Sevenfold Sword: Champion Read online

  SEVENFOLD SWORD: CHAMPION

  Jonathan Moeller

  Table of Contents

  Description

  A brief author’s note

  Chapter 1: The Keeper of Andomhaim

  Chapter 2: The Guardian of Cathair Animus

  Chapter 3: Battlefield

  Chapter 4: Fail Again

  Chapter 5: The Prisoner

  Chapter 6: A New Realm

  Chapter 7: Thunderbolt

  Chapter 8: Order of the Arcanii

  Chapter 9: Oath

  Chapter 10: Last Words

  Chapter 11: Maledictus

  Chapter 12: Survivors

  Chapter 13: Reunion

  Chapter 14: Battle Plan

  Chapter 15: Counterstrike

  Chapter 16: Castra Chaeldon

  Chapter 17: Earth Magic

  Chapter 18: Dead Soldiers

  Chapter 19: The Traitor

  Chapter 20: The Duel

  Chapter 21: Breach

  Chapter 22: Armor & Shield

  Chapter 23: Visions

  Chapter 24: The Company

  Epilogue: The Guardians

  Glossary of Characters

  Glossary of Locations

  Other books by the author

  About the Author

  Description

  Ridmark Arban is the Shield Knight, the defender of the realm of Andomhaim.

  The realm is at peace after a long and terrible war, but dark powers threaten other lands.

  And when a mad elven wizard comes to the High King's court, Ridmark finds himself fighting not only for his own life, but for the lives of his family.

  For the quest of the Seven Swords has begun...

  Sevenfold Sword: Champion

  Copyright 2017 by Jonathan Moeller.

  Published by Azure Flame Media, LLC.

  Cover design by Clarissa Yeo.

  Ebook edition published July 2017.

  All Rights Reserved.

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the express written permission of the author or publisher, except where permitted by law.

  A brief author’s note

  At the end of this book, you will find a Glossary of Characters and a Glossary of Locations listing all the major characters and locations in this book.

  A map of the realm of Andomhaim is available on the author’s website at this link.

  Chapter 1: The Keeper of Andomhaim

  The day the quest of the Seven Swords began, the day in the Year of Our Lord 1488 when the cloaked stranger came to the High King’s court, Ridmark Arban showed his youngest son how to hold a sword.

  It surprised him how much he enjoyed spending time with his sons. Ridmark had not been close with his own father. Leogrance Arban had been a great and noble lord of Andomhaim, a man who had done his duty and done it well, but he had spared little time for his youngest son. As Ridmark grew older and experienced losses and griefs of his own, he came to understand that Leogrance had thrown himself into his duties after Ridmark’s mother had died. By then Ridmark had been a page at Dux Gareth Licinius’s court, and Dux Gareth had raised him more than Dux Leogrance.

  Still, Ridmark begrudged his father nothing. In the end, he supposed a father’s duty was to train his sons to look after themselves after he had died. Leogrance Arban was eight years in his grave, slain fighting the Frostborn at Dun Calpurnia, but the skills Ridmark had learned after Leogrance had sent him to Dux Gareth’s court had served him well.

  But in the years since, Ridmark had learned that no matter what a father did, no matter how he trained his children…there were some things that no amount of love and teaching could conquer.

  The black grief fluttered at the edges of his mind.

  Once, as a younger man, he would have tried to push it aside, or deny it, or let it drive him into a rage. Instead, Ridmark accepted it, and let it remind him of those who were still with him.

  “Father?” said Joachim Arban.

  Ridmark blinked and looked at his youngest son. “What did I tell you the last time?”

  He stood with his sons on the western bank of the River Moradel, the walls and towers of the High King’s city of Tarlion rising on the far side of the river. To the south stretched the endless expanse of the southern sea, which no man had ever crossed. To the east stood the domus where Ridmark and his family and their servants lived, a villa built in the style of the Romans of old. A salt-scented breeze came off the sea, the blue sky dotted with white clouds overhead.

