The Wyrm of Ercch-sometimes known as Master Smythe-held a territory many leagues across, centred on the white-topped Mons Draconis. The drovers and the inn lived within the Wyrm’s claim, and prospered. Travellers were seldom disturbed, although a few faint-hearted souls claimed to have seen a flying creature as big as a ship and refused to pass that way again. Merchants, on the other hand, always travelled across the Wyrm’s dominion.
Sauce handed her apple core to her riding horse. “By all accounts, the Outwallers came right up the stream and hit the drovers-inside the circle,” she said.
Ser Dagon grimaced.
“Company’s never been ambushed,” said an archer, the master tailor, Hans Gropf. He was standing with his palfrey to hand and two small boys waxing his leather gear at his feet.
Ser Dagon nodded his acknowledgement.
“Company’s only four years old,” Wilful Murder muttered. He stood in the middle of the yard, watching everyone with his mad eyes. He was holding all the horses-Nell’s job, but he liked the chit and she’d run off to get her boy onto the right pony, or somesuch. “Lots o’ time to get bounced and massacred. When we get soft. Mark my words.”
Ser Dagon shook his head. “Well-I’ll just suffer in silence, then.”
“If’n we start any later, we might as well wait ’til tomorrow,” Wilful Murder muttered, loudly enough to wake the dead.
Sauce saw the captain, standing in the inn door. Bad Tom came out and embraced the innkeeper’s eldest, Sarah, his dead brother’s wife. It was quite an embrace. Some of the pages looked away, and some whooped.
Mag’s head turned, and Sauce saw her searching the baggage train-all apparently a chaos of horses and wagons and donkeys and wicker baskets. Looking for her daughter Sukey. Who had been Tom’s lover for a year and more, and now was publicly displaced.
The captain-Gabriel, as he now was called-materialized at her elbow, as the bastard had the habit of doing, with Ser Michael and Ser Bescanon at his heels. Just looking at him made her smile.
“Where’s the good count?” Ser Gabriel asked.
“We had a trifling disagreement,” Sauce said in a put-on version of the genteel accent. “He’s off grooming his vanity.”
Ser Gabriel’s face twitched but gave no more away. “Sauce, will you take your banda and cover the baggage train?”
Sauce nodded.
Ser Gavin walked up. Apples were the fashion of the day, and he tossed one to his brother. “Can we get moving?” he said impatiently.
Tom appeared. If he was concerned that he had just publicly humiliated the daughter of the most powerful sorceress in a hundred leagues, he gave no sign. “You called?” he asked.
The captain nodded. “You’re not my primus pilus,” he said. “You’re the Drover. I can’t order you into my line of march.”
Tom laughed. “Nah-never think it. I’ll follow you. The fewkin’ sheep are so slow I’d just as soon butcher the lot.”
The captain nodded sharply, all business. “Right, then.” He looked around for Count Zac, found him, and beckoned him. When the short easterner rode up, the captain bowed, since, technically, he and Zac were peers. Zac returned the bow. He glared at Sauce.
Mag narrowed her eyes at Tom.
Ser Dagon smiled innocently at Ser Gavin. Ser Gavin, who was particularly eager to reach his lady love at Lissen Carak, shifted uncomfortably, as if by moving his hips he could get the column moving.
The captain sounded remarkably like himself. “Friends,” he said, “I begin to suspect that if I don’t offer you a constant diet of danger and drama, you go and manufacture it for yourselves.” He looked around. “Very well-Count Zac, if you will be pleased to lead the way. Ser Michael with me, then Gavin, and then Ser Dagon followed by Ser Bescanon. Baggage last, covered by Ser Alison. The drove brings up the rear. They’ll raise a lot of dust, and we don’t want to be the drag.”
“You are taking the precautions of war,” Count Zac said, somewhere between a protest and a query.
“Master Smythe made his views plain,” he said. “There’s a big force north of us, forming at the edge of the Adnacrags. We’re leaving the Empire and entering Alba. The sun has been warm long enough for every Outwaller in the world to have slipped south past Ticondaga. Right? We’re at war. When someone like Master Smythe gives you a warning, you’re a fool not to heed it.”
Their nods were uniform.
“Good. Let’s ride,” the captain said in his captain voice.
That voice relieved Sauce. The more he was Gabriel, the less she felt she knew him. She preferred the captain, with his steady arrogance and his adamantine self-assurance. Gabriel had entangling alliances that the captain didn’t have-a mother, a family, a set of alien obligations.
Sauce got her steel-clad leg over her riding saddle and waved at her squire, who had both her chargers. “Keep close,” she said. If the captain said war, it paid to listen.
The new trumpeter sounded a long call-the last summons. Ser Alison trotted her horse along the restless ranks of her ten lances, arrayed just outside the inn’s gates. Then she placed herself at their head and saluted the captain as he rode out with Ser Michael and the banner-three lacs d’amour in gold on black. Father Arnaud carried the banner today. The company was split into three, Sauce knew, and had new recruits in every lance, so that discipline had to be fiercer than usual and little things like saluting were suddenly important. The company’s gonfalonier, Ser Bescanon, was now the primus pilus, and few of the oldsters took well to his taking Bad Tom’s role. No new banner bearers had been appointed, and the company’s well-loved Saint Catherine was in Liviapolis with Ser Milus and the White Banda.
Behind the captain’s own extended lance-banner, trumpeter, his own squire, Toby Pardieu, and his page, Nell, and his archer, Cully-came the lances of his household; Father Arnaud had acquired his own lance, with two squires and two pages-a popular man, for all that Sauce found him hard to talk to. Then Ser Francis Atcourt, with his squire, page, and pair of veteran archers. Then Angelo di Laternum, once Ser Jehan’s squire, now leading his own lance. The last two knights were magnificent in new armour that flashed in the sun; Chris Foliak, always a popinjay, and Ser Phillipe de Beause, who was a famous enough jouster to have his own invitation to the royal tournament. Behind them came the newest recruits-two gentlemen of Occitan, Ser Danved Lanval and Ser Bertran Stofal and their squires, pages and archers. Ser Danved was almost as wide as Ser Bertran was tall, but they were veteran lances from the south, and they were accounted fine jousters. Ser Danved had a loud voice that was almost always on offer-a contrast to his brother-in-arms, who was almost always silent.
The command lances were all in scarlet and gold, even the pages. The pages wore eastern turbans with plumes over their helmets, and had curved sabres, Etruscan steel breastplates, and hornbows. They rode fine eastern mares, small horses with elegant heads and endless enthusiasm.
The command lances reeked of opulence and military power. Sauce knew it was advertising, but in war, advertising paid off as well as it did in prostitution, and she laughed to think about the similarities between her first profession and her second.
The command lances turned sharply off the road after trotting out of the gate and formed from column into line facing her across the road. The captain caught her eye and smiled. She saluted again with her sword.
Count Zac cantered across her vision, beautifully intercepting his troop of Vardariotes, two dozen steppe nomads who were at least two thousand leagues from home and two hundred from their barracks at Liviapolis. Sauce had no idea what bargain the captain had struck with the Emperor, but it had included the loan of her lover, and she thanked him silently, even if the man was being an arse this morning.
Zac looked at her, horse perfectly collected under him as he passed as if in review in front of the captain. He had the golden mace of his imperial authority in his fist, and he used it to salute the captain, and then he turned and flashed her one of his wide-open grins.