Sir Philip Beckwith removed the saddle from his chestnut Bagstock stallion, running his fingers along the animal’s spine, caressing and scratching.
“Thank you, old boy,” he said. “It was a long ride today.”
The horse turned its head to Philip, nuzzling, then shivered all over.
“I’ll brush you out in a moment.”
“Captain?”
Philip lifted his head. Chenguer, a sergeant in the Knights Celestial, stood at the stable entrance.
“Chen,” Philip said. “How was the day?”
“Good, sir. Barley is all in on Hillcrest Siding.”
Philip nodded. “Let’s hope for good weather.”
“Sir—” Chenguer hesitated.
“What is it, Chen?”
“The Queen is in the lodge.”
Philip set down the saddle. He was tired in the way a man gets after six years of a campaign that never truly ends — not broken, but worn smooth at the edges. He didn’t need a queen tonight. He needed a bath, a meal, and silence.
“I’ll see her at once, though I should bathe first. I smell of horse and blood.”
“Might I suggest—”
“I know, Chen. Thank you. We’ll go see her at once.”
“I’ll accompany you.”
“Of course,” Philip said. “Because you expect her to be in Lady Christine’s company. Don’t take me for a fool.”
“Never, sir,” Chenguer said. He led the way toward the lodge.
“What’s the topic?” Philip asked.
“She’s been reticent.”
“So, about the lands, then.” Philip frowned.
“Your guess is as good as mine,” Chenguer replied.
They entered and immediately bowed before the Queen, who had made herself at home in the knight’s abode. Servants moved briskly around the kitchen and dining room, preparing a meal whose scent made Philip’s stomach growl.
“My queen,” Philip said, kneeling.
“Stand, Philip,” she said. “I want to look you in the eyes.”
She took her time, inspecting him for injuries, as a woman who had sent men to war might.
“How goes the campaign?”
“There are good days and bad,” Philip said. “Today was one of the better ones. We’ve pushed the Urukesh back beyond Tallfellow Canyon, but I expect reinforcements.”
“Good progress,” she said. “Back to the original frontier line.”
“It’ll be tough to maintain without more men,” Philip said. “But we have chemists working on a nasty surprise should they return.”
“I’ve never met one of these Uruks. Are they as fierce as they say?”
“No fiercer than humans, though perhaps more savage in some ways. They are tribal. I hope to negotiate boundaries that satisfy both sides, even if neither is fully happy.”
“But they know these are our ancestral lands?”
“They do,” Philip said. “Some respect that; others believe conquest overrides any claim.”
“A strange dichotomy,” the Queen said. “Might serve us to remind them that conquering works both ways.”
“Indeed. We are making that clear.”
“Speaking of ancestral rights…”
Philip met her gaze steadily. He had known this was coming. The Queen never rode this far for good news.
“My queen,” Philip said, “I’ve spent six years on this campaign. If we reacquire land lost to conquest, it’s equal to new acquisition. Ancestral rights become moot.”
“In theory,” the Queen replied. “But many sages disagree. They argue that occupation doesn’t erase a family’s claim — or their children’s.”
“I’m not sure I agree that decades of possession are equal to temporary occupation,” Philip said.
“Indeed,” she said. “That is the dispute in a nutshell. But I’m not here to adjudicate legality. I’m here to propose a different resolution — one that avoids dissatisfaction on all sides.”
Philip blinked.
She smiled.
“You are what — twenty-three?”
“Yes, your majesty.”
“And unmarried.”
“Yes—” He paused. “Where are you going with this?”
“The eldest Wentworth child is a girl. About your age. Also unmarried.”
Philip froze, watching her carefully.
“I can think of a way,” she said, “to wrap this up neatly, tie it with an elegant bow. I wager you can too.”
“My queen,” Philip said. “There—is another girl.”
“Another girl?” she repeated, amused. “Knights are always thinking of chivalry and honesty. I’m talking practicalities.”
“I understand, your majesty. But hearts do not always bend to practicality.”
“Don’t lecture a queen on that,” she said sharply.
“Yes, my queen,” he said, eyes lowered, sensing the weight behind her words.
“Who is the girl you love?”
“Just a girl I knew in my youth.”
“You court her now?”
