Bad Tom grinned. “You’re just saying that.” He smiled. “You’ll need to run courses every day.”
Ser Gabriel nodded. “I will—but I don’t want to be injured.”
His brother laughed mirthlessly. “You are the original glory-thief. If you’re injured, I’m sure one of us can find the time to take your place.”
There was some forced laughter.
Bad Tom grinned ear to ear. “It’s fewkin’ de Vrailly?” he asked.
Ser Gabriel shrugged. “It won’t be the King in person. De Vrailly is his champion.”
Ser Gavin looked at his brother. “He’s mine,” he said. “As God is my witness. I want him.”
The knights at the table looked at each other.
Ser Gavin leaned forward. “I’m the best jouster.”
Ser Gabriel nodded. “Yes,” he said slowly, and then smiled at his brother. “Some days.” He sat back. “The Queen asked me, last fall. I don’t think she knew what was at stake then—”
Tom Lachlan slapped his thigh. “At stake!” he said, laughing. “Damn me, that’s good.”
The next two days on the road were not like the first week. They moved faster, into the northern Albin, on better roads, crossing the great bridges over the river with each great bend, and paying tolls to local lords at every bridge. The King’s officers maintained the bridges and the roads, and local men collected the tolls and passed them to Harndon. Trade on the Royal Road was one of the major sources of northern revenue.
“Why doesn’t the Royal Road run all the way to Albinkirk?” Sister Katherine asked one evening.
Ser Gavin, who had just sung evensong with the nuns, made a face. “Mostly, because of my da,” he said. “In the dark times before Chevin, the creatures of the Wild ruined every road they could find—they tried to cut Albinkirk off from Harndon altogether.” He shook his head. “The great lords of the north used to maintain the northern stretches of the road. My da doesn’t see any need to be connected to Harndon or to pay taxes there.”
“So—” Amicia could see it as if on a map in her head—which it was, in a way, in her memory palace. “So north of Sixth Bridge…”
“North of Sixth Bridge is a network of little muddy trails rather than a single maintained road. Even under the old King, the gorge and the highlands made it hard to maintain a big road.” Ser Gavin stared off into the evening. “If we had a good king, and time, and peace, we’d finish the road—and that would spur trade, and link the north more closely to the south.”
“Ser Gerald showed that it could be done by boat. All the way to Lorica.” Sister Amicia couldn’t help but watch as Ser Thomas and Ser Gabriel came together on the plain to her right. Their armour glowed in the twilight, and their horses’ hooves shook the earth.
Ser Gavin nodded. “I will go join them—I’m late getting armed. Random’s boats made it, and will again this year. But it’s four days getting around the falls, and in a wet spring, with the river high—a hard row above the falls in the gorge.” He looked out over the rich fields. “But if the kingdom’s ever to be united—the river and the road will both have to go all the way through.”
South of Fifth Bridge, there was traffic on the roads. They passed a late convoy rolling north—a convoy that knew less than they did about events in Harndon. They were still three days from Lorica.
“Lorica on Good Friday,” Amicia said to Sister Mary. “We can observe it in the Basilica!”
She made bright small talk with her nuns and tried to ignore the signs around her, but the soldiers looked grimmer and grimmer as they moved south. They had begun to see refugees on the roads—at first, they were mostly prosperous people with carts. But a day out from Lorica, they were seeing hundreds of people, families, and some had already been robbed. They looked like tinkers—dirty, carrying sacks of belongings with spare clothes and odd items attached any which way.
Neither the nuns nor the soldiers could ignore them. Many begged for food—many told harrowing tales.
Ser Gabriel found her towards afternoon on the tenth day on the road. “I’m not going to Lorica,” he said.
“I saw you send Mikal off to the east,” she replied.
“Good eye, then. There are small roads now, on both sides of the river. We’ll turn east and make for the highlands and try to outflank the refugees.”
“You’re not telling me everything,” she said.
