35. Bridge Crossing
Bridge Crossing
On the fourth day, it rained.
Not the gentle rain of spring that farmers prayed for, but the kind of rain that came down like it had personal grudges to settle. Sheets of water turned the road to soup, turned every dip and hollow into a trap waiting to swallow wheels and break axles.
The storm had been worse upstream. What should have been a simple creek crossing had become a torrent of brown water, swollen with mountain runoff and angry with debris.
The bridge that should have spanned it was gone, torn away by the current.
Only stone pilings remained, rising from the surge like broken teeth.
The water ran thick with mountain soil and branches and the bloated carcass of what might have been a sheep, spinning slowly in an eddy near the far bank.
Baldir arrived first with his shield line, studying the problem with the same calculating attention he brought to everything. When I rode up with my team, he was already sketching possibilities in the mud with a stick, drawing lines and angles that meant nothing to me from horseback.
“Current’s too strong for a swimming crossing,” he said without looking up. His voice carried the absolute certainty of someone who’d never had to swim for his life. “But the stones are solid. We could rope across if we can find the right approach.”
I stared at the rushing water, calculating weights and distances. The current moved fast enough to carry a man downstream before he could reach the far side. Fast enough to drown horses. Fast enough to turn a mistake into a body.
Behind us, the column had bunched up on the narrow road. Horses stamped and whinnied, nervous from the noise of the water and the smell of dead sheep. One of the supply wagons had already tilted where the road edge had softened, its wheel sinking into mud that wanted to swallow it whole.
“What about the carriages?” I asked. “Cromwell and the other servants. We can’t rope them across that current.”
Baldir’s jaw tightened at the question. Or maybe at who was asking it. He straightened from his sketching, rain dripping from his dark hair, plastering it to his skull.
“There’s only one way to get anything done,” he said. “Work.”
“The carriages alone weigh half a ton each,” I said, watching Henrik’s personal transport sink another inch into the mud even as we spoke. “Add the rain making everything slick, horses already spent from fighting this mud all morning. A rope bridge won’t hold them.”
Baldir held up a hand and gestured at the stone pilings. “We build a temporary span. Cut timber from those trees, lash it down to the pilings, move everything across piece by piece. Standard field engineering.”
“That’ll take hours,” Perrin said, stepping closer to look at the water. “Maybe we could scout downstream for a ford, or.”
“Your men talk out of turn.”
Baldir cut him off without even looking at him, his eyes fixed on me instead.
The dismissal was absolute. Perrin wasn’t a person to him, just a tool that had made noise when it shouldn’t have.
The words landed harder than they should have.
Old anger warmed the back of my neck, the kind that had kept the Red Gale marching through forty years of war and dying and watching good soldiers get treated like furniture by men who’d never held a line.
I opened my mouth to defend him, then caught myself. This wasn’t the barracks. Different rules applied now, and breaking them carried consequences I couldn’t afford to spend on pride.
Grit had gone still, studying the water with the focused attention he gave everything worth knowing. Perrin’s face flushed red, jaw working on words he couldn’t say, but he stepped back without another sound. He was learning fast, and I hated that he had to.
Behind Baldir, his own men stood in perfect formation despite the downpour, not one of them offering suggestions or complaints.
They’d learned their places through years of similar rebukes, through years of being reminded that legitimate blood meant their voices mattered and bastard blood meant silence.
I searched for options that didn’t involve half a day of construction in driving rain while the column sat exposed on a road that was becoming a river itself. The servants huddled under wagon covers, Cromwell among them looking pale and miserable. His books would be getting wet.
We needed a better solution, and we needed it now.
A memory surfaced unbidden, the Red Gale’s, not Danarre’s. A river crossing in the foothills of the Thornback range, where our escort lost two wagons and six men to a current half this strong. The screaming of horses as they went under, thrashing against ropes that only dragged them deeper .
The crack of wood breaking against rocks. A man named Torvik who’d survived a dozen battles, pulled under by the weight of his own armor, reaching for a hand that wasn’t there.
I pushed it down. This wasn’t that river and these weren’t my Wolves. But water didn’t care about names or loyalties. Water just killed.
