Corsair

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The shrill ring of steel on steel woke Geran Hulmaster in the dark hour before dawn. He rolled up onto one elbow in his bed, listening with his brow creased in the darkness of his room. He could hear cries of alarm spreading through the castle of Griffonwatch, his family’s ancestral home. For a long moment he wondered if he were caught in one of those strange dreams that came with a delusion of wakefulness. Then the shouts and the commotion started again, and Geran came fully awake.

He threw off his covers and jumped out of bed; the flagstones of the floor were cold under his bare feet. Fighting in Griffonwatch? he wondered. He’d lived in the castle of the Hulmasters all his seventeen years, and never had the castle come under any kind of attack. Oh, there were the occasional barracks-room brawls down in the Shieldsworn quarters, but that was down in the castle’s lower bailey, where the soldiers and the servants had their lodgings. And he doubted that the fighting he heard was any kind of drunken brawl. It sounded serious and deadly.

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