Hiring guards seemed like a perfectly reasonable idea, but the mood had gotten heavy, and he was so deadly serious.
“What was it you said? Something about being able to hold this place against a small army?”
The blademaster gave me a look. “I have to sleep, and there will be times I might have to leave the house.”
I sipped my tea. “If only we knew someone who was an expert in martial arts and also aware of a lot of veterans in need of a steady paycheck.”
Reynald raised his eyebrows at me. “You’re bold this morning.”
“Clover’s delicious brunch restored me to my natural state. Who are you thinking of hiring?” I asked.
“A man named Gort Magnar.”
One of my college professors was a retired homicide detective. He used to say that cops did not believe in coincidence. Yesterday I decided to go after the salt. Today, Reynald wanted to hire Gort, who was in the salt subplot up to his eyeballs.
I hadn’t even done anything yet. I had only decided to do it, and here was Rellas, shoving the mercenary dilemma at me front and center.
Reynald paused with his cup halfway to his mouth, watching me.
“What?” I asked.
“Waiting for you to tell me some earth-shattering secret about Gort.”
The most earth-shattering thing about Gort was that he was devoted to Reynald. He would follow him through fire and death. When Reynald was an officer in the King’s Army, Gort was his sergeant-at-arms, his right-hand man. If we brought him and his sons into the house, and I did something Reynald didn’t like, one word from the blademaster, and Gort would chop my head off with his axe. And he wouldn’t lose a wink of sleep over it. But it didn’t even matter. Of the two of them, Reynald was the better killer, and if he really wanted to do away with me, he wouldn’t need Gort to do it for him.
And Gort had a grudge against Hreban. The kind of grudge that would put either Gort or Hreban into their grave.
“Anything?” Reynald prompted.
I could tell him what I knew, but it wouldn’t hurt to find out how he would present Gort. It could tell me more about where Reynald and I stood.
I shrugged. “I told you. Some people have big parts to play and others small. I don’t know everyone’s story. What’s Gort like?”
“He’s a solid soldier. Good with an axe.”
I waited.
“He has a leg that never healed right, a souvenir from a hard campaign. It doesn’t slow him down unless there is a forced march coming. If you needed a man to defend a bridge, you could put Gort there and tell him ‘Nobody crosses this,’ and he would die on that bridge with about a hundred bastards that tried to get past him.”
That checked out.
“He’s a survivor,” Reynald continued. “He also badly needs the work. He has a wife and two grown sons, both mercenaries like him. He trained them himself and they have experience, but their last job went sideways.”
“What happened?” Clover asked.
“They didn’t get paid, and they didn’t take it well. Now people are afraid to hire them.”
“They didn’t take it well” was code for “They almost started a revolt in the lands of the noble who’d hired them, drove a flaming cart through the fortress gates, and nearly kicked him out of his own tower.” Because that’s how the Magnars rolled.
“Should we be afraid?” I asked.
“No. Gort and his sons follow orders.”
At his core, Gort was a professional soldier. The son of a blacksmith in a small village, he had enlisted in the King’s Army when he was nineteen. He met Shana, his wife, while he was in that service, and he’d fully intended to do his twenty years, get the Green Purse, and settle down. It was a good, simple plan, but it was shattered on the rock of Ulmar Hreban’s ambitions.
Reynald had been transferred by that time, but Gort had been part of Lerem Siege. He’d made it almost all the way, until he took an arrow to the side during one of the final battles, fell off a siege ladder, and broke his leg. His side was fine, but his leg didn’t heal right. He was discharged with eighteen years in. No Green Purse, no chance at his own farmstead, nothing. Hreban was the reason why Gort’s sons had become mercenaries instead of tradesmen or farmers.
Between his hatred of Hreban and his loyalty to Reynald, Gort was almost tailor-made to be our guard.