  “You said,” said Joachim, his face scowling with concentration as only a child of three could scowl, “that I should hold the hilt with both hands.”

  Ridmark nodded. “That’s right.” His youngest son looked more like his wife. Both Ridmark and Calliande had blue eyes, but Joachim had Calliande’s eyes and blond hair. Of the two boys, Joachim was by far the more emotional, capable of giddy joys and ferocious tantrums. When Gareth had been three, the only time he had ever cried had been when he had accidentally scraped or hurt himself.

  “Like this?” said Joachim, shifting his grip on the wooden practice sword.

  “No,” said Gareth Arban before Ridmark could speak. “Your thumbs are wrong.”

  Ridmark looked at his oldest son. Gareth was now eight years old, and while Joachim looked like Calliande, Gareth looked more like Ridmark, with black hair and blue eyes. Gareth wasn’t smiling, but then he usually didn’t. Calliande had said that Gareth had inherited Ridmark’s sober nature, and that seemed true enough.

  Joachim’s face screwed up as if he couldn’t decide if he wanted to cry or not. “What’s wrong with my thumbs?”

  “Nothing,” said Gareth. “They’re just in the wrong place.” He reached over and adjusted Joachim’s grip. “There, like that.”

  Joachim looked up. “Is that right, Father?”

  “It is,” said Ridmark.

  “Father showed me how to do that when I was your age,” said Gareth with all the wisdom of his eight years.

  “I did,” said Ridmark. “Now. Hit me with the sword.”

  Joachim lifted his wooden blade and glanced at Gareth, and Gareth took a prudent step back.

  “No, don’t hit your brother,” said Ridmark, for what felt like the billionth time. The boys were as likely to start fighting as they were to start talking. Gareth had explained to Ridmark that Joachim needed punching to instruct him, while Joachim sometimes hit Gareth just for the fun of it.

  Ridmark had rejected both arguments, much to their dismay

  “It is unknightly to attack an unarmed opponent,” said Gareth.

  “I’m not a knight yet,” said Joachim. “Neither are you.”

  “Soon I’ll be old enough to be a page in a noble court,” said Gareth. “So, I will know more about being a knight than you will.”

  “You still haven’t hit me,” said Ridmark.

  Joachim blinked, took a deep breath, drew back the wooden sword, and swung it with all his strength. He spun on his right leg, overbalanced, and landed with a thump, blinking in surprise.

  “I don’t think you were supposed to fall over,” said Gareth. Another boy would have flung it as an insult or a joke. Gareth made it as a simple statement of fact.

  “You swung too hard,” said Ridmark. “It’s important to hit hard, but it’s also important not to leave yourself open.” Joachim staggered back to his feet. “Watch.” Ridmark took a swing with his own practice swor
d, going through the movements with exaggerated slowness. “Did you see?”

  “Could you do it again?” said Joachim, his eyes wide.

  Ridmark repeated the attack, still moving with exaggerated slowness.

  Joachim took a deep breath, adjusted his grip on the little wooden sword, and swung again. He overbalanced once more, but only a little, and this time he kept his feet.

  “That was better,” said Gareth.

  “It was,” said Ridmark. “Now, try to hit me.” Joachim started to wind up for a massive swing. “No, not like that. You’ll fall over again.”

  “It’s bad to fall over in a sword duel, isn’t it?” said Joachim.

  “Well,” said Ridmark. “Yes.”

  Joachim swung at him, and this time the boy kept his movements controlled. Ridmark lowered his practice sword and deflected the attack. The swords came together with a sharp crack, and Joachim flinched, blinked a few times, and grinned. He let out a shrill imitation of a knight’s battle cry and started hammering at Ridmark’s sword repeatedly.

  Despite his worries about the present and the future, the sight of a small child attacking him with a wooden sword was so absurd that Ridmark burst out laughing. Joachim froze in astonishment and then started laughing at well. He looked a lot like Calliande then. She reacted the same way on the rare occasions when Ridmark laughed.

