Daughter of Disgrace

Darren the Disgraced wasn’t the best name for a father. He wasn’t the best father either. He wasn’t the best anything by the time Danielle knew him. He’d been a knight. Not for Long. He’d been a drunk much longer.

            When she found him dead he looked happy. He lay in his filth with a smile on his face. The only difference from his usual naps was the lacking pulse. She kicked his leather boots and cursed him. He had never been of much use. On occasion he’d tossed her mother coins of the lowest denomination. Eventually her mother married a carpenter and pretended that Danielle was nothing to her.

            Darren, useless as he was, had been around. Not where she needed him to be exactly, but he was generous with his wine after a few gulps. It was more than she’d had left by that point. She was homeless. Penniless.

            With mud in her hair, scabs on her feet and pain in her stomach she looked at him. No armour. He’d sold it for wine or women years before. His shield had been modified to show his abatements. Abatements were marks of dishonour among the knights. His coat of arms, a unicorn with a red horn and a mane of fire, was covered by triangles on the left and right leaving a Y shape showing his legendary familial crest. One triangle represented his drinking. The other represented womanising. She didn’t know which was which.

            Even Darren’s abatements were hard to make out because all the paint on the shield was chipped. Entering tournaments drunk, he’d taken many a blow to the shield for the coin of a victory before bowing out. Unskilled with a sword, he somehow had a knack for always taking a blow on his trusted shield.

            Having to rip the shield from his fingers which were stiff from rigor mortis, she lifted it. It was heavy. Very heavy. Most Knights favoured a wooden shield braced with steel. Darren had carried an all-metal shield with the crest of the once proud Unicorn of Longbow. Darren Longbow was the last legitimate child of his line and she his bastard heir. She unbuckled his ancient belt and scabbard from his waist.

            The sword was chipped. The leather straps for the handle were shredded and stained with the blood they’d drawn from Darren’s hand. She saw the blisters on the palm of his corpse. Some knights wore tight leather gloves to save their hands from blisters. She’d watched the tournaments from the pauper’s stands, watching her father win once to lose again and again.

            Danielle always felt like he could have been someone worthy if he’d only cared. It was too late for that. She closed his eyes. She frisked the body, avoiding the wet area at his breeches. There was nothing else to him but an empty coin pouch and the bottle still in his hand. Darren the Disgraced, lived a drunk, died drunk.

            “Fuck,” she hissed. “You were all I had. I have no trade. No money. No home. No family now.”

            Buckling his belt around her waist she had to use holes in it he never had. She was thin from living hand to mouth. She had begged. She had stolen. No more.

            She had a sword. She couldn’t use it, but she had one. She had a shield she couldn’t lift but she could sell it. Maybe. Something gnawed at her conscience when she thought of selling it. She didn’t know why.

            She had watched other knights wielding their swords. Real knights who gave a shit. She swung the sword and was thrown off balance by the weight. Her father was many things, but he had never been weak. His arms were thicker than her legs. They had to be to bear the shield and swing the sword. She could never find enough food to gain that kind of muscle.

            The sun was setting on the village. Fisher’s Gasp was a place of only eleven houses. One of the houses was said to be haunted since the husband had murdered the wife and been hung for it. Danielle had an idea.

            Thatched roofs caught the light of a blue crescent moon through clouds as Danielle crept from the barn where Darren lay dead to the haunted house. Voices rose and fell beyond locked doors, including her mother’s house. The shield might as well have been a cow for its weight as Danielle lifted it across the village.

            The door to the empty house creaked as she pushed it open. Moonlight peered through rotting thatch. No one tended that house. None dared. The floorboards were covered with leaves and moss. She moved the bedroom where the broken bed remained. Spiderwebs filled the space, catching her as she crept through the dark to stow the shield. It scrapped the dirt on the floor as she slid the unicorn painted shield beneath the bed of a killer.

            “Farewell Fisher’s Gasp.” Danielle whispered to the night. Clouds had covered the moon. Darkness was absolute but for flickering light in windows. Using the heavy sword to feel her way, she headed north towards Bandit’s Forest which went on for miles until the fields outside the capital of Leonor.

            The damp grass on the forest floor soothed the blisters on her feet. Some burst with a hideous gushing but she kept walking on. She had nothing else to do. If death found her, she would show it her sword.

            On she marched in the dark. Breaking twigs cracked beneath her feet. Some poked her blisters making her swear a rainbow of colourful language. On she walked, sword arm growing weary. The hooting of an owl echoed off the trees. As the clouds were blown away the half-eaten moon lit up her surroundings with a dim blue glow.

