The beast ambled through town, a clatter of maille jostling his flanks, feathers and beads rattling from his reins. His hips, packed with muscle, rocked his rider back and forth, while she leaned back to ease the weight on his downhill climb from Combe.
The stench of Bree hit her like a splash of filth from the gutter. She lifted the stained scarf over her nose to repel the rot of human waste.
“A mask? What you think we can’t see you?” a Redcloak jeered as she trundled past.
“To keep out your reek,” she grumbled through the spores of dust clotting its fibers.
He had smirked and continued his procession. She turned her steed towards the jail. Bree had not changed since she had ridden south in escort of a company of horsemen.
It was not an insult to have spear-wielding allies in the north. There were advantages – access to oiled leather and crisp metal, horse-head trinkets for barter. But she did not eat with them, nor drink with them, and only one of them she had ever let between her legs.
The horselords traded gifts for favours, gold for loyalty. She had seen the rings men braided into their beards, tokens of their masters’ pleasure. She had none of them. All she had she bought by trading her own.
Plunder fell under different rules. Around the woven rags she laced the broken arm rings plucked from silver hordes. Earrings of gold freshly polished of grave dust hung from the laces in her jerkin. All of them for sale. Even the sword at her hip.
No market today, and the Pony patrons were not drunk enough yet to barter gold for glass. She lassoed her horse to a post outside the jail’s gates and climbed the steps, the wood cane making up for her foot’s drag in rhythm.
He had to be here. Or had Bree already forgotten its enemies?
She scoured the board of wanted signs. Crude renditions of men and women she had seen drinking with their feet up in the Wattle’s front rooms. Easy enough to avoid Watchers these days. And if they didn’t, well, was it the law that guaranteed release from capture in under a week? Or was it simply the idleness of the men who enforced it?
He had to be here.
The pages covering promising sketches of thick-jawed men fell torn to her feet as she ripped them away.
Nothing.
Rhoane turned from the wall. It was useless to do more. She would have to find him herself. Her hand tightened around the pommel of her cane, thinner than a club but as deadly when wielded with vengeance.
Vincent didn’t come north because he had to, she knew that. It wasn’t business or exile that gave him some fortunate excuse to return to the dead fields of their homeland. Two weeks she had been back, and Cyndyn not that much longer. Chance was not something that hillmen believed in.
He was here, and she knew why. He was here for her.
