“So-” Amicia could see it as if on a map in her head-which it was, in a way, in her memory palace. “So north of Sixth Bridge…”
“North of Sixth Bridge is a network of little muddy trails rather than a single maintained road. Even under the old King, the gorge and the highlands made it hard to maintain a big road.” Ser Gavin stared off into the evening. “If we had a good king, and time, and peace, we’d finish the road-and that would spur trade, and link the north more closely to the south.”
“Ser Gerald showed that it could be done by boat. All the way to Lorica.” Sister Amicia couldn’t help but watch as Ser Thomas and Ser Gabriel came together on the plain to her right. Their armour glowed in the twilight, and their horses’ hooves shook the earth.
Ser Gavin nodded. “I will go join them-I’m late getting armed. Random’s boats made it, and will again this year. But it’s four days getting around the falls, and in a wet spring, with the river high-a hard row above the falls in the gorge.” He looked out over the rich fields. “But if the kingdom’s ever to be united-the river and the road will both have to go all the way through.”
South of Fifth Bridge, there was traffic on the roads. They passed a late convoy rolling north-a convoy that knew less than they did about events in Harndon. They were still three days from Lorica.
“Lorica on Good Friday,” Amicia said to Sister Mary. “We can observe it in the Basilica!”
She made bright small talk with her nuns and tried to ignore the signs around her, but the soldiers looked grimmer and grimmer as they moved south. They had begun to see refugees on the roads-at first, they were mostly prosperous people with carts. But a day out from Lorica, they were seeing hundreds of people, families, and some had already been robbed. They looked like tinkers-dirty, carrying sacks of belongings with spare clothes and odd items attached any which way.
Neither the nuns nor the soldiers could ignore them. Many begged for food-many told harrowing tales.
Ser Gabriel found her towards afternoon on the tenth day on the road. “I’m not going to Lorica,” he said.
“I saw you send Mikal off to the east,” she replied.
“Good eye, then. There are small roads now, on both sides of the river. We’ll turn east and make for the highlands and try to outflank the refugees.”
“You’re not telling me everything,” she said.
For the first time, anger flashed across his face, and he was impatient. “I’m not lying. I can tell you what I guess, but what I know makes a very slim volume. I wish you were not here. Is that too frank? They want you. This is… orders of magnitude worse than what I expected. I feel like a fool-practising for a joust when the whole kingdom is coming apart like a doll crushed under a wagon wheel.”
He looked away, as if he’d annoyed himself.
“You don’t like to feel as if you are not in control,” she said.
“That’s facile. No one’s in control in a war, but this is-insane. A king, ripping apart his own land and his own marriage?”
Amicia nodded. “Well, I shall miss Easter in the basilica of Lorica,” she said. “But I’m not foolish enough to ride off on my own.”
He nodded. “Good,” he said.
That was it-no flirting and no discussion.
“I think we’ve become part of their company,” she confided to Katherine, who laughed mirthlessly.
“One of the pages offered to marry me, if his knight would allow it,” Katherine said. “I think I’m old enough to be his mother.”
Sister Mary blushed.
They rode east, away from the setting sun.
That was a long night.
What the captain hadn’t mentioned was that they wouldn’t be stopping to camp. The turn east was accompanied by a further increase in speed, with veteran squires leading the files in alternating walking and trotting their horses. Even Katherine began to suffer, and by moonrise, Amicia was chewing her lower lip in mingled fatigue and pain. Sister Mary was moaning.
The column halted. The moon was three-quarters full; the narrow road was clear and fairly hard between darkened fields.
“Dismount,” came down the column.
Ser Christos, very chivalrously, leapt from his riding horse and helped Sister Mary off her mount.
Sister Katherine slid from the saddle, tired but unbeaten. “Don’t tell me that this is nothing next to Christ’s Passion,” she said. “I know it is nothing, but it is sufficient penance for everything I’ve ever thought about Miriam.”
Pages came down the column, shadows shifting in the odd, moon-shot darkness. They had feedbags already prepared, and they helped the nuns put them on their horses’ heads.
Nell appeared at Amicia’s elbow. “Cap’n says you have about half an hour, and is everyone all right?” she asked, in his accent exactly.
Amicia waved a tired hand. “No one ever died of riding sores,” she said. “I hope.”
All too soon, they were off again, the whole column a quiet jingle of horse harness and mail and steel plate and leather. They passed through a small hamlet-dogs barked, but no one came to their doors.
Past the hamlet they turned suddenly south, and she realized they were riding along the crest of a tall, shallowly sloped ridge, and she could see the twinkling lights of a dozen distant villages-odd that they should have light so late.
South. She knew enough stars to know that they had turned south, towards Harndon, and that the smoke on the horizon to the west must be the breakfast fires of Lorica, the kingdom’s second city.
They didn’t stop or make camp.
By noon, Amicia was asleep in her saddle. She dozed away an hour or more, and woke sharply to find the column halted in deep forest. Behind her, Ser Christos was again helping Sister Mary to dismount-or rather, to collapse.
Pages appeared and gathered the horses. Amicia’s was done-lathered all down his flanks and wild-eyed.
She didn’t know the page who took her mount, but the boy smiled. “Never you mind, Sister, I’ll have your little mare right as rain by tonight.”
“So we’re to sleep?” she asked. She was too tired for anger or complaint.
It was like the convent, after all.
The page shrugged. “No one told me. But if we’re currying and feeding ta’ horses, stands ta’ reason we won’t move for some time. Eh?” He winked.
Sister Amicia gathered the other two nuns and led them to the shade of a great oak tree. They lay down-Mary collapsed-and slept.
Amicia awoke with a tree root carving a hole in her side to realize that she had slept through Christ’s Passion and she was instantly on her knees. When most of the rest of the company was awake, she led them in prayers of contrition.
A valet brought her a bowl of oatmeal.
“Oatmeal?” she asked.
“Nicomedes says it’s Good Friday,” Bobert, the youngest valet, said. “No meat, no fish.”
Ser Gabriel rode up, and Amicia was distantly pleased to see that his red jupon was rumpled and something had left a crease on his forehead. He smiled at her.
“This is your notion of Good Friday observance?” she asked.
“Fasting and travail?” He nodded. “Pretty much-ah, here’s Tom.”
Ser Thomas came up with a dozen heavily armed Hillmen at his tail, all mounted. “Well, Kenneth Dhu has the herd until we get this done,” he said. “You made good time.”
“Only the next week will see what ‘good time’ might have been,” Ser Gabriel said.
Almost as soon as the column moved off they left the woods, which were not the deep forest Amicia had imagined but instead a small copse of carefully tended great oaks on a rich manor. As the sun set in the west, Amicia looked around her. She could see fields-and to the east, mountains, their tall, snow-capped summits catching sun.