            She reached a stream in the darkness. The water looked black sparkling white when it caught the moonbeams.

            “Fuck. I should have taken his bottle,” cursed Danielle, thinking of the wine bottle still gripped in her father’s dead hands. Getting down on her hands and knees she scooped water into her mouth with one hand. It was ridiculously ineffective, but she was damned thirsty. When she’d drunk to the point of feeling almost sick, she moved on.

            Thinking she was heading due north it turned out that she had ended up going west. Instead of heading right through Bandit’s Wood she found herself in a clearing and heard groaning. Thinking of the knights in sword fights she held the sword in both hands as they did if they were not carrying a shield. Fear and the rise of adrenaline made her forget how tired and sore she was.

            Rascal’s Cave was a place she’d only ever heard of. She’d specifically tried to head straight to Leonor City to avoid it. Bandit’s Forest took its name from the endless rogues who’d fled there from the city from the law or to avoid the war the kingdom fought. Thanks to that same ridiculous conflict the kingdom could not afford the soldiers to clear out the rapists and murderers who called the forest home. Rascal’s Cave was a premade shelter so of course the rogues would head there and depose each other for the prime camping site.

            Scenes of battle greeted Danielle as she entered the clearing which dipped down towards the cave mouth. Blood speckled the brown leaves on the forest floor. Fingers lay by a splash of red. A man lay backwards over a log with a black hole in his neck that went up into his skill, painting him and the world beneath crimson.

            Another rogue lay on his side with an axe in his chest. From the look on his face, he’d seen death coming. His left hand missed the fingers she’d seen before. Further down towards the cave a man lay almost beheaded, clutching a club in his hand.

            Groans echoed from the cave. It was the voice of a grown man. She should have turned back. Any man with experience fighting would kill her. It was a night of madness. She embraced it.

            A man with a knife through his eye lay at steps cut into the stone. It seemed the cave was more than a mere cave, some sort of formal construction in the past. Alcoves carved into the stone were decorated with figures which had lost their details to time.

            “Who’s there?” gasped a ragged voice. “Cal, you survived without your eye?”

            “Cal’s dead,” Danielle said. Hair pricked on the back of her neck, and she flushed. Embarrassed by her own boldness she kept going. Life didn’t feel real in those moments. A death on cold steel might have.

            The soft orange/red glow of dying embers lit the sprawled form of a man she had seen before.

            “Ronnie the Rapist. I haven’t seen you since you earned your name.” She pointed the sword down at him. She had to stand away from the light of the embers to see him properly.

            “My name’s Neville,” coughed the man on his back who had a hole in his stomach. His skin was pale. Most of his blood seemed to be on his tunic and breeches or the stone beneath. He was tall, or would be on his feet. Strong shoulders on a rakish frame.

            “That’s not the correction a good man would make.” She said, sitting on a sack of something soft to look at him dying.

            “Too late to pretend I’m a good man darling. Have to say though, seeing you as I die isn’t the worst way to go.” He coughed a laugh which clearly hurt him.

            “You can’t have long to live,” she said.

            “Too long with a hole in my gut. A few hours like this. Unless you want the honour of finishing me off.”

            “You want to die?” He smiled. The teeth of his lower jaw were red. His lip was burst.

            “No one wants to die sweetie. People who think they do are full of shit. I knew a kid once tried to top himself jumping off a high bridge into a river. Dunce broke his leg, crippled for the rest of his life but said he was glad. Halfway down he’d changed his mind. He swam to shore with his leg bent the wrong way. No one wants to die miss. But I will.”

            “Seems to be a night for dying. Want me to end your pain?”

            “Aye. I don’t deserve it, but I can’t do it me self. I’ll tell you about our stash if you agree to.”

            “Stash?” She saw a twinkle in his eye.

            “Yeah lass. Plenty good stuff hidden about here. What d’you say?”

            “Tell me, and I’ll stick my sword through your heart. That’s a deal.”

            “I’d shake your hand, but I can’t lift mine.”

            “That’s alright. I don’t want your hand touching me. I know where it’s been.”

            “Shovel’s by the cave mouth. Back up the track, dig between the roots of the newest stump. We jumped a taxman outside Leonor a week ago. Plenty coin and some chainmail.”

            “Chainmail?”

            “’At’s what I said innit? You gonna kill me or what? I’m in agony.”

            Danielle left him, to dig in the dirt, surrounded by bodies in the darkness beneath the moon. Sure enough, two feet down she found a sack with pouches of gold and a taxman’s uniform and the chainmail given to all guards of Leonor.