  Not that there had been many opportunities of late.

  “That,” said Gareth, attempting a stern glare, “is not the proper way to use a sword, Joachim.”

  “No, it isn’t,” said Joachim. “But it’s loud!”

  He whacked Ridmark’s sword once more with a resounding crack, and all three of them laughed.

  “No one is louder than you, Joachim,” said Gareth.

  “When I am a knight,” said Joachim, “I shall be known as Sir Joachim the Loud.”

  “Most likely,” said Ridmark. He glanced at the towers of Tarlion across the river to the east. “And I think that’s all the time we have for sword lessons today.” Both Gareth and Joachim groaned. “Gareth, you need to go to your lesson with Brother Octavius. And I need to take the ferry to Tarlion to meet the new Dux of Calvus.”

  “Can we come with you?” said Joachim.

  “Not today,” said Ridmark. The new Dux of Calvus would be offering homage and swearing fealty to the High King, and it would be a long affair with oaths in formal Latin, followed by a feast. Joachim would be bored out of his skull before the new Dux got halfway through the first of the formal oaths. “But maybe if you ask nicely, Dieter will let you help in his workshop today.”

  Joachim brightened. “I like helping to make the fences.”

  “Knights don’t make fences,” said Gareth.

  “I shall,” announced Joachim. “I shall be Sir Joachim the Loud and the Maker of Fences.” He fell silent, frowning as a thought seemed to occur to him.

  “What is it?” said Ridmark.

  Joachim looked up at him. “Do you think we will see Mother today?”

  Probably not, thought Ridmark.

  “Maybe,” he said aloud. “If she is feeling better.”

  “But she’s not sick,” said Joachim. “At least not anymore.” He hesitated. “Do…do you think she’s mad with me, Father? Did I do something wrong?”

  “No,” said Ridmark, gesturing towards the domus. Both boys followed him as they climbed the slope from the river towards the house, the thick grasses rustling around them. He didn’t want to discuss this, but he knew how that kind of fear could fester in a young mind. “She’s not sick, and she’s not angry with you. She…is in mourning.”

  “Because of Joanna,” said Joachim.

  “Yes,” said Ridmark. The grief fluttered at the back of his mind. “That was very hard for your mother. One of the hardest things she’s had to face, and she has done many difficult things. She just needs time.”

  “But I don’t understand,” said Joachim. “She was just a baby. Mother only knew her for three days.”

  Ridmark was at a loss how to answer that. He supposed it all seemed unreal to Joachim. When Joanna had been born, neither Gareth nor Joachim had seen the small, struggling girl. She had barely lived three days, and Calliande had not slept for a single one of those three days as she tried healing spell after healing spell.

  Calliande had not slept much in the six months after, either.

  Ridmark wondered if Joachim resented that. He knew that older children often resented the younger ones. But Ridmark had been the youngest, and Calliande had been an only child. Perhaps neither of them understood.

  “You used to be a baby, didn’t you?” said Gareth in a quiet voice.

  Joachim’s eyes went wide at that. “Oh. I think I understand.”

  “Then you understand,” said Ridmark, “that we must be kind to your mother.”

  “And we must pray for her,” said Gareth.

  “Yes,” said Ridmark.

  They walked in silence for a while as they drew nearer to the house. Its walls had been built of white stone, its roof covered in tiles of fired clay. Ridmark and Calliande had built the house on the site of the long-abandoned fishing village where she had grown up all those centuries ago. Though, to be totally accurate, they had built the domus several hundred yards west of where the fishing village had once been, given how the River Moradel tended to flood in the spring.

  The house was stirring as they walked to the courtyard gate. Servants, both human and halfling, went about their tasks. Soon after the defeat of the Frostborn, Ridmark had hired a halfling woman named Dagma to look after the Tower of the Keeper in Tarlion, and in the past eight years, Dagma had taken over as the seneschal of both the Tower and the domus. Ridmark made a mental note to speak with her before he left for Tarlion. It was good of her husband Dieter to let Joachim hang about in his workshop, but he didn’t want Joachim causing problems with the servants. In another few years, Joachim would start taking lessons with Brother Octavius, but…

  “Gareth, you have to keep learning to speak the orcs’ language,” said Joachim. Evidently, he didn’t want to talk about his mother any further.

