Chapter 12: The Market

We were saddled and gone before the sun was up.

The publican came down to the yard himself to see us off, and bowed deeply to my mother, and refused her purse with one hand while putting the other lightly on Aelea’s shoulder for a blessing he did not say aloud. He stood in the gate as we rode out and did not move until we had turned the corner past the church. I have wondered since whether he had been hoping for us, all those years, or only hoping for someone — for proof that what he saw of his country was visible to other eyes, somewhere. I do not know. I never saw him again.

Josen took us out of the village by the road that ran south for a quarter-mile and then turned hard west onto a lesser track, and the King looked across at him sharply.

“This is not the road we marked.”

“No, Sir,” said Josen, easy. “Our publican told the lady of the armed bands. The main road runs straight where they have been seen. This way is longer by half a day, but it carries us round the lord’s quarrel — if the quarrel is real — and brings us back onto the main road two villages on.”

The King considered it a moment, and inclined his head, and said no more. He had taken the news of the bridge yesterday harder than I had let myself see at the time. He was not yet, this morning, ready to override a man who was reading the country for him. The Form bent a little further for the road.

We rode west.

The country thinned as the morning wore on. We were leaving the breadbasket behind us, by degrees — the fat dark soil giving way to thinner brown, the great wheat-fields breaking up into smaller patches with rough stone walls round them, then giving way altogether to grazing land and rough scrub. The farms grew further apart, and meaner. The orchard dogs of yesterday were gone; there were no orchards to keep here. The dogs were the kind that hung about a yard with their ribs showing and barked once, low and tired, as we passed.

I rode for an hour beside Trimmel without speaking, watching the country fade, and at last he said, almost to himself: “This is what the war eats.”

“Sir?”

“Look at it. Three days west of the breadbasket and you might as well be in another kingdom. Where do you suppose the boys went, off these places? Off to the war with my brother in command of them, I suppose. Off to the war and not coming home. So the land does not get worked. So the houses do not get patched. So the wives wear what they had when their men went, year on year, and the children eat what they can find.” He spat into the dust. “It is the same in every county west of the river. We win the war by emptying the country to fight it; the country empties; we lose. We lose either way.” He glanced at me. “I should not say so.”

“You should,” I said, low. “But not in earshot of my father.”

“I am not a fool, lad.”

“No.” I considered him. “I have begun to think you are not.”

He laughed at that, surprised, and we rode on.

I had not understood Trimmel before this road. I had taken him as Bran had taken him, with affection and a kind of indulgent dismissal — Trimmel, dear honest plodder. I had been wrong. He was not a quick man, but he was a seeing one. He looked at a country and a country was what he saw. There were worse instruments to carry on a hard road, and I had been carrying him in my mind as a less serious one than he was. I corrected the inventory.

It was at about that hour, with the country dwindling around us, that Coll, riding at the front, lifted a hand and said: “Market.”

The market sat in a clearing where four bad roads came together at the foot of a low rise — a market town in name, a clutch of permanent stalls in fact, with the canvas of perhaps fifty more stalls thrown up around them on this market-day. Smoke from a charcoal pit; the cry of children; an old donkey grumbling in the line. The smell of pies. We came to it at mid-morning, and I felt the road’s grimness lift a little around all of us.

Josen drew us up at the edge of it. “This is our last chance. After here, we eat what we shoot and what we carry. The grass, by the lord’s leave, costs nothing.”

He had it laid out. Coll would take the herbs and the dry-keep — flour, salt, hard cheese, oil, the bag of small things a man in the wilderness curses himself for not having. Josen would take the sleeping gear, two more rolls of waxed canvas, fresh oil for the saddles. Cinder would take meat that would keep and the bread for the next two days. They would go in turn through the market and bring back to where the rest of us would stand by the horses, two of them in the market and one at the horses at all times, in case the day decided to be a different kind of day.

My mother, surprising me, came down off her horse and stood with her hand on its neck and watched the market with a kind of small ferocity. “Maerith,” she said, “you will go with Cinder. The bread is to be the heaviest the baker has; the bottom of a loaf is the best meal a man eats on a road. The cheese is to be the hardest he has; we will need to carry it three days. The dried meat is to be the lean cut. Mind he does not buy the gristle. He will buy the gristle if a woman is not standing there to mind him.”

Maerith bowed her head. “Yes, Your —” she caught herself smoothly, “— yes, lady.”

“And tell the baker,” my mother went on, “that we are buying his good loaves and not his bad ones. I do not care what we pay. I care what we eat. There is a difference.”

It was the most use my mother had got out of being the Queen, on the whole of the road so far. I marked it. She had ridden two days quietly, and watched, and had now arrived at a market and was running it as she had run her household for forty years. Some part of her that had been folded up in the carriage was unfolding. Coll caught my eye, and raised an eyebrow, and the eyebrow said: that one is more than she lets on. I gave him back the smallest nod.

