Book 3 Ch 18: Preparations

It wasn’t much longer before the rest of the village was awake. The guards on the walls and roofs were shifted, with several of those taking over being those that had been injured just the previous day. Hu and Ollie arrived at the small training ground around the same time with Hu seemingly laughing at something Ollie had said as they made it there.

“Ser Hu,” said squire Bawn with a quick bow. “Shall I gather your armor and sword?”

“Please,” replied Hu. “And you can call me Hu. I keep telling you.”

“Will do Ser Hu,” replied Bawn as he made his way into the village.

Hu sighed and turned to Michael. “Laird already knows, and I just got done telling Ollie, but with you here we are hoping to seal more than one rift at a time. With your healing our forces are back up to near full strength and morale has improved as well. With you as the diviner, one whom Ollie here tells me has closed a large number of rifts already, we should be able to make much faster progress.”

“Could we not divide into two groups? One with me and one with the other diviner?”

Liard, Hu, and the squire Clyde all shared a grimace.

“While we have been grateful for Diviner Lukas’s help, he is not… the most fit for this kind of work. Our progress has been slow with him, and with his advanced age I think he needs a few day’s rest to recover now that he has the option.”

“Is there a diviner in every village?” asked Michael.

“Not quite. We’re actually lucky to have had Lukas here already. Usually a cluster of two or three villages has had only one diviner available to seal rifts. We’ve managed a good pace in spite of that, and if the diviners can seal one rift, they typically gain Titles or Deeds that make sealing further ones easier on them, but it’s still an uphill battle.”

“Is your entire military focused on the rifts right now?” asked Ollie.

Hu nodded, getting a glare from Laird for doing so.

“You don’t need to give the takers that information.”

“It’s common knowledge now anyway. Who would even want to invade Hume at this point? With all the rifts here?”

“Bah,” replied Laird, turning to Clyde. “Go and fetch my armor and weapons then ready the horses.”

Hu turned to Laird. “Did you have time to assess this one’s combat ability?” he asked, pointing to Michael.

“He’s one of the strongest fighters I’ve ever seen. Bested both our squires with a single strike. Could likely defeat the two of us in a fair or unfair fight as well.”

Ollie frowned and leaned toward Michael to whisper. “Strange fucker isn’t he,” he said gesturing to Laird. “Clearly hates us, but has an actual honest assessment of how good we are.”

“Yeah, I’ve gotten so used to prejudice making people underestimate us here that it almost feels like out of place to be properly estimated.”

They broke away from the knights so that Michael could go and retrieve his armor. As he walked to the smithy he saw nearly twenty of the village militia wielding spears and wearing thickly padded cotton armor. They shared hugs and kisses with loved ones, tousled the hair of their children, and gave one another’s hands a final squeeze before they turned away, some of them with eyes wet with tears.

Michael’s own became watery as he watched the display. This small series of intimate moments by a group of people trying to protect their homes and those dear to them.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

“I vow to bring them home,” he whispered under his breath.

He pushed his way into the smithy where Octa and Lentus were hard at work. It seemed his wife had decided to return after all. When Lentus saw him he gestured toward a pile of metal that Michael recognized as his own. He held it in his hand, looking at it for a moment. He could still picture how it had looked when he’d first gotten it, Durdan handing it to him from across the counter back in Stent. Then the pauldrons had been antique, but the rest was well suited for him. Now it looked almost unrecognizable from what it once was. It had been patched dozens of times in metals that rarely matched in color by smiths of widely varying skills. One of the pauldrons had been completely replaced, as had one of the greaves. He ran his fingers over the uneven patchwork of metal before he quickly threw it on and tightened the straps to bring it closer. It may have been ugly, but it was what he was used to, and no matter how good he got at shield spells, he couldn’t see himself replacing a solid piece of metal over his vitals any time soon. He smirked a bit as he wondered how much of the original metal of the armor was really left under all the patching. Perhaps it was an ‘armor of Theseus’.

He gave his thanks to the smiths and left to see Ollie causing some balls of multicolored light to stay just out of the reach of a few small children. When he noticed Michael behind him he had all of them come back to him and popped them into his mouth, pretending to chew on and swallow them to the delight of the nearby kids. When one of the parents came and smacked a child upside the head with exclamations of ‘taker’ and ‘stay away from them’, Ollie frowned deeply, but Michael placed a hand on his shoulder to get him moving toward the front gate. Aside from that one parent, none of the others seemed to care much.

The cart from before was there, and Michael threw his pack into it as he saw the villagers and the knights’ squires do. Then he moved toward the front while Ollie stayed toward the center of the villagers. Michael was fairly certain the wizard actually had most of them beat even in close combat, but mage in the middle had been the standard since he’d arrived in Stent and it seemed that the tradition held in Old Hume as well.