Paladin's Prize (Age of Heroes, Book 1)
AGE OF HEROES, BOOK 1
Paladin’s Prize
GAELEN FOLEY
TABLE OF CONTENTS
My good blade carves the casques of men,
My tough lance thrusteth sure,
My strength is as the strength of ten,
Because my heart is pure.
~Alfred, Lord Tennyson,
“Sir Galahad”
Chapter 1
Kiss of Life
T
he Golden Knight lay dying on the starlit field where he had made his stand alone against the bestial horde.
He had wreaked mayhem on the enemy, but had paid a terrible price.
Even now, the thirsty spring ground drank his noble blood like some dark pagan sacrifice to the old gods. Rainless rumbles from the dark sky, however, voiced the indignation of the deity under whose banner the paladin had won so many battles. Ilios, the Father of Lights, however, was not without
other
votaries in the area…
From the moment she had heard the distant clamor of the melee, the young healer had understood her mission and obeyed.
Shouldering her satchel of supplies, she had lifted the loose, wide hood of her gray gown, grasped her walking staff, and left her hermitage atop the mountain.
Twilight had darkened to nightfall while she trekked down through the wind-rippled woods, her tiny fey familiar hovering by her shoulder.
The lady Wrynne du Mere tried not to listen overmuch to the battle sounds echoing up from the farmer’s field below as she went. Shouts. Roars. Ugly porcine squeals. The clatter of weaponry.
What would her parents say, she wondered, if they knew she was heading
toward
the danger rather than away from it? A small frisson of worry crept through her. For she knew what probably awaited her down there.
Everyone in Mistwood knew all too well about the Urmugoths rampaging through the countryside this past fortnight.
She was just glad the good-for-nothing king had finally yawned himself awake enough to send soldiers to deal with the beasts. Finally, somebody had bothered enough about their sleepy northern province to
do
something about the brutish raiders.
Whatever was happening down there, it reached a fairly swift crescendo. She only paused when a flash of brilliance suddenly lit up the night.
A thunderclap and a man’s lionlike roar shook the whole valley. Her fairy shrieked at the sound and dove into her satchel, but Wrynne’s very soul had gone quiet.
The hairs on her nape tingled as she sensed divine power in the air.
Of course.
It could only be Sir Thaydor at the head of the king’s troops, she thought in relief, still holding her breath. His devotion to the Light was said to flood the paladin on occasion with supernatural fighting ability, much like her healing.
And then he became practically invincible.
Well, then.
An embarrassing flutter of giddy schoolgirl eagerness flitted in her belly to see the famous knight. There was obviously nothing to worry about.
“You can come out now,” she told Silvertwig. “Don’t worry, the king’s champion is still undefeated, last I heard.”
The Urms would rue the day they’d ever come crashing through the North Gate of the kingdom once they found Sir Thaydor waiting to put a stop to their bloody rampage.
Sure enough, the battle sounds had gone abruptly still.
Victory as usual, Sir Thaydor?
she thought with a slight smile. She did not have the highest opinion of knights, in general. Most seemed thickheaded brutes who only lived to kill people and break things, but a paladin was another matter.
A paladin had a purpose and a code.
Reassured that he had matters well in hand, Wrynne told Silvertwig to hold on and banged her enchanted staff lightly on the ground, using a
hasten
spell to teleport the rest of the way down the mountain. There was no time to lose if she was to aid any of his men who’d been wounded in the battle.
Moments later, she stepped out of the woods onto the edge of her neighbor’s pasture. It was now quite dark, but a few dropped torches burned here and there, and she shuddered at the carnage revealed by their eerie, flickering glow.
Dead Urmugoths everywhere. But where were the knights? Archers? Soldiers?
Anyone?
Heart pounding, she scanned the field in confusion until the realization slowly sank in. It was not a troop of soldiers that had done this.
It was
one man.
She stared across the battlefield, awestruck.
She had seen many things in her twenty-three years of life, but never so much death, and never such mad courage.
The Golden Knight had come alone.
Then she drew in her breath, for she saw that he had fallen—the hero of the kingdom, the favorite of the gods.
He was unmistakable in his bright armor, the silver steel of his breastplate, as well as his tattered white surcoat adorned with the sun symbol of Ilios in gold. By his position on a slight rise, surrounded as he was by the slumped, hulking bodies of Urmugoth warriors, she realized that Thaydor had not permitted himself to drop to his knees until every last foul thing sent against their people had been slain.
She started rushing out across the field, but unfortunately, some of the raiders were still clinging to life. She could sense the presence of evil ahead—or rather, brute malice, in their case.
