looked past him. “We all know he can sometimes get overexcited.”

“Nonsense,” Dad said at once, denying it like he was telling a joke. “When have I ever done that?” Mom rolled her eyes, and Dad pointed down at Georgius as if he had found the true criminal. “The boy is the one always pestering me to learn this move or that.”

“He has not even taught me how to swing a sword yet!” Georgius said, eager to report on the abuse before Dad could wriggle free. “Only blocking.” He puffed up his cheeks in indignation.

“As he should,” his mother said, ruining his hopes of victory in one clean stroke. “Fighting and swinging swords is dangerous business, Georgius. You should only learn enough to protect yourself.”

She said it firmly and caught his eyes with a stern look. No matter how brave Georgius thought himself, he couldn’t ever seem to take this blow and stay standing.

“Okay, Mother,” Georgius muttered, looking down at the ground. “I am sorry.”

“Madness, how you can make the boy listen,” Dad swore under his breath. “I swear you are the only one who can get a hold of him.”

“Of course I can. He is my precious darling, though a mischievous troublemaker at the best of times,” She kept her gaze on Georgius for another moment to make certain the lesson had settled in. Once satisfied, her voice softened again, and the bright smile he loved returned.

“Georgius, do you want to hear him?” she asked, trying to cheer him up. “I think he is trying to kick his way to you.”

“Yes!” Georgius’s sadness vanished so quickly that it felt silly it had ever been there. He loved talking to his little brother, even if he never answered back. Mom said she knew it was a boy, and Georgius couldn’t be happier. He leaned close, pressing his ear against the warm curve of his mother’s belly, and held his breath until he felt the soft, hidden thum-thum beneath her skin.

“When do you think he will come out?” he demanded, which made Dad rumble with laughter and Mother sigh at the foolishness of boys.

“It is still a month away,” she said. “Do not get too excited yet, Georgius.”

He only half listened. The quiet beating held him still. It sounded so small. So fragile. This was his little brother, his first real one, unlike Iohannes, who did not count and never would, no matter what anyone said.

Georgius pressed his cheek against Mother’s belly and swore he would do anything for him. He would become strong enough that no one could hurt him without paying for it.

Yes, he would be strong like Dad, brave like Dad, and chivalrous too! Then his little brother would have no choice but to look up to him!

Georgius was going to be the best big brother in the world.

…

“Hey, what you dreaming about, my champion knight?”

Warm breath crawled up Georgius’s ear, and his eyes snapped open. His hand went for the sword he always kept on his left when he slept. His fingers closed around dirt and splinters instead, and every lazy part of him burned awake at once. He tried to rise, but there was weight on his hips - warm flesh and cheap perfume pinning him down.

“None of that, honey,” the woman said, amused. “We don't want any of that violence here. Or maybe...we do.”

The way she said it carried a different meaning entirely.

Georgius blinked through the stink and darkness until the world returned by ugly pieces, showing a crooked shed’s roof, sour wine, and the stale stink of bad bodies and cheaper sex. As well as who the woman on top of him was.

Once he did, he rose anyway, this time using strength properly to throw her off him like a bundle of rags.

“Unhand me, woman,” he spat as she flew.

“Ow,” Nadia said, falling dramatically onto the hard-packed ground just beyond their bedroll. She sprawled there as if he had thrown her from a tower rather than shoved her aside. “What a brute. Though what should I expect, given how rough you were last night?” She bit her lip at the memory.

“Where did you put my sword?” Georgius demanded.

He seized her wrist and loomed over her, uncaring that neither of them had a stitch of clothing on.

“Your ‘sword’?” Nadia’s brows rose. For one ridiculous moment, she looked almost shy, glancing to the side with a blush. “Last night, I put it right…here.”

She guided his hand toward the middle of her legs.

Georgius shoved her off. “I have no time for games.”

His hand closed around her throat, not tight enough to crush, but enough to remind her of her position. “Where is it?” he gritted out.

“By the chamber pot,” she wheezed, both hands flying to his wrist.

He threw her off again, snatching through the dim corner of the shack until his fingers found the familiar leather of the scabbard. Only then did his pulse stop hammering quite so hard. The blade was there, oiled to a sparkling sheen, and Georgius fel relief leaving him all at once.

“Do not move it again,” he said, looking back at her. “Do you hear me, Nadia?”

“Last time I woke you, you nearly skewered me with the damned thing,” Nadia snapped, rubbing at her throat. She had never known when to keep her mouth shut, “I was trying not to get stabbed, moron.”

“That’s easy. Don’t wake me up, then.” Georgius grunted and began dressing, dragging on his clothes with rough, impatient movements. His head throbbed like some bastard had taken a hammer to the inside of his skull and gotten bored before finishing the job.

“As if you would ever do that on your own,” Nadia said, pushing herself upright. “What time do you think it is? It’s almost midday, champ. I thought I would die of boredom in this pit.”

“Are you complaining?” Georgius spat. “Do I need to remind you what you were doing before I took in your sorry ass?”

“And do I need to remind you why you took in my beautiful ass?” Nadia shot back, gesturing at her curves as if they were something divine.

Georgius threw her clothes at her face by way of answer.

“Get dressed,” he said. “We’ll have to move out of this place soon.”

It was never smart to linger after a strike. Any fool with half a brain knew that.

