“So why’re you on this road?” demanded the single rider. “The Reusel road would have taken you there easier.”
“Oh, don’t I know that,” moaned Aufors. “But I work for the Marshal, and he has me running messages to Fensbridge, near the Ramspize, to do with all these Danian cowherders coming across the border. Well, I’ll do that first, then go on down to Poolwich along the coast road.” He took another large swallow and muttered, “That is, I will when my horse gets over being lame! If the damned beast ever does!”
On the morning, while Aufors watched from behind his window curtain, the single rider went off the way he had come in company with two others who had been in the post house the night before. Within minutes, Aufors was off as well, though in the opposite direction. At the inn where he stopped that night, he met yet another group, and it was there he learned that the Earl Ruckward had posted a reward of fifty royals for the return of his wife. No wonder every man with a horse was out galloping the roads. Fifty royals was a year’s income for many of them.
Early on the following morning, he left the inn and rode westward again, this time for only a few miles, turning southward on a narrow track that wound among the low hills above the coastal fens of Southmarsh. The road was all but deserted. He saw a swineherd with his beasts mid-morning, and not another person or animal the rest of the day. At mid-afternoon, he came upon a croft crouched low at the foot of a hill, and behind it a copse of low woods and a stone dolmen like two hooded figures peering seaward, precisely as his directions had specified. An old woman came out to greet him as he came down the lane, stopping him with a hand on the horse’s nose and a glare from fierce old eyes.
“And what would you be wanting, young man? There’s naught here to interest a young man who’s up to any good.”
“Well,” murmured Aufors, “this young man comes from the mother of a certain one. And that mother wants this certain one and her baby taken safe into Merdune. And it’s best we go soon as can be, for there’s riders everywhere along the main roads, and it’ll be a short time before they’re sifting along these little lanes, like ants after sugar.”
“Riders?” she asked, wonderingly.
“Someone’s offered a large reward, old woman. One that might tempt even you.”
“Pah!” she spat. “Can I be tempted with money? Not likely. What would it buy me, at my age? Food? I’ve plenty. A lover? And what would I do with him? Peace of mind? Hardly, not with what’s going on. But I take your point. Enough riders going hither and yon, someone’s bound to see something. And that makes me wonder if any such person as you describe would be safe on the road, even with you.”
“No.” Aufors smiled. “She would not. So it would be up to me or her or you to make her look like something else. Either that, or hide her completely.”
“And how would you do that?”
“Well, maybe I’d surround her with a raggedy old mother and a dirty young husband, and I’d dress her in simple clothes, and I’d probably dye her hair. Black, I think, for black tangles nicely. I’d smutch her face and glue down an eyelid to make a squint, and I’d black a tooth or two as well, just to add verisimilitude.”
“Verisimilitude, is it?” She cackled. “And the baby? How would you disguise the baby?”
“Boys around here wear rooster-tail-feathers on their cradle boards, do they not? I’d dress the baby’s cradle with such.”
“Always wanted to travel,” she murmured. “Always did.”
“You’re here alone?” he asked.
“Except for a certain one. And her baby. And a half-dozen old sheep, and a dog.”
“Sheep and a dog would be good additions. Do you have a cart?”
“I do. A good one, too. One my youngest son built, just before he went down to Bliggen, seeking adventure. Wanted to have adventure while he was young, he said. Well, happen he did, though I can’t say what or where.”