BVC Announces King’s Shield by Sherwood Smith
King’s Shield
Book 3 of the Inda series
by Sherwood Smith
Inda comes home at last–ahead of an invasion from the Venn. His former best friend, the powerless second son, is now king. With no commander capable of running a defense against overwhelming odds.
Inda’s protest that all his experience is at sea is so much wind, against the desperate situation they are in. And so once again, Inda goes to war …
Acclaimed Inda series within Sherwood Smith’s epic fantasy Sartorias-deles universe. Military fantasy woven with courtly politics, vast worldbuilding, and diverse characters.
For eight difficult years, Inda had been at sea, using an assumed name and forcing himself to never think of all he had lost. And he had created a new life, for the military skills that had been trained into him and his own inborn leadership ability brought him to found a mercenary marine company—as a pirate raiding pirates he had earned a reputation for being one of the most dangerous fleets on the waters.
When Inda discovers that his home country is about to be attacked from the sea by an ancient enemy, he throws his carefully guarded anonymity to the winds and returns home. After nearly a decade at sea, Inda finds his home utterly changed. His good friend Evred, the formerly powerless and harassed younger prince, is now king. Evred has heard of Inda’s martial accomplishments at sea, and is determined to make Inda his Royal Shield Arm—the person in charge of defending the entire kingdom.
And Inda has to learn how to conduct a land war while on the march against an enemy outnumbering his force ten to one.
Book 3 of the Inda series
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Sherwood Smith writes fantasy and SF.
One
After nearly nine years of exile, Inda was going home.
The still-wintry wind sent the scout craft Vixen scudding down the coast of Iasca Leror. Four crew and four passengers crowded the small craft, the passengers on the watch as they drifted past tall bluffs of sedimentary stone. Above the cliffs occasional conical roofs were visible but seldom any living thing besides wheeling, diving sea birds. At night signal fires twinkled with a ruddy, sinister glow along the highest bluffs, beacons tended day and night against sighting of Venn raiders.
Inda was not alone. Three of his companions would go with him.
Inda fretted over the way the Venn Sea Dag, Jazsha Signi Sofar, had taken to standing at the rail, staring up at those forbidding cliffs, her hands clasped tightly together. The only way he could think of to break that silent, white-knuckled tension was to essay a joke. “How often does a fellow fall in love with the world’s most wanted woman? Maybe we should help the balladeers along. Make up some good verses about us.”
Dag Signi shifted her gaze from the horizon to Inda’s hopeful face. The gulf between nineteen and thirty-two had never seemed wider. What could she say? “You are notorious throughout the world, but you are coming home. I am renegade only to my people, and nothing to the world. There is no home for me.” No. If he did not see the width of the moral gulf between them, why give him pain?
Inda tried again. “Don’t your people have a lot of songs about evil villains or great heroes? Mine do. In ours, you Venn are always the villains strewing blood and death everywhere. And I’m sure we Marlovans are the same in yours.”
Inda flashed a smile aft at Tau, lounging at the taffrail next to Jeje, who had insisted on handling the tiller until they reached land. “Tau,” Inda called into the wind. “This is more your skill. Make up a ballad? A heroic one.” He smacked his chest, then indicated Dag Signi with his thumb. “About us.”
“You want a hero’s song?” Taumad’s manner was languid as he covertly studied the two forward: the small, spare Venn mage with her hands gripped together, and Inda, not much taller, broad and strong through the chest, golden hoops affixed with rubies glittering at his ears. His face scarred in battle, making him seem older than his nineteen years. He was a sinister figure, except for his utterly guileless expression. Because even after nine bloody years, he remained remarkably guileless. His concern was as evident as her tension.
Tau flicked a glance between them again, and guessed with typical accuracy at Inda’s motive. Tau had been trained to sing as well as to observe, and making up verses was an old game for him.
“Scar-faced Inda riding the wind,
His fleet a scout craft. Surrounded closely
By powerful mates, standing beside him,
Oath-sworn and loyal, to guard Inda’s ass—”
“Hey,” Inda protested. “It’s supposed to be about my greatness.”
“But there isn’t any,” Tau retorted.
The banter sparked chuckles from a pair of brothers crewing for Jeje, and a deep, husky laugh from her.
