At the Queen's Command by Michael A. Stackpole Read Free Book Online

And the Mystrians hadn’t had any qualms about setting their guns aside to pick up axes and shovels to clear routes and shore up roads.
    But this countryside would take a battalion or more of laborers to widen roads and build bridges. While that would make troop movement easier, it made surprise impossible. Reaching an advantageous position from which one could engage the enemy was important. If the enemy could tell from which direction you were coming, chances were they would occupy that position before you ever could.
    Of course, that is putting winter before fall . Owen had to wonder if there were any suitable battlefields in all of Mystria. The farms he’d ridden past might have, at most, a dozen acres cleared and most had little more than two. That would be enough ground for a battalion to fight, but battalions do not decide battles.
    Aside from the cleared fields making a quilt of the countryside, most of the land was far from level. Farmers had terraced some spots, but mostly left hillsides for cattle and sheep to graze. And the ground was filled with stones, as evidenced by those gathered to form walls at the fields’ edges.
    No, the land was decidedly inhospitable to war. But I will find a way around all obstacles .
    Another shiver shook him. He wanted to put it down to a damp vest and the coming dusk, but a profound wave of isolation washed over him. His wife, his beloved Catherine, had always said that he could find a way around all obstacles. She’d intone the words with reverence, and smile at him in a way that made him feel like a god striding the earth.
    He shook his head, smiling. I so hope you are right, darling, for the sake of our future .
    The sense of isolation bled into caution as the world darkened. He drew the horse pistol and weighed it in his hand. Heavy dark wood, brass fittings binding the steel barrel to stock and brass for the stonelock, the pistol was standard issue for cavalry soldiers. Owen’s thumb fell naturally to the blue firestone at the barrel’s base.
    While Owen was considered a very good shot among his peers, the pistol would avail him little against the hazards of Mystria. He could easily bring the pistol to bear on an enemy, invoke the spell that would ignite the brimstone and thereby propel the lead ball at his target. But that horned creature, or the jeopard, would shrug off such a shot.
    And so his mission loomed before him, gigantic and possibly insurmountable, just like Mystrian fauna. If he failed, many would expect him to use the pistol to blow his own brains out. It would be the honorable thing to do, after all. Wouldn’t be proper to have the family’s name besmirched by his failure.
    They’d expect me to take a gentleman’s way out . Owen laughed to himself. And then would claim I’d never been a gentleman at all. In fact, if his uncle had the means to do it, the story would be changed so that a Ryngian assassin had killed Owen. The tale would ennoble his death, allowing Owen to enhance the reputation of a family that had little earthly use for him.
    No matter what I do, the Duke will find a way to make it serve his purpose.
    Owen laughed again, the sound disappearing into the forest. Since his uncle would turn anything to his advantage, Owen needed to make sure he succeeded well enough that it benefited him and Catherine as well. Only then could he escape his uncle’s influence and find true happiness.
    He slid the pistol back into the saddle scabbard and looked over Temperance from the hill above it. It struck him that perhaps this new world—so far away from and alien to his uncle—would give him the chance he’d not ever had before. Catherine was certain of it. He chose to believe in her dream, and that had him smiling all the way back into town.
    Night had fallen by the time he reached the Guards’ headquarters. He slid out of the saddle, surprised. The building was shut up tight with no sign of life. There wasn’t even a guard stationed nearby.
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