He smiled as he glanced up at her from his half-bowed head. She regarded him with a start, which seemed a bit of recognition. Bransen winked at her for that, and she fell back, putting her gloved hand to her mouth.
That made Bransen smile all the more, but he kept his face aimed at the ground to make sure the gray-bearded soldier didn’t catch on.
“He is a prince, you say?” Callen asked the man. “Or a laird, for you’re calling him both.”
“Prince Yeslnik of Delaval,” the gray beard confirmed, moving his horse onto the cobblestones. Across the way, his younger companion rushed up the embankment to join him and quickly mounted.
“Named Laird of Pryd soon to be Laird of Delaval,” the younger man insisted.
“Aye, and the king of all Honce, don’t you doubt,” said his companion. “Ethelbert’s soon to break, and when we’re done with that one, we’ll put the other lairds in place in short order.”
“Aye,” agreed the younger. “Now that we’ve got the river running free o’ wild northmen and goblins, and Palmaristown’s joined in Laird Delaval’s cause, the ships’re moving and it’s not to be long. Ethelbert’s city of Entel will find herself blockaded by the spring, and without his supplies and warriors flowing in from the southland he won’t last long.”
The gray beard shot his young and boisterous companion a scolding expression, clearly willing him to silence by showing him that he was wagging his tongue too much.
Bransen caught the nuance and understood that they were speaking of something terribly important.
To him, though, it all seemed meaningless banter, for he cared not at all which side won this fight, or what Honce came to look like thereafter. He had no love for any laird and could only hope that they would all kill each other in the last throes of the seemingly endless war. One thing did strike him, though: the notion that Prince Yeslnik had already been named as the replacement laird for Prydae, a man dead because of Bransen. It amused Bransen to think that Yeslnik was in line to become Laird of Delaval, and even king of Honce. The man was a fool and a coward, Bransen knew all too well. He had come upon the very coach that had just rolled past a long time before, when vicious bloody-cap powries had forced it from the road. Yeslnik, his wife, and their two drivers (one of whom had been seriously wounded) were surely doomed, but Bransen, the Highwayman, had come to save the day.
Of course, he had taken some reward for his efforts-much more than the stingy and ungrateful Prince Yeslnik had offered-and so the tale of his heroics had been buried by the prince’s wounded pride.
Bransen closed his eyes and reconnected with the soul stone set under his black silk bandanna, leaving the Stork far behind.
“Laird Yeslnik?” he whispered under his breath as the two soldiers moved off. Cadayle called to the departing men, begging them to help her get her wagon back on the road, but of course they just ignored her.
“King Yeslnik?” Bransen asked quietly, shaking his head as if the possibility was truly incomprehensible. And indeed, to him, it surely was.
Still, given his experience with the nobility of Honce, he was hardly surprised.
“We should have gone straight out for Behr, as we’d planned,” Cadayle said to Bransen as he coaxed and tugged the horses to get the wagon back on the road.
“No choice to us,” he answered, and not for the first time.
Cadayle sighed and didn’t argue. Both of them had wanted to get out of Honce to board a ship in the port of Ethelbert dos Entel and sail around the Belt-and-Buckle Mountains into Behr. Bransen’s greatest desire-at least, that which he expressed to his two companions-was to find the Mountains of Fire and the Walk of Clouds, the home of the Jhesta Tu mystics. Their centuries of wisdom had created the tome that Bransen’s father had penned. Bransen’s mother, Sen Wi, had been of their order. In their midst, Bransen believed, he would find the answers to his dilemma. There, he would attune himself more fully to his ki-chi-kree, his line of life energy, and would thus free himself of having to wear the soul stone strapped to his forehead. That soul stone allowed Bransen to keep his line of life energy straight and strong; without it, his energy sputtered and flitted in every different direction, leaving him the crippled Stork.
The Jhesta Tu had his answers, he believed, and he prayed. But he could not go there at that time, as he had hoped, not through Ethelbert dos Entel, at least, for the place was locked down, and any man who entered the holding of Laird Ethelbert without proper authorization would find himself pressed into service or hanged by the neck.
And so the trio had come southwest instead of southeast and now neared Delaval, the principal city of the land, the seat of power for Laird Delaval, the man who would be king of Honce. Rumors along the road said that passage could be gained to Behr from that city, though it would be a roundabout journey indeed, sailing up the great river, the Masur Delaval (recently named for the ruling family), then through the southern expanse of the Gulf of Honce, and down along the broken region of small holdings known as the Mantis Arm.
It would be an expensive journey, no doubt, and perhaps one full of danger, but the roads simply were not an option at this time of intense warfare.
Or perhaps they were, but Bransen wasn’t quite ready to make that all-important journey.
They were moving again soon after. Around a bend in the road less than a mile to the west the trio came in sight of the renowned city nestled at the base of southern hills, surrounding three fast-flowing tributaries that swept down through the streets and joined in a deep pool before the city’s northern wharves. This was the head of the Masur Delaval, a river whose currents swirled and backed with the varying tides of the northern gulf.
The city itself was everything Bransen, Cadayle, and Callen had imagined, with rows and rows of stone and wooden buildings, many two or even three stories high. A stone wall surrounded much of the town, including all of the central region. Within it sat the most impressive structure that any of the three had ever seen, a castle so imposing and expansive that it dominated the landscape wholly, a series of three connected keeps whose walls towered so high and strong that Laird Delaval’s designs on ruling the entirety of Honce as the one king suddenly seemed all too tenable.
By late afternoon, the trio had come to the outskirts, crossing through lanes bordered by trade shops of every type and with a large produce market set in a wide square just outside the city wall. A few peasants moved about the market, old women mostly, trying to get in a last purchase before the vendors closed their kiosks.
“Rotten goods,” Callen whispered to the others, for Cadayle had come down from the wagon now to walk beside them, the three of them leading the team slowly. “Kitchen throwaways from the castle, no doubt.”
“No different than in Pryd Town,” Cadayle said. “The lairds and their closest take all the best, and we get what’s left.”
“Except the best that we never let go their way in the first place,” Callen remarked with a wry grin.
“Or the best that a certain black-clothed highwayman took from them,” added Bransen, and all three shared a laugh.
Cadayle was the first to stop, though, as she caught the undercurrent of the statement. She stared at her husband suspiciously until at last he looked her way with a puzzled expression.
“You can’t be thinking…” she said.
“I often am.”
“Of letting him out here,” Cadayle finished. “The Highwayman, I mean. You keep yourself in the guise of the Stork while we’re in Delaval.”