The Talk

The afterglow of the setting sun dyed the village's broken walls and ruins a bleak gold-red, and the air was thick with the stench of blood, smoke, dust, and char.

Under the officers' command, soldiers and the surviving young and able-bodied villagers were silently and efficiently clearing the battlefield: carefully gathering the bodies of fallen comrades, stacking the Bandits' corpses for burning, collecting scattered weapons, and tending to the wounded.

Relief at surviving the disaster mingled in the air with the grief of losing kin and friends, but a stubborn will to live was beginning to gather again.

The only stone granary in the village that remained more or less intact had been temporarily turned into a command post.

Count Boles and the knight Friedrich sat facing each other beside a rough wooden table hastily made from a door plank.

On the table was food the villagers had scraped together, fare that could be called crude for two such important figures: several loaves of mixed-grain bread roasted a little black, a basin of wild-vegetable meat soup with a few flecks of oil floating on top—the meat had just been cut from a dead horse—and a jug of cloudy ale.

Yet neither the elderly governor nor the young knight showed the slightest disdain. They needed food to recover the strength they had spent to the last drop.

Boles picked up a piece of hard bread, dipped it in the meat soup, and chewed with effort, but his gaze never left Friedrich across from him.

The more he observed him, the stronger the admiration and gratitude in his heart became.

This young man not only possessed a towering physique and formidable martial strength like a hero who had stepped out of myth; rarer still was the steadiness and restraint far beyond his