  Gareth sighed. “I wish knights didn’t need to learn to speak orcish.”

  “It will serve you well,” said Ridmark. “Almost everyone outside of the realm of Andomhaim speaks orcish, and not just the orcs.” Of course, Kothluuskan orcish, Qazaluuskan orcish, Anathgrimm orcish, and the orcish tongues of the three baptized kingdoms all tended to have different slang and grammar, but there was no reason to trouble Gareth’s head with that quite yet.

  “I don’t have to learn orcish,” announced Joachim with pride.

  Gareth scoffed. “That’s because you’re too little.”

  “I’m not little, I’m three!”

  Ridmark stepped into the courtyard. It was a wide, clear space, with a narrow pool running down the center, pillars lining the walls. When guests came, Ridmark entertained them here, assuming the weather cooperated, and…

  He stopped in surprise, as did Gareth and Joachim.

  “Mama!” shouted Joachim, and he shot across the courtyard like a crossbow bolt.

  Calliande stepped closer to them.

  She did not look at all well.

  In many ways, she looked no different than she had ten years ago when Ridmark had first met her on the slopes of Black Mountain. She had the same blue eyes, the same long blonde hair, the same sort of windswept beauty to her face. But that face was much thinner than he remembered, the lines sharper, with dark circles under her eyes. She had lost a great deal of weight in the last six months, enough to alarm Ridmark, and the dress hung much more loosely from her than it had a year ago.

  Her eyes were still bloodshot. Likely she had been crying again this morning.

  “Mama!” said Joachim, and he slammed into her legs, wrapping his arms around her.

  “Joachim,” said Calliande. She propped the worn staff of the Keeper against one of the pillars and picked up Joachim. “How are you this mornin
g?”

  “Good,” said Joachim as Ridmark and Gareth drew nearer. “I learned how to hold a sword, and I’m going to be Sir Joachim the Loud. I’m also going to build fences and not learn to speak orcish.”

  Calliande tried to smile at him. “Well, it sounds like you’ve had a very busy day.”

  “I did!” said Joachim.

  Calliande squatted to look Gareth in the eye, still holding Joachim. “And how are you, Gareth?”

  “I am well, Mother,” said Gareth. “I hope you are well.”

  She set Joachim down, kissed Gareth on the top of the head, and straightened up. “Why don’t the two of you go have breakfast in the kitchen? I want to talk to your father.”

  “Yes, Mother,” said Gareth. “Come on, Joachim. The bread should still be hot.”

  The two boys ran from the courtyard. Ridmark tried to remember what it was like to have the energy to run everywhere and failed.

  Instead, he met Calliande’s eye.

  She tried to smile. Her eyes were still red and raw from weeping. But she was on her feet and out of bed, and she had bathed and dressed. There had been too many days of late when she hadn’t been able to get out of bed.

  They stood in silence for a moment.

  At last Ridmark took her hand. Her fingers felt thin and cold. “How are you?”

  “Ridmark,” said Calliande. “I’m…” She took a shuddering breath, and she looked away.

  He gripped her hand tighter, and she squeezed back. They had faced all manner of dangers together, but this had broken her in a way that none of them ever had. Ridmark thought he had known all there was to know about grief.

  Joanna’s death had taught him otherwise.

  It had hit him very hard.

  It had hit Calliande far harder.

  He tried to take comfort in the fact that Joanna had been baptized before her death, that her soul now resided with the Dominus Christus in paradise. Her brief life had been full of pain, but she would never have to know the many, many other pains of mortal life.

  It was a comforting thought, but it did little for his own grief. But some sorrows simply had to be borne.