Expect this thread to be updated periodically as RP progresses.
To keep updated on House Graves and its newest son:
One Graves Digs His Own; The Rise of a MercenarySoon to come: Dueling Women, a Life Lesson Learned
Origins of the Girl
The Many Adventures of Puke the Magnificient
The Mother I Never Knew
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A Beautiful CountryThe sun had set on a chaotic scene - troops landing in longboats and smaller skiffs, rushing ashore, sloshing the surf and churning up sand. But there had been little blood, and fewer deaths.
Acting-Captain Puke had crewed the longboat Waldor rode in with violence and apathy, barking low-toned orders at men and laying about with the flat of his scabbard - beating on shields, shoulders and helmets. The sailors were terrified him, and bent to the oars with manic desperation. Puke was as expressionless as a dead fish, mechanical, fearless because fear was something only thinking men felt. In a way, Waldor envied him. He could not stop thinking about the day Lord Tarkus had died. Ranulf had elected to stay behind in Fissoa, head of the household guard, and Waldor missed his company, his reassurances. Puke offered no such wisdom.
And then there was the Girl.
She had sat beside Waldor on the small craft, fussing with the leather straps of his baldric and the cinch of his belt. The shield - his shield, though he hadn't used it before - rested against her knee, as did another scabbarded sword, a hook-barbed spear and a smaller buckler. How she intended to carry it all was beyond him. When he had asked, she had shrugged and, with an angry set to her mouth, told him it was a squire's duty. He had left it at that. When he had been her age, he had gut-knifed a mercenary who had raped his mother.
Now he strode across the beach, kicking at arrows that had been fired in defense of the coast and still jutted, broken-shafted from the sand. Rumors were filtering up from the other companies that cavalry had been spotted a little further inland. Memories of the charge that had broke them - killed so many of his men - came back to him. The spear in his shoulder, the long wait, feigning death, while his soldiers had wept and cursed and bled out beside, above and beneath him. The heartfelt prayers and bitter screams. The agonized squeal of a horse impaled by a pike, crashing forward onto itself, the broken flop of its rider. The blood and bile that had churned the sand into sludge. His hand clutched at the hilt of the longsword that rode at his hip, taking comfort in the weapon, if not his own skill with it.
His grip on the blade only relaxed when he reached the scouts. He'd sent them on ahead to wait near where the beach met tangles of grass, vine and thornbrush. Both were hidden when he arrived, but a rustle of underbrush and a quiet, hissed call led him directly to where they crouched, their quilted armor decorated with thorns, leaves and smears of dirt. Waldor had shed his own chainmail back at their makeshift camp, and wore only his padded under-armor, too. He was more comfortable in it, anyway.
He crouched nearby after a mindful look about, then started to smear the cloth with dirt, leaves and rotted plant matter. It stunk, but he was used to it.
"Patrok," he whispered, greeting the elder of the scouts, a man nearly twice his age. "Gren." The younger, who could have easily passed as Waldor's twin in poor lighting. "I only need one of you tonight. The borderlands have most been canvassed, but I don't want surprises. There's rumor of cavalry hiding in the woods somewhere." He'd drilled these soldiers in use of the shortsword and pike, and they had all left their bows at home, but that changed little. A cavalry charge still set him on edge.
"Let me come with you," Gren spoke up suddenly, earnestly, and Waldor had to bite back the urge to clasp him on the shoulder as he may have once, to embrace him like a brother. He was no longer a sellsword captain. He was a knight, and there was distance between them that could never be broached. Instead, he looked questioningly at Patrok, and nodded when that older man nodded his own approval.
"Granted." Waldor murmured, lifting his head to stare about the thornbrush and scrub. "Patrok, keep patrolling about here, see if you can't get a bead on those horsemen. We'll be back before dawn. If you get the chance, pass back to Puke that I want the nearest village plundered. All the food they have, strip it. We'll need the provisions. Nothing else. I don't want a single serf harmed, or a single bit of gold taken. Not by my men." It would be cruel enough taking their harvest from them.
"Come on, Gren," he added softly, pushing past the two to creep further into the brush along the beach, skulking like no noble had a right to. The boy - his own age, he had to remind himself - followed with a pleased grin that quickly melted into professional seriousness. They did not speak during the entire patrol. They did not have to.
Night fell.
Waldor eventually returned, caked in dirt and debris, to where his men had set up under Puke's dull, watchful gaze. He stood near one of the pitched tents and stared at the forest that cropped up in the distance, cleaning mud from his hands.
"Your father's duchy," a soft voice said at his shoulder, and he turned to see the Girl staring out at the trees with a mixture of solemnity and expectancy. Clearly she wanted a response from him, but he had none to give. He nodded a little, returned his attention to the woods, and ran calculations in his head: stores of grain, injuries, the cost of hiring sailors to crew them back to the warships anchored off the coast. Logistics a captain should always worry over. But she was persistent. "You are home."
That gave him pause.
Home?
Waldor Graves thought of a stretch of coastline to the southwest, where bones bleached in the surf.
"It is a beautiful country."