Chapter 1405: Farewell banquet(2)

Vilon seized a roasted onion dripping with rich pan-drippings and shoved it whole into his mouth. It gave a crunch.

The food was nothing short of miraculous. Just when he thought he had stuffed his hide tight as a roasted sow, the chilling thought of waking tomorrow on hard tack and trail dust miraculously carved out a fresh hollow in his gut, instantly begging to be filled.

There was everything a wandering sword could ever dream of: trenches of roasted fat, trenchers of spiced fowl, and thick crusts of white bread slathered in a glossy, scarlet paste. When he had cautiously asked what the sticky red stuff was, Lord Edric had bellowed with laughter and told him it was strawberry jam.

It struck Vilon as pure sorcery, given that strawberry season had died moons ago, but he supposed honey and jars held their own magic.

In truth, he didn’t give a damn about the technicalities.

It was sweet, tart, and tasted like summer.

"Do you think... I might take a jar of this on the road?" Vilon asked, pausing with sticky fingers. "My back teeth ache from weeks of gnawing dried salt-beef. Five more years of this life, and I’ll be twenty with the gums of a sixty-year-old beggar."

Roars of laughter rippled across the high table.

Initially, Vilon had approached the dais with his heart in his boots when the Legates of the Fourth and the Primogenia had summoned him. But that dread had swiftly dissolved as the flagons emptied and the evening rolled on.

His first impression of Lord Edric had been a terrifying iron wall, a man of ruthless duty, scarred hide, and perpetual fury. In his cups, however, the Legate was as loud and boisterous as a tavern barkeep, throwing his head back at every bawdy jape. The truly silent one was Lord Rykio. The commander of the Hounds sat straight-backed, sipping his wine with measured restraint, offering only an amused half-smirk whenever Edric’s jokes struck gold.

It was strange to think of the wild Hounds being led by so taciturn a man.

"I’ll have the camp cooks bundle up something proper for your saddlebags,maybe roasted meat?" Edric grinned, waving a dismissive, grease-stained hand before catching Vilon’s crestfallen look. "Aye, perhaps a small clay urn of the red stuff, too. We’ll lash it with boiled leather so it doesn’t crack against your cantle the first time your nag stumbles."

"My thanks, Edric," Vilon murmured.

It still tasted bizarre on his tongue to address high-born lords by their born names, as though they were drunken mercenaries sharing a bench in a ditch. Vilon had not met many lords in his wandering life, but he knew enough of the realm to know most of them would have taken his skin for such familiarity.

"Think nothing of it, man," Edric scoffed cheerfully. "At the royal palace in Yarzat, we have dozens of crocks stacked to the rafters. I need only name a fruit, and some terrified page brings it on a silver tray. I don’t imagine you and your boy dine on sweetmeats too often on the ditch-roads."

Vilon swallowed another massive chunk of bread, shuddering with sheer pleasure as the honey melted over his tongue. He licked his lips clean. "Usually, we spit-roast whatever squirrel or hare hasn’t outrun the lad, boil some wild roots, and make thin porridge. Sometimes we trade for a sack of turnip or parsnip from a crofter.It was hard to get food by here. Bread was sold by their weight in silver.

Mostly it’s just gray salt-meat. Never had jam. There wasn’t anything like this at the grand feast the King threw after Oizen fell."

"You marched with us on Oizen?" Rykio asked, his long, dark braid sweeping over his shoulder as he turned his cool, assessing gaze away from Owen, who was currently swaying sideways, three cups deep in Ambrosia.

"Not under the black falcon, no," Vilon clarified, adjusting his posture. "I took the field under the banner of the Bull."

Rykio paused, his goblet halfway to his lips, his eyes narrowing with sharp interest. "I did not recall Alpheo taking hedge-knights into his purse back then. I assumed you had ridden south under one of our march lords. So... you took the prince’s silver and marched with Merelao of Kakunia, eh? I wondered where in the five hells you had sprouted from. You dropped out of the woods like a ghost, solved our bottleneck, cracked our captive traitors, and then butchered the Vulture Lord in his own thicket. Safe to say, without you and some of my hounds, Ratio would be across the river by now."

"I merely lend my steel where it’s needed, my Lord," Vilon said modestly. ’’It is the gods that direct me. It was by chance that I met those bandits assaulting a woman, and by chance we faced with the Vulture.But it was to Mariol that I direct my thanks, he saved my life at the creek and gave his for the Vulture’s’’

’’Aye’’ Rykio said a note of respect in his voice ’’It is a rare and precious gift to don our clothes.Love and respect from the people, a duty to tend to and silver to make the pot sweeter. It is a gift given to few and Mariol did not soil it one bit.

He might have slayed the rogue , but likewise not any of it would have been possible without you’’

"Hell, it might as well have been the Warrior himself who dropped you in our lap!" Edric guffawed, slamming his goblet so hard the pewter rattled. "What in the gods’ names drove a wandering blade to swear his sword to the Lord of Epietoli anyhow?"

Vilon hesitated, caught off guard by the question, his eyes drifting into the smoky ceiling.

