“I don’t know for certain,” the man from Dothan replied. “Only thing I can tell you is, I didn’t see none. Just riders-lots and lots of riders.”
“Lots and lots of riders,” Ned echoed unhappily. “They were heading for the Franklin River? Aiming to cross it and get farther up into Dothan?”
“Can’t tell you for certain,” the other man said. “All I know for certain is, them buggers is on the move. If you don’t stop ’em, Lord Ned, who the hells is going to?”
“Nobody,” Ned answered with a mournful sigh. “Nobody at all.” He nodded to the informant. “I do thank you for bringing me the news.” He wished the news hadn’t happened, so the other man wouldn’t have needed to bring it. Such wishes, though, were written in water. Ned took a certain not quite modest pride in realizing as much. Hard-Riding Jimmy’s move was real. Now Ned had to find some way to stop it.
He knew where Jimmy would be heading: toward the manufactories in Hayek and the other nearby towns. If the southrons could seize them or wreck them, where would King Geoffrey’s men in this part of the realm get the crossbows and quarrels and engines and firepots they needed to carry on the fight against the southrons? We won’t get ’em anywhere, in that case, Ned thought. And if we don’t, then it’s really all over.
By noon the next day, his own force of unicorn-riders was hurrying west out of Great River Province. Richard the Haberdasher had promised to send footsoldiers after them. Ned had thanked him without believing a word of it. For one thing, Ned doubted the crossbowmen and pikemen who’d survived the advance to Ramblerton and the retreat from it were in any sort of fighting shape even now. For another, they were bound to get to Dothan too late to do much good.
Ned wondered if he would get to Dothan too late to do much good. In winter, roads turned into quagmires. That worked a hardship on both sides, for it also slowed Hard-Riding Jimmy. But streaming away from Hayek and the other towns full of manufactories was a great flood of refugees who clogged the roads even worse than the mud did. The people of Dothan knew Jimmy was coming, and didn’t want to get in his way.
“Bastard’s burning everything in his path, same as that other bugger done did over in Peachtree,” one man said. Others fleeing the southrons nodded, adding their own tales of horror.
Being who and what he was, Ned of the Forest needed longer than he might have to notice one thing about the flood of refugees: they were almost all Detinans, with hardly any blonds. This part of Dothan, though, held about as many blonds as it did ordinary Detinans. Ned wondered what that meant, but not for long. It meant the serfs were either staying put and waiting on the land for Jimmy to sever their ties to their liege lords, or else they were fleeing toward Jimmy and not toward Ned.
Attached to his command, he had a wagon train staffed by several dozen serfs. They’d been with him since the earliest days of the war. Some of the blonds were men Ned had caught, but who’d appealed to him because of the way they’d escaped or the way they handled themselves. Others had sought him out: men who wanted an overlord, perhaps, but not the one they’d got by custom.
They’d done a lot of things for Ned: carried supplies, doctored, foraged, and even occasionally picked up a crossbow and taken a few potshots at the southrons. He’d promised to cut their bonds to the land and to him when the war ended. “Well, boys,” he said now, “we’ve been through a lot together these past four years, haven’t we?”
“Sure have, Lord Ned,” Darry rumbled. Ned of the Forest was a big man. Darry stood half a head taller, and was broader through the shoulders. The blond had not an ounce of fat on him anywhere; he was hard as a boulder. Several other men nodded.
“You know I promised you I’d set you up as yeoman farmers when the war was done if you stuck with me till then,” Ned went on. Before the war, blond yeomen had been exceedingly rare in the north, but there had been a few.
His crew of blonds nodded again, this time more or less in unison. They weren’t his serfs, not in any formal sense of the word. He had no noble blood; he owned no estates to which serfs were tied. But for all practical purposes, he was their liege lord, and they gave him more loyalty than most real nobles ever got. They could have fled or betrayed him to the southrons countless times. They could have, but they hadn’t.
Clever Arris raised an eyebrow. Ned nodded for him to speak. Arris was only about half Darry’s size, but had twice his brains. If he’d been born a Detinan, he might have made a general himself. Instead, he worried about unicorns and asses and scrounging-and about feathering his own nest, which he’d done quite nicely. Now he said, “If you grant us land, Lord Ned, will the grant be good?”
“What? You reckon Lord Ned’d cheat us?” Anger darkened Darry’s face. He clenched a massive fist. “I ought to break your face for you.”
Ned held up a hand. “It’s all right, Darry. I’m not mad.” Arris, he noted, hadn’t flinched. That might have meant he’d figured Ned would protect him. Or it might have meant he’d stashed a knife in his boot. Ned wouldn’t have been surprised either way. The commander of unicorn-riders continued, “He means, if I grant you land and the gods-damned southrons win, will they recognize what I’ve done?”
“If the gods-damned southrons win…” Even now, Darry’s frown showed he had trouble imagining that. Being Ned’s partisans, he and his comrades were stalwart partisans of the north, too.
“Will they win, Lord Ned? Can they?” a blond named Brank asked. He sounded as if he didn’t want to believe it, either.
“They can. They probably will,” Ned answered. “But I think the grants will be good anyhow. They’re on lands up near Luxor that I owned before the fighting started. I didn’t get ’em while Geoffrey was King.” He feared nothing done while Geoffrey ruled in the north would stand now that Avram was returning to power here. Then he added, “And you boys are blonds. The southrons’ll likely be happy with you on account of that. You may even have it easier than if you were ordinary Detinans, in fact.”
Darry’s rugged, blunt-featured face furrowed into another frown as he tried to imagine having it easier than a Detinan. Several of the other blonds laughed to show what they thought of the idea. Arris said, “Don’t bet on it, Lord Ned.”
Ned of the Forest shrugged. “Maybe you’re right. I don’t know for sure. But the reason I’m telling you is, we’re moving against Hard-Riding Jimmy now. He’s liable to lick us. Hells, he’s liable to smash us.” He’d never said anything like that before; the words hurt. “If you want to take your grants now and head for Luxor, I’ll give ’em to you. Nobody’s ever going to say you boys didn’t meet your end of the bargain.”
Arris said, “I’ll stick, Lord Ned. I reckon I’ve got a better chance of getting my land if you’re there to say I deserve it.” One by one, the rest of the blonds nodded. Arris had more brains than the others, and they had brains enough to know it.
But did the sly serf see everything that might happen? “They could put a bolt through my brisket tomorrow, you know. Or they could wait till the war’s over, call me a real traitor, and nail me to a cross.”
All the blonds shook their heads. “Oh, no, Lord Ned,” Darry said. “Nothing like that’d ever happen to you.” None of them seemed to think it was possible. Ned wished he didn’t. To the blonds, he was something not far from a god, or perhaps from a demon: something more than an ordinary man, anyhow. The scars he bore proved crossbow quarrels thought differently, though. And King Avram’s men wanted him dead; General Hesmucet had growled there could be no peace in eastern Franklin till he was. If they won the war-no, when they won the war-what would stop them from making their wishes come true? Nothing he could see.
He bowed to the blonds with as much courtesy as if they were King Geoffrey and his courtiers. There were times when he respected them much more than Geoffrey and that crowd of useless parasites in Nonesuch. “Thank you kindly, boys,” he said. “We’ll all do what we can to come out of this in one piece, that’s all.”