A brief smile eased Dag Signi’s expression. She raised a hand—the gesture, like all her movements, stylized with trained poise. She said something in a low voice, and Inda bent his head to touch hers as they talked privately.
Jeje muttered, “She’s got to be scared now that we’re close to land.”
“I would be.” Tau hitched himself up onto the rail. “A Venn, landing in a kingdom that’s been under Venn attack—or Venn-directed pirate attack—for five or six years?” He shook his head. “Does anyone besides me appreciate the irony that she, an enemy, has more recent news about what’s going on in our homeland than the three of us?”
Jeje scowled landward. “I suppose it’s stupid to say that Inda will make everything all right, when he doesn’t know what kind of a welcome he’s gonna get, after all these years.”
“His boyhood friend is now king,” Tau reminded her.
Jeje flipped up the back of her hand. “Kings,” she uttered in disgust.
Tau and Jeje had been with Inda for the entirety of his exile. They’d met as deck rats on an old trader. During those nearly nine years, as they’d followed him from the trader to Freedom Islands to become marine defenders—been taken as pirates—escaped just to turn around and take on the worst pirates of all—Inda had told them absolutely nothing about his past. When he announced a few days ago to his fleet that he was going to return to his homeland to warn them of imminent invasion by the Venn, everyone had assumed it an act of madness. He’d be killed! Thrown into a dungeon! Thrown into a dungeon then killed!
Jeje leaned into the tiller as the Vixen sped closer and closer to the coastline; Tau lounged forward to help the one of the brothers on day watch shift the tall, curved mainsail.
The contrast between the two secretly entertained Jeje, though she had long known better than to comment to Tau. He was astonishingly beautiful—well made, golden-eyed, with silver-touched hair the color of ripened wheat. Her young crewman, towering over him, was gangly, knot-limbed, with a beaky nose only exceeded by that on his brother. Not that they were bad looking fellows. It’s just that everybody looked a little rough and unfinished next to Tau. Especially me, Jeje thought with an inward laugh.
Inda stayed at the rail, sea glass at his eye, his body leaning toward the shore as if to get him there the faster.
They did not want to be seen by Venn spies up near the peninsula, so they had sailed around the curve of land bulking out to the west that encompassed Khani-Vayir, then dove in eastward toward one of the great rivers that flowed seaward from the eastern border of the kingdom. Inda had chosen this landing place after days of sailing past cliff-lined shores that looked much the same.
Earlier, Jeje, who had spent her childhood on the shore they first passed, had said, “We ought to bring in some catch as a peace-gift, so they don’t shoot us from the shore. People here know one another. If the Venn have been trying to land spies as well as invade, besides burning their fishing boats whenever they catch ’em, they’re going to really hate strangers.”
Inda had agreed.
Now, as they loosened sail, Inda said, “Leave the talking to me.”
Jeje was surprised. After all, they didn’t look the least like Venn. Even Dag Signi looked anonymous. And though they were far south of Jeje’s village, the people were pretty much the same mixture of old Iascan and Marlovan that she’d known from babyhood.
But as the sun slanted behind them toward the western horizon and they drifted into a cove, suspicious villagers lined the shore. The people did not hide their ready weapons—even when they could clearly see the nets of fish that the Vixen trailed behind. The villagers watched the four climb down into the rowboat, attach the nets, and row for shore. By the time they jumped out and brought the boat ashore, Jeje was thoroughly intimidated, with no desire to speak.
Inda called out formal greetings in Iascan. His accent seemed to calm the people enough for them not to kill the newcomers outright, as the villagers came down to help haul in the net of fish. But no one, they all noted, let go of their grip on their spears and knives, despite the peace-gift.
The Fisher brothers and the wakened night crew sailed the Vixen away, hoping they would be able to catch the rest of the fleet, now commanded by Inda’s second, known to them only as Fox.
Jeje forced herself to watch the Vixen slant toward the setting sun, though it felt like her heart was pulled thinner with every surging wave. Then she turned her back. It was her choice to be here.
