Chapter 1.3

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Between the Solar and the grand staircase ran a gallery that overlooked the great hall with its huge, stone-backed fireplace behind the high table. Trestle tables were stacked against the long walls, waiting to be pulled out when the household was ready to eat, and the floor was covered in a thick layer of reeds. Long, narrow windows set high in the walls let in the late autumn light. From the gallery I could look through those, out over the castle courtyard and what was beyond it.

Songless Castle stood on a high motte, its inner curtain wall holding the keep, the kitchens, the well, and all of Lord Reinard’s private gardens in a protected embrace. The outer bailey held the stables, the pigsty, the aviary, and the workhouses of castle tradesment. The outer curtain wall was ten feet thick, with a mural tower at each of the four corners. A double-towered gatehouse protected the entrance. On the eastern side the Gateway river hurried past the castle on its way to the Southern Wizardlands. The town hugged the other three sides of the keep, and a town wall kept out the wolves and the thieves.

I could also see the empty lot where the Bard Hall once stood, where burnt timbers and bones now rotted beneath weeds and waste brush, and the cathedral whose doors were locked with iron chains and whose bells were bound by black cloth, both the legacy of the old lord. Only the Silent Monks comforted the people of Songless.

Beyond the walls lay farmland and open wood, all worked by Lord Reinard’s serfs and tenants. Far to the east lay the long shadow of the Eastern Green Forest, enchanted and deadly, and beyond that towered the Dragon’s Mouth Mountain. Their white tops never disappeared, not even in the heat of summer. From them flowed the Dragon Tears river, which swept past the city of Slattern, just north of the Eastern Green Forest. The Gateway split off from it north of Songless Castle, heading south, but the Dragon Tears continued to Selice, where the High King held court, and then on to the western sea.

The Gateway River continued south to the Great Cliff, and there crashed down to the stunted desert a thousand feet below. Now the Teraze, it flowed to Bartiese and the southern sea.
The Great Cliff ran from the southern tip of the Dragon’s Mouth mountains to the western sea, holding our lands out of the reach of the Wizardkin, who lived in the desert with their strange, twisted gods. Only a determined man could climb that cliff save at the falls of the Gateway River, where a man with a pack-mule might pass.

It was by that pass that the Christians had come to our lands, a dozen generations earlier.
The first Christian, Brother William, had been conjured up in Bartiese by an idiotic wizard who thought to fish in other worlds for wisdom. The monk he caught carried no magic, only a book he called The Bible and a message from his god. As the god of the enslaved and poor, the homeless and the powerless, he would grant to his followers might and strength and ownership of a promised land. When the wizard sold Brother William for a small price, Brother William preached his message to his fellow slaves. None listened better than the tall, fair-skinned slaves stolen from the Northern Icelands, and when, empowered by their god, they broke the chains of slavery and flowed to the north, they took the Bardlands as their own. They built churches and castles, overshadowing the bardhalls, and tried to force us to accept their god and their ways.
Even as my Lord Reinard was now forcing me.

I turned from the window, realizing that I had been standing there longer than I should have been. I glanced toward the Solar, half-expecting to see Lord Reinard storm out – but all I saw was a Silent Monk who wove a blessing into the air as he walked past me.

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