Lord Soth by Edo van Belkom

at his legs, and saw that his feet had become entangled in his cloak. He kicked the cloak away. “Is it my turn to keep watch?” he asked hopefully. Anything to keep him from returning to the nightmare of the dream.
    “No, milord,” said Caradoc. “It is time to go. Your turn to keep watch came and went some time ago. You were sleeping so soundly we decided it was best not to wake you.”
    Soth said nothing to this. He could reprimand his knights for not waking him, but he knew the fault lay within himself. After all, the squire’s first rule was that knights who slept too deeply did not live very long. It wasn’t like him to forget something like that, but he had. Perhaps it was best not to dwell on it. In fact, the less he reminded himself about his ghastly nightmare the better.
    “Very well,” he said at last. “But, don’t let it happen again.”
    “Yes, milord.”
    Soth rose up off the ground, stiff and sore, his clothes cold and damp with sweat.

    The knights were well on their way as the sun broke over the tops of the Dargaard Mountains. After a cold night and its legacy of stiff joints and sore bones, the sun’s warmth was a more than welcome relief for the knights.
    Soth took his customary position at the head of the group during the early hours, but as they neared Halton, he allowed the rider who’d come from the village to take the lead position given that he was more familiar with the surrounding terrain.
    When the village at last came into sight, Soth moved the knights slightly up the mountain slopes in order to avoid detection as the ogres would no doubt have one or two guards watching the surrounding lands and especially the approach from Dargaard Keep.
    As they made their way through a shallow gully, one of the knights let out a birdlike cry. Soth immediately halted the knights with an upraised fist. The procession stopped and went silent as Soth waited for the knight who’d called out the warning to offer a report.
    The knight turned out to be Colm Farold, Knight of the Sword. “Voices, milord,” he said. “Coming from over there.” He pointed with a subtle gesture at a thick patch of fireweed growing close to the ground some yards off.
    Soth nodded, and listened closely. Indeed there were faint sounds coming from somewhere to his left. He gestured to Farold with his head, then pointed to two other knights. The selected knights immediately dismounted.
    “Nothing here, men,” said Soth, moving forward through the gully, leaving the three knights behind. “I think it’s best we be moving on.”
    Once they were through the gully, Soth doubled his men back around in a wide arc and minutes later they were once again traversing the gully.
    Except this time, Farold and the other knights were there waiting for them, swords drawn and two prisoners in hand.
    “Hender and Pike!” exclaimed the rider.
    “You know these two?” asked Soth.
    “Indeed, milord. One is my cousin, the other his neighbor.”
    Soth looked at the men flanked by the trio of knights and recognized them from their manner of dress as being simple farmers.
    “We found them cowering in the bushes almost with their heads buried in the ground,” Farold explained.
    “We were afraid you might be more ogres,” said the older of the two, the one the rider had identified as Hender. He was a man with thin gray hair, a long white beard, and the red neck and thickly calloused hands of one who tills the land.
    If the man hadn’t been so terrified, Soth might have considered his words an insult. And if their task wasn’t so urgent, he might have taken the time to make a comment about them. Instead, he decided to concentrate on the matter at hand. “How long ago did you escape from the village?”
    “This morning,” said the other farmer, a somewhat younger man who was obviously the one named Pike. “Before sunup.”
    Soth wasn’t surprised by this. It was just like ogres to take over a village, then get careless about keeping