The Red Knight (The Traitor Son Cycle, #1)

by Miles Cameron

“Never seen worse, and that’s a fact,” Gelfred said. He took a long, slow breath. “God shouldn’t allow this!” he said bitterly. “Gelfred,” the captain said, with a bitter smile. “God doesn’t give a fuck.”

“I have never met anyone who would admit being rich,” he agreed. “Or to getting enough sleep.”

“The devil can quote scripture,” she said. “No doubt he had his hand in writing it,” the captain shot back.

If there is a god, how can he allow so much fucking misery and deserve my thanks for it?

It was too easy to believe that someone else’s failure raised one’s own hopes of success.

People were often stupid, but he wasn’t used to being one of them.

The captain shrugged again. For once, he looked every heartbeat of twenty years old—the shrug was a rebellious refusal to accept the reality of what an adult was trying to teach him, and in that moment the captain was a very young man caught out being a fool. And he knew it.

They were going to do that thing that they did. When they moved like lightning and struck like the hammer on the anvil. Soldiers know, feel, these things. And luck rose about them, as if they were magi casting words of power with the hooves of their horses.

“Well, three cheers for the air of dangerous mystery,” the captain said. “I for one am delighted you both know each other.”

The old Magus offered him a hand. “So I do. I am Harmodius, Royal Magus, and you are Lord Gabriel Moderatus Murien—Anna’s son.” He smiled grimly. “The Viscount Murien. Don’t try and deny it, you little imp. Your mother thinks you’re dead, but I knew who you were the moment I saw you.”

And this fight—this little fight for an obscure castle that holds a river crossing vital to an agricultural fair—is turning into the fight of your generation.

“Listen up, then. Evil is a choice. It is a choice. Doing the wicked thing is the easy way out, and it is habit forming. I’ve done it. Any criminal can use force. Any wicked person can steal. Some people don’t steal because they are afraid of being caught. Others don’t steal because it is wrong. Because stealing is the destruction of another person’s work. Rape is a violence against another person. Using violence to solve every quarrel—” The captain paused in his moralizing lecture, because, of course, as a company of mercenaries, they tended to use violence to solve every quarrel—he laughed aloud. “It’s our work, but it doesn’t have to define us.”

But I tell you that if you ever choose to match yourself against the greatest Power that the Wild has ever bred, he will defeat you. This is not my will, but Fate’s. Do you hear me?”

The captain leaned forward into his lance. For a few glorious heartbeats, it was the way he had imagined, when he was a small boy dreaming of glory. He was the wind, and the roar of the hooves, and the tip of the spear.

“We do our level best to hold the line, so that the man next to us can live. We—we who are alive—we owe our lives to these, who are dead. It could have been us. It was them.” He managed a smile. “No one can do more than to give his life for his friends. Every drink of wine you ever taste, every time you get laid, every time you wake and breathe the spring air, you owe that to these—who lie here in the ground.”

You make them love you, and then you tire of the energy they demand, the voice said.

He captain shrugged. “God doesn’t give a fuck, Gelfred,” he said. He touched his heels to his magnificent new charger. “But I do, Gelfred, and I promise you, the priest will die.”

Do well. Act with honour and dignity. Not because there is some promised reward, but because it is the only way to live.