Sentry Peak Read Free

generals who served under him. He nodded to the hovering serf: a sharp, brusque motion. “I’m coming,” he said.
    His subordinates sprang to their feet when he strode into the dining room. All three of them bowed low. “Your Grace!” they chorused.
    “Gentlemen.” Thraxton returned the bow, not quite so deeply. He sat down in the empty chair at the head of the table. Once he was comfortable, the other officers sat down again, too.
    “May I pour you some wine, your Grace?” asked Leonidas the Priest, who sat at Thraxton’s right hand. Instead of the blue tunic and pantaloons that uniformed Geoffrey’s men, Leonidas wore the crimson vestments of a hierophant of the Lion God, with a general’s sunburst over each shoulder. Not only did he worship his chosen deity, he fed him well.
    “Blood of the grape,” Thraxton said, and Leonidas smiled and nodded. Thraxton nodded, too. “If you would be so kind.” Maybe wine would let him see something he couldn’t see sober. Maybe, at the very least, it would help ease his griping belly.
    On Thraxton’s left, Baron Dan of Rabbit Hill filled his own goblet with red wine. He was younger than either Thraxton or Leonidas, and waxed the tip of his beard and the ends of his mustache to points, as if he were a town dandy. Fop or not, though, he made a first-rate fighting man. Dan offered the bottle to the officer at the foot of the table, who commanded Thraxton’s unicorns. “Some for you, General?”
    “No, thanks,” Ned of the Forest answered. “Water’ll do me just fine.” The harsh twang of the northeast filled his voice. Thraxton wasn’t altogether sure he could read or write; one of his lieutenants always prepared the reports he submitted. He was a gentleman only by courtesy of his rank, not by blood. Before the war, he’d been a gambler and a serfcatcher, and highly successful at both trades. Since the fighting broke out, he’d proved nobody could match him or his troopers—most of them as much ruffians as he was, not proper knights at all—on unicornback.
    Baron Dan withdrew the wine bottle. Leonidas the Priest clapped his hands a couple of times in smiling amusement. “Any man who drinks water from birth and lives,” he observed, “is bound to do great things, much like one who survives snakebite.”
    “Oh, I got bit by a snake once,” Ned said. “Any snake bites me, it dies.”
    He might have meant he killed snakes with his knife or with a boot. By the way he made it sound, though, he thought his blood more poisonous than any venom. And he might have been right. He was the biggest man at the table, and without a doubt the strongest. His face was handsome, in a hard, weathered way. His eyes . . . His eyes worried even Thraxton, who had seen a great deal. They were hard and black and unyielding as polished jet. A killer’s eyes , Thraxton thought.
    A lot of men were killers, of course. The world was a hard, cruel place. But most men pretended otherwise. Ned of the Forest didn’t bother.
    The serf who’d led Thraxton in began carving the pork roast that sat in the middle of the table. He also served Geoffrey’s commanders baked tubers. Thraxton, Leonidas, and Dan ate in the approved manner, lingering over their food and chatting lightly of this and that. Ned’s manners proved he’d been born in a barn. He attacked his food as if he were a wolf devouring a deer he’d pulled down. In an astonishingly short time, his plate was empty. He didn’t bother asking the serf for a second helping. Instead, he stood up, leaned forward to grab the knife, and hacked off another big slab of meat. He slapped it down on the plate and demolished it with the same dispatch he’d shown at the first helping.
    “A man of appetite,” Dan of Rabbit Hill said, more admiringly than not. He waved to the serf, who gave him a second helping about half the size of Ned’s.
    “We are all men of appetite,” Leonidas said with another smile. “Some have a passion for