Chapter 3: The March East

They rode out three mornings later, a column of some two hundred men winding down from Camelot’s gates into country that grew wilder and less friendly with every mile — hedgerows giving way to scrub, scrub giving way to the long, uneasy forest that had swallowed more than one careless patrol in the years since the Saxons had first tested this border.

Tetsuya rode near the front, beside Arthur rather than behind him, which he had noticed drew glances from knights who had spent years earning the right to that position and had not expected to see it handed to a stranger inside a fortnight. He did not think Arthur meant it as an insult to them. He thought, rather, that Arthur had simply stopped thinking of him as a stranger somewhere between the tournament yard and the induction hall, and had not yet noticed how quickly that shift had happened, or how plainly it showed.

The land itself told him things the maps hadn’t. He read the tree line the way he might once have read a coastline before a landing — where the cover thickened enough to hide a hundred men, where the ground opened into killing fields too wide for an ambush to work, where a stream cut the earth in a way that would slow cavalry to a crawl at exactly the wrong moment. It was not so different, in the end, from the terrain of his own world. Men who fought for their lives learned the same lessons everywhere, whatever language they fought in.

“You’ve gone quiet,” Arthur said, an hour into a silence that had stretched longer than court manners strictly allowed. “Should I take that as a bad sign?”

“You should take it as a man reading ground he intends to fight on,” Tetsuya said. “I have found that silence serves better than speech, in the hours before it matters which of us was right.”

Arthur considered that, and something in his face — not quite a smile, but close enough to its neighbor — suggested he’d filed it away for later use. “My knights talk more before a battle than after one,” he said. “I’ve always thought that told you something about which half of the fighting they actually enjoyed.”

“Then perhaps,” Tetsuya said, “your knights have not yet learned to enjoy the part that matters.”

II. The Village of Aldwyn

They reached the third burned village by midafternoon, and whatever ease had carried the column through the morning’s easy conversation went out of it the moment the smoke smell reached them on the wind.

Aldwyn had not been large — a scatter of houses, a mill, a small stone church that had survived the fire only because the Saxons hadn’t troubled to burn what wouldn’t burn easily. What remained of the rest sat in blackened ruin, still faintly smoking two days on, the kind of slow, stubborn burn that spoke of a fire set with enough oil and enough time to make certain it caught everywhere at once. Tetsuya had seen villages burned before, on his own coasts, by raiders who understood exactly the same lesson these Saxons had learned — that terror was a weapon in its own right, one that did as much work in villages the raiders never reached as in the ones they did.

He dismounted and walked the ruins slower than most of the column had patience for, reading what the ash and the trampled earth had to tell him. Arthur let him work without asking why, which Tetsuya had come to understand was its own kind of trust — a willingness to let a man work in silence rather than demand he explain himself before he was ready.

“Twenty men, perhaps twenty-five,” Tetsuya said at last, straightening from a boot print half-filled with rain. “On foot, not mounted — they came from the tree line there, and left the same way, in good order rather than a scatter, which tells me this was not simple plunder. Plunderers run in every direction at once, weighed down with whatever they could carry. These men left together, unburdened, the way soldiers leave a battlefield they’ve already decided isn’t worth dying for.”