Chapter 17 The Escort

Audit of T. Marsh. Note 20. Contract: royal commission, decoy. Fee: 150 gold, 30 paid. Escort commander: Sir G. Vantrell. Escort commander appointed by: the Lord Chancellor's office. I have written this down three times. It does not look better any of the three. H.Q.

We left from the palace stable yard an hour before sunrise, and the horses wouldn't go.

There were twenty-six of them. Twenty for the palace guard, all big glossy bays, one each for the two officers, a neat grey mare for the princess, a pair of mules for the supply wagon, and Sir Gareth's white stallion. I came into the yard with the red warrant case on my back next to the cleaver, and Hal's coat buttoned up against the cold, and a royal tabard over the top of the coat that the princess's maid had given me, blue with a silver crown on it.

Every horse in the yard turned to look at me at the same moment.

Then the yard went mad.

Bays rearing. Grooms hanging off bridles. One horse went over backwards into a water trough. The princess's grey mare stood stock still in the middle of it all with her legs locked and her eyes white, trembling so hard her tack rattled. The mules sat down. Both of them, side by side, in their harness, like dogs, and would not get up.

Sir Gareth's stallion screamed, reared, and bolted for the stable door with Sir Gareth on him, and they disappeared inside, and there was a crash, and a lot of shouting from the dark.

I stood in the gateway and waited for it to calm down.

"It's the smell," I said to the nearest groom, who was on his back in the straw. "I've been butchering. It gets into the coat."

He looked up at me from the straw and didn't say anything.

* * *

It took half an hour to sort it out, and the way it got sorted was this. I walked in front. Fifty paces in front of the first horse, on foot, with the warrant case on my back. Any closer than fifty paces and the horses wouldn't go. Fifty paces or more, and they'd go, if you didn't let them look at me too long.

Sir Gareth came out of the stable with straw in his golden hair and a cut on his forehead and his face very red, and found this out, and liked it.

"Perfect," he said. "Our herald. The Level one walks ahead of the Princess's party and proclaims her coming." He wheeled the stallion, at a good distance. "Walk fast, farmer. We have four days to Coldwater, and I'll not be slowed by a peasant on foot."

"I'll keep up," I said.

The princess had come out by then. She'd been in the house, with her maps, and she stood on the steps with her riding gloves in one hand and took in the whole yard. The bay in the trough. The mules sitting down. Me, at the gate, in the blue tabard. Sir Gareth with straw in his hair.

She didn't say anything. She just watched for a while, the way Miss Quill watches a column of figures that won't add up.

Then she pulled on her gloves and walked over to the grey mare, which was still shaking, and put a hand on its neck and talked to it until it stopped, and got on.

"Mister Marsh at the front," she said. "Fifty paces. That's the job. Commander, form the column."

* * *

I kept up.

I don't think anybody expected that. I don't think I did, exactly. But I'd walked from Marsh Hold to the Ellsby turn in a day, which most people do in two, and walking's the thing I'm best at after pest control. A good long stride on a good road, and you just keep going. The column came along behind me at a fast walk, and then, after an hour or two, at a trot, to keep the fifty paces, and by midday the horses were blowing and I wasn't.

We made the Ellsby road by noon. It's the road I'd come in on with Fen. It was strange, seeing it the other way, going home. The same farms, the same bridges, the same ditches I'd walked past with the rain coming off my hat.

At the noon halt, the princess got down off her mare and walked up the road to me, on her own, while the guards watered the horses.

"You walk fast," she said.

"Farm walk. You don't stroll on a farm. You're always going somewhere."

She fell in beside me when we started again. Her mare came along fifty paces behind with a groom leading it, and her guards made faces at each other, and she ignored them. She walked with me for an hour, and she asked questions the whole time. Not like Fen, who asked and then answered himself. She asked and then waited, and listened, and asked a sharper one.

How big was the farm? How many neighbours? How far was Thornfell? What did we grow? What did the tax notice say, exactly, word for word? Had anyone else in the district had one? What had the reeve said? What had the reeve's wife's face done?

I told her all of it. She had a way of asking that made you want to answer properly.

"And you came to the city," she said at the end, "to pay it."

"Where else was I going to get it?"

"Most people," she said, "would have sold. Or left. Or written to the Chancellor's office and waited for an answer that never came, and then left anyway."

This chapter appears on NovelPhoenix under the author's publication, but this version was copied without consent; the original page supports the author.

"It's our farm."

She looked at me sideways. She had a sharp face. It was the kind of face that would always look like it was thinking, even when it was asleep.

"Yes," she said. "I suppose it is."

After a bit I asked her what it was like, being a third princess. I wasn't sure if I was allowed to. She didn't seem to mind.

"Quiet," she said. "My eldest sister will be queen. My second sister will marry the King of Valdesse and be queen of somewhere else. I was the spare spare. I was given tutors because it was cheaper than giving me things to do, and the tutors were given me because nobody thought I'd be any trouble." She smiled a little. "I read everything in the palace library by the time I was fourteen. Then I started on the treasury accounts. That's when I started being trouble."

"Dull jobs," I said.

"Dull jobs." She kicked a stone off the road. "Dull jobs are where nobody's watching. You find out a great deal when nobody's watching."

"Most jobs are dull jobs," I said. "Most of farming's dull. Fencing. Mucking out. Doing the same thing every morning. That's where it all actually happens. The exciting bits are just what goes wrong."

She didn't answer that. But she walked beside me for another half hour before she went back to her horse, and didn't ask any more questions, just walked.

* * *

Brakka followed us.