Aelea, beside her mother, was watching all of it with shining eyes. “Can I have a pie?”

“You may,” said the Queen. “But you may not leave my side.”

“I will get them,” I said. I had been about to suggest it. I needed to move; standing two days in the saddle had put a thing in my legs that would not come out without walking. “How many. Two each?”

“Three each,” said Coll, “and one for me besides. I am not a small man.”

“Six. Seven. Done.”

I left them. Josen, who I think had read my restlessness, said nothing.

I went into the market with my purse warm against my thigh and felt, for the first time in three days, like a free man.

I do not think I had quite known until then how much the disguise had been wearing on me. To be a hired man at the elbow of a cleric is to be no one in particular; that is the whole point of the disguise; but to be no one in particular is the freedom I had spent four years climbing down a wall to get a taste of, and I had had it, here, by the bushel, for three days, and I had not yet stopped to feel it. Now, walking alone among stalls of cabbages and bolts of cloth and an old man selling small wooden charms, with a purse and a hunger and no eye on me at all, I felt the freedom of it sit in my chest like a swallowed bird, and I think I smiled.

Last night I had stood up to four men in a pub. I had been good. The room had clapped, and a shepherd had called me a brother in arms. I had walked away clean. The danger of this road was sharpening every day, and somewhere not many hours from here a river waited with a death in it that I had given my consent to; and against all of that, walking through this market with the smell of pies in my nose, I was very nearly happy.

I should have been more careful of it. Happy on a road like ours is a thing a man should look at sidelong and not lean his weight on. But I was eighteen, and I was out of the castle, and a country market on a sunny morning is a thing to be carried by, and so I walked on, and bought my pies, and ate the first one out of hand as I walked, and that is when I made my first mistake.

The pie-woman, taking my coin, peered into my purse. It was a kindly-eyed peer, of the sort an old woman gives an unfamiliar coin to be sure she has not been cheated. Then she peered a second time, the way an old woman does not, and her eyes flicked up to my face and back.

Too much money. Too much for a man at arms in this kind of country.

I pocketed the purse, gave her my dullest smile, and walked on, eating my pie. But I had been seen. I knew it before I had walked four stalls. I felt the small particular pressure between the shoulder blades of a man being marked from behind by more than one pair of eyes.

I did not turn. Davil had taught me long ago that to turn is to confirm what the watcher only suspects. I walked on as a hired man on his easy hour, eating his pie, eyes ahead.

The crowd thinned at the end of the row. I let my pace ease, looked left and right at the stalls as a man does who is choosing where to go next, and used the eye-flick to take in what was behind me without turning the head.

A girl. Perhaps eighteen, perhaps younger. Pretty, in a sharp small way. She was looking at me, and when she caught my eye she smiled, brightly, the way a girl smiles when she means to be noticed.

Davil had taught me this one too. A pretty girl in a crowd alone is not a pretty girl alone in a crowd. Look for her men.

I did not stop. I did not return the smile. I gave her the slightly-flustered look of a hired man too country to know how to be flirted with, and I turned into the next row, and looked for cover.

The cover stood at the start of the row, where the row’s first stall ought to have been. It was not a stall. It was a tent — the small dark canvas kind a man would camp in, set up here on the market day as a private place of business. A board out front, painted in a thick uncertain hand:

Brawena the Medium. Fortunes and Curses.

I looked at the board, and at the tent flap, and over my shoulder at the corner I had just turned, and I made a small fast calculation.

A medium in a country market. In the capital, this woman would have been hanged for the sign alone. The kingdom’s writ ran thin here; she had stayed alive, and was advertising. Whatever she did inside, it was not a thing the King’s law was reaching for at the moment. And inside that tent I would be out of the line of sight of a girl whose men I did not yet know.

I lifted the tent flap, and went in.

It was dark, and full of incense, and the canvas had been hung inside with painted cloth in long stripes that the eye could not settle on. I stood blinking in the doorway. The tent was empty but for a small black-draped table and the woman behind it, and the smell of the incense was thick enough to chew.

“Welcome, young man! Come on in, don’t be afraid. My name is Brawena, famous medium of this country, known up and down the road from Tilesford to the Pass. What is your name, and what winds have blown you into my corner of the world?”

Her voice was a performance — pitched low and warm, as a medium’s voice should be — and she sat there in a quantity of black and a great deal of paint that did not move when her face did. Her hair was the colour of dried blood, and she wore a tall black hat with a brim wide enough to shade her shoulders, and she had a black robe stretched, by some marvel of stitching, across a chest that would have given pause to a much braver man than I was that morning. On the table in front of her there were six small things laid out in a row, and a silver cup, and a deck of painted cards face-down.