The Marrow Lances

The free company every power in the Vale hires and none of them trusts — the neutral sword, and the martial player's door. In the Lean Years, when no house can keep a standing army, the Lances are the army everyone rents: escorts, garrisons, sieges, and the work too bloody to put a name to.

Steel is honest, the Lances say, and they mean it the way a blade means it: it goes where the coin points. They garrison no cause but the contract, which is exactly why House Vandahl, the toll-takers, the merchant syndicates, and every petty power on the make have all paid them — and why each suspects the Lances of carrying the others' secrets. In a frontier the empire abandoned, with raiders pressing out of the cold passes and no crown to call the muster, the company that holds the roads and the walls holds real power, and they know it. Their whole worth is a single brittle thing: their word. Lately that word has a crack in it, and the crack has a name.