“We need help,” was all Trypp said to the girl, his voice deflated and working to offset their appearance.
“Wait here,” she said and closed the door. A few moments later it opened again and a woman hunched with age and thin as a reed, with a lined face showing the passage of life’s troubles like the dirt road showed its traffic, appeared instead. Without a word she ushered them inside, and did not blink an eye when Motega went back to his horse to retrieve Florian.
They lay Florian by the fire and inspected his wounds. The woman, Motega presumed the girl’s grandma, washed the punctured flesh with freshly boiled water from a kettle that bubbled over the fire, before applying a poultice brought by the girl. Florian’s eyes briefly opened, and though Motega tried to speak to him, he did not answer or meet Motega’s gaze.
Florian’s ancient nurse gave Motega and Trypp wooden bowls of stew filled with vegetables and a little meat. There was flatbread fresh from the hearth and the two ate it ravenously. Not until they had eaten, and the bowls washed and put away did the grandma begin her questioning.
“Where are you from, boys?”
“Edland. Kingshold,” said Trypp. He could have answered with ten other ways that he had back stories to cover, but Motega guessed there was no harm in telling the truth.
“Thought as much,” she said. “I hear our king is dead. New leader they say.”
“That’s right.”
“Want to know what else I heard? The people picked him! A vote. Is that true?”
“It’s true,” said Trypp, who disguised it well if he was as surprised as Motega at the news traveling this far to the edge of the realm. “You’ve had a town crier come by then?”
“Oh, no. Haven’t seen one o’ them in ten years. But news travels quicker’n the plague. Except when there’s plague, o’course.” She chuckled. “Well, who’d a thought. People having a say, eh? Another man though. I heard that well enough. Shoulda put the women folk in charge. There’d be a lot less killing going on then I’d wager. Not that I mind killing, if it’s the right folk.” She leaned forward on the wooden bench she was sitting on to more closely inspect her guests. “Do you hate Pyrfew?” she asked appraisingly.
“Yes, ma’am,” said Motega. “They killed my family.”
“Good! Mine too. Killed my sons and my grandsons and left me with the baby.” She nodded her head to the girl whose face looked grim at the mention of Pyrfew. “Good. Kill some for me, would you?” Motega nodded, not so sure that grandmothers would be a less blood-thirsty solution to the world’s problems. If there was ever someone who would be keeping tally of who needed payback, you could be sure it was a granny. “You can both sleep by the hearth and then be on your way in the morning. Your friend here needs help I ain’t equipped to provide. The wound needs stitching and I ain’t got no thread that won’t make things worse.”
They slept by the dying fire that night, the warmth and the hard earth floor comforting to Motega. His aches and pains appreciated the heat and the full night’s sleep without need to be woken for a turn at watch. In the morning they were roused, fed a bowl of scrambled eggs, and were on their way to Redpool before the sun was barely above the horizon.
The horses were fresher after their rest too, and they rode at a gallop, switching every hour to share the load of Florian. The air smelled suddenly crisp and salty and the dirt road gave way to a gravel track that got wide enough for two carts as the great walls of Redpool came into view. Tall and red, they rose into the sky with a dozen or more towers within the city visible above the walls. All of it built from red brick, the product of the rich clay all around the city.
But that wasn’t how the city got its name. It was called Redpool because of how the water of the bay washed red at times, thick with the clay sediment. The city itself was perched on the top of the cliffs; while the Harbor was almost a separate city, connected by great stone steps that clung to the edge of the land like barnacles on the hull of one of the many merchant ships moored there.
The road split a little way ahead. One path wound gently up to the city proper. The other led down to the Harbor, and that was the direction in which they cantered. For while the city was home to the governor, Uthridge had set up his headquarters close to the navy ships that had brought them there.
Motega and Trypp had to divert their horses off the road a mile or so out. The backlog of traffic—carts and wagons waiting to gain admittance to the port—tailed back, like a grumbling giant snake. The two friends cut into the line by the southern gate, and the grumbling threatened to become full-on discontent. The Harbor was also walled in red brick, and though Motega thought the cracks in the mortar made it a little too easy to scale, he had to admit it was impressive. Crenellated battlements, murder holes, slotted windows for archers, ten-foot buttressed overhangs with places to pour burning oil on those below; the legacy of a city that was fought over more often than a dildo in a convent. Passing through the gate he looked down at Florian, tied to the saddle in front him and breathing deeply. Motega missed his inevitable explanation of wall defenses and what the guards were doing wrong.
The town behind the walls was not as impressive as its perimeter, and much less so than the city proper. All the buildings alongside the harbor were made of wood. Florian had explained in the past that it was so by Royal ordinance; in the event that the harbor was taken by a foreign force then it could be lit by blazing incendiaries fired from catapults at the top of the city walls high up on the cliffs. There weren't any buildings in the Harbor that were more than twenty years old.
They rode quickly for the garrison, another wooden construction, walled and set back from the other buildings by fifty yards of clear space on all sides. Of course, that meant that it was the perfect place for an unlicensed market. Motega and Trypp trotted through the crowds looking to acquire their supper for less than the price in the stores. The main gates to the garrison opened at their request and, dismounting, they led their horses through to the large courtyard in the center of the garrison.