For the first time, anger flashed across his face, and he was impatient. “I’m not lying. I can tell you what I guess, but what I know makes a very slim volume. I wish you were not here. Is that too frank? They want you. This is… orders of magnitude worse than what I expected. I feel like a fool—practising for a joust when the whole kingdom is coming apart like a doll crushed under a wagon wheel.”
He looked away, as if he’d annoyed himself.
“You don’t like to feel as if you are not in control,” she said.
“That’s facile. No one’s in control in a war, but this is—insane. A king, ripping apart his own land and his own marriage?”
Amicia nodded. “Well, I shall miss Easter in the basilica of Lorica,” she said. “But I’m not foolish enough to ride off on my own.”
He nodded. “Good,” he said.
That was it—no flirting and no discussion.
“I think we’ve become part of their company,” she confided to Katherine, who laughed mirthlessly.
“One of the pages offered to marry me, if his knight would allow it,” Katherine said. “I think I’m old enough to be his mother.”
Sister Mary blushed.
They rode east, away from the setting sun.
That was a long night.
What the captain hadn’t mentioned was that they wouldn’t be stopping to camp. The turn east was accompanied by a further increase in speed, with veteran squires leading the files in alternating walking and trotting their horses. Even Katherine began to suffer, and by moonrise, Amicia was chewing her lower lip in mingled fatigue and pain. Sister Mary was moaning.
The column halted. The moon was three-quarters full; the narrow road was clear and fairly hard between darkened fields.
“Dismount,” came down the column.
Ser Christos, very chivalrously, leapt from his riding horse and helped Sister Mary off her mount.
Sister Katherine slid from the saddle, tired but unbeaten. “Don’t tell me that this is nothing next to Christ’s Passion,” she said. “I know it is nothing, but it is sufficient penance for everything I’ve ever thought about Miriam.”
Pages came down the column, shadows shifting in the odd, moon-shot darkness. They had feedbags already prepared, and they helped the nuns put them on their horses’ heads.
Nell appeared at Amicia’s elbow. “Cap’n says you have about half an hour, and is everyone all right?” she asked, in his accent exactly.
Amicia waved a tired hand. “No one ever died of riding sores,” she said. “I hope.”
All too soon, they were off again, the whole column a quiet jingle of horse harness and mail and steel plate and leather. They passed through a small hamlet—dogs barked, but no one came to their doors.
Past the hamlet they turned suddenly south, and she realized they were riding along the crest of a tall, shallowly sloped ridge, and she could see the twinkling lights of a dozen distant villages—odd that they should have light so late.
South. She knew enough stars to know that they had turned south, towards Harndon, and that the smoke on the horizon to the west must be the breakfast fires of Lorica, the kingdom’s second city.
They didn’t stop or make camp.
By noon, Amicia was asleep in her saddle. She dozed away an hour or more, and woke sharply to find the column halted in deep forest. Behind her, Ser Christos was again helping Sister Mary to dismount—or rather, to collapse.
Pages appeared and gathered the horses. Amicia’s was done—lathered all down his flanks and wild-eyed.
She didn’t know the page who took her mou
nt, but the boy smiled. “Never you mind, Sister, I’ll have your little mare right as rain by tonight.”
“So we’re to sleep?” she asked. She was too tired for anger or complaint.
It was like the convent, after all.
The page shrugged. “No one told me. But if we’re currying and feeding ta’ horses, stands ta’ reason we won’t move for some time. Eh?” He winked.
Sister Amicia gathered the other two nuns and led them to the shade of a great oak tree. They lay down—Mary collapsed—and slept.
Amicia awoke with a tree root carving a hole in her side to realize that she had slept through Christ’s Passion and she was instantly on her knees. When most of the rest of the company was awake, she led them in prayers of contrition.
A valet brought her a bowl of oatmeal.
“Oatmeal?” she asked.
“Nicomedes says it’s Good Friday,” Bobert, the youngest valet, said. “No meat, no fish.”
Ser Gabriel rode up, and Amicia was distantly pleased to see that his red jupon was rumpled and something had left a crease on his forehead. He smiled at her.
“This is your notion of Good Friday observance?” she asked.
