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Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2017 by Nicholas Eames
Excerpt from The Band: Book Two copyright © 2017 by Nicholas Eames
Excerpt from The Dragon Lords: Fool’s Gold copyright © 2016 by Johnathan Wood
Cover design by Lisa Marie Pompilio
Cover illustration by Richard Anderson
Cover copyright © 2017 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
Map by Tim Paul Illustration
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Eames, Nicholas, author.
Title: Kings of the wyld / Nicholas Eames.
Description: First edition. | New York : Orbit, 2017. | Series: The band
Identifiers: LCCN 2016038141| ISBN 9780316362474 (paperback) | ISBN 9781478946625 (audio book cd) | ISBN 9781478915355 (audio book downloadable)
Subjects: LCSH: Mercenary troops—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Fantasy / Epic. | FICTION / Action & Adventure. | GSAFD: Fantasy fiction.
Classification: LCC PR9199.4.E15 K56 2017 | DDC 813/.6—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016038141
ISBN 978-0-316-36246-7
E3-20161122-JV-PC
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Map
Chapter One: A Ghost on the Road
Chapter Two: Rose
Chapter Three: A Good Man
Chapter Four: Hitting the Road
Chapter Five: Rocks, Socks, and Sandwiches
Chapter Six: The Monster Parade
Chapter Seven: Swimming with Sharks
Chapter Eight: Vellichor
Chapter Nine: The Heathen’s Touch
Chapter Ten: Through the Looking Glass
Chapter Eleven: The Cuckold King
Chapter Twelve: The Council of Courts
Chapter Thirteen: The Duke of Endland
Chapter Fourteen: Farewell to the King
Chapter Fifteen: Breakfast with Thieves
Chapter Sixteen: Snakes and Lions
Chapter Seventeen: Fivecourt
Chapter Eighteen: All That Glitters
Chapter Nineteen: Guests of the Gorgon
Chapter Twenty: The Soul in the Stone
Chapter Twenty-one: The Riot House
Chapter Twenty-two: The Maxithon
Chapter Twenty-three: Born to Kill
Chapter Twenty-four: Flying by Night
Chapter Twenty-five: Treasures of Varying Usefulness
Chapter Twenty-six: The Revenant in the Room
Chapter Twenty-seven: Bounty
Chapter Twenty-eight: Larkspur
Chapter Twenty-nine: Flight
Chapter Thirty: The Dark Star
Chapter Thirty-one: A Walk in the Wyld
Chapter Thirty-two: Drums and Drugs and Dreams
Chapter Thirty-three: The Flesheater
Chapter Thirty-four: Hope in Flames
Chapter Thirty-five: The Cannibal Court
Chapter Thirty-six: Rambling On
Chapter Thirty-seven: The Claw-broker
Chapter Thirty-eight: Tamarat
Chapter Thirty-nine: The Spirit Beneath the Skin
Chapter Forty: Cinnamon Smoke
Chapter Forty-one: Out of the Woods
Chapter Forty-two: Bards and Broken Bowls
Chapter Forty-three: The Cold Road
Chapter Forty-four: A Grave in the Clouds
Chapter Forty-five: A Song for the Dreamer
Chapter Forty-six: Deliverance
Chapter Forty-seven: New Hands, Old Friends
Chapter Forty-eight: The Maze of Stone and Fire
Chapter Forty-nine: Immortality
Chapter Fifty: The Battle of the Bands
Chapter Fifty-one: The Autumn Son
Chapter Fifty-two: Sheer Dumb Luck
Chapter Fifty-three: One Last Time
Epilogue: Home
Acknowledgments
Extras Meet the Author
Author Interview
A Preview of The Next Installment in the Band Series
A Preview of The Dragon Lords: Fool’s Gold
Orbit Newsletter
For Mom, who always believed.
For Rose, who always knew.
And for Dad, who will never know how much.
Chapter One
A Ghost on the Road
You’d have guessed from the size of his shadow that Clay Cooper was a bigger man than he was. He was certainly bigger than most, with broad shoulders and a chest like an iron-strapped keg. His hands were so large that most mugs looked like teacups when he held them, and the jaw beneath his shaggy brown beard was wide and sharp as a shovel blade. But his shadow, drawn out by the setting sun, skulked behind him like a dogged reminder of the man he used to be: great and dark and more than a little monstrous.
Finished with work for the day, Clay slogged down the beaten track that passed for a thoroughfare in Coverdale, sharing smiles and nods with those hustling home before dark. He wore a Watchmen’s green tabard over a shabby leather jerkin, and a weathered sword in a rough old scabbard on his hip. His shield—chipped and scored and scratched through the years by axes and arrows and raking claws—was slung across his back, and his helmet … well, Clay had lost the one the Sergeant had given him last week, just as he’d misplaced the one given to him the month before, and every few months since the day he’d signed on to the Watch almost ten years ago now.
A helmet restricted your vision, all but negated your hearing, and more often than not made you look stupid as hell. Clay Cooper didn’t do helmets, and that was that.
