Daughter of Darkness & Light Read online

  Daughter

  of Darkness

  & Light

  Shannon Drake

  Daughter of Darkness & Light Copyright © 2020 by Slush Pile Players

  All rights reserved. This publication may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, including electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior express written permission of the author. Unauthorized reproduction of this material, electronic or otherwise, will result in legal action.

  Please report the unauthorized distribution of this publication by contacting the author at theoriginalheathergraham.com, via email at [email protected], or at Heather Graham 103 Estainvilke Ave., Lafayette, LA 70508. Please help stop internet piracy by alerting the author with the name and web address of any questionable or unauthorized distributor.

  Daughter of Darkness & Light is a work of fiction. The people and events in Daughter of Darkness & Light are entirely fictional. The story is not a reflection of historical or current fact, nor is the story an accurate representation of past or current events. Any resemblance between the characters in this novel and any or all persons living or dead is entirely coincidental

  For Maggie Mae Gallagher

  With love and thanks

  Prologue

  Year of Our Lord 562 A.D.

  The Dark Ages

  Brogan of Grayland stood atop the crest of a hill looking out over the land. He stood tall, just as he rode tall; he’d been taught long ago that a straight and rigid posture was a stance of power. His hands were easily clasped behind his back. His face was clean shaven and offered a fine, hawk-like nose and steel-blue eyes.

  He thought about his weaponry and his troops, and he felt a surge of energy and determination. He thought his men, gathering below. He thought of how they saw a stalwart figure. A leader.

  He was a great leader.

  He had also learned to be a ruthless one.

  The seashore lay behind them; they had chosen their landing carefully so they could bring their horses, their supplies, and war machines easily ashore at a vantage point—an area of sparse population where none could delay them as they set their goal in sight.

  He didn’t look back toward the sea. He looked to the east and the north knowing what land he longed to conquer.

  He had come once on an ill-fated mission. He had been but a boy, following a foolish leader who did not understand the true concept of an enemy.

  But he knew battle and he knew war. He knew death was necessary.

  Looking ahead, he thought of the beauty of the landscape.

  Aye, the land was good. Rich. The rain that fell so often made the forests rich with game and the fields fertile. Even the fog that could roll in with a winter’s chill in the dead of summer was a beautiful thing, soft and gentle to the touch.

  They would head north and east. He would subdue the mix of peoples below the wall, and then he would head north and first bring down the fortress at Kenzie, and then seize the lands of the wild men just north of there, those the Romans had not bothered to tame.

  He heard that some of the ever-warring tribes there had a central leader. Laird Padraic. But Padraic would fall easily; the painted peoples were little better than wild animals. They were no match for the swords and shields and spikes and maces carried by his men. They were half naked most the time with nothing to protect them from injury or death.

  Taking on tribes who were little advanced from farm animals would not be difficult.

  But he would need the strength of his forces against Rowan, Lord of Kenzie.

  “Sire!”

  He heard the call as Camden came toward him, puffing a bit as he headed up the hill. That caused Brogan a note of concern. He needed his men to have both strength and stamina; though thus far, they had tread easily into the countryside. He had carefully planned landfall south of the castle at Tintagel, where the “legendary” Arthur had been conceived if stories told about magic proved to be true. Tintagel was not the power it had once been, but there might be many a warrior still there, and he wanted to flatten the land without losing his men along the way.

  Kenzie was his main objective.

  And Arthur was dead these many years.

  There was no great king or lord to rally the people to battle. They fell...and they fell badly.

  He smiled inwardly.

  Oh, he did believe in magic. Not to be used recklessly or foolishly, but in the pursuit of what was needed. He did believe...and while they needed great strength and numbers, his form of magic was already under way.

  “Our army is ready to move?” Brogan asked Camden.

  “There are some whisperings among them,” Camden told him after gasping in a long breath.

  “And why is that?”

  “Many of our own people, Saxons who came before to settle, are among those in the villages. Sire, you know that with the fall of the King, the movement by Angles, Franks, Frisians, and Saxons coming here was constant. But it was not so much war that kept them, rather they settled here and they mixed...Saxon men found Briton wives and...it is not always so easy to slaughter everyone.”

  Brogan stared at him hard waiting for him to continue.

  Camden took another breath. “We are killing our own. We are killing Saxons. Many of the men are not happy.”

  Brogan did not reply. With a sweep of his great cape, he headed down the hilltop straight for his gathering men and the groom who held the reins of his war horse.

  Men, mounted and afoot, watched him come; they waited for him to speak. He did.