Maise had drifted closer, her red braid dark with rain, water running down her face like tears she’d never admit to shedding. She caught my attention with the slightest gesture, just a tilt of her head downstream. Subtle enough that Baldir wouldn’t notice. Deliberate enough that I couldn’t miss it.
“There’s another bridge,” she said quietly, just loud enough for me to hear over the rain and the roaring water. “Less used. Maybe a quarter mile that way.”
She pointed along the muddy track that ran parallel to the creek, disappearing into the trees.
“Stone arch, built for merchant wagons heading to the old mill. Wide enough for two carts side by side.”
I felt the tension in my shoulders ease, followed immediately by caution. “How do you know?”
Maise’s expression went flat and controlled, the kind of stillness she wore when memories turned sharp and she had to lock them down before they cut her open.
“I came this way before,” she said. Her voice was level, stripped clean of everything underneath. “When they brought me to the house.”
The words hung between us, heavy with what she didn’t say.
Maise never talked about her life before the barracks.
None of us did. But sometimes the past leaked through in moments like this, in knowledge that shouldn’t exist and skills that came from places nobody asked about and scars that had nothing to do with training.
“You remember the bridge?”
“Stone arch,” she repeated. “Wide enough for two carts. Four pillars.” Her voice stayed level, but her fingers had found the pommel of her sword, gripping it the way she gripped weapons in her sleep.
“The mill burned years back, but the bridge holds. The people who brought me used it to avoid the main roads.”
I understood. Sold children traveled quiet routes, routes where no one asked questions about crying cargo or small hands bound with soft rope so they wouldn’t leave marks.
Routes where bridges were remembered not for their construction but for the way they felt under feet that didn’t want to keep walking.
Baldir was watching us now, his face calculating. He’d heard enough to catch the important part, even if he’d missed the cost underneath it.
“A quarter mile adds time,” he said.
“Less time than building from scratch in the rain,” I replied. “And less risk. None of us want to see what happens when horses panic on a makeshift bridge over water like that.”
I gestured at the torrent, at the sheep carcass still spinning in its eddy, at the debris that crashed against the stone pilings hard enough to shake them.
Grit nodded once. Perrin kept his mouth shut, learning fast. Baldir studied Maise for a long moment, then looked at me. Water ran off his nose as he weighed her words against his pride, his plan against her memory, his certainty against her pain .
“If she’s to be one of your men,” Baldir said, “reward her if she’s right. Punish her if she’s not.”
The words were ice. The expectation clear.
Armand appeared at my shoulder, close enough that I could smell the rain on his cloak. His voice dropped low, meant only for me.
“The closer you are to them, the less you can do for them.”
A warning and a lesson wrapped in the same sentence.
I watched Maise’s face go carefully neutral, understanding it as clearly as I did.
Distance meant protection. Coldness meant survival.
Caring openly was a luxury that got people killed in houses where blood meant everything and bastards meant nothing.
Her knuckles went white on the sword’s pommel as she pushed down anger she couldn’t afford to show.
“Danzing,” Baldir called, raising his voice to carry over the rain. “Scout downstream. Check if there’s a crossing that’ll take the wagons.”
The instructor nodded and spurred his horse through the mud, disappearing into the trees in the direction Maise had pointed.
While we waited, I forced myself not to look at my team directly.
They stood in formation behind me, professional and remote, the way the rules demanded. My people, pretending to be strangers.
The rain kept falling.
◇ ◆ ◇
Twenty minutes later, Danzing returned with water streaming from his cloak and what might have been approval in his eyes.
“Bridge is there. Solid stone, wide enough for two wagons side by side. Road’s rough but passable.”
He wiped rain from his face. “Some wash-out on the approach, but nothing we can’t manage with boards from the supply wagon. Half hour’s work at most.”
Baldir gathered his sketching stick and stood. For a moment, I thought he might argue, insist on his own plan just to prove he could, just to remind everyone whose blood ran legitimate and whose didn’t. Then practicality won. Barely.
“Then we move. Signal the column.”