Priest of Bones (War for the Rose Throne, Band 1) - Softcover

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Peter McLean lives in the UK, where he studies martial arts and magic, and volunteers at a prison, teaching creative writing. He is the author of the Burned Man urban fantasy series.

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***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected copy proof***

Copyright © 2018 Peter McLean

Chapter 1

After the war we came home.

Sixty-five thousand battle-shocked, trained killers came home to no jobs, no food, and the plague. What the fuck did Her Majesty think was going to happen?

“Drink up lads,” I said. “It’s on the house, now.”

“That it is,” Bloody Anne said as she threw the innkeeper out of the door and locked it behind him.

He had wanted silver, for food and beer barely worth half a clipped copper. That was no way to welcome the returning heroes, to my mind, and it seemed Anne had agreed with me about that. She’d given him a good kicking for his trouble.

“That’s done then,” she said.

Bloody Anne was my sergeant. Her hair was shorter than mine and she had a long, puckered scar that ran from the corner of her left eye down almost to the tip of her jaw, twisting the corner of her mouth into a permanent sneer. Nobody messed with Bloody Anne, not if they knew what was good for them.

“You drinking?” I asked, offering her a tankard.

“What do you think?”

She had a gravelly voice that had been roughened by the smoke of blasting powder and too many years of shouting orders. No amount of beer would soften that voice, but that didn’t stop her trying every chance she got. We sat at a table together and she took the cup from me and drained half of it in a single swallow.

A couple of the lads were dragging the innkeeper’s daughter up some splintery wooden stairs while the others tapped a fresh cask. Kant grinned at me from those stairs, his hand already thrust down the front of the girl’s kirtle. I shook my head to tell him no. I don’t hold with rape and I wasn’t allowing it, not in my crew.

I’m a priest, after all.

Over Anne’s shoulder, I watched Kant ignore me and drag the girl up onto the landing and out of sight. Those were the times we lived in.

All the same, there were limits.

I got to my feet and shoved the table away from me, spilling our wooden tankards of warm beer across the sawdust-covered floor of the inn.

“Oi,” Anne complained.

“Kant!” I shouted.

Kant stuck his head back around the rough plaster arch at the top of the stairs.

“What?”

“Let the girl go,” I said.

“Good one, boss.”

He grinned, showing me his shit-colored teeth.

Bloody Anne turned in her seat and saw what was going on.

“Enough, Corporal,” she growled at him, but he ignored her.

It made me angry, that he thought he could ignore Anne like that. She was a sergeant and he was only a corporal, although that sort of thing didn’t matter much anymore. Kant was a head taller than me and maybe thirty pounds heavier, but I didn’t care. I knew that didn’t matter either, and more to the point Kant knew it too. There was a devil in me, and all my crew knew it.

“No,” I said, letting my voice fall into the flat tone that warned of harsh justice to come.

“You’re joking,” Kant said, but he sounded uncertain now.

“Come here, Kant,” I said. “You too, Brak.”

Spring rain blew against the closed shutters, loud in a room that was otherwise plunged into nervous silence. A smoky fire crackled in the grate. Kant and his fellow would-be rapist came back down the stairs, leaving the girl crying in a heap on the top step. She had maybe sixteen or seventeen years to her, no more than that, putting her at barely half my age.

I could feel Anne and the rest of my crew looking at me. Men set down their tankards and bottles to watch. Even Fat Luka put his cup down, and it took a lot to stop him drinking. The crew knew something had been ill done, and when something was ill done in my eyes there was always harsh justice.

Bloody Anne was giving me a wary look now. Sir Eland the false knight just stood there sneering at everyone like he always did, but he was watching too. Billy the Boy was halfway to drunk already, but then he was only twelve so I supposed I had to let him off not being able to hold his beer. Grieg and Cookpot and Black Billy and the others just watched.

I met Kant’s eyes and pointed at a spot on the boards in front of me.

“Come here,” I said. “Right now.”

A log popped in the grate, making Simple Sam jump. Kant glared at me but he came, and Brak followed in his wake like a little boat trailing behind a war galleon.

“Would you like someone to fuck, Kant?” I asked him.

Kant was bigger than me, huge and ugly. Kant the Cunt, the crew called him, but never to his face. His chain-mail byrnie strained across his massive barrel chest over a jerkin of boiled leather. The scars on his face stood out livid and red as he started to get angry right back at me. I remembered how he had earned those scars at Abingon, forcing his way through the breach in the west wall when the citadel fell. Kant had led his squad over a mound of corpses, and never mind the archers waiting for them. He had taken an arrow through the cheek for his trouble. He had kept fighting, had Kant, spitting blood and teeth as he swung his mace into this head, that shoulder, those balls, crushing and bludgeoning and forcing his way forward. Bludgeon and force, that was how Kant the Cunt made his way in the world.

Kant was a war hero.

But then so was I.

“Course I want someone to fuck,” Kant said. “Who don’t?”

“You want to fuck, Kant?” I asked him again, and this time my voice went soft and quiet.

All the crew had been with me long enough to know what that tone meant. That tone meant the devil was awake and there was harsh justice coming for sure, and soon. Kant was drunk, though, not booze drunk but rape drunk, power drunk, and I knew he wasn’t going to take a telling. Not this time.

“Yeah, I fucking do,” he said.

I didn’t like Kant. I never had liked Kant, truth be told, but Kant was a good soldier. In Abingon I had needed good soldiers. Now I needed good men, and the Lady only knows the two ain’t necessarily the same thing.

“Come here,” I said again. “If you want to fuck, come here and fuck me.”

I held Kant’s gaze. I wouldn’t have put it past him, under other circumstances. If I had been some other man, some peasant lad, I doubted Kant would have been picky. A hole was a hole as far as he was concerned, and if he could stick his cock in it then it made him happy.

“Tomas . . .” Anne started to say, but it was too late for that and I think she knew it.

The Weeping Women hung heavy on my hips. They were a matched pair of beautifully crafted shortswords that I had looted from a dead colonel after the last battle of Abingon. I had named them Remorse and Mercy.

My crew knew all too well what the Weeping Women could do in my hands.

“You didn’t ought to force yourself on lasses, it’s not right,” Black Billy said. He nudged the man beside him with his elbow. “Ain’t that so, Grieg?”

Grieg grunted but said nothing. He was a man of few words, was Grieg.

“Lady’s sake,” Brak muttered, scuffing his foot at the beery sawdust underfoot while Kant tried to stare me out. “We was only having a bit of fun, like.”

“Does she look like she’s having fun?” I asked.

Kant saw me point to the girl, he saw my eyes and hand move away from him, and he took his moment. I had thought he might,...