Alcaeus had seen all the signs before.
“That’s why you should be dead, too, but you aren’t-” Young Mark stepped in close and went for the baselard at his waist, but Alcaeus, who had seen men broken by war and terror since he was a child, stripped the weapon from him and put the man down on the catwalk as gently as he could.
“Guard!” he called a few times.
The two roads met by the inn at Troy. The inn was small, nothing like the fortified edifice at Dorling, but the King’s Arms at Troy was a pleasant building with six mullioned windows newly replaced by the innkeeper, a tall, thin man whose Etruscan parentage showed in his straight black hair and aquiline nose. Sheer luck had preserved his roof and his floors from the forces of the Wild; he’d helped hold the walls of Albinkirk and done his best to fight fires. He’d poured his fortune into restoring his inn, preparing for what he hoped might be better times, and he’d watched with sickened apprehension as more and more reports came into his common room of raids on the frontier, of monsters and death.
The morning rain had been so heavy on the frozen ground that his lower basement had flooded, and he was down there, bailing with a bucket with all four of his scullery maids and both of his grooms, when his wife’s shrill voice summoned him to the common room. He pounded up the steps with the grooms at his heels and he took the long Etruscan halberd off its pegs behind the great fireplace as he passed and turned into the great low common room that was the centre of his inn-and his village.
There were neither irks nor boglins in the courtyard. Instead, framed in the doorway was a knight in the richest armour Giancarlo Grimaldo had ever seen. He bowed.
The young knight returned his bow. “You are the keeper?” the young man asked.
“My lord, I have that honour,” Giancarlo said, setting his halberd into the angle that the mantelpiece made with the wall.
“I am Ser Aneas Muriens, and my mother, the Green Lady of the North, wishes to take her midday meal in your establishment.” He inclined his head slightly. “We are wet, and my mother is chilled.”
“I will make up the fire and serve you only the best.” The yard outside was filled with men-at-arms and servants, and they would all need to be fed. It was two months’ business in a single convoy, and all he had to do was survive it.
He turned to Nob, his best groom. “Run along to Master Jean’s and ask for both his daughters. Quick as you can.”
His wife leaned forward and hissed, “And send Jean’s son Robbie to Lady Helewise at the manor house and see if you can get her girl and Jenny to serve the duchess. Fetch Lady Helewise herself if she can come.”
Nob was out the kitchen and running in heartbeats, spraying new mud as he went.
But the great Duchess of Westwall was not coming in. She was out in the stone-flagged street-stone flagged only to the limits of the village, and with the sewer running down the middle in stone-slabbed confines cleaned by an old stream-sitting on a magnificent, high-blooded eastern riding horse. Chatting with a nun on a donkey.
“Let her through!” Ghause snapped at her men-at-arms. Her tone of command gave way to the dulcet accents of seduction as she leaned down. “My gossip, the saintly Amicia. Give an old woman your blessing, my sweet.”
Amicia had had several minutes to recognize the banner, and the men-at-arms. She knew Ghause’s youngest son and her captain. She still found the impact of the woman enough to rob her of words.
Ghause Muriens, mother of the Red Knight and of Ser Gavin, wife of the Earl of Westwall, was not a tall woman, although few people remembered her as small. She was, in fact, just five feet tall in her stockings; though not so small when booted and spurred atop a tall horse. Her honey-blond hair was as unmarked by time as her face or the skin of her neck or the tops of her breasts, and she wore the very latest in Etruscan fashion, a long pointed hat with a great spray of ostrich plumes held in an heraldic brooch, a perfectly dry cloak in her own colours of green and sable, lined entirely in sable so black it looked hermetical and trimmed in royal ermine to which she had every right as the king’s sister. She wore gloves of dark green and two matching emerald rings in red gold, and her waist was clasped with a heavy knight’s belt of cockle shells in the matching gold, and a similar chain-the shells full size-lay over her shoulders and breasts under her cloak. Her spurs were gold like a knight’s, and she wore a great sword of war-an uncommon accoutrement for a woman even in Alba-the scabbard green and all its fittings gold.
Just behind her in the crowded street was a great bird, too big to be a hawk and possibly large even for an eagle, on a perch and jessed and belled and hooded. It was huge. The size of a big dog. It gave a mad screech that made horses shy.
The duchess glanced at it and turned back. She wore the value of the whole village on her back. The people came to their doors or lined the street to see her, and she waved politely and smiled.
Amicia took a deep breath, dismounted, and curtsied.
The duchess smiled. “You are really such a pretty thing. Don’t you think those breasts and those legs are wasted on God? He doesn’t care. Let him have the ugly old maids. Those legs were made for sport, sweeting.”
Ghause’s men-at-arms were used to her. No one leered. No one commented.
Amicia rose from her curtsey. “No one could be immune to your grace’s flattery, or fail to perceive your meaning,” the nun said.
Ghause smiled. “I like you, my little witch. Come and share a meal with an old woman. You know my son is, by all report, in yonder fortress.”
Amicia smiled. “So I have heard.”
“You look tired,” Ghause said. “Too much prayer?”
Amicia was tempted to say that she’d been drained of her ops for two days and nights, but chose not to share that. She made herself smile. “Too many young lovers,” she said.
Ghause’s beautiful blue eyes almost bulged. There was a long silence, and then she snorted so hard that her horse started and she had t0 curb the animal. Then she laughed and laughed.
Amicia was not used to the level of service that the duchess provided. The duchess retired and changed into a yet more splendid dress of green velvet that left no man present in any doubt as to the shape-and tone-of her body. Her hair was brushed until it shone like the red gold of her jewels.
It came to Amicia that the great duchess was nervous.
The innkeeper and his staff were as courteous as the strain of twenty men-at-arms and forty more servants on a country inn could leave them, and she chose a strong red wine to steady her nerves, but the best tonic was the sight of Helewise-Lady Helewise to the older locals. She was the lady of a manor just to the south, and she came in quietly, wearing a good wool gown and an apron, with her daughter Phillippa and another girl the same age, Jenny, both pretty and blond and capable of being gentlewomen when called on to do so. After a whispered conversation with the innkeeper, Helewise went out into the yard and spoke to the captain of the duchess’s men-at-arms and took wine to Ser Aneas in person.
Ser Aneas gave her a deep bow. “You are no inn servant,” he said.
She smiled at him. “Nor I am, ser knight, but in a village, we all help each other. Especially in these times, mm?”
The men-at-arms were all gentlemen, and they had dismounted, and stood in knots in the yard. The inn was too small for them to all go in at once.
Through the windows, Helewise could see the keeper’s wife bustling to make the two common room long tables fit for gentry.
“We will have two tables ready for you in a moment,” Helewise said. “If you gentlemen would be kind enough to enter in files, and file to your seat, that would allow the duchess some privacy. And allow us to get you fed efficiently.”