Years earlier, I had made a trip to Neatbay as part of Verity’s entourage. Then it had taken us five days, but we had traveled with wagons and litters, jugglers and musicians and valets. This time we traveled by horse, with seasoned warriors, and we need not keep to the wide coast road. The only thing that did not favor us was the weather. By midmorning of our first day out, a winter storm swept in. It was miserable riding, not just for the physical discomfort but in the unsettling knowledge that the driving winds would slow our companion ships. Whenever our path took us overlooking the water, I watched for sails, but never saw any.
The pace Foxglove set was demanding but not destructive to horse or rider. While stops were not frequent, she varied the pace and saw that no animal wanted for water. At such stops, there was grain for the horses and hard bread and dried fish for their riders. If anyone ever noticed a wolf shadowing us, no one spoke of it. Two full days later, as dawn and a gap in the weather found us, we were looking out over the wide river valley that opened onto Neatbay.
Bayguard was the Keep of Neatbay. And Bayguard was the home Keep of Duke Kelvar and Lady Grace, the heart of Rippon Duchy. The watchtower was on a sandy cliff above the town. The Keep itself had been built on fairly level land, but fortified with a series of earthen walls and ditches. Once I had been told that no enemy had ever made it past the second wall. It was no longer true. We halted and looked out over the destruction.