“Where is the Lord Marshall?” asked Motega.
“He's over there,” said the guard, waving his arm toward the back of the courtyard where a number of troops were busy with drills.
Motega led his horse toward the old soldier, Trypp close behind. “Uncle!” he called, “we need a medic. Now.”
Lord Marshall Uthridge. Old soldier and the man tasked with entertaining him and his sister when they were first taken to Kingshold after being rescued from Llewdon. And the one who introduced Motega to one of his best friends, the wounded man who he gently lifted off the horse to lay down on the gravel training ground.
Uthridge walked over, dressed in the simple riding attire he preferred when out in the field, free of the stuffy uniform he had to wear when surrounded by ‘politicians’.
“What happened?” asked the Lord Marshall.
“A bit of a fight with some Pyrfew cavalry. He got a spear in the gut.”
A medic rushed to the scene carrying a small leather bag. He crouched down next to Motega’s friend and inspected the wound.
“He’s lucky. It should be fine. He’s not dead yet. No sign of infection or fever. Looks like it was already cleaned out?” Motega nodded. “Good. I'll need to see if there is any internal damage and then stitch it up. Help me get him inside.”
Two men and a woman who had been conversing with Uthridge walked up and looked down at Florian. A rough looking man, hair more grey than black, shook his head.
“Well met, Twins. I must admit, you've looked better.”
“Urgh,” grunted Florian, opening his eyes at the man’s voice. “Oh, shit. Sergeant Morris?”
Chapter 3
You Can't Please All Of The People
“Where is everyone?” asked Alana of the five faces seated around the long table in the Royal Oak’s back room.
“Don’t know, lass,” said the wrinkled and hunched figure of Eldrida, district supervisor of Fishtown. “Reckon some of the others h
ave got jobs. Maybe the morning ain’t the best time to do this.”
The shrugs and nods from the others around the table let the wind out of her sails.
“I know that some of the others from the outer rim don’t like coming up here. They don’t feel welcomed,” said Dyer of the Inner Narrows, the only representative of the vast area of poor neighborhoods from beyond the outer wall. His face betrayed a realization that he may have inadvertently offended his host. “I mean, you’re always very welcoming, Mistress Jules, and you have a nice place an’ all. But they feel like a frog in a different pond. Some of ‘em ain’t sure it’s not a pot of hot water yet.”
Only a quarter of the district supervisors made it this time. Dyer and Eldrida were probably both right, but Alana couldn’t help but think that she’d also done something wrong. Messed up her new responsibilities. The first meeting a week after the election had been a full house and the atmosphere had been thick with celebration. The meeting the following month had been standing room only but the general air had been one of complaint and confusion over the lack of pots of gold for all at the end of the rainbow that was winning the election. Today, there were only Eldrida and Dyer, along with Jules from the Cherry Tree district—but she was hardly not going to attend as she was hosting—Geary from the Golden district, and a woman that Alana did not know too well; Margaret of Fourwells, replacement for the traitor Win.
“Alright, well I guess I will change it for next time. I don’t think there is any point waiting any longer so I’ll start with the usual update,” said Alana. She proceeded to report what had been occurring within Kingshold and Edland at large. Or at least, what she knew. Mareth included her, and her sister, in the privy council meetings as observers for all but conversations of war. Apparently, there was no precedent for people with their roles to be on the privy council—which was hardly surprising given that there hadn’t been an election before—and so observer status was it for now.
During those first meetings she found it hard to relax; she had a job preventing herself from fetching refreshments for everyone. That struggle against her natural impulse had led to uncertainty in herself and whether she should join in, until Mareth had pulled her to one side and asked why she was not engaging. She couldn’t even complain that the rest of the council looked down on her; they had been very welcoming, at least to her face. This was all her. The events leading up to midsummer had been a whirlwind and now she was faced with a new world and a new job that she knew she was completely unqualified to perform.
Alana felt like an imposter.
But she tried very hard not to let it show with the few district supervisors who had turned up. She read from her notes of the various goings on; Mareth wanted to be as open as possible with this group. City watch reports from Grimes. Construction reports of the repairs to the Warehouse district following the substantial fire damage. Reports from the farmlands of Edland on the harvest. So many reports. Her audience listened, at first with some degree of attention, before fingers started to tap on the table, or chins were propped up by open palms. Eldrida continued her knitting throughout.
Alana finished her report and then there was silence. Had they even realized she’d finished talking?
“Very good, dear,” said Eldrida, thankfully breaking the silence. “But what’s changed for us, eh? Most of us are still just scraping a life. I thought your Lord Bollingsmead was going to make life better for everyone.”
Ah, the familiar refrain. Trust Eldrida to raise her complaints first. She’d lived a lot longer than most and apparently, she’d used her time on the world to perfect the art of a good whinge.