He gave a slow, self-deprecating shrug. "I was at the end of a rope I had just grapped. My father had just died on the road, and I had got my notched sword off his cold corpse.With that I had three copper bronzii rattling in my pocket, worn-out boots, and a swaybacked horse on its last legs."

He glanced down the bench at Owen, who was practically snoring into his plate, before continuing softly. "I had nowhere to go, and word blew through the coaching inns that the Lord of Epietoli was rousing up men for his host. I knew precious little of the politics between Yarzat and the southern princes, all I knew was that marching meant regular rations and a chance at loot.

When I arrived at the muster, the marshals laughed in my face and turned me away. I looked more like a drowned beggar than a warrior. But the Lord of Epietoli happened to walk past the pavilion right then. He stopped his stallion, looked down at me, interceded with the quartermaster, and bought me proper armor out of his own coin."

"Hold," Edric interrupted, his booming voice dropping into sheer disbelief. "The Valorous Bull himself bought your harness?"

Vilon nodded.

"Well, that sounds like him," Rykio murmured, resting his chin on his knuckles with a dry, knowing smirk. "He is the sea itself. Wild and ficke. One moment he will flay a courtier for an ugly compliment, the next he is clothing beggars. What did you say to move him?"

"Nothing grand," Vilon replied, a faint smile touching his mouth. "I just stood straight, told him I was a knight, and that if he fed me, I would make his enemies bleed."

"And the prince had an ear for honest desperation," Rykio mused. "Go on."

"Aye. I took my place in his lines, fought in the south at the river ford, and walked away with enough silver loot to survive the turn of the season. But my luck is a sour bitch." Vilon cast a warm, fond look down at the sleeping squire. "Right after the campaign ended, my old horse gave up the ghost. Died of old age in the grass, which I suppose is a sweet and gentle death for a warhorse, but it left me afoot. I had silver, but not nearly enough to buy even a paulfrey. I was stranded in the mud, utterly lost.And it was then that I saw him."

"Him?" Rykio repeated, tilting his head with quiet curiosity.

Vilon nodded and turned toward Edric with a soft, reminiscent smile. "Just as you think the Warrior dropped me into your lap, the Weaver sent me that lad. A young lordling. He found me out in a muddy clearing as I was burying the last piece of my life. I was weeping like a child, shoveling dirt over old Chestnut’s flank.

The boy rode up with a small escort of knights, dismounted without a word, and offered to help me finish the work. And he did, ruined his fine leather boots, dragged his velvet cloak through the muck, and put his shoulder against the dead weight to push the mare into the pit."

Vilon sniffed, the memory vivid against the hazy warmth of the pavilion.

"I thanked him for the kindness," Vilon continued, staring down into his empty cup. "He asked where the road would take me next. We spoke for no more than a quarter of an hour, long enough for him to see what manner of man I was, a beggar with an old sword. I gave him the plain truth: I’d sell my steel to the nearest company, sleep in the brush, and pray to scrape together enough coin for a mount before winter set in. It was a distant, miserable hope, but the only one left to me."

He looked at his calloused, scarred palms.

How easy, he remembered thinking.

It had struck him then, as it did now, how terrifyingly fragile a man’s fortunes were, how easily a whole life could pivot on a single turn of the wheel.

"It was then that he looked me up and down," Vilon said softly, leaning back into his chair. "Without a breath of hesitation, he thrust the reins of his own courser right into my hands. His knights stared at him as though he’d lost every shred of his wits. He gave away a magnificent, high-bred beast for nothing. He didn’t know my name, nothing more that I did not tell him in passing, he simply handed me the leather and told me to ride and be a good knight."

A solitary tear caught the torchlight, glistening as it traced a path through the dried sweat on Vilon’s cheek. He blinked, surprised by it, and wiped it away with the rough silk of his sleeve.

"So that was what I did down at the creek," Vilon said, his voice steady. "I rode to the ford and did what a true knight ought to do. The gods saw fit to place me on that road, and that boy wagered I wouldn’t simply ride on by. Everything that followed, the skirmish, the hunt, the Vulture’s death, sprang from that single choice."

Edric sniffled loudly, scratching at the gray stubble on his heavy jaw before taking a long draft of wine. "Well, damn me if that isn’t a fantastic tale," the Legate rumbled, a grin breaking through his scarred face. "A bit poetic for my taste, but a grand story all the same."

Vilon let out a quiet chuckle, amused by a private irony that only he seemed to appreciate. "Perhaps. But no man may walk out of his own story."

Rykio leaned forward, resting his chin upon steepled fingers, his dark eyes sharp and contemplative. "Tell me, though... what was the lad’s name? Did he say?"

"Basil," Vilon answered easily. "Said his name was Basil.Someday I will meet him and offer him my sword."

Edric burst into a sudden, roaring belly laugh that rattled the pewter cups on the high table. "Basil! By the gods! You stumble upon a high-born stray named Basil? The Crown Prince of Yarzat bears the very same name!What are the chances?"

Vilon grinned back, nodding toward the sleeping squire slumped beside him. "Aye, so Owen was quick to inform me. The lad nearly jumped out of his skin when I told him."

’’As if you had met a prince’’

Both men laughed as if that was the funniest joke in the whole wide world.