They were brought to the central house of the small coastal village, a round structure made of heavy, thick stone: though Tau, too, had been a child on this coast, he was harbor-bred, where houses were square. The door was on the east, a custom inherited from their long-ago Venn ancestors, who’d come from the north where wintry winds and storms blustered and howled over the sea from the west. The floor was covered by bright, thick rugs, woven in patterns of running animals: foxes, deer, wolves, horses. Later they discovered that the rugs covered trap doors, connecting tunnels built for escape against the Venn or pirate incursions of the past five or six years.
The people dressed like those in Jeje’s village when she was small: tunics sashed or belted at the waist, leggings or loose trousers, everything with some embroidery at the edges. The people themselves were the usual mix of Marlovan and Iascan—dark people like Jeje among blond heads, and all shades between. “It’s a good day’s catch you give us,” said a man on entering the roundhouse.
“The fish are a gift,” Inda said. “The boat is trade.”
All deferred to the man, whose attention stayed on Inda. He was older, his blond hair gone gray. “What do you want in trade?”
“The loan of mounts for our journey, as far as we need until we can arrange for our own. Then we will send them back.”
“Where do you go?”
A young man, strong of arm and gripping a knife, said, “How can you prove you are not Venn spies?”
Inda pointed eastward. “I am first going into Marlo-Vayir land, where I have allies. And then to the royal city, with news that will not wait.”
Quick looks. “Who’s your ally?” the headman asked, not hiding his suspicion.
Inda attributed that suspicion to the years of war. He had no idea his accent was an anomaly: he sounded like a Jarl’s son, but he looked like a brigand off the sea.
“Cherry-Stripe—uh, that is, Landred-Dal Marlo-Vayir,” Inda said. “And if you are going to try to trick me with questions about his personal life, you will find out quickly that I haven’t seen him in years.”
“Your name being?” the head woman asked, her suspicion far less hostile since the stumble over the private name of Landred Marlo-Vayir.
But then Inda hesitated, and suspicion narrowed eyes and tightened shoulders again as he wrestled with that old memory, the orders from the King’s Runner, Captain Sindan, when he was eleven years old: You must find another name, another life.
So Tau spoke up from where he lounged against the wall: “He is Indevan-Dal Algara-Vayir of Choraed Elgaer.”
Tau’s accent was a perfect mirror to Inda’s. Eyes flashed his way, observing the long, hard body below that watchful face that brought to mind the old goldstone carvings of ancient kings. They observed the presence of three visible weapons near his hands. Those who knew about such things saw instantly that from his position in the room he could take out the three most important adults before anyone could reach him.
Jeje bit her lip. Beside her, Dag Signi breathed softly and slowly, but kept her gaze lowered, her hands folded.
Jeje winced, remembering the danger she was in. Dag Signi was a mage—what the Venn called a sea dag. Supposedly that meant she could gabble some spell or other and transfer away in a poof of air. Dag Signi had to be feeling fear of discovery, and Jeje considered what it must mean for her to be a renegade, wanted by both sides once the Marlovans found out who she was. “Wanted” as in “preferably dead.”
Jeje flicked a glance Dag Signi’s way, unsettled by how the mage made herself unobtrusive. Not with magic. It was the way she moved, subtleties of posture that you couldn’t really put words to, but the overall effect was unmistakable: Dag Signi was adept at vanishing in plain sight.
A coltish young girl announced, “I know all the Jarl families, including in Choraed Elgaer. My tutor made us learn them. There is no Indevan-Dal in Choraed Elgaer.”
“Yes, there was,” said the head woman, finally. “I remember the stories from some eight or ten years ago, though most of that was deemed mere rumor. I also heard other stories, from the queen’s runners—so more believable—that Indevan-Dal had gone to sea under another name, a name associated with the defeat of the pirates belonging to the Brotherhood of Blood two years ago.”
Jeje hooked her thumb in Inda’s direction as she said proudly, “On the sea, he’s known as Elgar the Fox.”
“Ah,” said the head man, and smiled.
Later, as they sat in a circle and listened to local stories of pirate and Venn attacks and burnings, Jeje leaned over and whispered to Tau, “Why didn’t Inda come out with his own name?”
Tau whispered, “Later. When we’re alone.”
Jeje subsided. These people unnerved her, and they were coast folk: Iascans, like her own family. The inlanders might well be much stranger, because they would all be Marlovans.