Edward Radcliffe wore a cloak himself, and a broad-brimmed hat in lieu of a hood. He made sure he steered well clear of Warwick's men. The less reason they had to get angry at him, the smaller the chance they would do something he'd regret. He watched them trudge by. They paid him no attention at all.
The soldiers seldom went about in groups smaller than three, not any more. Two of them had suffered unfortunate accidents while walking around by themselves. Nobody could prove anything. Even Warwick admitted as much. But the exiled noble had called Edward in to the house he'd appropriated and laid down the law like Moses coming down from Mount Sinai.
"This will stop," Warwick said bluntly. "It will, or I shall turn loose my wolves, and New Hastings will not be the happier for that."
"Your Lordship, I had nothing to do with it," Edward said.
"I believe you. If I didn't believe you, you would be dead, and I would be talking to someone else." Richard Neville didn't waste sweet words on his social inferiors-which meant he wasted them on no one in Atlantis. "Still, these people listen to you. And they had better, if they don't want to see what slaughter looks like. They will not play me for a fool. D'you understand me?"
"Oh, yes. You always make yourself very plain, sir," Edward Radcliffe answered. "But may I ask you one question?"
"Go ahead." By Warwick's tone, he was granting a favor to a man who didn't deserve it.
"Even if your soldiers hold New Hastings down, what good will it do you? What will you get from it?"
Richard Neville stared at him. They might both use English, but they didn't speak the same language. "If I cannot be a lord in England, Radcliffe, I shall be a lord-no, a king-here. This may be a miserable puddle of a realm, but it is my miserable puddle of a realm. Do you understand me now?"
"I certainly do, your Lordship," Edward said.
"Good. Then get out."
Get out Edward Radcliffe did, thanking heaven the noble let him leave. And he spread the word, as Warwick wanted him to do. But he spread it for his own reasons, not for the earl's.
"We don't want a king here, do we?" he said when he visited his son after getting away from Warwick, and answered his own question: "No, by God, of course we don't, not if he uses his soldiers to steal from us and to hold us down."
"Why shouldn't we knock 'em over the head as we find the chance, then?" Henry said-and he was only the first of many. "If we get rid of a few now, the rest will be easier to dispose of later."
Reluctantly, Edward shook his head. "If Warwick keeps them all together, think what they can do to us. Do you want England's worthless war coming to the shores of Atlantis?"
"Sooner or later, we'll have to kill them all." Again, Henry was only the first who said that. The Earl of Warwick's soldiers had not endeared themselves in New Hastings.
"How can we, without raising the whole settlement?" Edward asked. "They have training. They have discipline. They have armor. One of them is worth more in the field than one of us."
His son smiled a most unpleasant smile. "We have longbows."
He was right. A clothyard shaft from a longbow would pierce any mailshirt ever made. A shot at close range would pierce plate. But he seemed to think being right was enough. Edward Radcliffe feared he knew better.
"Unless we kill them all at once, the rest take their revenge," he said. "The whole settlement is hostage to them. Trying and failing is worse than not trying at all."
Henry shook his head. "Nothing is worse than not trying at all. If we don't try at all, what are we but their dogs?"
"Patience," Edward told him. "Patience. What we have to do is, we have to make sure we don't fail when we try. And we have to make sure Warwick and his wolves-his name for them, not mine-think we are their dogs till we try. If they're ready for us, if they're waiting for us, our work gets that much harder. Am I right or am I wrong?"
"I am a man, not a dog," Henry said, but then, shaking his head, "I'll be a quiet man, I suppose-for a while."
"That's what we need." Edward didn't try to hide the relief in his voice.
He had to play the dog, too, no matter how it galled him. And acting subservient wounded him all the more because he knew he wouldn't be worth much if it came to a fight. For a man his age, he was healthy enough. He could still see well-at a distance. He hadn't gone deaf. He still had most of his teeth. All the same, he was nearer seventy than sixty. He wasn't very strong, and he wasn't very fast. His wind wasn't what it had been, either.
When he grumbled about it, Henry set a hand on his shoulder. "Don't fret, Father. You've still got more brains than any three men in Atlantis, and that includes Warwick. When we move against him, we'll move because of you."
"You flatter me," Edward said. "I think you're wrong, though. When New Hastings rises against Warwick, chances are it will be because a soldier does something so horrible, he'll make everyone hate him-and his lord. These things work out that way."
"If you say so." Henry winked at him. "What I say is, you show you've got all those brains by knowing such things."
"What I say is, you're a miserable pup," Edward said with rough affection.
Henry winked again. "And where do I get that? From you or from Mother?"
"Don't let her hear you ask, or you'll get it, all right," Edward said. They both laughed, as if he were kidding.
Snow on the ground and sleet in the air told Richard Radcliffe he was back on the east side of the mountains again. His breath smoked, as if he were a dragon. He had a dragonish temper right now. Just a few miles back, the weather had been tolerable-not warm, but tolerable. No more.
"We're living in the wrong place. We all ought to pack up and head for Avalon Bay," he grumbled. Fog spurted from his mouth and nose with every word. And if that didn't prove his point, he couldn't imagine what would.
He also couldn't imagine getting everyone in New Hastings and Bredestown to pack up and travel across Atlantis or sail around it to get to the land where it was always April. Most people were like plants; they found a spot, and they put down roots. He didn't even intend to try to talk the whole English settlement into leaving. A few men, a few families, might. More likely, nobody would.
"Bloody fools," Richard said, scuffing through the snow. He kept his head down, partly to ward against the nasty wind and partly to spot any tracks there might be. If he could follow a trail straight to a honker or an oil thrush…
When the weather got cold, you needed to eat more. The fire inside you needed more fuel to keep going. And, before long, he found some. This country was extravagantly rich in extravagantly stupid game. The oil thrush he came upon eyed him in mild confusion as he approached. Maybe, like the red-crested eagles, it thought he was some strange kind of honker. It probably wondered what he was doing right up to the moment when he knocked it over the head.
He found shelter behind a fallen pine. Dried-out needles made good tinder: he dug around under the trunk till he found some the snow hadn't reached. Once he got the fire going, he fed it with twigs and branches. The warmth felt good-felt wonderful, in fact. He butchered the oil thrush and started cooking a leg. He hadn't done the best job of plucking it; the stink of singeing feathers filled his nose. Grease dripped down onto the flames and made them sputter and pop.
He carved chunks of meat off the bones with his knife. He didn't admire his own cookery. Part of the bird was nearly burnt, the rest nearly raw. He didn't care. After tossing the gnawed leg bones aside, he cooked the liver and the heart and the gizzard, and then the other thigh. The breast and the wings had less meat on them.
A couple of soft, slow, almost sleepy chirps startled him. Then he started to laugh. He wasn't the only one who thought the fire felt good. One of those mouse-sized katydids had taken shelter against the cold under the downed pine. With the fire close by to heat it up, it revived. Maybe it thought spring had come early.