  “We have come to conquer!” he shouted out, after mounting his horse. “We have come to take this land, to be free men upon it. We seek the rich, fertile fields and forests filled with deer. This is to be ours. But I warn you—those like us who came before us ceded to others. They have become like the others—like the Britons! The Romans did a great service, constructing a wall to keep out the hordes of pagan painted people. It well fits our battle plan. The landscape before us awaits. Indeed, it needs a conquering lord! And I warn you again, if you kill the bear cub’s mother and not the cub, the cub will grow and rip you to shreds and feed on your flesh. We leave no bear cubs. We ride with no mercy. We ride to kill! Aye, some will escape, but they will be the weak. And we will seize the lands; and when we have beaten down and seized the last great fortress, we will hunt them out and exterminate those who are not among us! We will conquer!”

  He said the last slowly, enunciating his words.

  And as he expected, he received a rallying cry from his men.

  They, of course, did not know he had witnessed the carnage when a “bear cub” had grown to seek his revenge.

  Mercy was not the way.

  He had learned that bitter lesson.

  He had learned it in pain and sorrow.

  Camden joined him, mounting up beside him.

  Villages would fall today. He feared Camden would fall today, too. In fact, he knew it.

  He needed a man stronger of heart, mind, and body at his side.

  “Men, we ride to triumph!” he cried.

  And that day, they did triumph.

  They feasted that night on the livestock of the fallen.

  They talked and laughed and drank and compared the rare Briton and Roman jewelry that had been taken from the corpses they had left to rot in the fields.

  Aye, they celebrated. But they took a moment to raise their cups to a great man who had fallen, Camden of Grayland, a mighty hero, a great warrior. His body had been retrieved from the field. He was set on a bier and then set aflame with the greatest reverence.

  He died in a skirmish, fighting hand
to hand at the side of Brogan their leader. Ah! The way swords had slashed and plummeted. Alas! A mighty enemy took Camden down even as he died himself.

  Or so was the story that was told as the campfires burned later that night.

  Afterward, Brogan summoned a man named Leif to his side.

  Leif was tall. He was not heavily muscled, but rather lithe and incredibly strong. He was not much as an archer, but with a sword or spear he was vicious and adept.

  He was shrewd and cunning, and had come to the island before as well.

  He had no problem killing—man, woman, child, or babe in the arms of its mother.

  Brogan looked him over, nodding slowly.

  “You will be at my side; our good Camden is gone. You will rise in his stead.”

  Leif nodded. “My lord Brogan, I will prove myself deserving of the honor.”

  “So you will,” Brogan promised him. “So you will.”

  He kicked the earth to prepare a blank spot in the dirt, and he drew a crude map of the territory they would travel.

  “This is where we will seize all around us that is the isle!” Brogan told his new man. “There are a few scattered villages we will decimate quickly on the way. But scouts have reported that a fortress of stone, not heavily ravaged during the years when the Empire fell, was shored up by those who followed and made strong under Arthur. We will meet their leader on the field, and if victory is not immediate, we will lay siege until they beg for death.”

  “Aye, my lord, as you command. And then?”

  “We will give them death!” Brogan vowed. “Because we will seize this land, and it will be ours!”

  And then, he added silently to himself, then I shall be king!

  Chapter 1

  Death was coming, thundering upon them on horseback.

  Kyleigh could hear the riders, and already, though the attackers had not yet reached the village, she could hear the screams of the women and children and the rising anxiety of the men as they hurriedly sought their weapons.

  Those weapons were poor; the Village of the Lake was just a peaceful place, inhabited by those who could claim to be ancient Britons along with those who had recently been enemies, Picts, Angles, Saxons, and even Romans. Now often of mixed blood, these inhabitants were people left behind or who had chosen to stay years ago when the island had been abandoned, first when the man called the usurper, Magnus Maximus, had withdrawn northern troops and left Briton and Roman warlords in their place, who in turn expelled the magistrates of another usurper, Constantine III. Honorius told them all to defend themselves.

  Rome couldn’t spare the men to protect the island they had seized in conquest and ruled for hundreds of years. They were busy fighting the Visigoths; and the whole of the great empire was imploding from enemies and from within.

  Her little village, Kyleigh thought, was perhaps four hundred or so in number, many of those just children. She had lived her life among peaceful farmers and fishermen; they eked by and lived in humble dwellings and had little that could be taken. So many people, descendants of people from so many places, lived in harmony together.

  And yet those who would conquer came. Great armies came from the mainland, from across the sea, from the north and the south and the west. Thus far, they had escaped them.

  The land had no great leader, though there were strongholds and lords who held their own against invaders. While there had been a time when Rome had sent conquering armies and there had been bloodshed, that had been hundreds of years in the past; and those same armies had then built towns and provided water, and they had defended those who worked the land even though it be for a price. They had remained for years.

  There had been confusion; all those people coming.

  Chaos.

  For a time, out of that chaos, there had risen a great king. He had created a vast and peaceful empire, listening to his knights, putting no one man above the others. He had a dream, one in which a strong country lived in peace and prosperity.