A monstrous race of semi-primitive, nomadic barbarians, Urmugoths roamed the wastelands beyond the kingdom’s northern border. Seven feet tall on average, clad in spiked armor, they adorned themselves with the bones of past enemies and wielded giant maces, clubs, and poleaxes. The stump tusks they sported on their lower jaws proved they were indeed descended from ogres, just like the nursery tales warned—to say nothing of their cannibalistic tendencies.
How a raiding party of some twenty Urms had got through the North Gates in the first place was the great mystery of the day, along with why the king failed to send troops to destroy them.
All Wrynne knew was that after somehow breaching the border, the Urms had raged across the countryside from farm to farm and village to village, plundering and killing, ripping the peasants apart, until, thank Ilios, justice had caught up to them this night.
Sir Thaydor had clearly lured them here, away from the people in the nearby hamlet and the people there, to fight them in this field.
Now all twenty of the hideous brutes were either dead or dying. Wrynne shook her head in wonder as she proceeded past them at a more guarded pace, just in case any of the beasts were still capable of attacking her.
As she walked by, she looked around at the litter of bodies and was still profoundly shocked at Sir Thaydor’s obvious ferocity. He was known back in her hometown, the capital city of Pleiburg, as a decidedly gentle soul. Enemies might quake at his name, but at festivals after his victory parades, she had personally seen little children climb on him as if he were a great, tall, affable golden tree.
And now this bloodbath.
Well, she thought with a nervous shrug, the bards said the Paladin of Ilios could do this sort of thing when the power of the Light flooded him with a blinding, holy wrath and his famous blade, Hallowsmite, began to glow—but who believed bards?
It seemed they had been telling the truth for once.
Go to him. Hurry. He needs you
, said the voice of the Light, deep within her heart.
Before going any closer to the dying Urms, Wrynne closed her eyes to the bloody scene before her and summoned forth the trancelike state of indomitable bliss that she would have to draw upon to heal whatever wounds the paladin had sustained.
That she do so was obviously the will of the god they both served in their two different, confraternal orders—he as the first of the Sons of Might, she as one of the Daughters of the Rose.
Ilios clearly wanted him alive, and no wonder. The man was a walking, talking force for good upon the earth, and she had a feeling in her bones that he was important to their country in ways yet to be revealed.
With a deep breath, Wrynne flicked her eyes open, ready to proceed. Her tranquil stare fixed on him, she set out across the battlefield, pulling more deeply into the peace within herself with every stride. He had used his gift to protect her and everyone who lived here; now she would wield hers to save him.
Time seemed to slow all around her. Ignoring the stench and severed limbs, the gore of spilt entrails, the low animal groans rising up here and there, and the baleful yellow eyes that watched her pass, she focused on the Light spreading through her body. The radiant path was the way of love and beauty…
The ugliness receded. The healing power unfolded within her like a flower, and at each spot where her bare feet trod the bloodstained ground, the crushed and trampled grass began to rise again, the delicate shoots of clover unbending.
The hem of her pewter-gray gown was edged with crimson by the time she knelt down beside him. “Sir Thaydor?”
No response.
She glanced at the arrow in his side, which had somehow found one small, vulnerable chink in his armor between his back and breast plates. She laid her hand gently on his chest and gazed at him in sorrow. Wrynne was a compassionate but not a sentimental woman. No healer could afford to be. One had to learn to steel oneself in order to work calmly and swiftly in the midst of human suffering.
But even she was shaken by the sight of the kingdom’s greatest warrior lying defenseless on the ground, no one here to protect him now but her. She glanced around uneasily to make sure no more enemies were coming.
Strange
. She could not shake the feeling that something was still out there that wanted him dead.
If they came back to finish him off, what could she do? She was no warrior.
I have to get him out of here.
With her tiny winged companion whispering anxiously in her ear, Wrynne took the rolled-up Aladdin stretcher out of her satchel. A rare and very expensive item, it had been a gift from her proud parents upon the completion of her healing studies. All the way from the exotic bazaars of Arabia, the magical floating stretcher had been made by djinn weavers from the strands of a flying carpet.
“Let’s get him onto this,” she murmured.
Silvertwig assisted as Wrynne hurried to unfurl the thick, tapestry-like cloth. Without it, she had no hope of transporting the warrior off the battlefield. His armor weighed a good four stone, and that did not include the solid muscle of the tall, broad-shouldered body underneath.
Oh, and they could not leave Hallowsmite behind. The longsword was heavy, too. She was a little afraid to touch it, just in case it had another thunderbolt stored in there somewhere, waiting to fly out.
Don’t be silly
, she thought. The power came from him, not from the sword itself.
Once the stretcher was unrolled, Wrynne used the golden strap of the hand-loop to make it rest on the ground.
Whether or not he could hear her, she gave her patient fair warning of the movement to come. “I’ll try not to hurt you.” It seemed an odd thing for a petite woman to say to a large man who had slain dragons, but she got to work anyway, quickly tucking it under the length of him.