Chapter 19 – The Road to Court
The king's road met them on the fourth day: wider than any valley track, ditch cut clean on both sides, mile-stones set every thousand paces with neat numbers hammered into iron. More banners moved here—traders with bright wagons, priests in gray, small lords riding with six or eight men who tried to look like twenty. The Delsar hawk drew eyes, and so did the neat files behind it.
Aric rode in front with Wren and Sir Malrec. He wore the coat the tailor had cut for him and kept his axe strapped to the saddle, not his belt. It was a small choice, but men on roads judged small things. The plain old ring his mother had given him sat in his pocket where his thumb could turn it once and forget it.
"Files in twos," Wren called back. "Shields to the outside, pikes to the cart side. Quiet feet."
They moved like that for an hour and came to a bridge of three stone spans. The river ran fast below, spring-high. Tollkeepers waited under a red awning, scales polished, quills sharp. They stepped out when they saw the hawk banner, hands already open.
Malrec passed a folded sheet: the crown's schedule with seals pressed deep. The tollkeepers read once, then again. One tried to add a copper for "river height."
"River doesn't charge more to pass under the bridge," Malrec said, calm. He pointed to the line that said so. The man swallowed and bowed them through with the right coins in his palm.
On the far side two smaller escorts muttered as the road parted for the hawk.
"They see you," Malrec said as they rode on. "That's coin at court. Spends fast if you don't mind the edges."
By noon, a tinker's cart ahead of them snapped a pin and slewed across the lane. Oxen lowed. A merchant behind him began to shout that he'd lose a day. Aric swung down, set a shoulder under the axle, and lifted while Wren hammered in the spare. The tinker's hands shook.
"Thank you, my lord," he managed.
"Check your next pin before you start," Aric said. He set the cart down and walked on without waiting for blessing. The merchant stopped shouting.
That evening they slept at a wayhouse where three roads met. Straw was clean, stew honest. The keeper ran a ledger that balanced; Aric looked out of habit and paid for the men to sleep under a roof in turns. In the corner two men with Keld colors spoke too softly and looked too hard at the escort. Wren shifted two shields to sit between them and the door. The Keld men found other business outside.
"Spies?" one of the younger Hawks whispered.
"Ears," Wren said. "Ears are everywhere on this road."
The next morning a caravan joined from the west: bright-painted wagons, bells on the oxen, guards whose helms shone more than their eyes. At its head rode Lord Fenrel, green wave on white. He smiled with too many teeth and drew up alongside without asking.
"You ride neat for a valley house," Fenrel said. "Is it true you broke a siege with your bare hands?"
"It was many hands," Aric said. "Ours held."
Fenrel laughed too loud. "Modest. Court loves a bold story better. Perhaps you'll tell mine when you reach it."
He spurred away, but his guards kept glancing back, counting Hawks and measuring wagons.
Malrec rode a little closer. "Crows," he said.
"Carrion?" Aric asked.
"Sometimes," Malrec said. "Sometimes they carry it back to the king's table."
They kept their own pace. Aric refused Fenrel's invitation to ride abreast twice—once with polite thanks, once with silence. At the midday halt the Fenrel men tried to set their camp on top of Delsar's space by the mile-stone.
"Marker says this turn is ours," Wren told their sergeant. "You'll have the next. We'll switch again tomorrow. Road law."
The sergeant looked to his lord. Fenrel measured Aric's face and decided not to make a scene. His men settled on the far side with a mutter that died quick when Wren's shields happened to rest facing their fire.
On the sixth day they ran a narrow where the road squeezed between river and rock. A petty baron with eight riders and a temper tried to push his way past on the blind bend.
"Right of way," he snapped, pointing at his faded boar's head banner. "My house is the elder here."
Malrec was already reciting road custom in a soft voice. Aric held up a hand. "We'll step aside," he said. "You'll take the inside by the rock."
The baron puffed. "I said—"
"The inside by the rock," Aric repeated, not moving his eyes. "It's the safe line. Take it."
The baron took it, cheeks red. Fifty yards later his overloaded cart struck the rough edge of the stone and went crooked. He swore. His men pulled and pushed and made it worse. Aric rode past, swung down, and set the wheel straight with one hard lift. He didn't look at the baron as he walked back to his horse.
"Thank you," one of the riders said under his breath. The baron said nothing at all. When they reached open ground he pulled his men aside without another word and let the hawk pass.
That night, in a small temple waystation, a priestess with ink on her fingers asked for a donation for the poor of the road.
"Silver?" she asked without coyness. "Or grain?"
"Grain," Aric said, and called for a sack. "And this book." He gave her a simple copy of the river tallies—columns, dates, neat marks. "Teach boys to count true. Counting keeps hunger off longer than alms."
She blinked at the ledger and held it like it weighed more than the sack. "We'll teach," she said. "We'll remember who sent it."
On the eighth day two of Fenrel's men drifted too close, loud with wine and the road, calling Valeor oarsmen thieves and Hawks river-peasants with ideas. It was meant to be a spark. Wren lifted two fingers and two shields stepped forward and simply stood. Aric didn't look at the men; he looked past them at Fenrel, who had turned to watch and was smiling too much again.
