Chapter 10: Coll

We were two hours out before the country opened.

The trees fell away on either side of us as though a hand had drawn them back, and a long flat plain rolled out in every direction to the rim of the world — black soil, dark as wet coal, turned up in long ploughed lines that ran straight to the horizon. The first wheat was up, an inch or two of green over the dark, and it covered everything. I had never in my life seen so much land all of one mind. The breadbasket. I knew of it in the way a man knows a thing from a council ledger: so many wagons of grain, so many measures, the kingdom’s larder. I had not understood, until I rode out across it, that to a horseman it is a sea — that the breath comes differently in your chest with so much sky above you, that the smell of the wet black earth gets into your hair, that a single yellow farmhouse at the centre of a quarter-mile of green looks like a small ship on a calm.

Trimmel, beside me, drew it in like a man who has come home, though he had no holdings here that I knew of. “Look at it,” he said, soft, almost to himself. “That’s why they want us, you know. The Seronians. All of this. Their own ground gives them nothing the like of it. They look up at this and they ache.” He spat into the dust. “And we sit on it and we lose it back to them an acre at a time.”

I did not answer. He had said the thing every man at the council knew and no man dared say aloud in the King’s hearing: that the war was, in the end, about this dirt, and that the dirt was slipping our hold.

I had been here before; Davil brought me to show me. And I think that my home is these lowlands, and always will be, whether I like it or not.

Every two or three miles along the road there was a small farm — yellow stone, low and stout — and round each one a careful little orchard, blossom-white at this season, and around each orchard a small dark dog. Every one of them. And every one of them barked at us, full-throat, the whole length of every property, as though we had come to murder the trees. Trimmel laughed at the third one and called it a brave fellow. By the sixth I was beginning to grit my teeth at the noise; by the tenth it was simply the sound of the day, like wind. Aelea, riding between Josen and our mother, took a great delight in barking back at them. She had a fair small bark, my sister. I think I never knew that before.

“They keep the birds off the blossom,” Josen said over his shoulder when I asked. “That’s the only thing they’re trained to. They’ve never met a friend, those dogs. Every creature that comes by their fence is the enemy. It’s the orchard they care for. The man at the door of the house, them — they barely notice.”

I rode on a while, listening to the eleventh dog take up the chorus, and thought a small bitter thought about a kingdom that had built its safety by teaching everything in it to hate everything else. I did not say it. I was learning to be sparing of the kind of remarks that came easily to me when I rode out of a castle into the open country with my heart high.

We came to the river by mid-morning, and the river was no small thing.

It ran out of the mountains we were riding toward, broad and brown and fast, and it cut the breadbasket in two as cleanly as a knife. There was the road, running down to it. There were the stone footings of the great bridge, blackened on the upstream side where the water had taken the timbers in some flood years ago. There were no timbers. Where the bridge should have spanned, there was nothing — only the two stone abutments and a wide swift gap between them, and the empty air over the river, and a tied raft of green branches caught against the upstream pillar where it had fetched up. And, on the near bank, a queue of carts and travellers and a few patient mules, and one fat-bodied flat barge at the water’s edge, being slowly worked across and back by a man on a long sweep oar.

I felt the King go still in the saddle beside Trimmel. I did not need to see his face.

I knew the story of this bridge. Every man at the council knew it. It had gone in the great winter floods three years back, and the lords whose lands fronted the river had fought for two seasons over who should pay to put it up again, until at last the King himself had paid for it out of his own purse — a thing nearly unheard of, even with him, but the kingdom’s grain ran over this water and grain was a thing he still understood. He had paid, and signed, and the Truth-Teller had come to him before the year was out and given him the report I had myself heard read in the council, sitting at his right hand: that the bridge was raised, the work was sound, the road was open again, the kingdom’s belt was buckled where it had been gaping.

And here was the gaping belt. The Truth-Teller had lied to him.

I do not think the King knew, before that moment, that he could be lied to about a bridge. The other lies — the smiling lords, the courtiers, the Queen — those had been the music his ears were tuned to for forty years. But the bridge was a thing of timber and stone. It was either there or it was not. He had paid for it himself. And it was not.

He sat his horse a long minute and looked at the water where his bridge was not. He said nothing. But I could see the bridge being unbuilt in him too, beam by beam — every small fact he had taken at the Truth-Teller’s word over twenty years coming loose under him, all at once, in front of a queue of farmers waiting for a barge. He gave no sign. The man could give no sign of anything; that armour, at least, was still on him. But he was very still in his saddle, and I marked it, and I rode forward to Josen to ask what we should do.

“We wait,” Josen said. “And we cross.”

“And the timing?”

“Some hours. The barge holds a wagon, or eight souls and their horses. There are three wagons ahead of us. We will go in pairs and pretend not to know one another while we wait. Match yourselves so no enemy in this queue takes us at a glance for the count we are. I’ll take Aelea.” He glanced past me toward the women. “Your mother with Maerith. The King with Trimmel — Trimmel, mind your mouth. You” — to me — “with Cinder.”

I did not love that pairing. Neither did I argue it. It was the cleanest read of the queue, and it left me the unknown thing on the road — Cinder — where I could see him.

We split. We watered the horses. We took a long breath of being eight strangers waiting on a barge.

Aelea wandered over to me where I sat on a piling at the water’s edge, and dropped down beside me without ceremony, and pulled her shoes off, and dangled her bare feet into the cold brown river. After a moment, because she was looking at me and waiting, I pulled mine off too. The water went straight through my bones to somewhere behind my eyes. It was wonderful.

She did not speak for a while. She was working herself up to it. I had seen her do this often enough to know the shape of it.

“Gord.”

“Yes.”

“Last night. The woman in the rushes. With the bailiff.”

I went still inside.

“What happened to her? Truly.”

I had not thought she had seen so much. I had hoped she had not. I picked my words slowly. “She lost her cow.”