Chapter 9: The King’s Road

We left in the dark, a full day before the day we had let the castle believe.

That was Josen’s doing, and it was the first of his rules I saw the worth of. The household had been told we rode at dawn on the morrow; the grooms, the kitchen, the under-stewards, every mouth that might carry a word out through the walls and down into the city and from there to whoever was paying for words that week — all of them believed we had another day. Only the eight of us knew otherwise, and we were in the saddle and moving through the lower yard while the sky was still nothing but a paler kind of black.

There was a fog. A heavy one, come up off the moat and the river in the night and lying thick over everything, so that the famous white walls were only a greater greyness in the grey, and the torches at the gate swam in halos and lit nothing. I have wondered since whether Josen prayed for that fog, or whether the Old Man sent it, or whether it was only the luck of the season. Whatever it was, we went out under it like ghosts, and I do not think a soul marked our going.

We did not take the proper road. The proper road out of the Great Castle runs straight and broad through the King’s Gate and down the processional way, where a royal party is meant to be seen. Josen took us the other way — in through the King’s Forest by a deer-track he knew, a thin winding thread of a path under dripping trees, the fog so close among the trunks that I could barely see Trimmel’s grey shape ahead of me. We rode in silence and single file, and the horses’ feet were near soundless on the wet leaf-mould, and for the better part of two hours the whole of the world was wet black trees and the breathing of horses and the cold beading on my face.

And I will confess a thing here, because I have promised these pages the truth. Under the fear — and I was afraid; we were eight souls riding out past the only safety any of us had ever known, with a mad king and a midwinter blade and a thousand-year-old summons all at our backs — under the fear, something in me had come alight that had never been lit before.

I was out.

Not down the wall by night to creep through the city and creep back. Out, truly, with the castle falling away behind me into the fog, the whole unknown country opening ahead, a road under me that did not end at any wall I knew. I was eighteen years old and had never in my life been further from the Great Castle than a man could walk between dawn and dark, except unless I was with an entire army, and now I was going to the edge of the maps and beyond. Aelea’s word, from two nights gone. The edge of the maps. I had thought, when she said it, that I was humouring a child. Riding through that dripping forest with my heart going hard and high, I understood she had simply seen the true shape of the thing before I had, the way she so often did.

When we came out of the trees the fog was thinning, and there below us, pale in the first real light, ran the King’s Highway — the great road, the spine of the kingdom, running straight as a spear-cast north and south as far as the eye could follow it. Josen drew up a moment at the forest’s edge and looked both ways along it, and then he grunted, which from Josen was a whole speech, and led us down onto the stones.

And then we rode.

We rode hard, and that too was Josen’s rule, and his reasoning was a thing I turned over with admiration as the miles went under us. We had no plan. That was the point of us. We had told no one where we would stop the first night, because we did not know ourselves; Josen meant to ride until dusk and then take whatever village we happened to be nearest, by no logic any watcher could have guessed in advance. A king’s progress is a slow and announced and predictable thing, and predictable things can be waited for on the road with knives. We would be none of those. We would be a tired cleric and his people, stopping wherever the dark caught us, gone again before it was light. The lack of a plan was the plan, and there was no spy in the kingdom clever enough to ambush a thing that did not know its own next move.

We were a holy man’s household, for the eyes of the road. The King rode as the cleric — a senior one, a man of some standing in the church, travelling with his wife and his grown daughter to some shrine or other, with a maid for the women and four hired men to ward them on the dangerous miles. I rode as one of the four hired men.

I will say what it was to watch my father wear that costume. The robe fit well enough; it was the humility of it that would not sit — the bent head, the mild way a travelling cleric must give place at a narrow road and thank a ferryman and be no one in particular. My father had not been no one in particular for forty years. And yet he bore it. Stiffly, with a tightness about the mouth I learned to read as the miles wore on, but he bore it — and a king travelling hidden is, after all, a thing that may be done properly; there were old precedents, kings who went among their people unknown. The Form gave his pride a door it could survive, and he walked through it, and hated it, and said nothing. I rode behind his stiff straight back in its borrowed brown and felt something for my father I had not felt in a long time, and did not have a name for, and did not entirely want.

We stopped once, at the noon of it, and that stop is worth the setting-down, for a reason that had nothing to do with what we ate and everything to do with it.

It was a cheese-maker’s, hard by the road — a long low stone building with the sour-sweet reek of the craft hanging about it, and a yard, and a woman who sold to travellers from a board by the door. Josen did the choosing. He would not be hurried at it, either; he stood at that board and went over the wheels and rounds like a man choosing a horse, pressing them with his thumb, smelling them, asking the woman sharp small questions about the milk and the age, until she stopped seeing a hired sword and started seeing someone who knew. He bought four kinds in the end — a hard pale one, sharp enough to bite back; a crumbling blue-veined one that he swore by and Trimmel made faces at; a soft young white one; and a smoked one the colour of old wood. And biscuits, dry and good. And a crock of dark relish, sweet and tart at once, that the woman made herself from autumn fruit.

We ate it sitting on a wall in the thin spring sun, and it was the best food I had eaten in a year — which is no small thing to say of cheese and biscuit, and which told me something. In the city, away from the palace, the food was grey; I had grown so used to the greyness that I had stopped tasting it. Here, half a day out, at a poor cheese-maker’s by a country road, the food was good. Better milk, better made, freely sold. The famine that stalked the city thinned out here, and would thin further still the further we went — which is precisely backwards from how a kingdom is meant to be, the rot deepest at its heart. I ate, and understood that with my mouth before my head, and said nothing of it.