The Hermit and the Songbird

Fiction

Photo by Joshua J. Cotten on Unsplash

They flew no banners, the carts that snaked down the narrow, overgrown paths of the Mordenwood, but any who saw them would recognize them as vehicles of conquest. The cart in the lead was open to the air, drawn by draft horses in barding and filled with soldiers and their kit — two pikemen, four musketeers and a driver with a matchlock pistol secreted in his garb, each of them with a cuirass and a…