Chapter 16
Finding the road the farmwife had told them about was easy.
The hard part was finding enough cover to get Large Francis to it without being spotted.
In the end, they found a drainage ditch running alongside a field and the pillbug simply scurried through it on …
well, Edmund wasn’t sure what you’d call it.
Not all fours. All twelves, maybe? Though she’s also got that modified lung set, so maybe all fourteens …
The road itself was an education. Every quarter mile or so, the woods had either been cleared or were being cleared.
They passed a field full of stumps and another being plowed by a stern-faced man with a mule, who stopped and watched them pass, while Large Francis made her way through the woods on the far side.
Edmund waved to the man with the plow and got an almost imperceptible nod in return.
About three-quarters of a mile from the barn Alba had described, the woods petered out completely. Large Francis settled into the deepest thicket available. “It-is-fine-friends. I-will-wait-until-it-is-dark.”
“Dog Violet, will you stay with her?” Edmund asked.
“Yeah, yeah, a gnole makes sure no one trips over Francis-bug.” She arched her whiskers forward. “Use time, teach Francis-bug more cards, eh?”
“I am generally in favor of cross-cultural communication, but this seems like it will end badly,” Edmund muttered. The Dervish snickered.
“A gnole is hurt that book-man doesn’t trust her. Hurt.”
The Dervish walked beside him on the farm road. Edmund tried not to steal glances at his profile. Stop that. What are you, fifteen?
“So this is all new, then?” the Dervish asked.
“What?”
“The fields here.” He gestured with one silver-lined hand.
“Oh. The last five years, Alba said.”
“Do you think she was telling the truth?”
Edmund frowned at that. “Most of it looks about that old. The hedgerow certainly wasn’t much older than that. Blackberry grows up like you wouldn’t believe, and all the trees were young. Besides, that would be an odd thing to lie about, wouldn’t it?”
The Dervish shrugged. “She seemed nervous about something.”
“We just told her there was a dragon nearby.”
“There’s that.” He smiled crookedly. “I’m a paranoid bastard at heart.”
Edmund sighed. “I’m not, I’m afraid.”
“I had noticed.” The Dervish nudged him with an elbow. “That’s what I’m here for.”
And whatever happened to “I’m just a bodyguard,” hmm…
? Edmund ducked his head to hide his smile.
The Dervish had definitely warmed up, or relaxed, or both.
Edmund would like to believe that he’d been the reason, but suspected that Dog Violet and Large Francis probably had something to do with it.
We’re all so obviously harmless. Except maybe Dog Violet, but she’s not dangerous in a way that would worry someone like the Dervish.
Just as promised, the barn and a cluster of buildings loomed ahead, gleaming in the late-afternoon sunlight.
A small knot of people were working outside.
Two men gutted a deer while two more scrubbed laundry in a tub.
The sound of hammering drifted from one of the buildings, the regular metallic sound of a forge.
“They seem to be doing well enough for themselves,” murmured Edmund. “I would have said that between the short seasons and the wildlife, this wouldn’t have been a good place for anything but fur trading, but apparently I was wrong.”
“Wildlife?”
“Oh, you know. Bears, boars, wolves, panthers, the occasional gargath, that sort of thing. Hard on domestic animals. You can’t just run pigs in the woods like you can farther south.”
“What’s a gargath?”
“Mm. You know what a hermit crab is?”
“I’ve heard of them.”
“Imagine that, only it’s a wolverine and it uses hollowed-out corpses for shells.”
“Ancestors! And you didn’t think to mention this before?”
“Oh, they’re very slow. And we’d have smelled it long before it smelled us.”
“… Are you sure you aren’t making this up? Like your manicwhatsit tree?”
“It’s a real tree. But you can ask anybody about the gargaths. They’re really rare, though. People usually call in the army or the local militia to deal with one. They can be a real problem if they get into a watercourse.”
The Dervish looked unconvinced. Edmund frowned, struck by another thought.
“I wonder what army they would call in? Ghaston’s borders stop pretty much at the valley.
This area is ostensibly part of the Hundred Houses, but none of them actually bother with it, so far as I know.
The timber’s the most useful thing here, but it’s mostly softwoods, so it’s not worth it to set up more than the occasional logging camp.
Even if you do set one up, the roads are narrow and you can’t widen them through the hills without a whole horde of men with pickaxes.