Yesterday had been their largest haul yet, and the thought brought a hard smile to his face. He had struck a blow at that little rat Theodorus. He only wished he could have seen his brother’s face when the message reached him. That smooth silver-eyed bastard, standing over the ashes and graves, finally understanding that Georgius had not crawled off to die.

The smile died when Nadia spoke again. Because she was irritable like that.

“Maybe if you hadn’t spent last night drinking yourself stupid, we would already be gone by now,” she said, pulling on her clothes. “And by the look on your face, you’re nursing a hell of a hangover too.”

“Got to keep the men’s morale up,” Georgius said without sparing her a glance.

He tore open the rickety door of the shack and stepped out into the glare.

Their hideout squatted high in the mountains, wedged into a fold of stone and pine where the wind came thin and cool even under the summer sun. A handful of half-abandoned huts clung around a blackened firepit, their roofs patched with bark and hide. Smoke curled lazily from the central fire up into the air, mixing up there with sweat, spilled wine, piss, and old meat.

Around fifty bandits crowded the place now, too many for the miserable little camp. Some lay passed out where they had fallen, sprawled in dirt and ash with empty skins beside them. One man slept with his face pressed against a sack of stolen grain as if it were a lover. Another vomited behind a hut while two others tiredly cheered him on.

Near the edge of camp, a dozen civilians huddled together and attempted the herculean task of cleaning up after the place. They were part of the families that had fled into the mountain into Georgius’s good graces. Well, good depended on who you asked.

Georgius found one of his warriors in the dirt near the firepit, distinguishable from the common bandit scum mostly by the fact that he did not look like an untrained peasant pretending a stolen knife made him dangerous. Petrache still had the shoulders of a fighting man and the scars to prove he had earned them.

Georgius kicked him awake.

“What the…? Who did that? You bastard-” Petrache cracked his eyes open, then winced as daylight stabbed straight through whatever wine still swam in his thick skull. “Ah-Commander,”

He tried to sit up straight and failed the first time.

“We’re leaving,” Georgius declared. “Need to get the supplies back to the main camp.”

That earned him a pained groan from the layabout.

“Now? Must we?”

Something hot twitched in Georgius’s temple. He kicked him again, harder this time, and Petrache jerked back in pain, rubbing at the spot while he tried to heave himself up, and nearly fell in the attempt.

“I fucking told you yesterday not to get hammered,” Georgius snapped.

This was the most ill-disciplined rabble he had ever been cursed to command, and that said plenty. Worse, the rot was starting to spread to his own men. Good fighters turned sloppy around filth if they slept in it long enough. Let a warrior drink with peasants, raid with peasants, and roll in the dirt with peasants, and soon enough he started thinking like them too.

“Wake everyone,” Georgius ordered. “Now.”

Petrache staggered off to obey, shouting and kicking bodies as he went. The camp stirred like a midden heap full of rats. Men cursed, spat, reached for blades that were not there, then remembered where they were and who was watching. A few captives flinched at the noise, huddling closer together near the edge of the camp.

Georgius watched them crawl back into motion with disgust.

From the mouth of the narrow valley, one of the sentries started toward him. At least that much had improved since Georgius took charge. Before him, these wastrels had called it caution if a drunk man looked up from a fire whenever a twig snapped. Now they had watches, signal points, fallback routes, and a string of ugly little hideouts cut through the high country.

He had learned quickly that a bandit’s greatest ally was the half-buried trails no lord’s patrol cared to map until men were dead along it.

The boy coming toward him could not have been more than fifteen. He looked too thin even for the knife at his belt and too clean in the eyes to belong among murderers. One of the poor sods who had come into the mountains with his family, most likely dragged there by a father or older brother who had heard there was food to be had if a man was willing to steal it.

Georgius’s plan to draw more unfortunates into the hills had worked better than even he had hoped. Hunger did half his recruiting for him. Fear did the rest. Burn a field, take the grain, leave a village wondering whether the Crown could protect anyone at all, and soon men began asking if the bandits might be safer than the law.

The Principality had chosen a fine time to start fighting itself. Right when Georgius was finally in control of all the noteworthy bandit groups in the northern mountains. It was enough to make him think that God was finally on his side.

Then word came that his brother had taken Suyren.

That conniving, two-faced fop had been rewarded for his betrayal. Not content with helping steal the lands Georgius was owed by blood, Theodorus had somehow climbed higher still, setting himself up as Lord of the North. Mocking him all the while.

Georgius couldn’t let that go. He would not.

“Commander,” the boy said as he came near.

Georgius looked him over. He tended to put fresh meat on sentry duty. They were hungry enough to stay awake, scared enough to obey, and unlikely to run far when their families were kept close under Georgius’s eye. Chancing the wilderness alone was foolish besides, doubly so if you had a hole for a belly.

“What is it?” Georgius asked.

The boy swallowed. There was fear under his voice, not the usual fear of Georgius either. This was fresher.

“There’s talk from the nearby village, and word is spreading,” he said. “The lord in Suyren is offering an unconditional pardon to all bandits in the north of Theodoro.”

Georgius went very still, and something ugly pulled at the corner of his mouth.

Theodorus’s first move was just as he had expected. The little rat had always known how to dress a knife as a gift.

Georgius would not let it end like last time. There was only one way this story would finish.

With his brother’s neck beneath his blade.