‘Take the two women in your service with you,’ Vogel continued. ‘The boy is used to the company of women, his mother and tutors and so forth. They may help put him at his ease.’
Neither Anne nor Rosie were exactly what you might call motherly, but I’d work with what I had. Rosie might manage sisterly at a push, I supposed, and that gave me an idea.
‘Yes, sir,’ I said. ‘My Billy too. Another lad will do the young duke good.’
Vogel waved a hand in a way that said he wasn’t interested in details, just results.
‘Whatever you think is best,’ he said, and with that I was dismissed.
*
‘Where?’ Anne said blankly when I told them.
‘Varnburg,’ Rosie said, repeating my earlier words. ‘It’s north and west of here, on the coast. A port city, but more than that I don’t know, and I don’t know a soul there either. We’ll be going in blind, Tomas, and I don’t like that.’
‘No, nor do I,’ I said, ‘but it’s where we’ve been sent. What do we know of this Sea Keep?’
Rosie spread her hands helplessly.
‘It’s the seat of the Duchy of Varnburg,’ she said. ‘Other than that, fuck all, I’m afraid.’
Beast cleared his throat. The huge man had barely left Anne’s side since that day at the Spring of Mercy, and he was standing behind her chair now like a bodyguard with his head almost brushing the ceiling of the Bountiful Harvest’s private dining room. He was rapidly beginning to regain his truly impressive bulk. He had been eating like a horse ever since he had been freed, and had taken up lifting heavy barrels and sacks of grain in the stable yard of the inn whenever he had the chance. I thought he was probably already stronger than me and Jochan combined.
‘Something on your mind?’ I asked him.
‘My wife was from Varnburg, sir,’ he said. ‘We visited her family there a time or two, her mam and da and that. I know my way around the place. Might be I could help.’
‘Aye,’ I said. ‘I reckon you could, at that. All right, you’re coming.’
‘When do we leave?’ Anne asked.
‘Tomorrow,’ I said. ‘Lord Vogel isn’t a man you keep waiting when he sets you a task.’
‘It’s a long way,’ Rosie said. ‘Three weeks at least by carriage, probably more like four. That’s if the weather holds fair, and the year isn’t getting any younger. I’ll organise what we need for the road.’
I nodded and let her get on with it. Rosie knew what she was about. Riding would have been quicker than a carriage, of course, but we could scarcely expect a grief-stricken ten-year-old Grand Duke to travel so far ahorse in late autumn weather and Rosie had seen that. I was fast coming to realise that she was very, very good at this.
The year was beginning to turn by then, as Rosie said, and her point about hoping the weather held was a good one. If it didn’t we could be a month and more getting to Varnburg and even longer returning, and I didn’t want that. I offered up a silent prayer to Our Lady for fair travelling, knowing as I did it that it was futile. Our Lady didn’t answer prayers, after all.
If She had, I wouldn’t have been in this situation in the first place.
*
Our Lady and the Stormlord were both kind, or more likely indifferent, and the weather stayed fine and dry as our carriage made its slow way through the countryside on the long road to Varnburg. The land was streaked with the rich colours of autumn now, the harvest long since brought in, and everywhere around us ploughmen toiled to turn their fields in preparation for the late planting. The journey took us weeks and I’ll not record the details here, save for one thing.
There was a night we stopped at a country inn at the crossroads of a little market town, our great carriage looking out of place in a yard crowded with simple carts and wains. This was farming country after all, and although the common room of the inn was warm and the food hearty, it was plain our faces didn’t fit there.
I had left Fat Luka behind to mind my affairs in Dannsburg, and Oliver and Emil to mind him, so it was Anne and Rosie, young Billy and Beast and our coachman and me that sat down in a room filled with ruddy-faced farmers and their sons and daughters and wives. We were too well dressed for that company and we had come in a carriage, and while the threat wasn’t open it was there nonetheless, simmering under a surface tension of people who had worked their hands raw on the ploughs all day. I could understand hard work, coming from the Stink as I had, but I am a city man born and bred and I’ve never worked the land a day in my life.
After a while it became uncomfortably apparent that our clothes and our carriage weren’t the real problem. Anne and Rosie were visibly together, and why not? In Dannsburg and even Ellinburg no one gave them a second look for that, but here? Here perhaps it was different, as it had been in the village where Anne grew up. Rosie’s bright-red hair and the yellow cord knotted on her shoulder were drawing stares that I didn’t like. The three farmers at the next table to us were becoming increasingly loud in their derision, one older man and two burly youths who might have been his younger brothers or eldest sons.
‘It’s like the fucking city air makes people forget what they’ve got between their legs and what it’s for,’ one said, loud enough to be overheard, and I saw Anne stiffen in irritation.
‘Aye,’ said his fellow. ‘Women are supposed to lie with men, not each other, it’s only right. It’s what
