A Sellsword's Resolve Read online

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Join the newsletter

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FORTY

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

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  Note from the Author

  About the Author

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  A Sellsword’s Resolve: Book Three of the Seven Virtues

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to the retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of the author.

  Copyright © 2018 Jacob Nathaniel Peppers. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical without the express written permission of the author. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials.

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  CHAPTER ONE

  They were coming. The night was dark and moonless, filled with an almost preternatural silence, the silence of ancient things and long forgotten places, and they were coming. The great trees loomed overhead, monolithic shadows that watched the scene play out before them, thinking their strange, alien thoughts. Those who came were not of the forest, but intruders in this place who cared nothing for the world of men and its doings. Each metallic shift of their armor rang like clarion bells in the near silence. Each heavy footfall was loud and somehow profane.

  Aaron waited, silently crouched in the shadowed nook of a tree and its branch some fifteen feet up from the base of the trunk. He waited, his hand on the hilt of the sword at his back, and listened as the intruders drew closer.

  Aaron had grown up in cities, his life spent surrounded by shops and taverns, criminals and whores, a world very different than the one in which he found himself, yet there were similarities, if a man looked closely enough.

  The Downs, the slum of Avarest, may not have been filled with trees, but buildings and trees were not so very different in the darkness. Vague, shadowed outlines that served to conceal predators and prey alike. In the woods, such predators were wolves and bears, creatures of claws and teeth that hunted to survive. In the Downs, there were predators too, more, in fact, and though these did their hunting with knives and swords, with clubs and shivs, they too hunted for their survival.

  Still, Aaron had to admit that he’d learned a lot from Wendell, his new sergeant. The man was a gruff, irreverent bastard with a jagged scar across his face—not that he’d have won any beauty contests anyway. Unlike the majority of Perennia’s soldiers who’d been born and raised in the city, Wendell had grown up in a small forest village and his father taught him much of what it took to survive—and fight—in the woods. He, in turn, taught Aaron and those men under Aaron’s command. Or, at least, he’d tried. The failure of many of the men to learn the sergeant’s lessons was evident in each snap as they stepped on a twig, in each metallic scrape of armor against the forest’s undergrowth.

  Aaron kept his eyes wide in an effort to pick up any light the night held, peering into the darkness where the sounds were coming from. He could have used his bond with Co to see the men clearly, locating them by the many emotions that were no doubt roiling through them, but he was determined to win or lose based solely on the things Wendell had shown him. And anyway, he thought he knew well enough what emotions he would find should he hunt for them. There would be exhaustion, mental and physical, annoyance more than likely, and some small bit of fear as was always present when a man finds himself in the deeper, darker places of the world, places that felt, if not malevolent, certainly indifferent. Such places cared little for men and their concerns.

  Aaron, too, was weary, and he wanted to rub his eyes, to shake his head in an effort to clear vision that was blurred from lack of sleep, but he fought back the impulse. In the deep silence of the woods, the smallest sound could give away a man’s position.

  Three days they’d been at it this time. Three days and only four men left besides Aaron. Wendell himself, of course, and three others, two of which were the owners of those unmistakable footfalls down below. At least one of the others—not Wendell, he was sure of that—he heard coming from the other direction, the men doing what they could to pen him in and leave him no room to flee.

  It would have been a clever enough strategy, Aaron supposed, except that he was not the type of man who often looked for a way to flee. Things that fled were chased. Things that fled were prey and left a scent in the air that all predators could detect and pursue. No, fleeing had never been the idea.

  The two were drawing nearer now, and he judged that it would take them no more than five minutes to be underneath him. The other was closer, hidden somewhere in the darkness by the oak sentinels, but easy enough to track by the sound his steel boots made on the forest floor.

  Aaron eased himself down the trunk of the tree, taking his time, acutely aware of the unavoidable sounds he made as he clambered down the tree. He let go a couple of feet above the ground, his own leather boots making little noise as he landed on the blanket of grass beneath him. There had been dead leaves lying about the oak he’d cho
sen, but he’d moved them away before he climbed, all too aware after Wendell’s lessons of how easily such oversights could give a man away. He stayed crouched low, sliding the dulled sword he’d brought out of its sheath, his heightened senses wincing at each scrape the blade made against the leather before it was free.

