Kings departed in songs as falcons left the fist: one cry, one lift of wings, and the world below made smaller by courage. Men with wounded guards, divided records, hired packhorses, mudded tack, and a shipmaster still arguing over mast timber left, by contrast, in poor light.
The reduced party rode first to a wool-yard beyond the lagoon settlement, a place of sheds, barking dogs, wet fleeces, and a shrine to Saint Tedoran where sailors’ wives had hung little wax ships from the rafters. There Rydric cursed the delay, Morain purchased three mules no honest thief would have stolen, and Father Aldemar spent half the night bent over Masud ibn Fadl while Rafiq held the lamp and Sivelle cut linen into strips with the expression of a woman imagining the throat of every man who had made this necessary.
By dawn, Masud could sit upright.
Aldemar bound him again, tighter than he liked and looser than Rafiq wished. “If he rides, he rides slowly.”
Masud opened one eye. “I ride beautifully.”
“You ride at all because the Light is patient and your prince is stubborn.”
Zeid, standing nearby in a plain dark cloak with the hood drawn forward, said, “The prince has advised him to remain.”
Masud looked at Aldemar. “You see? Stubbornness.”
Rafiq gave the wounded guard water mixed with something bitter from a small packet saved from Ruhullah’s stores. Masud swallowed, grimacing.
“This tastes like the bottom of a saddlebag.”
“It is for pain,” Rafiq said.
“It has given me a new one.”
They left after first light. Rydric rode in a merchant’s dark mantle with his hair hidden under a fur-edged cap that made him look less like a wool factor than like a king about to seize the wool trade by force. Baudren had rubbed mud along the king’s horse’s glossy neck; the horse endured the indignity better than its master.
Morain had selected the plainest saddles, wrapped sword-hilts in cloth, divided coin into three purses, and assigned each person a place in the invented household. Rydric was Master Renier of Bruneval, a prosperous but tiresome buyer of northern wool. Baudren was his cousin. Alianor was a widowed kinswoman traveling under family protection. Father Aldemar was a chaplain hired because merchants wished to die solvent and confessed. Nasir and Zeid were interpreters, one for eastern tongues, one for “figures and contracts,” which Morain argued would explain Zeid’s silence better than any lie about piety. Rafiq was a household servant. Sivelle was Alianor’s woman. Khalaf was a junior clerk whose terror of losing the records required no acting.
The road left the lagoon by causeways raised over reed-water, then climbed through vineyards stripped to black canes and villages whose shutters closed when strangers approached. The air smelled of peat smoke, wet wool, onions boiling in poor houses, and the sour marsh breath of winter beginning to find its throat. Rain came first, thin and slant, needling beneath hoods. The next day the mud froze in the morning and thawed by noon into ruts deep enough to catch a mule’s temper. On the third, frost silvered the edges of cart tracks. By the time white touched the shaded ditches, nearly seven weeks had passed since the treaty had been sealed under the eyes of Solymer, and Kedrayan heat had begun to feel like a fever someone else remembered.
Zeid bore the cold with the same grave offense he had once bestowed upon the sea. His borrowed wool scratched at his throat and sat badly across his shoulders. Too much cloth made him bulky; too little betrayed the lines Rafiq worked daily to conceal. Rafiq had to choose every morning between warmth, modesty, pain, and speed, and every morning the world allowed him only three.
On the fourth day inland, Alianor drew her horse beside Zeid’s as they passed a stand of leafless poplars. A grey mist lay low over the fields. His hood shadowed his face, but she saw the stiffness in his seat and the careful way he held his breath over rough ground.
“You wanted the west,” she said.
He looked at her from within the hood. “I wanted a treaty. No one warned me the west was damp.”
“It gets worse.”
“I suspected. Your people have the air of men shaped by dampness.”
“And yours by sunstroke.”
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It was easier to trade insults than to ask whether the wound of another man’s blood had kept him from sleep.
Zeid’s eyes moved past her to the road ahead. “You are angry.”
“I am often angry.”
“That is why I mentioned it. I wished to be correct without effort.”
She glanced at him. “You nearly were taken when I was across the deck.”
“Yes.”
“My father’s line was breaking.”
“I saw.”
“I could not—”
“I know.”
She tightened the reins. The horse tossed its head, protesting a hand harder than the road required.
Zeid said, “Do not make Masud’s wound into a debt you intend to pay without asking him.”
“I did not ask for counsel.”
She looked at him sharply. His mouth had gone still, but there was tiredness at the edges of his eyes. Behind them, Masud rode between Yasin and Fadl al-Marduni, pale under a dark scarf, his left hand braced against the wound whenever the horse stumbled. Every mile was being stolen from his body.
“You should have stayed on the ship,” Alianor said to him later when they halted by a stone trough.