"If you want to speak," Aric told the pair, "sober first."
They flushed and muttered off. Fenrel said nothing, which was an answer.
The king's road climbed and leveled. Banners thickened. A patrol in the crown's blue stopped them at a stone post where the mile marker wore a tiny iron crown.
"Names, colors, purpose," the captain said, brisk but not unkind.
Malrec gave names and papers. The captain looked them over and the escort over and grunted. "Files neat," he said. "Most houses aren't." He wrote something on a slate and handed them a small lead token stamped with the day's date. "Show this at the next post."
Aric nodded. "What's written on your slate?" he asked.
"Who rides clean," the captain said. "They'll hear it in the city before you arrive."
The ninth day, the capital broke the horizon: pale towers, wide walls, flags like a field of new flowers in the wind. The river bent toward a glitter that could only be sea. Smoke hung in a high blue sheet. Sound carried a long way—market cries, horns, the roll of cart wheels that never seemed to stop.
Men sat taller in their saddles without being told. Wren checked straps no one had touched since dawn. Malrec put his quill away and smoothed his coat like a man ready to go on stage.
The road swelled into the king's approach: three lanes, each broad enough for a cart to turn on, lined with plane trees just putting out leaves. Stalls crowded the ditches—cooks with hot pans, sellers of brass hawks on strings, a boy offering songs about the ridge for a coin. The first verse had the names wrong and the feeling right. Wren bought it anyway and told the boy the names. The boy nodded earnestly and then sang the old way to the next passerby. Songs didn't learn as fast as men.
At the outer gate a clerk with a polished head and a harried face took their names again and tried to impound their gifts "for the safety of the palace."
"They travel with the heir," Malrec said, polite as water. He showed the schedule. "They'll be lodged in the host field under our watch until the chamberlain signs the receipts."
The clerk tried a second time, softer. Aric took one step forward and let the man see the neat files, the clean boots, and the way the escort watched him like a wall.
"We'll bring the gifts ourselves when the chamberlain calls," Aric said. "We'll sign together."
The clerk swallowed and wrote a new note. "Host Field North," he said. "Blue pennants. Your token gets you past the earthwork."
Inside the earthwork was a city of tents and pavilions—colors of a hundred houses, cooks shouting, smiths hammering, horses tied in long lines. Boys ran messages for pennies. Dogs wove between cart wheels and lived in the cracks. A place to be seen before you were seen.
Wren found a square of ground the size of two wagons and made it an orderly camp in twenty minutes: ropes down straight, canvas tight, a single line for the latrine cut where the wind would carry the smell away from food. He set the wagons where no hand could reach them without a hand on a Hawk shoulder seeing it. Malrec sent two men to the chamberlain with names. Aric walked the line once, then twice, and didn't change a thing. That told men more than if he'd moved pegs.
Dusk came down like a lid. The city didn't quiet. It shifted sounds—market voices thinning, music picking up, a dozen kinds of iron ringing on a dozen anvils. In the host field, cooks ladled stew and arguments started about nothing and stopped when a sergeant looked at a man without speaking.
A runner in the king's blue found their fire an hour after sundown. He saluted without flourish and read from a strip of parchment.
"House Delsar, you will be received at second bell tomorrow. Escort to be ten at the palace gate, the rest to remain in the field. Gifts to be presented to the chamberlain's table after introduction."
"Signed?" Malrec asked.
"By the chamberlain's hand," the runner said, and held it out so the legate could see the small neat mark.
"Good," Malrec said. He folded the strip and tucked it into his sleeve.
Wren saw the runner off with bread for the road. When he came back he looked at Aric, not Malrec. "We sleep in turns," he said. "No drink tonight. Boots by the bed, coats ready."
Aric nodded. "Wake me on the third watch."
"You're up in the morning," Wren said. "I'll take the third."
"I'll wake anyway," Aric said. It wasn't a boast. It was how his body worked now.
He walked the field edge once more. A trio of men in unfamiliar colors watched too long and stopped when he looked back. A woman from a salt-house sharpened knives and sang under her breath. A boy with a basket of hot rolls tried to sell him one for twice the fair price and blushed when Aric gave him the coin anyway with the right number named.
By the time he lay down, the city had settled into its night rhythm. The host field snored. Fires threw low orange. He slept like a man in a barracks with one hand near a boot and woke twice to the sound of feet that weren't his. Both times it was Wren making a round. The third time it was dawn.
They washed faces, shook dust from coats, checked edges that had never seen a fight and would not today. Malrec pinned a small strip of hawk-blue on Aric's collar, no crest, just color. Wren lined ten men to go to the gate with him—clean boots, steady eyes, all the little things that made strangers think "order" before they thought "threat."
"Remember," Malrec said low as they started toward the inner gate, "every hall is a field."
Aric nodded once. The capital rose ahead of him, white and tall, full of rooms he'd never stepped in and men who would try to step on him. He had his footing.
He walked on.