Rider Gesca recoiled at the close view of Ingrey when helping him to mount up, then intercepted Ingrey’s glower and swallowed any comment. Ingrey had shaved, and the divine’s servants had returned his riding leathers dry, supple, and buffed; but there was nothing he could do about the squinting, bloodshot eyes and gray, puffy face. He clenched his teeth, settling his aching body into his saddle, and endured the slow procession to the town gate through the clamor of bells and chants and billows of incense that Reedmere thought becoming to the prince’s send-off. Ingrey waited till the town had passed out of sight behind them before waving the new teamster to chirp his beasts into a lumbering trot. The dray horses seemed the only cheerful members of the party, fresh and ponderously frisky and apparently regarding the jaunt as some horse holiday.
Lady Ijada appeared as trim as she had yesterday morning, now in an even more elegant riding habit of gray-blue trimmed with silver thread. Clearly, she had slept through the night. Ingrey wavered between resentful and relieved, as his headache waxed and waned. An hour into the bright morning, he began to feel about as recovered as he was likely to get. Almost human. He gritted his teeth at the bitter joke and rode up and down the column taking stock.
Ijada’s new female attendant, one of the middle-aged Temple servants on loan from Reedmere, rode in the wagon. She was wary of her ward, much more frigid than the rural wife from Boar’s Head who had known more of Boleso. She seemed even more wary of Ingrey. He wondered if the woman had told Ijada of his sleepwalking episode.
Boleso’s retainers, too, seemed edgier today, as they drew closer to Easthome and whatever chastisement awaited them for their failure to keep their banished prince alive. More than one cast glances of dark resentment at Boleso’s victim-and-slayer, and Ingrey resolved to keep them from both drink and his prisoner until he could turn the whole lot and their dead leader over to someone, anyone, else. Ingrey had dispatched a Temple courier last night to Sealmaster Hetwar with the cortege’s projected itinerary. If Hetwar left it to his discretion, Ingrey decided, Boleso was going to be galloped to his burial in record time.
If not at a gallop, the great horses moved them briskly and steadily through a countryside growing kinder, with wider roads mostly in better repair. Narrow pastures surrounded by vast precipitous forests gave way to tracts of merely hilly woodlands surrounded by broad fields. The eye might see more than one hamlet on the horizon at a time. They began to pass other traffic—not just farm wagons, but well-clad riders and petty merchants with pack mules—all of whom hastened to give way. An exception was a drove of lean black pigs encountered in an oak woods. The swineherd and his boy, not expecting to encounter such a royal procession on their road, lost control of their half-wild beasts, and Ingrey’s and Boleso’s men, variously amused and annoyed, had to assist in clearing the path, hooting, swearing, and swinging the flats of their sheathed swords.
Ingrey checked himself; this squealing prey did not seem to attract or excite him unduly, which was as well. He sat his horse in grim silence till the pigs had been driven again into the tangled verge. Lady Ijada, he noted, also sat her horse quietly, waiting, although with a curious inward expression on her face.
He did not attempt speech with her on the ride. His guards, by his order, kept close to her while she was mounted, and the servant woman dutifully dogged her steps during the stops to rest the horses. But his eye returned to her constantly. All too often he crossed her grave glance at him: not a frown of fear, more a look of concern. As though he were her charge. It was most irritating, as though they were tied to each other by a tugging leash, like a pair of coupled hounds. Not looking at or speaking with her seemed to consume all his energy and attention, and left him exhausted.
It had been a long and wearisome day when they rumbled at last into the royal free town of Red Dike. The town’s proud status left it subject neither to local earl nor Temple lord-divine, but ruled by its own town council under a king’s charter. Alas, this did not result in any diminution of ceremony, and Ingrey was trapped for some time as his hosts carried Boleso’s coffin into the temple—stone-built in the Darthacan style, its five lobes rounded and domed—for the night.
The town’s superior size, however, meant it had not merely a larger inn, but three of them, and Ingrey had mustered the wit that morning to instruct his advance scout to bespeak rooms. The middle hostelry had also proved the cleanest. Ingrey himself escorted Lady Ijada and her warden up to its second floor, and the bedchamber and private parlor his man had secured. He inspected the portals. The windows overlooked the street, were small, and could not be readily accessed from the ground. The door bars were sound solid oak. Good.
He dug the rooms’ keys from his belt pouch and handed them to Lady Ijada. The woman warden frowned curiously at him, but did not dare demur.
“Keep your doors locked at all times, tonight,” Ingrey told Lady Ijada. “And barred.”
Her brows rose a little, and she glanced around the peaceful chamber. “Is there anything special to fear, here?”
Nothing but what we brought with us. “I walked in my sleep last night,” he admitted with reluctance. “I was outside your door before anyone woke me.”
She gave him a slow nod, and another of those looks. He unset his teeth, and said, “I will be staying at one of the other inns. I know you gave me your word, but I want you to stay close in here, out of sight. You’ll wish to eat privately. I’ll have your dinner brought up.”
She said only, “Thank you, Lord Ingrey.”
With a short return nod, he took himself out.
Ingrey went down to the taproom, lying off a short passage, to give orders for his prisoner’s meal. A couple of Boleso’s retainers and one of Ingrey’s men were already there, raising tankards.
Ingrey glanced at the retainers. “You’re housed here?”
“We’re housed everywhere, my lord,” said the man. “We’ve filled the other inns.”
“Better than bedrolls on the temple floor,” said Ingrey’s man.
“Oh, aye,” said the first, and took a long swallow. His burlier comrade grunted something that might have been agreement.
A commotion and a small shriek outside drew Ingrey to the taproom’s curtained window, which looked out into the street. An open wagon pulled by a pair of stubby, sweaty horses had drawn up outside in the dusk, and one of its front wheels had just parted company with its axle and fallen onto the cobbles, leaving the wagon tilted at a drunken angle. Its lanterns swayed on their front posts, casting wavering shadows. A woman’s brisk voice said, “Never mind, love, Bernan will fix it. That’s why I—”
“Had me bring my toolbox, yes,” finished a weary male voice from the back of the wagon. “I’ll get to it. Next.”
The manservant hopped out and set some wooden steps beside the now-sloping driver’s box, and he and a woman servant helped a stout, short, cloaked figure to descend.
Ingrey turned away, thinking only that the late-arriving party might find rooms hard to come by in Red Dike tonight. The burly retainer drained his tankard, belched, and asked the tapster for directions to the privy. He lurched out of the taproom ahead of Ingrey and turned into the passageway.
The bulky cloaked woman had arrived therein; her maidservant was bent to the floor behind her, muttering imprecations and blocking the way. The voluminous cloak was grubby and tattered, and had clearly seen better days.
The burly retainer vented a curse, and growled, “Out of my way, you fat sow.”
An indignant “Huh!” sounded from the recesses of the cloak, and the woman threw back her hood and glared up at the man. She was neither young nor old, but matronly; her curling sand-colored hair escaped from falling braids to create a faint ferocious aureole around her breathless face, pink from either the insult, the evening’s chill, or both. Ingrey, looking around the retainer’s shoulder, came alert; Boleso’s men were not the sort whom lesser folk dared casually defy. But the foolish woman seemed oblivious to the man’s sword and mail. And size and dubious sobriety, for that matter.