Masud blinked as if surprised she had addressed him. “Highness?”
“You heard me.”
“I hear many things. Rafiq says I should hear fewer.”
Rafiq, adjusting a pack strap nearby, said, “I said speak fewer. Your hearing is not worth correcting.”
Masud considered this distinction gravely. “Highness, if I stayed on the ship, my prince would have lost one guard.”
“He may lose you on the road.”
“That is more respectable.”
Alianor wanted to snap at him, but he looked so pleased with his own logic and so close to collapse that the words would not come. Instead she gave him her water flask. He accepted it with both hands, as if receiving a courtly favor rather than boiled road-water in a dented flask.
“May the One reward you,” he said.
“Tell the One to send dry boots.”
Masud’s face brightened. “A practical princess. Our prince is lucky.”
The roads grew narrower as they climbed toward Albaric lands and the Osterven March. The villages changed their roofs, then their saints. High Vestimarian in Aldemar’s mouth no longer sounded like command but like a cousin to the local church tongue, respectable and suspect in equal measure. People looked at Zeid too long and Rafiq longer. At one toll-house, a clerk asked whether the eastern servants had been baptized.
Nasir answered before Rydric could. “They are hired under household protection for language service and account reckoning.”
The toll clerk squinted at Zeid. “That one does accounts?”
Zeid, who had said nothing for an hour, looked at the clerk and replied in careful Vestimarian, “Better than men who price bridges by the axle and not the wheel.”
Morain closed his eyes.
The clerk frowned. “What?”
Morain leaned in. “He says your toll board is old.”
“It is my uncle’s toll board.”
The argument lasted long enough for a priest to emerge from the chapel beside the toll-house, wiping crumbs from his beard. He saw Aldemar, saw Alianor’s sword despite its wrapping, saw Rydric’s horse, saw Rafiq’s face partly hidden, and began to ask whether they carried letters from a bishop.
Aldemar smiled with all the warmth of a locked reliquary. “Father, we carry a sick man, a widowed lady, wet wool, tired beasts, and the hope that the charity of the Revealed Light has not frozen before the ditches.”
The local priest stiffened. “Charity does not exempt toll.”
“No,” Aldemar said. “But it sometimes hurries fools.”
The toll clerk charged them anyway.
Morain paid in small coin and demanded a mark of receipt. The clerk, affronted, pressed a seal into wax so dirty it looked diseased.
“Keep it,” Morain told Khalaf.
Khalaf stared at the filthy wax as though Morain had handed him a relic found in a ditch.
“This?”
“This is the sort of useless scrap that saves useful men when a greater fool asks who robbed him.”
Khalaf wrapped the receipt and placed it with the lesser papers. He had begun to understand that the west wrote danger on smaller skins than the east, but no less thoroughly.
They rode on through country that grew more watchful with every league.
Nasir watched everything: the same rider passing twice at distance, the same merchant mark chalked on two doors, a chapel clerk who asked about wool and looked only at faces, a man at supper who said Darat al-Bahr incorrectly and waited to see who corrected him. By the sixth day he no longer said they were followed.
He said, “We are being gathered.”
Baudren glanced toward Rydric, who rode ahead as if speed could outrun description. “By whom?”
Nasir watched a crow lift from a field, black against frost. “By everyone who has been told where to stand.”
That night they slept in a granary belonging to a monastery that took payment in coin, tallow, and a promise from Aldemar to mention the house favorably if he ever wrote to any bishop who mattered. The brothers gave them turnip pottage, sour ale, and blankets that smelled of mice but had the great virtue of being dry.
Masud’s fever rose.
Zeid sat beside him after the others had settled. Rafiq cleaned the wound again, face tight. Aldemar held the lamp, his lips moving in silent prayer or calculation; perhaps by now he understood that both required humility.
Masud opened his eyes. “Sayidi.”
“I am here.”
“That is wasteful. Princes should sit where they are admired.”
“I have admired you enough today.”
“Then I am rich.”
Zeid’s hand closed around the edge of the blanket. “You should have stayed with Loukas.”
“A ship cannot guard you on a road.”
“You cannot guard me dead.”
“Everyone says that until the moment requires a dead man.”
Rafiq looked up sharply. “Do not speak like that.”
Masud smiled a little. “Then stop looking like it is true.”
No one answered. Beyond the granary wall, frost settled over the yard. A mule coughed. One of Rydric’s men snored like a saw through wet wood. Somewhere in the monastery church a bell rang for the night office, and the sound moved over them all, foreign and familiar, calling men to wakefulness before a Heaven that did not appear troubled by borders.
Alianor lay on her cloak several paces away, eyes open in the dark.
She heard Zeid say, very softly, “Later, then.”
Masud answered, “Later.”
The word sounded thinner than it had on the ship.