“No, your majesty.”
“Then what is the impediment? She may already be another’s.”
“Sadly, yes.” Philip admitted, more to himself than her. Years in the field forced such reckonings: all the doors left unopened, words unsaid. He didn’t know where she was, or if she thought of him at all.
“Then there is no difficulty beyond your feelings,” the Queen said, “which I encourage you to set aside swiftly. Meet the Wentworth girl. Judge for yourself.”
“Daughter of a noble? Probably big-boned, boring, willful, and smells of saffron and sweat,” he muttered.
The Queen laughed aloud.
“She is willful,” she said. “I’ll grant you that. But the rest — you should judge yourself. For the sake of resolving a delicate situation.”
She stood, signaling the conversation was over.
“I must return to the castle. My staff left a meal for you after your ride.”
“Thank you, your majesty.”
“I’ll arrange a meeting,” she said, locking eyes with him. Her gaze made clear it was not optional.
Philip watched her leave, then turned to the stable, to the horse still needing brushing, to the simple work of his hands.
In the morning, Philip took a different horse, to let his main rest following yesterday’s long ride.
He saddled a white-chested black Corvaire mare. Bella was quite full of energy. He had not taken her out in weeks and thought a stretching of the legs would be good for her.
He took his time with the animal. She was excited, dancing slightly at the cross-ties, tossing her head, and making the saddling harder than it needed to be. It was his own fault for letting her sit idle for too long, so there was no urgency in his movements. There was no point fighting an animal ten times stronger than him. So he waited her out.
They were on the move twenty minutes later than he’d hoped, but she had the energy to make up for lost time.
He took the road north out of Stormrest, heading toward the Dragonspires — a long spine of peaks that marked the edge of contested territory. The road would take him within sight of Amblefell if he rode far enough, the ancient Terran city carved into the mountain’s bones, though he had no intention of going that far today.
At the crossroads north of the city, he turned left, heading southwest. In the distance rose Elduros, the ancient volcano that had, in an age now forgotten, swallowed the city of Sardis whole. What remained was called Earthmelt — a wasteland of cooled black rock and poisoned ground that nothing had reclaimed in three centuries.
Philip intended to follow the road further south today, riding solo — quicker, if more dangerous. His purpose was to scout for Urukesh activity south of the Dragonspires. His secondary purpose, known only to himself, was venison. Which was why he carried his shortbow — a weapon he could manage from horseback.
He saw a doe with a pair of yearlings early in the day, but they were both too far for a safe shot, and too young to be left without a mother. They’d be old enough to survive on their own in another month or two, but he had passed on the opportunity.
Shortly after noon, he saw the smoke of a fire. It was off the road, perhaps a hundred yards outside the tree line, burning with the deliberate economy of someone who knew what they were doing — not the careless blaze of an accident or a camp in a hurry, but a fire built to last and cook over. Philip slowed Bella and studied it from the road.
Nobody was tending it.
That was wrong. A fire that size, in contested territory, with nobody sitting beside it meant either a trap or trouble. Philip had survived six years by treating both possibilities with equal respect.
He tied Bella at the road’s edge and moved into the tree line on foot, hand on his sword.
What he found at the fire was a quartering operation of considerable skill. Two massive hind quarters from what Philip initially took to be a large deer — but no. Too big. The legs alone were the length of his arm. An elk. Whoever had taken it down had already boned out the backstraps and laid them carefully beside the hinds, wrapped in broadveil leaves to keep them clean. The forequarters were absent.
Whoever had taken the elk had gone back for forequarters.
Philip looked at the fire. Looked at the meat. Looked back through the trees in the direction of a faint path. Someone had crossed between the woods and the fire enough times to indicate a route.
Then he heard it. Someone returning with a load, but something faster, heavier, and more urgent than a human. The crack of underbrush give way all at once. A sound he recognized from six years of ambushes.
He was back at the road and mounted before he’d consciously decided to move, Bella responding to his urgency with her ears already forward and her body coiled. He pushed her toward the tree line at an angle to intercept whatever was coming, and then he saw it.
An Uruk burst from a dense stand of pine at a dead run, a massive forequarter across one shoulder, pale skin catching the broken light through the canopy. He was faster than a man had any right to be under that load — but not fast enough.
