Koa Attila

Synopsis

The young man

He woke in a farmer’s barn at dawn, wearing very little, beside a girl called Daisy who had called off a wedding after meeting him in the tavern the night before, and he got his horse out the back way before her father found him. His days are for working, he says, and his nights are for fun. He is eighteen, and it shows.

The Free Folk are not an old people with an old culture. They are mismatches: men and women out of Idir and Peredhel and further, some running from law and some from themselves, and half-orcs among them in numbers you would not see anywhere else. For every silver a Free Folk earns, two slivers go back to the group. Hire one and you get somebody reliable if you pay properly, and a grudge if you do not. Koa’s family wandered, joined them, wandered further; he went off alone a couple of years in and has been working the thorps around Ridh ever since.

He rides Nightstorm, a young horse he found at night in a storm and trained himself, and who stands guard over a camp better than most men. He fights with a greatsword, a shield on his back, a couple of short spears, and hardened leather. He is not afraid of a scrap with anyone. He is afraid of fire, and says so plainly.

Ridh

Ridh is about two hundred people and one tavern worth naming, the Wyvern’s Tale, whose sign is misspelled and whose bartender Brindle trades Koa free drinks for road-news. Wyverns are real and pass overhead; dragons, everyone agrees, are not.

Drinking there he met Leon Yaegar: a very old Peren with one eye and a bear-fur cloak, retired out of Peredhel’s armies, riding south to the Chantry at Haudh-Gwenn to see whether they had any medicine for the mind. He talked the way old soldiers do, in lessons, and explained what happens when Peredhel takes a country: seven years of civil labor, or three under arms, or death. Everything in Peredhel comes in threes. He also took Koa’s measure against the gods he keeps himself (Lady Eravil for dedication, and the Martyr for forgiveness) and did not say what he concluded.

Koa keeps seven of his own in his ideopan. He asks Snaga to bless the blade and Vroga Waruk for a fair fight, and keeps the rest to himself.

He heard a name that night he had not heard before: Orsugo, a half-orc who is called Krelene’s Fury, said to be ten feet tall with fire for skin, said to lead a gang out of the eastern woods, and said (this last uncomfortably) to be one of the Free Folk.

The road west

The job came from Phil Nye, a portly and thoroughly pleasant merchant in alchemical goods, traveling with his wife Phillipa and their daughter Philomena. Phillipa keeps the books and was born in Yovance, where she was owned; Phil paid to free her through an arranged marriage and has doted on her since. Philomena is sixteen and can butcher a carcass better than Koa can, having learned it from a butcher’s apprentice when she was small. She took to Koa as a brother inside a week.

The woods gave them two things that were never explained: a great fire burning far to the north, and a column of something moving between the trees that caught the moonlight like armor.

Then, on the open road between Forven and Loshev, an arrow came out of the dark and killed Phil where he sat. A swordsman rushed the wagon for the girl, saying she was worth a ransom. Koa cut him down. The archer went into the trees and was not found.

The dead man’s fingernails were clean and his sword was rusted from neglect, which is not what a woods brigand looks like. He carried a single sliver and nothing that said who he was. Koa kept the body and the arrows to have someone in Loshev look at them, took charge of a widow who had stopped speaking and a girl who had not, and refused to let anyone separate him from them the rest of the way in.