  But his dream had fallen; he had died. And for Kyleigh, all she knew of the time of the great King came from stories told by the elders and written down by Father Peter, the one priest who served the village and beyond, aging now, but ever trying to teach them the past, the beauty of a dream in which men lived in decency and remembered all that had been good.

  There was just one stronghold that might be defended now just north of them.

  They no longer had a powerful king protecting them with an army. They could turn to the fortress for help. For years though, they had lived in peace here—enough to the south of the fortress that they might go unnoticed drawing sustenance from the earth and the beautiful lake near their cluster of homes and farms.

  The great King Arthur had fallen in the wars. His shimmering castle had fallen to rot and ruin, pillaged and sacked, burned beyond recognition to fall back into being nothing more than a memory in the landscape.

  “Kyleigh!”

  It was Alistair calling to her.

  She was knee-deep in the lake, since she had been trying—with both talent and success if she dared such conceit as far as fishing went in herself—to catch their dinner and a bit extra.

  Indeed, she had a fish in her hand.

  The old widow Anne in the village could not fend for herself. Father Peter had taught them all to care for one another, and Kyleigh was always proud to see the villagers did just that.

  They all looked after old Anne. Anne, like Peter, could tell wonderful stories. She had been alive when King Arthur had reigned.

  And when there had been such a thing as Camelot.

  “Kyleigh!”

  She turned, aware she had been listening, terrified and then numb, to the sound of the coming thunder.

  Thinking rather than acting.

  And Alistair was so desperately beckoning to her. She knew him well and loved him. Alistair and his wife Mary had raised her. She’d been dropped in the village as an infant. They had never lied to her; never pretended she was their child. But they had loved her as if she had been, and she loved them both fiercely in return.

  And she knew he wanted to get her safely hidden because he would go back. The men who were coming would be in the village soon, and he would go back because he would never leave Mary to fend for herself. Of course, Alistair’s nephew, Taryn, would be there...

  But Taryn would die for Mary, too; and if the invaders acted as this new breed of would-be conquerors were known to behave, they would all die no matter their heart or their valor.

  “No,” she whispered.

  In an instant, everything she loved had been threatened.

  “Kyleigh!” Alistair shouted. “Get into the forest and don’t come out until they are gone. And if you do not see me soon after they have come...head north. You know the fortress that remains. Lord Kenzie rules there, and the men who would be warriors and those who survived the wars and have been trained can be found there. I—”

  He broke off.

  They had heard the thunder of the horses coming en masse; but neither of them had heard the two men on foot who broke through the trees, swords in hand, laughing as they saw Alistair with his poor fishing rod and Kyleigh in the stream. These two men were not in armor. They were dressed in brown and green dyed wool, the better to blend in with the countryside. They were, Kyleigh thought, scouts sent ahead to see the village, to assure the attackers there would be little resistance.

  But the swords they carried were sharp and glittered in the sun.

  They had underestimated Alistair, though. He was well over fifty, but years working the land had made him hard. He had a full gray beard and was clad in nothing but wool breeches, his boots, tunic, and belt. What they didn’t see was his knife, tucked into that belt.

  And as they laughed, lifting their swords, certain of an easy kill and Alistair’s death, he pulled the knife from his belt and threw it with true aim.

  One laughed no more.

  He fell in a gurgle of blood.

&nb
sp; The other then bellowed out a cry of rage, racing toward Alistair, a man now totally defenseless against the rage of steel coming toward him.

  “No!” Kyleigh shouted the word, hurtling through the water, ready to die before letting an enraged enemy slice Alistair down before her.

  She thought she heard a whisper, a strange whisper.

  It seemed to come from the water and the air, to rush around her. It was not part of the approaching thunder of horses’ hooves. It was all around her and part of her.

  “Wield it well; wield it for protection, for the innocent!”

  She was going to die, and so she was imagining things.

  Wield it well!

  Yes, she was going after a brutal attacker with a fish in her hands...

  Except that as the strange whisper—born of the air and the water and rustle of the trees—swept around her, what she held was no longer a fish!

  She was suddenly holding a gleaming sword in her hand! It was heavy—much heavier than a fish! Her arm dropped with the weight of the thing. It couldn’t be!

  But she had no knowledge of what to do with it! She had no training in swordplay.

  And she had no time and no choice but to seize upon the sudden miracle.

  She gripped the thing with both hands, running from the water to jump in front of Alistair and raise the sword in time to stop the blow that would have severed Alistair’s head in two.

  The shudder of the steel rippled through her. She would drop the sword.

  “Sword, please!” she cried out, the words escaping her when there was no reason to say them—just desperation. The sword was a thing. She did not believe a creation of steel and leather would heed her words.

  Still, she willed it to defend them!

  And to her amazement, the sword moved on its own. She barely had her hand on it as it parried and struck and parried and struck and flattened—and came down upon the man’s head with such force he fell to the ground before them.

  She was gasping and panting. Alistair stared at her. Stunned.