Chapter 15: The Roasted Chestnut

I was the last man on watch.

Josen had taken the middle hours and woken Trimmel for the small dawn shift, and Trimmel, in turn, had let me sleep through till the grey came. When I sat up the fire was a low red eye still, banked under its ash, and Aelea was a small dark shape stirring on the other side of it.

She was awake. She had been awake some time. She was sitting cross-legged in her cloak with her hand near the bank of ash, not touching it, watching it the way a person watches a thing she has been told will surprise her.

She saw me sitting up and her whole face went bright.

“Watch,” she said, in a fierce whisper.

I watched.

She blew on the bank, the way I had told her to blow, low and steady, and the ash lifted in a small grey breath and the heart of the coals showed underneath, bright orange. She fed in three twigs from her tinder-pile and one breath after that, the flame came up — clear, lifting, real — and she had a fire.

She looked at me across it with her mouth open.

“It worked.”

“It worked.”

“It just worked.”

“You banked it. You did the work last night. It only had to come back when you asked it.”

She sat for a moment looking at her fire as though it had told her a secret, and then she scrambled to her feet and went to put more wood on it — the larger pieces from the night’s stack — and very quickly there was a proper morning fire in the meadow and the others were stirring out of their bedrolls toward the warmth of it. Coll, who had not been asleep so much as quiet, came up smiling.

“My Lady the princess has built us a fire.”

“I had banked it. From last night.”

“Ah. Even better.” He winked at her. “You will do that every camp from here on, then. You have the trick.”

She glowed.

Maerith was up and combing through the Queen’s hair, slowly, working out the tangles the river and the cold dell had put into it. The Queen sat very still with her eyes closed and let her do it. It was the first time on the road I had seen the Queen let anyone touch her hair, and the first time, I think now, that any of us had seen her wear that small luxury of being attended to and not in a hurry; she had ridden two days as a cleric’s wife and now, on the wilderness side of the river, she was something nearer to herself.

The King came round from where he had slept, rubbed his hands together at the fire, and looked at Aelea, and did a thing he had not done in years. He laid his hand on her crown of fair hair for a moment, very briefly, in passing, and went on to take the cup of broth Maerith handed him without breaking her stroke through the Queen’s hair.

Aelea did not appear to notice. I think she did. I think she chose not to make it more than it was.

We ate the cold remains of last night’s fish, and a heel of bread, and we struck camp slowly because the saddle Coll meant to take us over was, by his account, only a half-day’s ride. While we ate, my father did one more thing I marked. He went to his saddlebag, drew out the bundle he had been carrying since we left the castle that none of us had spoken of, and stepped behind the screen of birch to change his clothes.

When he came back he was the King.

Not the King of the council chamber — the great robes were not in any of our saddlebags, and would not have served on this road if they had been — but the King as a man on a journey of his own. A good wool tunic in the deep red of the house, a leather jerkin over it, his own riding cloak, and his own sword on his belt where the cleric’s small knife had been. The sword I had seen in his hand only at the great spring reviews and the rare occasions when he had stood at arms in the courtyard for the Captain of the Reds to inspect. He carried it as if he had never not carried it, which, I understood for the first time, was perhaps true; he had been a man at arms long before he had been a king who did not carry one.

The change said the thing the river had said the day before. We were past the kingdom’s edge. The cleric’s disguise had taken us as far as it could take us, and we did not need it for the wilderness; the wilderness did not care who we were.

Coll, sipping his broth, looked at the King and gave him a small nod of acknowledgment. The King returned it. Neither said anything.

“Up the brook three more miles,” Coll said then, looking round at the rest of us, “and we come to the head of it. Then there is a long shoulder up to the saddle. By noon we are over and into the next valley.”

“And the forest?” said the King.

“A day further. Perhaps two. Depending.”

“On what.”

“On what the country tells us as we go.”

The King accepted that. He had begun, since the river, to accept things like that from Coll without pressing.

We mounted and went on up the brook.

The morning was the best riding of the journey.