“Clay! Hey, Clay!” Pip trotted over. The lad wore the Watchmen’s green as well, his own ridiculous head-pan tucked in the crook of one arm. “Just got off duty at the south gate,” he said cheerily. “You?”
“North.”
“Nice.” The boy grinned and nodded as though Clay had said something exceptionally interesting instead of having just mumbled the word north. “Anything exciting out there?”
Clay shrugged. “Mountains.”
“Ha! ‘Mountains,’ he says. Classic. Hey, you hear Ryk Yarsson saw a centaur out by Tassel’s farm?”
“It was probably a moose.”
The boy gave him a skeptical look, as if
Ryk spotting a moose instead of a centaur was highly improbable. “Anyway. Come to the King’s Head for a few?”
“I shouldn’t,” said Clay. “Ginny’s expecting me home, and …” He paused, having no other excuse near to hand.
“C’mon,” Pip goaded. “Just one, then. One drink.”
Clay grunted, squinting into the sun and measuring the prospect of Ginny’s wrath against the bitter bite of ale washing down his throat. “Fine,” he relented. “One.”
Because it was hard work looking north all day, after all.
The King’s Head was already crowded, its long tables crammed with people who came as much to gab and gossip as they did to drink. Pip slinked toward the bar while Clay found a seat at a table as far from the stage as possible.
The talk around him was the usual sort: weather and war, and neither topic too promising. There’d been a great battle fought out west in Endland, and by the murmurings it hadn’t gone off well. A Republic army of twenty thousand, bolstered by several hundred mercenary bands, had been slaughtered by a Heartwyld Horde. Those few who’d survived had retreated to the city of Castia and were now under siege, forced to endure sickness and starvation while the enemy gorged themselves on the dead outside their walls. That, and there’d been a touch of frost on the ground this morning, which didn’t seem fair this early into autumn, did it?
Pip returned with two pints and two friends Clay didn’t recognize, whose names he forgot just as soon as they told him. They seemed like nice enough fellows, mind you. Clay was just bad with names.
“So you were in a band?” one asked. He had lanky red hair, and his face was a postpubescent mess of freckles and swollen pimples.
Clay took a long pull from his tankard before setting it down and looking over at Pip, who at least had the grace to look ashamed. Then he nodded.
The two stole a glance at each other, and then Freckles leaned in across the table. “Pip says you guys held Coldfire Pass for three days against a thousand walking dead.”
“I only counted nine hundred and ninety-nine,” Clay corrected. “But pretty much, yeah.”
“He says you slew Akatung the Dread,” said the other, whose attempt to grow a beard had produced a wisp of hair most grandmothers would scoff at.
Clay took another drink and shook his head. “We only injured him. I hear he died back at his lair, though. Peacefully. In his sleep.”
They looked disappointed, but then Pip nudged one with his elbow. “Ask him about the Siege of Hollow Hill.”
“Hollow Hill?” murmured Wispy, then his eyes went round as courtmark coins. “Wait, the Siege of Hollow Hill? So the band you were in …”
“Saga,” Freckles finished, clearly awestruck. “You were in Saga.”
“It’s been a while,” said Clay, picking at a knot in the warped wood of the table before him. “The name sounds familiar, though.”
“Wow,” sighed Freckles.
“You gotta be kidding me,” Wispy uttered.
“Just … wow,” said Freckles again.
“You gotta be kidding me,” Wispy repeated, not one to be outdone when it came re-expressing disbelief.
Clay said nothing in response, only sipped his beer and shrugged.
“So you know Golden Gabe?” Freckles asked.
Another shrug. “I know Gabriel, yeah.”
“Gabriel!” trilled Pip, sloshing his drink as he raised his hands in wonderment. “‘Gabriel,’ he says! Classic.”
“And Ganelon?” Wispy asked. “And Arcandius Moog? And Matrick Skulldrummer?”
“Oh, and …” Freckles screwed up his face as he racked his brain—which didn’t do the poor bastard any favours, Clay decided. He was ugly as a rain cloud on a wedding day, that one. “Who are we forgetting?”
“Clay Cooper.”
Wispy stroked the fine hairs on his chin as he pondered this. “Clay Cooper … oh,” he said, looking abashed. “Right.”
It took Freckles another moment to piece it together, but then he palmed his pale forehead and laughed. “Gods, I’m stupid.”
The gods already know, thought Clay.
Sensing the awkwardness at hand, Pip chimed in. “Tell us a tale, will ya, Clay? About when you did for that necromancer up in Oddsford. Or when you rescued that princess from … that place … remember?”
Which one? Clay wondered. They’d rescued several princesses, in fact, and if he’d killed one necromancer he’d killed a dozen. Who kept track of shit like that? Didn’t matter anyway, since he wasn’t in the mood for storytelling. Or to go digging up what he’d worked so hard to bury, and then harder still to forget where he’d dug the hole in the first place.
“Sorry, kid,” he told Pip, draining what remained of his beer. “That’s one.”
He excused himself, handing Pip a few coppers for the drink and bidding what he hoped was a last farewell to Freckles and Wispy. He shouldered his way to the door and gave a long sigh when he emerged into the cool quiet outside. His back hurt from slumping over that table, so he stretched it out, craning his neck and gazing up at the first stars of the evening.