Six wolves came out of the trees behind him.
Not the lean timber wolves Philip knew from the southern ranges. These were mountain wolves, heavy-shouldered and grey, the kind that pulled down elk in deep snow without particular effort. The Uruk dropped the forequarter without breaking stride, spun, and had an arrow on his string before Philip had fully processed what he was seeing. The shaft took the lead wolf through the chest and it rolled without a sound. The Uruk was already nocking a second arrow.
The remaining five didn’t slow.
Philip put his heels to Bella.
She went without hesitation, the result of battle experience that had made her something other than an ordinary horse. They hit the pack from the flank at a full gallop. Bella’s shoulder caught the nearest wolf and sent it cartwheeling into a tree trunk with a cracking sound and a yelp that ended the matter entirely. Philip was already off the saddle before she’d fully stopped, sword drawn, landing between two wolves that had turned from the Uruk toward this new threat.
The first one came in low and fast. Philip drove the blade down into it before it reached him.
The second was already airborne. The Uruk’s second arrow took it through the neck from ten feet away.
The remaining three scattered, dissolving the moment the calculus of the fight shifted against them. There was still a carcass somewhere in the distance that didn’t fight back with sword and arrow.
Philip stood there, breathing heavily.
The Uruk snorted.
They looked at each other.
Philip knew this face — or faces like it. He’d seen Uruk at close quarters plenty of times. Had put his sword through them. Had the scars to confirm they returned the favor without sentiment. The pale grain-patterned skin, the ram’s horns, the pointed beard braided at the tip, the broad ears that were now rotating slowly through the tree line, checking.
The pale grey eyes came back to Philip.
The Uruk bent, picked up the forequarter, and settled it back onto his shoulder as though the last two minutes had been a minor inconvenience.
He said something in his own tongue — a short phrase, two or three words, delivered with the flat affect of a man stating a fact.
Then he walked back toward his fire.
Philip sheathed his sword, retrieved Bella, and stood at the tree line for a moment before following the Uruk back to the fire.
The Uruk set the forequarter down and crouched to tend the coals, which had burned lower in his absence. Philip crouched on the opposite side without being invited, which seemed to be acceptable. The Uruk added wood without comment, repositioned the backstraps on their green stick, and produced a small pouch from which he pinched something — dried herbs, Philip thought, something sharp and resinous — and applied it to the meat with the unhurried precision of someone who took cooking seriously.
After a while he spoke again. His human tongue was accented and economical, each word placed like a stone crossing a stream.
“Grakh took carcass,” he said. He tilted his head toward the forequarter. “Kept what matters.”
Philip looked at the hinds, the backstraps, the tenderloin already resting on a flat stone near the coals.
“You planned that,” Philip said. “The quartering. You knew they’d come.”
The Uruk’s ears moved. Something that might, in a human face, have been the beginning of a smile.
“Grakh always come,” he said.
He cut a section of backstrap and set it on a stone on Philip’s side of the fire without ceremony, the way a man pays a debt he considers minor but real.
Philip picked it up and ate.
It was excellent.
They sat in silence while the fire did its work, two people who had spent six years trying to kill each other, sharing meat that a pack of wolves had helpfully contextualized as a secondary concern.
When Philip rose to leave, the Uruk did not look up.
Philip nodded once anyway.
He rode south with the taste of woodsmoke and unfamiliar herbs on his tongue, thinking about a queen who wanted elegant solutions and a land dispute that six years of war hadn’t resolved.
He thought about Grakh always come.
There might be something in that worth considering.
Later that evening, when Philip arrived at the lodge, Chenguer found him in the stables again, brushing Bella.
“Evening, Sir. What of the day?”
“Had lunch with an Uruk,” Philip said.
“You—you what?”
“I’ll tell you about it over some whiskey later. What’s happened here?”
“A letter for you.”
Chenguer handed it to him.
Philip looked it over and unsealed the fine, colored paper. The handcrafted beauty of fine calligraphy nearly floated from it.
The masquerade ball was in a fortnight.
Stephen B. Anthony is the author of Transmigrant, an epic science fiction thriller, available on both Amazon and Audible. The first seven chapters are available on this website for free.