They moved across the face of the wilderness, sometimes following trails and sometimes following the flow of the terrain, and their paths gradually made sense to Peter – they were following a relatively straight course west, and avoiding the river. He had no sense of how many of them there were, even when they made camp, because that night, they simply stopped and lay down, all nestled tightly in a tangle of bodies and limbs. No one had a blanket, few had shirts, and the night was cold. Peter found he despised the touch of another against him, front and back, but his revulsion was quickly forgotten in sleep.
In the rainy grey of not-quite-morning, he offered some very stale bread from his sack to Ota Qwan, who accepted it with gratitude, took a small bite, and handed the crust on. Men watched it eagerly, but no one protested when the bread ran out before the mouths did. Peter hadn’t even had a bite. He had expected it to be handed back. But he shrugged.
On his second night with the painted people he couldn’t sleep at all. It rained softly, and the sensation of wet flesh – paint, grit, and a man’s naked thigh against his own – made him get up shiver alone. Eventually he crept back into the pile of bodies, disgusted but almost frozen.
The next day was agony. The whole group moved faster, running the length of a grass meadow curiously criss-crossed by an arterial profusion of canals the width of a man’s outstretched arm. The painted people leaped them with ease, but Peter fell into several, and always received a hand out and a belly laugh for his troubles.
The painted people wore supple, thin leather shoes, often the same colour as their paint so that he hadn’t noticed them at first. His cheap slave shoes were falling to pieces, and the great meadow was littered with sharp sticks pointing up from the ground. He hurt his feet a dozen times, and again, he was helped along and laughed at.
He was limping badly, exhausted, utterly unaware of his surroundings, so when Ota Qwan stopped Peter all but walked over him.
Just the length of a horse in front of them stood a creature straight from nightmare – a beautiful monster as tall as a plough horse, and as heavy, with a crested head like a helmeted angel, a raptor’s beak and blank eyes grey, the colour of new-wrought iron. It had wings – small, but heart-breakingly beautiful.
Peter couldn’t even look at it, because for the third time in as many days he was terrified beyond his ability to think.
Ota Qwan put a reassuring hand on his shoulder.
Skadai raised a hand. ‘Lambo!’ he said.
The monster grunted, and raised a taloned claw-hand.
Peter had time to note that its left claw was wrapped in linen, the way an injured man’s hand would be wrapped in bandages.
Then the monster grunted again – if it spoke, the tones were too deep for Peter to understand – and then it was gone into the underbrush. Skadai turned and raised his bow. ‘Gots onah!’ he shouted.
There was an answering roar from all around them, and Peter was staggered to discover that there were dozens – perhaps hundreds – of painted warriors around him.
He grabbed at Ota Qwan. ‘What – what was that?’ he asked.
Ota Qwan gave him a wry smile. ‘That was what men call an adversarius,’ he said. ‘A warden of the Wild.’ He eyed Peter for a moment. ‘A daemon, little man. Still want to be one of us?’
Peter took a breath but it was hard. His throat was closed again.
Ota Qwan put an arm around his shoulder. ‘Tonight we’ll be in a regular camp. Maybe we can talk. You must have questions. I know a little.’ He shrugged. ‘I love living with the Sossag. I am one. I would never go back, not even to be a belted earl.’ The black painted man shrugged. ‘But it ain’t for everyone. And the Sossag are Free People. If you don’t want to continue with them, well, just walk away. The Wild might kill you, but the Sossag won’t.’
‘Free People?’ Peter asked. He’d heard it said before.
‘You have a lot to learn.’ Ota Qwan smacked his shoulder. ‘Move now. Talk later.’
Dormling – Hector Lachlan
Hector Lachlan walked into the courtyard of the great inn at Dormling like a prince coming into his kingdom, and men came out to stare, even applaud. The Keeper came in person, and shook his hand.
‘How many head?’ he asked.
Lachlan grinned. ‘Two thousand, six hundred and eleven,’ he said. ‘Mind you, master, that includes the goats, and I’m not so very fond of goats.’
The Keeper of Dormling – a title as noble and powerful as any in the south, for all it belonged to a big bald man in an apron – clapped Lachlan on the back. ‘We’ve expected you a ten-day. Your cousin’s here to join you. He says it’s bad to the south.’ He added, ‘We were afraid you might be broke, or dead.’
Lachlan accepted the cup of wine that the Keeper’s own daughter pressed into his hand. He raised it to her. ‘I drink to you, lass,’ he said.
She blushed.
Hector turned back to the Keeper. ‘The Hills are empty,’ he said, ‘which trouble in the south explains. How far south? Is it the king?’
The Keeper shook his head.
‘Your cousin told me that Albinkirk was afire,’ he said. ‘But come in and sit, and bring your men. The pens are ready, even for twenty-six hundred and eleven beasts. And I’m eager to buy – if I serve you a steak tonight, Hector Lachlan, you’ll have to sell me the cow first. I’m that short.’
The staff of the Dormling Inn descended on the drovers like an avenging army, carrying trays of leather tankards of strong ale and mountains of soft bread and sharp cheese. By the time the youngest, dustiest drover far in the rear had been served his welcome cup and his bread, their lord was clean of the mud of the trail, sitting in a room as fine as most lord’s halls, looking at a new tapestry from the East and smiling at the back of a local woman – a grown woman with a mind of her own, as he’d just discovered. He rubbed his bicep where she’d pinched him hard as a land crab and laughed.
‘Cawnor tried to levy a toll on me,’ he went on.
The Keeper and the rest of the audience shook their heads.
The drover shrugged. ‘So we opened the road. I doubt there’s enough of his men left alive to hold their fort, should someone decide to take it from them now.’ Drovers never sought to hold land. Drovers drove.
His cousin Ranald pushed through the crowd.
‘You’re taller!’ Hector said, and crushed him in an embrace. Then he sank back into his chair and took a long draught of ale. ‘Albinkirk afire? That’s ill news. What of the fair?’
Ranald shook his head. ‘I was moving fast. I kept moving. I was already on the east side when I reached Fifth Bridge, so I stayed there and rode cross country.’ He shrugged. ‘I didn’t see a thing.’
The Keeper shrugged. ‘If I’d thought you’d be here today, I’d have held the two bloody peddlers,’ he said. ‘They claimed they’d been part of a merchant convoy headed west from Theva. Lost all their goods and slaves.’
Hector nodded. ‘Like enough.’ This was the time of year for the great convoys.
‘A pair of Moreans. Said it was an ambush. Whole convoy destroyed.’ The Keeper shrugged. ‘My sons say there was a good sized Theva convoy a ten-day back as well, on the south road, so they didn’t pass by here.’ He shrugged again. ‘I have no faith in Moreans, but they had no reason to lie either.’
‘Ambushed by what?’ Hector asked.
‘They couldn’t agree,’ the landlord said.
‘They said the Wild,’ said a bold young farmer, a frequent customer, and a suitor for one of the Keeper’s daughters. ‘Or, leastways, the younger one said the Wild.’
The Keeper shrugged again. ‘That’s true. Some of them said it was the Wild.’
Hector nodded slowly. ‘I certainly didn’t see an animal bigger than a dog the whole trip here,’ he said. He shook his head in weary disgust. ‘The Wild is set against Albinkirk? Where’s the
The Keeper sighed. ‘I don’t know, and that’s a fact,’ he said. ‘I’ve put two of my sons and a dozen men on fast horses out to get ye news. We’ll see what they have. Folk have spied Outwallers in the woods. Sassogs. I think that if they were really there, they’d have been seen and et alive – but then I’m a suspicious bastard.’
