Chapter 58
Golden Rose
I ran my thumb along the flat of the blade, as if I were sharpening it.
Nobody looked twice. Mercenaries maintained their weapons during stops.
What they couldn't see was what I was doing to the blade itself; the individual worms that made up its serrated edge were being infused with explosive charges.
Zo dropped onto the dirt beside me and handed over a strip of dried beef. "You've been fingering your worm for an hour."
"...just maintaining its edge."
"Uh huh." She bit into her strip and chewed with her mouth open, watching the camp.
Her eyes moved from the guards near the front wagons to the two men standing post by the gold-threaded wagon at the back.
Those two hadn't moved from their positions since the caravan stopped.
They hadn't eaten. Just stood there, hands on their sword hilts, watching the road behind us.
"Those two are better than the rest," Zo said.
"The merchant I traded with said they were guarding some woman, part of some merchant family."
Zo snorted. "So she's either stupid rich or running from something."
I thought about that. The canvas on that wagon was new. And the beasts pulling it were bigger than the others, their scales darker and their horns trimmed short.
The Golden Rose Merchant Organization trimmed their draft animals' horns to prevent damage to their merchandise during transport. Cedric had seen Golden Rose caravans move through like clockwork, and their animals always looked the same. Horns trimmed. Scales oiled.
Golden Rose.
My gut tightened. The Golden Rose wasn't just a merchant family.
They were one of the three great merchant organizations that controlled trade across the northern territories, and their reach went a hell of a lot further than spices and furs.
They brokered Regalia. They funded Dragoon expeditions.
They had their fingers in every major military contract from the Frostspines to the southern coast, and their family heads and their heirs were all Dragoons themselves.
Which meant the woman in that wagon might be a Dragoon. And if she was part of the Golden Rose's inner circle, she was probably a strong one.
"The wagon might belong to a merchant group called Golden Rose," I said.
Keeping it from her would've been pointless—if we ran into trouble with whoever was inside, Zo needed to know what we were dealing with.
And I wasn't about to let her mouth off to a Golden Rose operative the way she'd mouthed off to the gate guard.
Zo swallowed her mouthful and looked at the gold wagon again. The two guards stood like statues.
"So we've been walking behind a Golden Rose princess for two days," she said.
"And what about the Dragoon at the front? The one on the scaled horse?"
"Could be her escort. Could be the caravan master's hire. I haven't been able to find out yet."
Zo picked at a loose thread on her sleeve. The motion drew my attention to her hands. She'd been doing her exercises every night—flexing, extending, squeezing a ball of wadded cloth she kept in her pack.
She caught me looking and closed her fists.
"Maybe we should stay the hell away from that wagon."
"..."
"I mean it, Fish. Those people buy and sell Dragoons. If she figures out what we are, Sacred—"
"She won't."
"If she does—"
"Look, Zo… We're boring. We're nobody. And we're getting off this caravan when it hits Valdris."
She nodded and went back to her dried beef.
A merchant princess with private guards and an expensive wagon wasn't traveling through frozen wasteland for the view. She was here for a reason, and the only thing worth traveling this way for was the Star Saints' treasury.
I didn’t know that for sure. But the timing was too damn convenient.
If word about the treasury had spread—and I'd assumed it had, because Emilia hadn't been the only one with access to that dead Dragoon's journal—then the Golden Rose would've heard about it.
They would've sent someone immediately. Someone like the woman in that wagon.
"I'm going to take a walk."
Zo gave me a look that said she knew exactly what I was doing. "Don't do anything I'd do."
◆◆◆
The two guards saw me coming. The one on the left was tall. The one on the right was shorter, thicker, and his winged-crossguard sword hung at his side.
"Afternoon," I said.
"Beat it.”
"...just walking around camp, getting to know everyone."
"Nobody you need to know here, now get lost."
The short one hadn't said a word. His eyes moved from my face to my boots and back to my face, and his hand drifted closer to his hilt.
I raised both palms.
"Easy. I'm with the caravan. Walking behind the last wagon. Figured I'd come say hi."
"You've said it." The tall one's chin tipped toward the center of the camp. "Go."
These two didn't care. Their job was the wagon and whatever was inside it, and everything else in the world could go to hell.
But the thirty seconds I'd spent standing there had given me what I needed. Up close, I could see the insignia stitched into the collar of the short guard's coat, half-hidden by the leather of his gorget. A rose with five petals, each one a different shade of gold.
Golden Rose. Confirmed.
I walked back toward the center of the camp with my hands in my pockets.
A merchant princess. That was the term the organizations used for the daughters and nieces of the ruling families. Women who carried the organization's authority and its Regalia into the field. Women who could buy a town and burn it down on the same day if they wanted.
And she was heading in the same direction we were.
The caravan master was talking with the Dragoon on the scaled horse, the two of them looking at something ahead that I couldn't see from where I was.
Then the caravan master turned his beast around and rode back down the line, and this time he stopped at every wagon and said something to the drivers.
The message reached us through the family in the wagon ahead. The father leaned out and called back.
"We have to cut through the mountain trail… we won't be able to reach any more settlements, the caravan master says, weapons out, stay ready."