  He waited then, watching and listening for any of the tell-tale signs—whispers, rapid footfalls—that would indicate that he’d given away his position. The lone man was almost on him now, the other two a few minutes away, or so he suspected. The forest did strange things with sound. Still, he knew they were close and that was enough. He crept forward, keeping the trees between him and the sound of the approaching man, his eyes studying the forest floor below him, so that he might avoid any fallen twig or leaf that might give him away.

  Soon, he was close enough to hear the sound of the man’s breathing. Shallow breaths, caused as much by anxiety, he suspected, as exertion. Being in such a place, on such an errand, had ways of awakening a primal fear, no doubt a remnant of times before men learned to cultivate, to build, back before they had learned—for better or worse—how to shape the world around them to their liking instead of being forced to be part of it as it was.

  Aaron propped his back against the trunk of a tree, waiting until the man passed, and he could see his breath pluming out before him in the chill night. Then he glided forward, clapping a hand over the man’s mouth from behind even as he brought his sword up to the soldier’s throat.

  The man grunted in what would have been a scream had Aaron not clamped his mouth shut, and his body went rigid in the darkness. “You’re dead,” Aaron whispered in his ear, “go and be with the other dead men.” The man slumped but nodded quietly enough before turning and starting back in the direction he’d come. Aaron thought he saw something almost relieved in the man’s posture as he walked away, and he frowned at his back for a moment before stalking back into the woods toward the other two.

  He didn’t have much trouble locating them again—a blind man would have found them well enough for all the noise they were making. Gritting his teeth, Aaron crept toward them, concentrating on keeping his own breathing under control and stepping only on the balls of his feet—a task that had grown more difficult as exhaustion threatened to give way to carelessness. He’d had little sleep the past three nights. Almost none, in fact, and his body felt each movement all the more for his weariness. Still, he did not mind the loss of sleep as much as he might have. Whatever was happening with his bond with the Virtue, whatever magic brought on the terrible rages in which he lost control of himself, it had not stopped since he’d thrown Owen—or Boyce Kevlane, that was—from the queen’s balcony. In fact, the rage had gotten worse, following him even into his dreams.

  They were red dreams now. Dreams of blood and pain and screams, and it was not the dreams themselves that scared him, at least not as much, but the fact that each night he woke from them, he found himself less frightened, less unnerved. Found, instead, that he was well rested, rejuvenated and, if not happy, exactly, possessed of a certain satisfaction that he did not care to investigate further. The important thing was that it—whatever it was—was getting worse. Over the past weeks, he’d found himself getting angry at things that normally wouldn’t have bothered him and furious at things that he might once have only considered a small nuisance.

  Things, for example, like the careless noises the soldiers were making. As he drew closer to them, he found the anger growing within him, a creature rousing from a troubled, fitful sleep and baring its teeth within him. They though themselves soldiers. But not Aaron and not the building rage within him. They were butcher’s meat, cows with bells wrapped around their necks, signaling an easy meal to all within earshot. Sacks of blood waiting only to be pierced so that they might spill their contents onto the forest loam. Had they listened to nothing the sergeant had taught them?

  He tried to slow his breathing, to get a grip on his rising anger, but with each sound the fools made he found his rage growing. He waited until they moved past him—unmindful of his presence—before he abandoned his position among the shadowed trees and charged forward. He planted a boot in the lower back of the first, and the man cried out as he went sprawling. The second got his sword—already drawn—up in time to block Aaron’s blade, but he grunted, stumbling backward under the force of a blow that had been delivered much harder than Aaron intended. Blunted blades or no, it had been a dangerous blow and aimed at the man’s neck.

  The man, a youth really, no more than nineteen or twenty years old, was much bigger than Aaron, but his sword came back surprisingly quickly, just managing to block Aaron’s follow up strike. It was a good parry or, at least, would have been but the man, Bastion by name, was gripping the sword’s handle tightly in his surprise. Too tightly. All too aware that the man behind him would find his feet any moment, Aaron swung his sword again, this time with both hands and aiming for the young giant’s sword. The youth’s tight grip on the handle kept his wrists and arms from being able to flex and shift to absorb the shock as they should. Instead, his sword went wide, and Aaron lashed out with his own blade. In his anger, he wasn’t sure what was going to happen until the tip of the steel stopped an inch away from the big man’s throat. Bastion grunted, his eyes wide with shock, but he nodded in acknowledgment of his defeat.