            A shield. A sword. Chainmail. Enough gold to buy a horse and some bits of armour. The dream was forming in her mind. Only men could fight as knights but sod that. She could strap herself flat like the stories she’d heard. Women had fought as men before. She owed Neville a death.

            He was still there. He told her he’d been paralysed in the fight with Cal. No feeling from the neck down. He was pale and breathing quickly as if there was no air for him.

            “I was there the night we named you Ronnie the Rapist. I heard what you did to Jessica. You know she hung herself? Her betrothed called her damaged goods after you. No one wanted her.” Danielle pulled her sword from the scabbard and pressed it to his heart. “Just let me, you said. It’ll all be over in a moment darling.” She pressed the sword tip into his heart. He gasped. “Jessica was my friend.”

            He wheezed as the blade bit in. With his last breath he thanked her before his eyes went blank like her father and all the other men outside.

            Danielle rebuilt the fire. From the look outside all the rogues for miles around were dead. The cave was a good shelter. She dragged Neville and Cal from the cave and slept on the only bed that wasn’t covered in blood.

            Nightmares ruined her sleep but sleep she did. In the morning she woke, cold and stiff. The fire had gone out, but the sun was up. She ransacked the den of thieves, killers, and rapists on the run. Knives, a rusty sword, two axes, a bow, and arrows. A bag of onions and a few potatoes went with everything buried in the ground. A near empty keg of beer hid in the snug depths of the carved cave. A bottle of vodka had been abandoned near the path. Stealing the boots of a corpse she cleaned her feet with the spirit and swore until birds nearby took flight.

            She’d never shot a bow before. There were hunters in the village for that. She had worked the field for her mother then begged villagers for food when she was thrown out. The first few times she released the string of the bow the arrow just fell to the ground. She had food. She had shelter. She had beer. She had time. Occasionally as she stumbled around near Rascal’s cave, she found something else useful.

            One of the corpses had an empty water skin on him that she filled at a stream. As she looked at her reflection in the water, she imagined armour and a helmet to hide her face from anyone who might realise she was a woman.

            A week got her to the point where she could hit a tree from a dozen paces away with the bow which was as well because the potatoes and onions were almost gone. Two weeks later after subsisting on mushrooms, wild garlic and berries she shot her first rabbit having lost all but three of the dozen arrows she’d started with.

            By that point the rabbit tasted like the best thing she’d ever eaten. The next was even better. She could skin them because that was a woman’s job in Fisher’s Gasp when a man brought one home. That and anything else men thought was beneath them.

            Danielle started to lose track of time after that. She could soon catch a rabbit or deer every few days. Their bones began to tile the mud outside the cave she’d made her home. Flies were devouring the bodies of the rogues and she’d seen wolves drag one off somewhere. The man probably deserved no better and the wolves were happier to take an easy meal than to fight her. Win, win.

            Autumn turned to winter as Danielle realised weeks had turned into a month or two. She still had the money. The beer was long gone but she had muscled up drawing the bow and doing push ups every morning and evening before she slept. She started doing the push ups wearing the taxman’s chainmail. She walled off the back of the cave with sticks and slept on and under furs from the rogue’s stash. The snow came.

            Animals could hear her from further away, but she was good enough by then that it didn’t matter. Dragging a deer back to the cave was good exercise and the bodies lasted longer in the cold.

            She swung the sword in the movements she’d seen the knights practicing as they warmed up to fight. Darren the Disgraced had never bothered. She would be better than him. By melting snow in her leather canteen over a fire she kept from freezing to death drinking from the icy stream. Somehow, she made it through winter.

            When the stream swelled with the first summer rains, she saw in the water she was no longer a thin girl who couldn’t lift a shield. She was a broad-shouldered survivor who could hit a deer from the absolute limit of the bow’s range and take it through the eye. Her shoulders were as broad as any man. Her arms weren’t as thick as her father’s, but she knew she could hold the shield and move in the chainmail. She’d be shit with the sword, but her father had won many a first round by waiting out the stamina of better men. She would do the same.

            With the filleting knife of a dead man, she cut her hair short. She donned her chainmail. She looped her bow over her body to carry and donned the quiver. She belted on the sword and left the coin purse buried next to the stump. She would get the shield before she went on to Leonor. It was time.

            In the night again she retrieved the shield. The next morning, she was back to the cave for the last time. With everything useful strapped to her she marched towards the capital through Bandit’s Forest. All the way she practiced a growl she hoped would make her sound like a man. She was not a knight. But she would be.