The Dread Wyrm (Traitor Son Cycle) by Miles Cameron Read Free Book Online Page B

harness every day? Couldn’t we let some of the bruises heal?”
    Sauce was pleased at some remove to know that she wasn’t the only one bitching.
    Ser George sighed. “If there’s a safer place in all Nova Terra than the country around the Inn of Dorling,” he said.
    Mag laughed and nodded her agreement. “Only a fool would come inside the Circle of the Wyrm,” she said.
    The Wyrm of Ercch—sometimes known as Master Smythe—held a territory many leagues across, centred on the white-topped Mons Draconis. The drovers and the inn lived within the Wyrm’s claim, and prospered. Travellers were seldom disturbed, although a few faint-hearted souls claimed to have seen a flying creature as big as a ship and refused to passthat way again. Merchants, on the other hand, always travelled across the Wyrm’s dominion.
    Sauce handed her apple core to her riding horse. “By all accounts, the Outwallers came right up the stream and hit the drovers—inside the circle,” she said.
    Ser Dagon grimaced.
    “Company’s never been ambushed,” said an archer, the master tailor, Hans Gropf. He was standing with his palfrey to hand and two small boys waxing his leather gear at his feet.
    Ser Dagon nodded his acknowledgement.
    “Company’s only four years old,” Wilful Murder muttered. He stood in the middle of the yard, watching everyone with his mad eyes. He was holding all the horses—Nell’s job, but he liked the chit and she’d run off to get her boy onto the right pony, or somesuch. “Lots o’ time to get bounced and massacred. When we get soft. Mark my words.”
    Ser Dagon shook his head. “Well—I’ll just suffer in silence, then.”
    “If’n we start any later, we might as well wait ’til tomorrow,” Wilful Murder muttered, loudly enough to wake the dead.
    Sauce saw the captain, standing in the inn door. Bad Tom came out and embraced the innkeeper’s eldest, Sarah, his dead brother’s wife. It was quite an embrace. Some of the pages looked away, and some whooped.
    Mag’s head turned, and Sauce saw her searching the baggage train—all apparently a chaos of horses and wagons and donkeys and wicker baskets. Looking for her daughter Sukey. Who had been Tom’s lover for a year and more, and now was publicly displaced.
    The captain—Gabriel, as he now was called—materialized at her elbow, as the bastard had the habit of doing, with Ser Michael and Ser Bescanon at his heels. Just looking at him made her smile.
    “Where’s the good count?” Ser Gabriel asked.
    “We had a trifling disagreement,” Sauce said in a put-on version of the genteel accent. “He’s off grooming his vanity.”
    Ser Gabriel’s face twitched but gave no more away. “Sauce, will you take your banda and cover the baggage train?”
    Sauce nodded.
    Ser Gavin walked up. Apples were the fashion of the day, and he tossed one to his brother. “Can we get moving?” he said impatiently.
    Tom appeared. If he was concerned that he had just publicly humiliated the daughter of the most powerful sorceress in a hundred leagues, he gave no sign. “You called?” he asked.
    The captain nodded. “You’re not my
primus pilus,
” he said. “You’re the Drover. I can’t order you into my line of march.”
    Tom laughed. “Nah—never think it. I’ll follow you. The fewkin’ sheep are so slow I’d just as soon butcher the lot.”
    The captain nodded sharply, all business. “Right, then.” He lookedaround for Count Zac, found him, and beckoned him. When the short easterner rode up, the captain bowed, since, technically, he and Zac were peers. Zac returned the bow. He glared at Sauce.
    Mag narrowed her eyes at Tom.
    Ser Dagon smiled innocently at Ser Gavin. Ser Gavin, who was particularly eager to reach his lady love at Lissen Carak, shifted uncomfortably, as if by moving his hips he could get the column moving.
    The captain sounded remarkably like himself. “Friends,” he said, “I begin to suspect that if I don’t offer you a constant