Page 50 of Traitor Son

The men didn’t refuse to drink the water she had brought for them, but an hour passed before she realized that no one was going to ask the Duchess of Andelin to fetch a shovel for him. She didn’t think they were being rude. They said thank you every time they came for a dipper of water, drank nervously, bowed, and then hurried back to their work. Andshe didn’t want to bother Sir Miche; he was working as hard as any of them, stripped to the waist and pitching in with a shovel at the far end of the trench.

“Is there anything else I can do?” she asked the next man who came to drink, reminding herself to speak up, as the duke so often admonished her.

“Aye? That is, no, lady, I’m fine,” he said, looking startled. “Very grateful for your help. Thankee.”

And he was gone, as if a wolf demon were on his heels.

She sighed and moved to the shade of a nearby oak tree, sitting down on a high root to watch.

Remember your rank,the duke had admonished her as he left her with Sir Miche that morning.Don’t let them order you about.It looked as if that would not be the problem. Sir Miche was right, what she was doing wasn’t useless; so many men went through water buckets remarkably fast, and when there were only two full buckets left, she went to refill the rest, picking her way down the hillside to the well, which stood on a paved platform overlooking the river, sheltered by tall trees.

Drop the bucket. Crank the windlass. She tried carrying two buckets at once up the hill, but a wooden bucket filled with water was surprisingly heavy, so she went back and forth eight times, puffing. They would go through them faster as the day warmed, and her busy brain fastened on this problem, for lack of anything else to do.

There were three places where the men came down from the wall. There were only two ways they came out of the deep part of the trench. It was convenient for her to put all the buckets together in one place, but if it were about her convenience, she would have left the buckets by the well. The stated objective, as defined by Sir Miche, was to reduce the amount of time the men spent off the scaffolding or out of the trench.

“Your buckets are there,” she told the next man who came down from the wall, pointing to the three buckets she had placed in the shadow of a nearby lilac bush.

“Ah, thank you, lady,” he said, and inwardly she breathed a sigh of relief. It might have been a small thing, but she had worried he might scold her for changing something, or that there might have been a reason she had overlooked for the original placement of the buckets.

The diggers seemed to go through water faster, so she took away one of the masons’ buckets and moved it down by the trench, then hurried to fill the buckets for the blacksmiths. She liked problems of this sort. Someone on the wall dropped his trowel as she was passing, so she dared to approach the scaffolding, stretching on tiptoe to hand it back to him.

“Sorry, m’lady, thank you very much,” he said, tugging his forelock. He had an eyepatch over his right eye, a lanky man as brown as a bean and just as stringy.

“It’s no trouble,” she said, as awkwardly as he, but then he gave her a crooked smile and she smiled back, and hurried away to gather her empty buckets with a lighter heart. That was one man who hadn’t had to get off the wall.

Putting the filled buckets back in their new configuration, Ophele went to stand under her oak tree again, her large, watchful eyes open, taking everything in.

* * *

“There’s about a hundred of them, Your Grace,” said Remin’s scout. Eude was still winded from his fast ride back to Tresingale, a short and slightly built man who was born to lurk. In Remin’s absence, Jinmin had dispatched scouts and trackers to locate the bandits, and reports had been coming in for the last week.

They were not all bad, but they weren’t good, either. The number was less than originally supposed, but a hundred men was a formidable force. On the north side of town, Remin had resurrected his old commander’s tent and set up a worktable, just as it had been through all the long years of the war. He even had his maps rolled up in their usual corner, stored in oilskin cases and neatly labeled.

“They made winter camp in the Veralde Forest.” The scout pointed to the place on the map. “I saw a lot of old Vallethi army insignia.”

“That’s a lot of men to be living off the land,” remarked Bram, who had come in from the Gellege Bridge early that morning. All of Remin’s knights had some degree of tactical genius, or they would never have become knights at all, but Bram of Lisle was uniquely attentive to practicalities. A hundred men would clear a forest of game inside a month.

“They cleaned up the camp some, sir, but we found this.” Eude held up the remains of a rough burlap bag, burned in the middle but whole enough to get an idea of size. “There were many more like it. Near their cooking pit.”

“A grain sack,” said Remin, his jaw tightening. Men living as fugitives in a forest should not have sacks of grain. Men living as fugitives in a forest should not have access to trade. Men living in a forest over a long, bitter winter should have been eating each other’s frozen carcasses by the new year.

Which meant someone was supplying them.

“The nearest villages are Ferrede and Meinhem,” said Bram, tapping each with a fingertip. “Ferrede is three or four days away, if I remember right. Meinhem, nearer a week.”

The scandalmongers of the Empire claimed that Remin had put every man, woman, and child living in the valley to the sword, to make sure no one loyal to Valleth remained. He had not. But if he had, he would not currently be having this problem.

“I’ll leave that to you, Bram,” he said after a moment. “Go watch the villages, see who goes in and out. Stop any wagons you see on the road. Take eight men.”

Bram nodded. He always reminded Remin of a rather moth-eaten ferret, with button-black eyes, a narrow, pockmarked face, and long black hair, peppered with gray.

“Where are they now, Eude?”

“About ten days out, Your Grace. Marching south-southeast on foot. Mostly spears and clubs, but I saw some swords and about two dozen bows.”

The tent was silent as they let him think. Remin knew every ripple and fold of the valley; he had been riding it for seven years and had an excellent memory. He wasn’t worried about dispatching a mob of deserters, though the fact that they were men of military experience shouldn’t be taken lightly. The greater concern was that every man he sent away from Tresingale was leaving some necessary work unfinished. If the walls were delayed, then they would be increasing night watches for Andelin devils; if the spring planting was delayed, then they might be hungry, come winter. And more than anything, he resented having to take his war horses from their plows.

“I’ll lead a force out tomorrow afternoon,” he said finally. “We’re not going to sit and wait for them to come to us. They’re in rough, rocky hills, with a lot of choke points. We’ll intercept them when they’re moving in column and hit them with our archers, then send in some horsemen to mop up. How many can we spare, Auber?”

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