Page 42 of Traitor Son

“Who?” He glanced over, following her eyes. He and his knights were not indifferent to the people they passed on the road, but she knew they were pushing hard to reach Tresingale, worried about what they might find there. “We have somewhere to be, Princess.”

“But that little boy looks sick.” She would have gone to help them herself, if she could, but Ophele was well aware that she was of no practical use to anyone. “They’re on their way to your valley, Your Grace. She wants to be one of your people.”

His black eyes flickered. After more than a month on the road, he was looking very shaggy indeed, with a thick black beard darkening his jaw and making him almost a stranger. She wasn’t sure whether it made him more or less easy to talk to.

“Tounot!” He called up the line, and the curly-haired knight swung around on his horse. “Go see if you can help the woman back there.”

There were others that needed help, too. An elderly man with swollen ankles, a family that had broken a wheel on their cart, and too many other hungry-looking travelers to count, but after the third time she timidly asked him to help them, he flatly refused.

“We can’t stop for everyone,” he said curtly. “They’re responsible for their own lives, Princess. They chose to leave their homes and come here uninvited, indeed, against my orders. They passed a dozen towns on the way here where they might have stopped for help.”

“But maybe some of them didn’t have any choice—” she began.

“I have people I am responsible for waiting in Tresingale,” he interrupted, looking down at her sternly. “People who have already sworn their loyalty to me. Some of them have risked their lives for me. I will keep faith with them first.”

Once again, she hadn’t thought things completely through. The duke met her eyes as if he were waiting for her to produce another objection, but he had already offered enough counterarguments tosilence her. She looked down at her lap, her eyebrows drawing together as she thought about the problem. Honestly, there were too many things she didn’t know to offer a solution.

They pressed on. The horses devoured the miles to the Brede and then followed its winding course to the bridge at Gellege, a plain but impressive structure that was so large, a shout from one side of the bridge would have been inaudible from the other. And that was the narrowest place on the river she had seen. The Brede River was called the devourer of armies for a reason. For most of its dark and churning length, the further bank was only a smudge on the horizon.

“Your Grace!” shouted one of the men at the gatehouse on the far side of the bridge, and the duke rose up in his stirrups, lifting a hand. “What’s the password!”

“Hawthorne!” The word boomed out like thunder. The duke knew how to make himself heard. But the drawbridge didn’t budge.

“Beg pardon, m’lord, it’s the other one!”

“Grimjaw!” Sir Miche shouted gleefully from behind them.

“I told you if you added that to the rotation, I’d reassign you to Kiel Gorge!” The duke bellowed. “Drop the bridge, you fu—” He glanced down at Ophele, who was looking fascinated, and declined to complete the sentence. “Now!”

The drawbridge lowered. Glowering, Remin Grimjaw spurred his horse forward, the saddle spanking Ophele’s tortured backside like she had done something to deserve it. Inside the gatehouse, soldiers crowded around to welcome them, including the wit with the password, who the duke kicked lovingly in the back of the head.

At last, they had crossed the Brede.

* * *

Nothing appeared to be on fire.

In his dreams Remin had seen black smoke rising from miles away and descended to the valley to find burning huts, burning wagons, burning horses, and dead men, all the sights he was accustomed to seeing in the Andelin. But from the rolling foothills at the southern end of the Berlawe Mountains, he looked on distant Tresingale and saw a pastoral paradise, every bit as beautiful as he remembered.

From the heights, the valley stretched before them like the pleats of a fan, lush and verdant from frequent rainfall, so green it dazzled the eye. Dark stands of old-growth forest carpeted the sides of the mountains, and the mountains themselves were almost relentlessly scenic and reminded Remin of old white-headed soldiers, marching away to the northeast. Soon it would be warm enough that the dark things in those mountains would begin making their way to the valley, and the city walls would need to be up by then, with solid gates.

They had already begun the spring planting. He could see it on the north side of the city, dark acres of freshly turned soil in slightly uneven furrows. War horses did not turn into plow horses overnight. There were more crofter’s cottages lining the town’s only road, carefully spaced so that there was room for each cottage to turn into a proper city house one day. One drunken night in Segoile, he and Tounot had gone out and measured the lot sizes for three blocks of Aben Road, to give themselves a base measurement in planning Tresingale.

There were his sheep, white dots on the green hills. There was a wagon track veering down toward the river, the area where they had found clay. There was another trail winding west into the trees, a quarry site they had begun to build last winter. His men had been busy.

He had to fight the urge to kick his horse into a gallop and race down to the town. His town. His city.

“That’s Tresingale,” he told the princess, who had closed her book and was looking at the town with her solemn-owl face. “Probably smaller than you imagined.”

“The valley is beautiful,” she replied, which was a clever way to sidestep the subject.

“You should have seen it before. I left two hundred men here, midwinter, and most of them were sleeping on the floor of the cookhouse. We’ve a dozen more cottages than when I left and it looks like they’ve been busy on the wall. We’re going to be doing nothing but hauling stone this summer.”

He hoped the oxen had arrived. Remin had dozens of items on his mental lists that he wanted to check, and Edemir maintained even longer lists, endless catalogues of tasks and plans that extended years into the future. Even the horses seemed to know that home was nearby and picked up the pace as they descended, watching the trees break to provide tantalizing glimpses of the town.

There was a palisade under construction on the north side of town, and another around the storehouse, the only building of substance. Its stone walls were three feet thick and contained all their food, weapons, armor, and other crucial supplies. He was half-tempted to keep the princess in it.

The sun was westering toward evening as they rode into town amid distant cries from laborers at the city wall and a few people taking their turn watching the sheep. He felt his heart lift. Most people would still be out at work, but Wen should be in the kitchen and Genon would be along as soon as he got word the duke had returned.

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