  Aaron hardly noticed the nod though, for he was already spinning, sweeping his leg out and kicking the feet out from underneath the other soldier who’d only just risen. The man landed on his back in a clanging of metal, and his breath exploded from his lungs. Before he could try to rise once more, Aaron stepped forward and rested the tip of his sword inches away the soldier’s throat.

  The man wheezed a curse, going for his own sword, and Aaron growled, the blade darting closer until it pierced the skin of the soldier’s throat. Aaron watched the trickle of blood slide down the man’s neck and, for a moment, the only sounds were the soldier’s wheezing breaths, and Aaron’s own, ragged and shallow in his anger. A part of him wanted to drive the blade through, to finish what he’d started. What good was the man, anyway? He was loud and careless and of no worth. Better to kill him. Better to—

  Aaron, Co spoke into his mind, and her voice sounded strained as she spoke past the anger that she and Aaron shared, don’t. He doesn’t … don’t.

  Aaron’s sword hand started to tremble. Small, almost imperceptible tremors, but enough to draw his attention, and he studied it, remembering the way it had looked covered in a glove of crimson blood after he’d killed the slavers and the men in the tavern back in Baresh. He remembered the feeling, too. Savage joy, a satisfaction at sating some bestial hunger, but he closed his eyes and took a slow, deep breath. “You’re dead,” he said, then slowly, he brought the sword away. The soldier nodded, apparently unaware of how close he’d come to being killed.

  “So are you,” came the words at his back, and Aaron spun in time to have the tip of a sword at his throat. He followed it with his eyes to see Wendell standing in front of him. The sergeant was grinning—seemed to always be grinning, in fact—and the expression did ugly things with the scar on his face.

  Aaron grunted in surprise. “You quiet bastard. How long have you had me?”

  The scarred man winked, “I guess maybe an hour or two, no more. Wasn’t sure it was you—wasn’t sure it was anybody, really, up there in that tree. You’re gettin’ better, sir, and that’s a fact. ‘Course, there’s some children of eight years or less in my old village could sneak up on you and steal your virtue without you knowin’ it, but you’re gettin’ better anyway. Didn’t know it was you, not till you came down from that tree, anyhow. Heard your boots.”

  Aaron frowned, glancing down to see that the sergeant was barefoot, his calloused feet nearly black with dirt and covered in pieces of leaves. “And then?”

  The sergeant shrugged, “Well. Figured I’d let you take out these others, save myself the trouble.”

  Aaron nodded, biting back a curse.
“Well done, sergeant.”

  He glanced back at the two others, frowning, then put his fingers to his mouth and let out a loud whistle. “A fire, sergeant.” Wendell nodded, motioning to several of the soldiers who set about gathering wood and soon they had a fire going, a big enough blaze that it could be seen for a great distance in the dark woods. Then they waited in silence.

  Soon, men began to appear on the edge of the light like revenants rising up from the darkness. They shuffled toward the fire, their exhaustion evident in each step they took, and the scarred sergeant kept count as they appeared. After a time, Wendell walked over to stand beside Aaron and nodded, “That’s all two hundred, sir.”

  Aaron nodded, studying the men gathered in the firelight. For a time, he only stood there regarding them in silence, and they began to fidget anxiously. “Two weeks,” Aaron said finally. “Two weeks we’ve been at this and for what?”

  None of them answered, their eyes cast on the ground like children being chastised, and Aaron felt himself growing angrier. “Two fucking weeks,” he growled, “and what have we got to show for it? You men clomping around in the woods like a bunch of fucking sheep waiting to get their throats cut. You,” he said, jabbing a finger at one of the men closest to him, “Adney, isn’t it?”

  A middle-aged man who’d been sitting slumped with his arms over his knees glanced up at his name, “Yes sir?”

  “You have any family? Kids? A wife?”

  “Yes sir,” he said, a confused look on his face, “Got a wife, Emily. The kids, Fran and Sarah.”

  Aaron nodded, pointing at another man, “And you, Gerald?”

  The man—a gray-haired veteran—seemed to know well enough what was coming judging by the shamed expression on his face, but he nodded, “Yes sir. A wife.”

  Aaron nodded again, glancing around at the gathered men. “Well, who looks forward to telling little Fran and Sarah that their father got killed because he’s too fucking loud? Who’d like the privilege of letting Gerald’s wife know she’s a widow now because her husband thought stealth meant only whistling some of the time? Anybody?”