“Dalia,” she replied, lifting her chin.
“Dalia, take the remainder west,” Fletcher said, pointing down the dilapidated street. “I want both team leaders back in twenty minutes.”
Dalia and Kobe stood uncertainly for a moment, unsure of the protocol.
“Well, you heard him. Move out!” Sir Caulder ordered.
The teams jumped to obey, but their faces still showed their discontentment as they stumbled down the overgrown streets. Fletcher wondered what they had expected when they signed up at the barracks. All he knew was that they would never have imagined they would be out here, starting a colony deep in the wilderness. Were they disappointed? Relieved? He didn’t know what to think, and suspected neither did they.
“Good work, lad,” Sir Caulder said, stomping up to him. “Now the colonists. You lead them too, you know.”
Fletcher turned to the gathering of villagers and dwarves. Many were wandering aimlessly, others standing with bewildered looks. Even Berdon had sidled up to one of the buildings and was peering through the rotten remains of a door. They needed direction, and as their lord, it was up to Fletcher to give it to them.
It was strange, looking around, to know that all of this was his, ruined though it was. And the land, as far as the eye could see, and farther still. All his. It felt wrong to have so much.
“I need everyone to stay by the convoy,” Fletcher called. “Berdon, Thaissa, Janet, Millo, might I have a word?”
As the four hurried up to him, Fletcher tried to wrap his mind around the fact that it was not just the soldiers but everyone in the convoy who answered to him now. Even his own father.
“I’ve thirty-two soldiers, if we include Sir Caulder. Add fifty dwarves makes eighty-two. Janet, how many villagers?” Fletcher asked.
“Fifty-two,” she said, after a moment’s thought.
“So that’s one hundred and thirty-five souls all told,” Fletcher said, amazed at the numbers of his colony. It was almost as large as Pelt’s population had been before Didric had turned it into a prison.
“So what’s the plan?” Thaissa asked, smoothing her veil anxiously.
“Let’s set up camp somewhere to rest, and get to work tomorrow,” Fletcher said, watching a nearby villager yawn and resisting the urge to do the same. “But I’ll need a complete manifest of our rations, tools and supplies before the day is out. Thaissa, Millo, you’ll have a better understanding of what was packed; I’ll leave you in charge of that. Janet, Berdon, I’d like you to assess the skills of our colonists. We know we have at least two blacksmiths, but we’ll need carpenters, masons, farmers, lumberjacks, potters, to name but a few. Can you do that for me?”
“Aye, we can do that,” Berdon answered for them, smiling proudly at his son. The four set off to their tasks, waving over nearby colonists to help.
“What about us?” Sir Caulder asked.
“Let’s explore a little,” Fletcher said, beginning to enjoy himself. “You can show me where everything once was.”
The pair strolled along the street, toward the south of the town. Sir Caulder stared at the ruins he had once called home, and Fletcher wondered how it would feel to be back after all these years. To see the ruins of another life.
“Blacksmith’s there,” Sir Caulder said, pointing to a low building with a wide entrance, the double doors long rotted away. Within, Fletcher could see the block of an anvil, and rusty tools strewn about the floor. A pile of metal ingots was neatly stacked in the corner.
“We’ll be able to clean off the rust on some of those, make ’em usable,” Sir Caulder said, continuing on.
They walked deeper into the town, and Fletcher began to get a sense of its size. It was smaller than he had first thought—many of the buildings were two or three stories high, making for a dense population in a space that could easily have fit within the circle of Vocans’s moat. He could walk around the edge of the town in less than ten minutes.
“Stables and kennels there,” Sir Caulder said, pointing at another low structure, separated into stalls. “Carpenters, apothecary, bakery, town hall…”
Sir Caulder stopped suddenly in front of the town hall: a large, round-walled building with a gaping hole in its rotted roof. His eyes fell on a depression in the ground, in the center of an empty space opposite the front entrance. Rubble surrounded it.
“This is where they came from,” he said, his eyes flinty as he crouched beside the hole and trailed his fingers through the dirt and loose stones within its center.
“The orcs?” Fletcher asked.
“Aye,” Sir Caulder said, hurling a pebble down the overgrown street. “Used to be a statue of your grandfather here. The tunnel to the other side of the mountains was beneath. Look.”
They were almost at the border of the town, and the savannah could be seen between the buildings. And beyond were the mountains, stretching into the sky.
“That range stretches from the river to the sea,” Sir Caulder said, sweeping a finger across the plains. “It blocks off Raleighshire from the orc jungles, except for the pass just a forty-minute walk away.”
But Fletcher was no longer looking at the mountains. He had just seen a structure a hundred feet beyond the town’s edge. The remains of a mansion that he recognized, even after seventeen years of neglect.
His family home.
CHAPTER
39
THE RUINS OF THE OLD MANSION were more broken than the rest of the town. Building stones from the explosion during his parents’ last battle were strewn across what was once the lawn, now wild with young shrubs and tangled weeds. Half of the front of the mansion was missing, revealing the stone flooring of the second story.
“I saw this place once,” Fletcher said as they picked their way to the gaping hole. “An infusion dream from Athena’s memory.”
Sir Caulder said nothing, instead sitting heavily on the ragged edge of the entrance. He stared blankly at the wreckage around them, his eyes seeming to settle on the remains of a staircase that wound halfway to the second floor.
“How did you survive it?” Fletcher asked, sitting beside him. “They say all the bodies were taken by the orcs and…” He trailed off, remembering the fate that had awaited his father’s body.
“An orc saved me,” Sir Caulder said, then caught Fletcher’s expression and shook his head. “Its body anyway. He was a big bugger, covered me completely. When the Celestial Corps arrived a few hours later, they found me there, flew me out before the orcs came back. Too late for my arm and leg, but they saved my life.”
Sir Caulder sighed and stared into the distance.
“I wish I’d had a chance to see your mother, Fletcher,” Sir Caulder murmured, so quiet Fletcher had to strain to hear. “I need to apologize to her. I didn’t stop them. Didn’t save Edmund.”
Fletcher shook his head and patted the old man on the shoulder.