We climbed slowly, the brook on our right diminishing as we rose toward its source, the wood thinning around us, the sky opening overhead in a great pale blue that I had not seen the like of in years from the inside of the kingdom. By the second hour we were above the woods entirely and the country had opened out into long grassy shoulders dotted with grey stone and small windflowers. We could see for miles.

In the middle distance, down across a long valley to the south, we saw deer. A whole small herd of them, perhaps thirty head, grazing slow over a clearing, with two young ones close to their mothers and one old hind on watch at the high edge of the clearing with her head up. Coll stopped us at a high place and let us look.

“You will not see that in the kingdom,” he said. “They have all been hunted thin.”

Aelea, on her horse beside me, watched them with her hand at her mouth.

“They’re living, ” she said.

I did not entirely know what she meant. I think now I do. The deer in the kingdom’s country, where they survive at all, live like men in the Drunken Pig — at the edge of the dark, keeping low, getting through the day. The deer in Coll’s country lived in the open, with the morning on them, doing their work as themselves. It was a thing Aelea had not understood was possible.

A little while later, as we rode on across the open, the eagle came over.

It was an ordinary mountain eagle, not the great green-and-blue thing from the lawn-feast, only a long brown wide-winged bird high over us riding the morning warm air in slow gyres. Coll glanced up at it and named it for Aelea — a tawny eagle, he said, a fish-eater, more likely after the trout in the brook below than at us. The eagle paid us no attention at all. It worked its slow circle once, twice, three times, and slid off down the valley to the east.

Aelea watched it the whole way. I do not think she breathed.

It was after the eagle that Coll, drawing us up at a turn in the trail, lifted his chin and said, low: “Look. Across.”

Across.

We were on a long high slope, with another long high slope a quarter-mile off across a wide stony cwm. On the opposite slope, perhaps two hundred paces away, perhaps a little more, a brown shape was working slowly at the edge of a stand of stunted pine. It was, I understood after a moment, a bear. It was the size of a small ox. It had its head down at a fallen log it had rolled over and was eating something that lived under the log with great patience.

Aelea made a small sound. The King’s hand went to his belt.

“He is not interested in us,” said Coll, easy. “He is not coming this way. He has woken up out of his winter in a mood of his own and he is finding what spring has left him under his logs. Watch.”

We watched. The bear worked the log. He sat back on his great haunches and licked at his paw with a slow tongue. He turned his head, and even at that distance I saw the white-tipped guard hairs lift along his shoulders in the sun. He looked across the cwm at us, briefly, the way a man at his lunch in a window glances at a passing carriage. He went back to his log.

“That,” said Coll, “is the lord of this country. Not your father. Not the lord of Wenmouth. Him. These hills are his hills. We are passing through his rooms with his permission, which is given freely so long as we make no claim on them. Look at him a long time, princess. You will not see his like again unless you come back here.”

She looked at him a long time. She did not speak. None of us did, much. The bear ate his log-thing and ignored us, and we sat our horses and watched him in the bright morning, and after a while Coll said, “Now we go on quietly,” and we did, and the bear did not look up again.

Aelea, when we had ridden a hundred paces past, turned in her saddle to look once more, and a small word came out of her that I will set down because I want to remember it. She said: “Thank you.”

She had not said it to anyone. She had said it to the bear, I think, or to the country, or to whatever in the world had let a bear be alive in his hills and let her see it. I have thought about it since.

We crested the saddle a little before noon.

It was lower than I had expected — a smooth gentle shoulder, not the great stone pass I had pictured from castle stories — and from the top of it we could see down into the next valley, which ran north into trees that did not end. Coll pointed.

“There. The forest begins at that ridge. It runs unbroken for fifty miles. We will be in it by the day after tomorrow.”

“The Old Man?” said Aelea.

“Somewhere in the middle of it. We are not sure where. He will let us know.”

“How?”

“The wilderness will tell us, when it is ready.”

Aelea nodded as though that were a sensible answer, which to her, then, it was.

I let my horse drop a step out of the line. The others rode on a few paces past the crest, looking forward into the new country, and I held my place a moment at the top, and turned in my saddle, and looked back.

