Beltran's private army

The army Beltran Grayeras trained over a winter was paid for by his family, and it was never the city’s. Its officers were hired separately from his four lieutenants and out of a different country: Peredhel notables, ex-military leaders and sellswords, all of them Dhel, and bound to Beltran personally rather than to any office he held. The lieutenants ran his business inside Haudh-Gwenn. The five commanders ran the column. They traveled with it without always moving with it, and they took an order as his only when it carried a code phrase he had set for the purpose.

How many men that came to was counted three times and never came out the same way twice. Beltran’s own answer, taken out of him after his death, was a hundred and fifty. Lady Talia, holding the garrison against them, put it at a hundred and twenty to a hundred and fifty, better than two to one against the sixty Leon Yaegar could field. A third count ran to about a hundred and thirty, a hundred or more of whom were Haudh-Gwenn citizens. When he first marched east on Ostrad the estimate had been about a hundred and twenty. Nothing has closed the spread.

His death left the thing leaderless at the top and unpaid, with nobody in it to negotiate with and nobody in it to remove. At the bottom rank it went on holding positions under orders no one had rescinded. What it had been hired with was coin, so what Leon expected of it at the end was a sack rather than a conquest.

Campaign Updates

The council voted it disbanded and paid off, and the money came from the family that raised it: two hundred gold out of the Grayeras coffers, volunteered by Alyphe. “I believe this should come from the coffers of the Grayeras estate. A donation. The beginning of charitable work.”

The disbandment went wrong before it went right. Command had passed to the sellsword Nadier Veilen, who came out to the parley with mock courtesy, talked over the councilor whose city it was, and needled Leon about his retirement. He was stalling. Two nights earlier he had sent some forty men wide to come at Haudh-Gwenn from the north while everyone watched the east, and Leon read the whole plan off the camp behind him, a tent formation he had taught in Peredhel decades before and recognized on sight. The councilor Asiya Azrak then bought Nadier’s own riders out from under him at quadruple pay; eleven of the twelve turned on him, beat him off his horse, and took him in his own camp. The northern force broke at the charge, and one man died in the whole of it. Every man of the army is to be paid except Nadier.