“Fasting and travail?” He nodded. “Pretty much—ah, here’s Tom.”
Ser Thomas came up with a dozen heavily armed Hillmen at his tail, all mounted. “Well, Kenneth Dhu has the herd until we get this done,” he said. “You made good time.”
“Only the next week will see what ‘good time’ might have been,” Ser Gabriel said.
Almost as soon as the column moved off they left the woods, which were not the deep forest Amicia had imagined but instead a small copse of carefully tended great oaks on a rich manor. As the sun set in the west, Amicia looked around her. She could see fields—and to the east, mountains, their tall, snow-capped summits catching sun.
“Wolf’s Head, the Rabbit Ears, White Face and Hard Rede,” Nell said, pointing to them. “My family’s from these parts. Morea’s another hundred leagues over that way.”
Ser Christos smiled at the page. “Not my part of Morea, young maiden. This is the soft south, where men grow olives, not warriors.”
Behind his back, Nell made a face. “Who’d want to grow warriors?” she asked.
They rode until the sky was dark and the stars twinkled overhead, and then dismounted and drank a cup of wine, every man and woman, their reins in their hands. Then most men changed horses, and the nuns were put up on three strange riding horses, and the next few miles passed swiftly as the three women learned to manage bigger, more dangerous animals. But no one was thrown, and they had another halt at a crossroad. There were four big wagons pulled into the other arm of the cross, blocking any traffic from the high hedges on either side.
Ser Christos grunted.
“What is it?” Amicia asked him.
“Food,” Christos said. “I wondered. He’s purchased food.” He nodded, as if satisfied.
The captain himself materialized out of the darkness like an unclean spirit. “It’s easy to get food now,” he said. “Wait ’til we’re running north. Then it will be exciting.” But he smiled, and his smile suggested he was more comfortable with the situation than he had been the day before.
Morning found them in another grove—this one bigger, on the eastern slope of another great ridge. Amicia thought she glimpsed the Albin running down to the sea in the middle distance—twenty miles. That put them far east of Harndon.
Holy Saturday.
They made a small camp. The women cooked—a rare event in the company—and made beef soup with dumplings and new greens—something Amicia hadn’t had before, but the nuns ate without complaint.
Ser Gavin and the other knights came for morning prayers. As they were singing, Sister Amicia saw one of the great imperial messengers circle and land on the captain’s wrist, and suddenly her outdoor service was much smaller. But the captain must have brushed them off—most of the knights came back to sing.
They turned west. For some reason, Amicia’s heart quickened. They moved at a trot for more than an hour and then turned south towards the river, rode into the outer wards of a small castle, dismounted, and collapsed into sleep.
When Amicia awoke, it was almost dark, and men were already mounting.
Ser Gabriel took her elbow. “We’ll halt at the monastery at Bothey,” he said. “Unless I miss my timing, you can all go hear Easter Vigil and greet the risen saviour.”
“And you?” she asked.
“I’ll spare you the details,” he said. He didn’t grin. He looked terrible, with straw on his clothes and deep circles under his eyes.
“Don’t be a foolish martyr,” she said. “You need rest, to fight. And Easter mass might help you in many ways.”
Then, he smiled. “Perhaps,” he said.
They rode into the late evening. The air was warm, fragrant with a later spring than they’d known ten days earlier in Albinkirk, where there was still snow under the trees. Here, it was the edge of summer, and in the last light of day, flowers bloomed in a riot of colour and scent along the road’s edges, and all the hedgerows were thick walls of green guarding fields where the plantings were already a fist tall or taller.
Darkness fell. An owl hooted repeatedly ahead of the column, and then another, to their right—the north, she thought.
The whole column moved from a walk to a trot.
Sister Mary didn’t even groan. She was a better rider every day, and she didn’t complain at all. She hadn’t moaned since they slept under the tree. Nor did Sister Katherine speak of the joys of riding anymore.
In fact, no one spoke at all. The saddles creaked, the armour clacked, and the company passed like shades of the past along the Harndon Road.
The moon climbed the sky.