The kingdom was behind me.

I could see, from the saddle, the country we had ridden over the last four days — the long open stretches of the Great Field hazed at this distance, the line of hills before it that hid the bridge that had not been built, the further blur where the breadbasket began and the fat fields of my father’s heart-country ran east to the capital we could not see. It was a great deal of country. It was a great deal of trouble. Somewhere down in it was a publican who had known my mother and warned us; somewhere a widow who had taken her coin without knowing the hand; somewhere a captain in a brown jerkin with five men and three years’ worth of unpaid cloth; somewhere a tent that had been struck, with a woman who had read bones at me and would not see me again; somewhere a man in a buried room who fed kindnesses to his fire; somewhere a back room of an inn where men in their cups had sworn over a bowl of grey stew to put a knife in my father at midwinter. All of it was back there. All of it was waiting.

And I was riding north.

I sat the horse a moment longer than I should have sat it. Should I be here at all? The question came up clean and I did not push it down. Should the kingdom’s heir be riding north into a wilderness on the word of a giant bird, when there are men in his country planning the killing of his blood, and lords sitting on grain that would feed children, and a Truth-Teller who has the King’s ear and would burn the King’s house to keep his own? I did not have an answer. The road had been chosen for me by my father and not by me, and my father had been chosen by the bird and not by himself, and the question of whether I should have ridden was not, in any sense I could lay hands on, mine to answer.

But the further question was. Will I be able to get back? I had said yes to the road. I had committed five days of riding and a killing on a riverbank and a sleep in a meadow and a banked fire to it. The midwinter was perhaps eight months off. There was still time to come back across this saddle and go down into that country and do whatever might be done about the men with the bowl of grey stew. There was time, if the Old Man let us go.

That was a question I had not yet allowed myself.

I shook my head once, hard, the way Davil had taught me to shake a heavy thought out of the place where it could fix me, and I turned my horse and rode down to catch the others. None of them had marked the small pause at the top. The country opened ahead of us, and I rode into it, with the look back of a man who has set down a thing he must come back for.

We rode down off the saddle slowly. We did not stop to eat at the top because Coll said the wind there was sharp and there was a better place a mile down where the slope softened. We would eat in the saddle, as we rode, from the bread and the dry-keep — and Coll had something extra.

He turned in his saddle and felt in his pack, and came up with a small cloth bag.

“I had forgotten. Roasted chestnuts. From the market yesterday. Maerith, would you share these around?”

“Gladly.”

He handed the bag to her. She rode forward, and gave one to each of us in turn — one to the King, one to the Queen, one to Trimmel, one to Coll himself, one to Josen, one to me, and last to Aelea, who was riding alongside me at that moment.

“For you, princess. They are sweet.”

Aelea took the chestnut between her finger and her thumb. She looked at it. She looked uncertain.

“I have not had one of these before.”

“They are very good,” I told her. “Try a small bite. If you like it, finish it. If you don’t, give it to me.”

She took a small tentative bite, no larger than the head of a pin, off the rounded end of the nut.

She chewed it three times.

She screwed up her face.

“It tastes bitey, ” she said. “And horrible. I don’t like it.”

She held the bitten nut out to me on the palm of her hand. I took it. I put it into my mouth and ate it without thinking — and there was a small surprised pause in my chewing, because the nut was not bitey or horrible at all; it was sweet and floury and mildly woody on the tongue, exactly as Coll had said. I ate it, and laughed at her, and said: “It is sweet, Aelea. You don’t know what you’re missing.”

She made a face at me.

We rode on perhaps thirty paces.

She made a small sound beside me.

I looked.

Her face was wrong.

It was flushed — not the high colour of a child’s exertion, but a darker, blotched flush that was coming up in patches under the skin of her jaw and her throat. Her lip was thicker than it had been a minute before. Her eyes were widening, not in fear yet, in confusion. She put her hand to her throat. She tried to say my name and her tongue would not form the word; the word came out swollen and thick.