She did it the way Brakka does everything. Her and her nine came up out of a side road about an hour after we left the city, and fell in a quarter of a mile behind the column, and sang. Orc war songs, Grosh told me, about burning villages and drinking blood out of skulls. They had big deep voices and they sang in parts, and to be fair it was quite beautiful if you didn't know the words.

Sir Gareth sent a rider back to order them off. The rider came back without them, white in the face, and told him the warlord had said the knight could shove his orders up his arse, sideways. Then she'd made up a new verse about him on the spot, and the rest of them had learned it very quickly, and were singing it now.

Sir Gareth rode up to the princess, red to the ears. "Highness, I must protest. Those animals..."

"Are an extra ten swords I'm not paying for, Commander," said the princess. "Leave them be."

"They are a rabble. They are a disgrace to the Crown's escort."

"They are the wife of my decoy," said the princess, "and her household." She didn't look round from her map. "Under the Ironfold Accord. Miss Quill can tell you the section."

Miss Quill, in the supply wagon, opened her mouth.

"That won't be necessary," said Sir Gareth, and rode away. I heard him say something under his breath as he passed me, about fucking animals, and his stallion shied away from me into the ditch, and he nearly came off.

* * *

Miss Quill rode in the supply wagon the whole first day, because the mules were the only animals in the column that could be talked into it if I wasn't too close. She had her satchel on her knee and a writing board across it, and every time I looked back she was writing. At the night halt, she got down with the board and went straight to the princess's tent.

I was building a fire on the edge of the camp, a good way off from the horse lines. I could see the princess's tent from there. The flap was open and the lamp was lit, and I could see the two of them inside, one dark red head and one brown, bent over the same papers on a camp table.

They were in there till past midnight. Every so often one of them would point at something, and the other would nod, and they'd both write. Once the princess laughed. Once Miss Quill put her hand flat on the table and said something sharp, and the princess sat back and looked at her and then nodded slowly.

Grosh came and sat at my fire. Brakka had camped her lot four hundred yards back up the road, where Gareth couldn't see them, but Grosh came and went as he liked.

He watched the tent with his one eye for a while.

"Those two," he said. "They count."

"They do."

"Counting women," said Grosh, "are the most dangerous thing in any clan. More than warlords. A warlord can only kill you." He spat in the fire. "A counting woman can prove you owe her."

* * *

In the morning there was a man tied to a tree.

He was at the edge of the camp, on the side away from the road, propped up against an oak with his hands bound behind it with a black silk scarf. He was dressed in grey and brown, the colours you'd wear if you didn't want to be seen in a wood. He had a spyglass on a cord round his neck and a leather wallet at his belt. He was fast asleep, with a very peaceful smile on his face and two small marks on the side of his neck.

There was a card tucked into his collar. Black-edged, cream-coloured, smelling of roses.

Found this creeping about in the night. Purely coincidental. I was not following anyone. E.V.

The guards made a ring round him. Sir Gareth came out of his tent half-dressed and took one look and said it was a vagrant, a poacher, nothing of any matter, and to cut him loose and send him on.

The princess said nothing. She knelt by the man and opened his wallet, while Sir Gareth was still talking, and took out a folded paper and looked at it.

I was close enough to see. It was a drawing. A neat one, done in pencil, of a column on a road. Twenty little marks for the guards. A box for the wagon. A circle for the princess.

And a single mark, well out in front of all of them, with an arrow drawn to it, and two words written beside it in a clerk's tidy hand.

Red case.

The princess folded the paper and put it inside her riding coat. She stood up. She looked at Sir Gareth, who'd stopped talking, for about three heartbeats.

"Cut him loose," she said. "Send him on. As the Commander says."

Then she walked away to her tent. She didn't look at me. But as she passed Miss Quill, Miss Quill fell into step beside her without a word being said, and the tent flap closed behind them both.

* * *

We were back on the road by sunrise. I walked my fifty paces out front with the red case slung beside the cleaver, and the column came on behind, and Brakka's lot sang a quarter of a mile back.

The country changed that day. The farms got further apart and poorer, and then there weren't farms, just grazing and rough pasture and stone walls with nobody behind them. In the afternoon, I saw the line of the Greywild along the eastern sky. That long dark run of trees that I've looked at every morning of my life. It was further north here, a different stretch of it, but it was the same forest. You can't mistake it.

Thornfell was somewhere south of here. Two days, maybe three, cross-country. I could have walked it.

I thought about the barn. About the plank over the drain, and Elsie in the mornings with the milk bucket, and whether she remembered to keep the side door shut. I hadn't thought about the barn much in the city. There'd been too much else. Now, with the Greywild on the edge of the sky, I couldn't stop.

The itch between my shoulders was bad that day. I kept reaching back to touch the cleaver's handle. It helped, a bit.

At the night halt the old sergeant of the guard, a man called Rusk who'd been decent to me, came and squatted by my fire. He'd brought me a cup of tea, which nobody else had thought to do.

"Tomorrow we go through the Hollin Gap," he said. "Narrow road through a bit of the old forest. Two hours of it, maybe three. High banks. Trees right up to the ruts." He looked at the red case on my back. "If anyone's going to try it, that's where."

"Thanks, Sergeant."

"Don't thank me." He drank his own tea. "You walk fifty paces in front of us, lad. That's fifty paces where nobody's watching your back."

He went off. I sat by the fire and finished my tea.

After a while the princess came out of her tent and walked over in the dark and stood on the other side of my fire with her arms folded against the cold.

"Mister Marsh," she said.

"Lys."

She was quiet a moment. Then: "Tomorrow, you earn your money."

"I know."

"I'm sorry," she said, very quietly. I don't think she meant me to hear it. Then she went back to her tent, and the flap closed, and the lamp went out.