She dozed, and then awoke to hear owls hooting to the front and to the right, again, and the column shuffled to a halt.
Amicia kept riding. She told herself that she wanted to be at mass if it could possibly be arranged, but she knew in her heart that she wanted to know what was happening. She could taste smoke—in the back of her throat, on the tip of her tongue. She saw the Moreans walling people—refugees—away from the column—at sword’s point.
At the head of the column there were a dozen men standing on the road around two points of mage light.
There was a newcomer in the command group and she knew him immediately from the siege—and took his hand.
“Ser Gelfred!” she said.
He knelt in the road, and she blessed him—and in moments she and her sisters had work. Gelfred and his corporal, Daniel Favour, were both wounded—long slashes with much blood and little immediate danger beyond infection. The three nuns sang and healed.
“Ser Ranald’s inside the palace with a dozen of the lads,” Gelfred said. “I can’t say more. You told us to keep our operations separate.”
Ser Gabriel smiled without humour. “Don’t do everything I tell you,” he said. “So you have no idea what Ranald is up to?”
“Not no idea,” Gelfred said. He smiled. “Sister, that’s the first time in four days I haven’t been in pain. God loves you.”
She smiled.
Ser Gelfred was back to work. “Not no idea, Captain. We brought Lady Almspend away a week ago; and yester eve Ranald handed us Ser Gerald and one of the aldermen. Alderwomen.” He shrugged. “And the paynim—no, I lie, he came from the knights.”
“The knights?” Bad Tom asked.
“The Archbishop’s disbanded the Order and declared all their lands and money forfeit. He tried to seize all of them.” Gelfred shrugged. “They’ve too many friends—by all the Saints, even the Galles love the Order. They probably had warning before the King signed the writ. Prior Wishart took all his people—he’s gone.” Gelfred wrinkled his nose. “Not gone far. Waiting for you, I reckon.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder.
“Disbanded the Order,” Sister Mary said.
“I told you, Sister,” Amicia whispered.
“It’s different, here,” Mary said, sounding scared. “Disbanded? What of our vows?”
“Our vows are unchanged, as is the Order,” Amicia said with far more confidence than she felt.
“And the smoke?” Ser Gavin asked.
“A good part of the south end of Harndon was afire yesterday,” Gelfred said. “The commons burned the archbishop’s palace.” He didn’t quite grin. “Someone took all the relics and—well—all the treasure from the cathedral.”
Ser Gabriel was stone-faced. “Harndon is burning?” he asked.
Gelfred nodded.
“Someone’s laughing,” he said bitterly.
“There’s more. The prince of Occitan is just south of the city. He’s made a camp—not a fortified camp, but an open camp like a tournament.” Gelfred coughed into his hand. “I—hmm—took the liberty of telling him that we had reason to believe the King would attack him.” Gelfred raised both eyebrows. “I do not think he believed me,” he added.
“How many men does he have?” Bad Tom asked, pragmatically.
“About what you have. A hundred lances—perhaps more.” Gelfred shook his head. “The Galles have three hundred new lances, and all the King’s Guard, and every sell-sword in the south.” He didn’t laugh, but again he allowed a smile of satisfaction to dent his mouth. “Including a fair number of my lads and Ranald’s.”
“Is the Prior at the monastery?” Ser Gabriel asked. He cocked an eyebrow.
Gelfred nodded. “Aye.”
Gabriel nodded, too. “Well—Easter vigil for everyone, then,” he said. “Mount.”
An hour later, and the company rode under the two high towers of the famous Abbey of the South—the Abbey of Bothey. Bothey had long been a favourite Abbey of both the Kings of Alba and the Earls of Towbray. It had all the marks of riches and royal favour—gold and silver vessels, magnificent frescos, some very old indeed—carved choir stalls and an altar screen of two knights in ancient harness fighting a dragon.
For all their wealth, the monks were not decadent. The brothers of the Order tilled their own land, and the sisters from the “women’s house” sowed grain and made the best fine linen in the Nova Terra.
The Dread Wyrm Page 39
