CHAPTER ONE
Lanraig
IN the northernmost village of the northernmost island of the northernmost country, it did not take much to excite the residents. This is Lanraig, the once dismissed and forgotten village on the island of Holm, on the outskirts of the Pig Islands, on the even outerskirts of proud Sawltair.
Why, just a month ago, the drama-starved residents of the village (once described as ‘no information available’ by infamous travel writer Aachen Topi) had thronged to witness a passing traveller… although given the village’s excellent transport links to the middle of nowhere, passing travellers were generally referred to as ‘lost’. A fortnight ago, they veritably swarmed to pick over the wondrous spectacle of an overturned cart. A week ago, they were shoving life-long friends into ditches to get a good look at someone putting their washing out the day after a feast day. And just yesterday, the entire populace of the village jostled for the best spot to ‘ooh’ in wonder at a pig with a suggestive smile.
All of these wonders of the world would inevitably encourage, nay demand, a gathering of curious residents.
Fourteen nights before the Feast of St Baltair, in the 15th year of the reign of King Theodore, on the auspicious day the curtains draw back, the audience’s murmurs begin to fade, and our story unfolds, the most easily-amused Lanraigians had rushed to the frontage of the village’s only pub, the Acceptable Baker, just after dinner time.
What had drawn them was a young woman on horseback; a woman whose youthful, heart-shaped face belied a warrior’s bearing, clothed in light chainmail barely covering a simple tunic of a bold red that matched her wild hair.
Her pointed chin had an aristocratic bearing, her brow suggested at her intelligence being greater than most, and her general countenance seemed to look down on those around her. This was true both literally, given she was mounted, and figuratively, with the suggestion of a sneer about her long, thin nose.
Astride a pony, she might have been mistaken for a farmer’s daughter on her way to market, were it not for her attire. And for the greatsword which hung heavily from her waist, almost dragging along the ground due to the limited height of her steed.
This sword, had anyone given it more than a cursory glance, was a cousin to the cladheim wielded by the soldiers who took their name from that very weapon. But where they boasted a hilt of silver, slightly-sloped quillons leading to a pommel inlaid with a unicorn’s head, the sword which encumbered the young redhead had a grey hilt, with slightly-less-sloped quillons, leading to a pommel inlaid with a horse’s head. These differences, of course, would be lost upon your average Lanraigian, and indeed, upon anyone who did not have a worrying level of interest in sword smithery.
As curious as the rider and her sword may have been, it was the aforementioned pony which had attracted the pig’s share of the villagers’ attention.
It was clearly a well-used horse, unafraid of toil, but it had seen better years, and its head drooped as it trotted into the village. Yet it was not the beast’s years nor gait that marked it out as a curiosity, but the fact that it was blue.
A charitable onlooker might call it blue-grey, and in the waning or waxing of the day, perhaps it would be mistaken as such. But under the bright light of a fine spring afternoon, it shone as blue as the vivid azure delphiniums which filled the windowboxes of the very pub outside which it had stopped.
A light tittering developed into a behind-the-hand chuckle, and even before all-out laughter had begun to ripple throughout the crowd, the rider’s embarrassment became evident as her cheeks flushed to a hue that even her tunic and hair could not match.
Lachlin sighed as she dismounted, then readied herself to face the third obstacle of what should have been the most joyous morning of her eighteen years.
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