He remembered how small the night sky used to make him feel. How insignificant. And so he’d gone and made a big deal of himself, figuring that someday he might look up at the vast sprawl of stars and feel undaunted by its splendour. It hadn’t worked. After a while Clay tore his eyes from the darkening sky and struck out down the road toward home.
He exchanged pleasantries with the Watchmen at the west gate. Had he heard about the centaur spotting over by Tassel’s farm? they wondered. How about the battle out west, and those poor bastards holed up in Castia? Rotten, rotten business.
Clay followed the track, careful to keep from turning an ankle in a rut. Crickets were chirping in the tall grass to either side, the wind in the trees above him sighing like the ocean surf. He stopped by the roadside shrine to the Summer Lord and threw a dull copper at the statue’s feet. After a few steps and a moment’s hesitation he went back and tossed another. Away from town it was darker still, and Clay resisted the urge to look up again.
Best keep your eyes on the ground, he told himself, and leave the past where it belongs. You’ve got what you’ve got, Cooper, and it’s just what you wanted, right? A kid, a wife, a simple life. It was an honest living. It was comfortable.
He could almost hear Gabriel scoff at that. Honest? Honest is boring, his old friend might have said. Comfortable is dull. Then again, Gabriel had got himself married long before Clay. Had a little girl of his own, even—a woman grown by now.
And yet there was Gabe’s spectre just the same, young and fierce and glorious, smirking in the shadowed corner of Clay’s mind. “We were giants, once,” he said. “Bigger than life. And now …”
“Now we are tired old men,” Clay muttered, to no one but the night. And what was so wrong with that? He’d met plenty of actual giants in his day, and most of them were assholes.
Despite Clay’s reasoning, the ghost of Gabriel continued to haunt his walk home, gliding past him on the road with a sly wink, waving from his perch on the neighbour’s fence, crouched like a beggar on the stoop of Clay’s front door. Only this last Gabriel wasn’t young at all. Or particularly fierce looking. Or any more glorious than an old board with a rusty nail in it. In fact, he looked pretty fucking terrible. When he saw Clay coming he stood, and smiled. Clay had never seen a man look so sad in all the years of his life.
The apparition spoke his name, which sounded to Clay as real as the crickets buzzing, as the wind moaning through the trees along the road. And then that brittle smile broke, and Gabriel—really, truly Gabriel, and not a ghost after all—was sagging into Clay’s arms, sobbing into his shoulder, clutching at his back like a child afraid of the dark.
“Clay,” he said. “Please … I need your help.”
Chapter Two
Rose
Once Gabriel recovered himself they went inside. Ginny turned from the stove and her jaw clamped tight. Griff came bounding over,
stubby tail wagging. He gave Clay a cursory sniff and then set to smelling Gabe’s leg as though it were a piss-drenched tree, which wasn’t actually too far off the mark.
His old friend was in a sorry state, no mistake. His hair and beard were a tangled mess, his clothes little more than soiled rags. There were holes in his boots, toes peeking out from the ruined leather like grubby urchins. His hands were busy fidgeting, wringing each other or tugging absentmindedly at the hem of his tunic. Worst of all, though, were his eyes. They were sunk deep in his haggard face, hard and haunted, as though everywhere he looked was something he wished he hadn’t seen.
“Griff, lay off,” said Clay. The dog, wet eyes and a lolling pink tongue in a black fur face, perked up at the sound of his name. Griff wasn’t the noblest-looking creature, and he didn’t have many uses besides licking food off a plate. He couldn’t herd sheep or flush a grouse from cover, and if anyone ever broke in to the house he was more likely to fetch them slippers than scare ’em off. But it made Clay smile to look at him (that’s how godsdamn adorable he was) and that was worth more than nothing.
“Gabriel.” Ginny finally found her voice, though she stayed right where she was. Didn’t smile. Didn’t cross to hug him. She’d never much cared for Gabriel. Clay thought she probably blamed his old bandmate for all the bad habits (gambling, fighting, drinking to excess) that she’d spent the last ten years disabusing him of, and all the other bad habits (chewing with his mouth open, forgetting to wash his hands, occasionally throttling people) she was still struggling to purge.
Heaped upon that were the handful of times Gabe had come calling in the years since his own wife left him. Every time he appeared it was hand in hand with some grand scheme to reunite the old band and strike out once again in search of fame, fortune, and decidedly reckless adventure. There was a town down south needed rescue from a ravaging drake, or a den of walking wolves to be cleared out of the Wailing Forest, or an old lady in some far-flung corner of the realm needed help bringing laundry off the line and only Saga themselves could rise to her aid!
It wasn’t as though Clay needed Ginny breathing down his neck to refuse, to see that Gabriel longed for something unrecoverable, like an old man clinging to memories of his golden youth. Exactly like that, actually. But life, Clay knew, didn’t work that way. It wasn’t a circle; you didn’t go round and round again. It was an arc, its course as inexorable as the sun’s trek across the sky, destined at its highest, brightest moment to begin its fall.