And there’s no point when half of the land around the Hundred Houses is prime timber country anyway. ”
“So you’re saying the ruler of this country probably doesn’t know they’re here,” the Dervish said.
Edmund shrugged. “Not necessarily. They might have gone to whoever the landholder is and asked to be allowed to settle it. The landholder wouldn’t lose anything, and might get some tax money out of it someday.”
The Dervish considered this. “If I were this ruler, I’d be a little more worried.
People in hard, isolated areas get scary.
If you can’t feed an army, you become the army.
” He grimaced. “We had a campaign once in hills that you’d swear wouldn’t support a starving goat, but there was a whole network of clans and feuds and alliances at work.
A group who had been your allies one week turned on you the next because someone had gotten married fifty miles away.
And they fought like demons. The only time I ever saw one surrender was a woman who had three children with her, and she killed two men first. While carrying an infant on her back. ”
“Gods have mercy,” said Edmund blankly.
The Dervish shrugged. “Life as a mercenary. When our contract ended, they tried to rehire us, but Commander Sarkis wouldn’t take the job at twice the price. One thing he did right.”
Edmund wanted to ask more, like how the Dervish had ever become a mercenary in the first place, but they had been spotted. A child that Edmund hadn’t noticed earlier scurried inside the barn. The people scrubbing laundry had stopped to watch them, and even the hammer had fallen silent.
He waved. No one waved back, and he let his hand drop, feeling foolish.
“Can I help you folks?” The speaker emerged from the barn, wiping his hands. He was a tall, lantern-jawed man with graying hair. His shoulders had the stoop of a man who was used to carrying all the burdens of those around him, including the ones that they might have preferred to carry themselves.
“We’re looking for Otto,” the Dervish said, with his most winning smile. “Alba sent us.”
“Did she now?” The speaker smiled, much less winningly.
“Yes.” The Dervish glanced at Edmund, who nodded at him to take the lead. “We were coming down the road from Ghaston, and I’m afraid we ran into a dragon.”
Someone exclaimed softly, quickly silenced. The tall man’s expression didn’t change, but the stoop in his shoulders became a trifle more pronounced. “Ah,” he said. “I’m Otto. Perhaps you’d best come inside and tell us about it.”
The inside of the barn was stacked with bales of hay, and the air glinted with dust. A door in the far end led to a smaller area with a rough-hewn table lined with benches. Otto gestured to the benches and sat down himself. “Now. Tell me about the dragon.”
The Dervish launched into the description again.
Otto listened closely, going so far as to pull out a map so that they could mark the approximate spot where they’d seen the dragon.
Edmund noted with mild interest that this one had almost certainly been made from firsthand knowledge rather than copied from something older.
The mountains were bigger and individual streams had been carefully marked.
There were also several borders that didn’t seem to correspond to any geographical feature that Edmund was aware of.
“What’s this here?” he asked, tapping one of the border lines.
“Soil areas,” said Otto easily. “Important to know for farming.”
None of the farms so neatly delineated crossed that border, which ran north past the main road.
While Edmund studied the road, looking for the spot where they had encountered the dragon, the Dervish stared intently at the southern part of the map, presumably looking for ways to get Large Francis through the farms without being spotted.
When Edmund had narrowed down the dragon’s location, Otto nodded and sat back. “How did it look?” he asked.
“Err…” Edmund pushed his glasses up on his nose. It seemed like a strange way to phrase the question. “Like a dragon? They don’t really look like anything else.”
“Yes, of course.” Otto laughed, somewhat unconvincingly. Edmund couldn’t really blame him, given that he’d just been informed that a dragon was in the vicinity. He rose to his feet and Edmund and the Dervish hastily followed. “Thank you for informing us. You’ll stay here tonight, of course.”
He said it in such a firm voice that Edmund winced internally. He didn’t enjoy flat-out disagreeing with people, unless it was about important things like gear construction or indexes.
“No, no,” said the Dervish smoothly, to Edmund’s relief. “We couldn’t impose on you.”
“It’s the least we can do, after you brought us word,” Otto said, a line forming between his eyes. It was the first significant change in his expression that Edmund had noticed all afternoon. “We can’t let you leave without offering our hospitality.”
“Alba already kindly gave us food,” said the Dervish. “And really, it was our civic duty.” He said civic duty with such sincerity that even Edmund almost believed him.
“I do not like to leave a debt unpaid,” Otto said, pronouncing the words as if passing sentence.