“He’s trying, ma’am. We’ve cleaned up the sewers in The Middle. We’re collecting the rubbish in the Outer Rim. We’re rebuilding those buildings that got destroyed. We’ve reduced the taxes on the green market so prices should be coming down.”
“Hmmph,” expelled the new supervisor, Margaret, a middle-aged mother of seven. “They aren’t bloody coming down. It’s just going in the pockets of those that are selling.”
“Thank you for bringing that to our attention, we’ll look into that. You need to be patient; we’re doing the most we can but we’ve had to reduce custom taxes too. We needed the merchants to come back to Kingshold.”
“We’re nothing but patient,” said Dyer. “All our bleeding life we’re patient. Waiting for death. Waiting for a kick in the teeth from someone with more money than we have. We need more jobs.”
“Lord Bollingsmead knows this. That’s why there are jobs doing the reconstruction. And we’ve hired hundreds of people in Sword Break for ship building—”
“—but them jobs aren’t here, are they? Means you’ve got to leave your family and move,” said Geary. “And the people in my district used to have those jobs working in the warehouses, and now they’re trying to put them back up. Most of them don’t know the head of a hammer from their own arse. When are they going to get back to what they know?”
This moment was inevitable. The cascade of gripes. Piling on. Everybody wanted to get a kick on the person on the floor, whether the victim deserved it or not. It was an outlet for frustration; at their lot in life, at the unfairness of it all. She had seen it before when they had first met with the guilds, but these people had much more to complain about. Alana took a deep breath and reminded herself that this was not personal.
Probably.
“Now, now, let’s give them time,” said Jules. Lovely, impressive, warm Jules, riding to her rescue. “What I’m worried about is all this ship building.” That was short lived. “Alana, is there going to be war?”
She’d dreaded this question. Knew that whatever she said would be around the city before sunset. Alana had spent considerable time striding around the palace grounds earlier that morning, thinking how to finesse an answer. But she couldn’t lie to these people.
“We may already be,” she mumbled.
“Are you saying Pyrfew was behind the pirates?”
“They could have been. We do know they have a new fleet in the Sapphire Sea. Made in Ioth.”
The collective exhalation was like a gale.
“So, what are we doing about those jumped up little shits?” asked Eldrida over the clicking of her wooden knitting needles.
“We’re preparing. And we’re trying to talk to Ioth, get them to cut off Pyrfew. But I don’t know what is going to happen.”
Silence once again as people processed the news. Life was difficult for many people in Kingshold. But war was what they all feared. Sure, most of them were patriots on feast days and celebrations, but talk about having to sleep in ditches and seeing your friends get mutilated and the worst days of peacetime start to look a whole lot rosier.
“Have you got any other good news for us?” Dyer asked, his voice quaking in barely contained anger. She shook her head meekly. “Well then, I’ll be off.” He pushed his chair back and left the room, the cue for everyone else to follow suit.
Jules was the last to leave as Alana slid her notes back into the leather satchel that the tavern owner had gifted her over the summer. Jules looked at her with some measure of sympathy. “Tell Mareth we miss him. You’re one of us, Alana. But we all need to see him occasionally.”
The landlady left the room, heading back to her tavern full of customers. And then Alana was alone.
Alana was alone in the carriage back to the palace as well. She looked down at the lady’s dress she was wearing—yellow-dyed cotton, not too ostentatious, though she even had clothes made of silk in her wardrobe now—and momentarily missed the simplicity of the life that came with her old maid’s uniform. From her home in the Narrows it had been a five mile walk to and from the palace every morning and evening, and though her feet may have had a different opinion, Alana thought about that time she would have had to herself every day to see the city. To feel Kingshold beneath her feet, the bubble of the melting pot all around her; and it was another thing she missed. That quiet time to think.
The carriage moved too fast. Already they were through the Floral Gate and into the Upper Circle. They’d be in the palace grounds in a matter of minutes.
She needed to do something more to keep the district supervisors engaged, make them feel like part of the solution. But Alana had no idea what that could be. She, Mareth, Lady Grey, and the others had soon discovered that it wasn’t easy to make changes in the city quickly. Especially given the state of the coffers of the realm. Not to mention unwinding all the conflicting agreements that had been made with various merchants during the election.
Had she made a mistake being so open in that meeting? Even when she had voiced her concerns about a possible war with Pyrfew, she knew it would become fact as it passed from lips to ear. It would spread from hovel to counting house faster than gossip in a wash house.
Maybe they could have a festival for the harvest? Everyone always liked a holiday. Perhaps that would take their mind off it?
Alana thought about this as she stepped out of the carriage, said thank you to the driver, said good afternoon to the men on guard duty and waved a hello in return to the gardeners who doffed their caps as she walked through the palace grounds to her new home; Jyuth’s old apartments. She had spent a strange month working in these rooms, nestled in the idyllic little corner of the beautiful palace gardens; at first in fear of the great wizard, then in wonderment at how quickly things were changing and how people treated her with respect. When Neenahwi had suggested to Mareth that Alana and Petra move in to this single-story cottage, she had resisted. Surely the wizard was returning? But Neenahwi had been insistent, certain that he was gone for good.
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