“These your cattle?” Brack asked.
The man nodded. His face was long and the jaw angular and his hair thin on the top of his head, though he did not look old. His skin marked with patches from the sun. Dust coating his whole being as if he were born from it.
“They were,” he said.
“Did you see it?”
He nodded.
“You were wise not to fight it.”
The farmer looked at him a moment and turned and spat in the road. Looked back up. “I'm as dead now as if I had fought it and been killed with the cattle. This way's just going to take longer. You may see that as a mercy, but I'm not as sure.”
Brack reached to his belt and took off the leather pouch he wore and poured into his hand a fistful of gold and held it out. The man did not move but just looked at him and then turned again and spat. “Who are you?”
“That important?”
“You carrying that much gold and throwing it around, I'd say it is.”
Brack nodded. Did not lower the gold. “Therros Brackson,” he said. “Do you know the name?”
The farmer looked at him a long moment. Then snorted and shook his head, the flicker of what might have for him been a grin at the edges of his lips, the smallest movement. He turned his head as if he were for a third time going to spit and then thought better of it and looked back at them. “Come on,” he said.
The house was a modest one made of mud and stone and wood and it sat on the edge of a small stream with willows hanging out over it and the sun golden in their arching branches. They came to it down the dusty road and from there it did not look as if a dragon had passed and all the carnage from the field seemed a thing distant and perhaps even untrue. The sound of the water moving lightly over the stones, the breeze in the tree branches. There was a woman sitting on the porch and she stood as they came up. Dark hair and clasped hands and two children coming out to see when the farmer called out.
They got down from the horses and tied them to a tree in the front and the farmer went and got a bucket of water from the well and Brack took it before he could lift it and carried it himself over to the horses. Setting it where they could all reach and wiping briefly his wet hands on his horse's coat. His hands coming away dark with the dust. He did not know when he'd bathed last and had not thought about it on the road, but did now.
The man's wife was named Marna and she smiled as they shook hands and her eyes widened when the farmer said his name and Brack smiled and looked away and saw the two boys staring at the sword. He bent down and shook their hands each in turn and their eyes did not leave the sword the entire time.
Inside it was plank wood floors and walls and ceilings and light from the windows slanting in the dust of the air and a stone hearth in the center of the main room. Two lanterns sitting on the mantle and neither burning. Candles sitting about and rough wooden furniture and the chairs covered in hides. The whole place meager but clean and kept and dry. They nodded their thanks and took off their weapons and hung them by the door and sat and looked about the house.
The woman went into the kitchen and when she came out she had a stoneware pitcher full to the brim of clear water and she poured it into clay cups and nodded to them and they thanked her and she went back out again. The farmer calling to her about the meat they'd dried and coming also to sit before his own cup at the table.
“Don't eat all you have on our account,” Brack said. “We've got some food in the saddlebags.”
“It's nothing,” the farmer said. “We were going to eat it anyway. Now we'll just eat it with you.” He shrugged. “A man has to eat and there's never enough so why fight it?”
Brack took the bag back out and poured again the coins into his hand. A few more this time than before. Reached across and set them in front of the man, the metal rattling as they spread. The farmer opened his mouth and Brack raised a hand.
“For the meat,” he said.
The farmer looked at him and then nodded and reached and slid with one hand all of the coins over the edge of the table and into his other hand. “For the meat,” he said.
The boys were out in the yard playing and they could hear the crack of the sticks coming together and them yelling from time to time. Slowly the smell of the meat came into the whole house, strong in the midday air. Already dried and salted but cooked all the same to make it feel new and fresh and the smell of it was very good. The farmer leaned forward with his elbows on the table and looked from Brack to Juoth and back again.
“You're making for Cabele?”
“Or Darish-Noth.”
“Cabele is closer.”
“Then we'll go there first. Which is the best road?”
“The old road,” the farmer said without hesitation. As a man in country he knows very well and who trusts that knowledge. “The new is fine if you're with a caravan or a company and you want to stop and trade, but it goes out of its way to hit the towns. Harihold. Stallfast. Barrion. The old road goes up through Krassmark Forest and under the Fall of Revian. Then you come down through the hill country into the plains and you can see Cabele for two days before you get to her. Unless you're riding hard.”
“We'll be riding hard.”
“If your horses will survive it.”
“We'll buy new ones if they don't.”
The man leaned back in his chair. Picked up his cup and drank and set it down again. “You really mean to catch the dragon? You saw my cattle.”
“And yours aren't the first.”
“I thought as much.” He looked away and then licked his lips and seemed to be turning something in his mind. Rolling it and getting a feel for it and what it was. Then he said: “Is it true what they say about you? I saw the helmet.”
Brack nodded. “It is.”
“You killed the red dragon.” He said it as if speaking of something barely believed. The trust one places in a dream. A tale that must not be true but has been passed down for generations. A feat not accomplished twice and so the first time is suspect.
“It was young and stupid,” Brack said. “But yes. I killed it.”
“And now you're sitting at my table.”
“And we thank you.”
The farmer waved it away. “I heard the stories, but you know how those things are. You took it with a lance first?”
“I didn't take it alone,” Brack said. “I had three companies of queen's men from the Springlands and archers also and many of them are dead now because of it. But yes, I rode it down with a lance and buried it and came back with the sword to finish it.”
“Is that the way to do it?”
“There is no way to kill a dragon,” Brack said. He nodded toward the wall where his sword hung with his cloak. The crossbow outside and strapped still to the horse. “I don't have the lance now but I'll do it with what I have. Each time is different. Men who try the same thing every time are men who are killed.” Thinking then of the bow and the quartered horse and the gold and the damned dragon falling on the town while he watched.
“So you don't have a plan.”
“We'll make one when we see it. For now we're just trying to get to the cities.”
“And you're sure it's going there?”
Brack nodded but did not say anything. Hoping the man would take it as fact if he said it and not ask why. For the explanation was not one that could be easily swallowed, no matter how he knew it to be true nor how the dragon had so far done exactly as he'd known it would.
“Where do we find the road?” Juoth asked.
Marna came out then with the meat and called to the boys in the yard and she set it down as they came running in the door and it slamming open and closed and her yelling at them to wash up and stop running. It was not as much as Brack had hoped and he was glad for the gold and nodded his thanks as she cut a piece and set it on his plate. Then Juoth, then the farmer, then the boys and at last herself.