CHAPTER 2

He returned to Wulfric Hall a few hours later. The purse was much lighter, but he’d acquired most of the essential gear and rations they’d need for the journey and had them sent to Wulfric Hall. Most importantly, he’d traded the lion’s share for Sandingham lire. Cambercian gildings wouldn’t go far across the border.

He opened the door to the Archbishop’s office without knocking. She was sitting at her desk, quill in hand. She didn’t look up.

“You gave my priest quite a time.”

“If he can’t handle a pickpocket he’ll have a tough time in the Tower,” Yannick said. “I still need a scout, one who can climb. If the guild isn’t open to me I don’t know--”

Before she could answer, there was a knock at the open door. The priest entered with his customary bow to the Archbishop.

“My lord, I have sent-- master Yannick, you are here! I was quite worried about you after our altercation in the city.”

“I’m not that old, priest.”

“Nevertheless, I sent the constables out to find you.”

Yannick laughed. “They’d be better employed finding that thief.”

“As a matter of fact, master, they did just that.”

“Really?” said the Archbishop, raising an incredulous eyebrow. “How?”

“A constable managed to chase her into a dead alley, my lord. She evaded him by scaling the Old wall, only to run directly into another constable, who thought her suspicious and arrested her anyway.”

“Is that how the constabulary works, now? Arresting people for looking suspicious?” Yannick said.

“The ways of the Father are often confounding to the uninitiated, master,” said the priest. He smiled without humour.

Yannick rolled his eyes and stood up. “Climbed the Old Wall, did she? What’s that, fifty feet or more?”

“Sixty-two, to be precise,” said the Archbishop, head bowed over her documents once again.

“Quite a climb,” said Yannick. He stood up. His feet protested. “Come, priest.”

“Where are we going, master?”

Yannick grinned. “To find ourselves a scout.”

***

The gaoler had let them through with a deferential half-bow as soon as she saw the priest. She didn’t even ask which cell they were going to. Times had changed in Cambercia, Yannick thought. This was the sort of treatment reserved for an Archbishop themselves, or at least it had been when he’d last been here.

He peered into the dark cells, looking for the small woman who had robbed the priest. At the end of the corridor he found her: in a cage alone, separated from the men who made up most of the gaol’s unfortunate inhabitants. It was quiet at this end - the other prisoners had hushed as they saw the priest.

“You,” he called.

She was lying in the foetal position on the rags that made up a bed, facing the wall. With a slow movement, she rolled over and looked at them balefully.

“You’re rather fast,” he said.

She spat on the floor.

“I hear you climbed the Old Wall, too. Is that true? Can you ride a horse?” he asked.

She said nothing.

“How are you with maps? Can you track across open country?”

She folded her arms and stared at him with fierce eyes.

“Are you going to send me to the Hulks?” she asked, her voice toneless.

“It was quite a movement, throwing that bag of coins. You’re a risk taker, but you’re not reckless. You disarmed one pursuer and confused the other, giving you the chance to get away.”

“If I got away, I wouldn’t be here, would I?” she said. She had a thick, regional accent.

“I heard you were arrested for looking suspicious - not because they associated you with the theft.”

She shrugged. “Still caught, aren’t I?”

“So, horse riding? Map reading?”

She scowled at him.

“I’m from out west,” she said. “Grew up on a farm, least ‘til the landlord turfed us out.”

Yannick nodded. “I thought I heard something in your voice. And what’s your name?”

She said nothing.

“Jeran, could you please fetch the gaoler?” Yannick said.

“Master, I don’t think I should leave you--”

“Leave us. Now.”

The priest looked startled, but he heard the authority in Yannick’s voice and returned up the dark corridor.

Neither of them spoke for a while,

“I’m not sorry I robbed that priest. That man is prime twat,” she said. “I’d do it again.”

Yannick laughed. “My name is Yannick Oswestry. I’m a mage.”

She looked at him curiously. He didn’t look much like one: twenty years of retirement and a battered travelling cloak had seen to that.

“You don’t look mad,” she said cautiously. “My mum told me all old mages are mad.”

“I’m not. Not yet, at least. I was always rather sparing with magic. I haven’t cast a spell in twenty years.”

“Is that what makes them mad?”

“Yes. The Guild don’t want to look into that, though. It might deter the young cannon fodder.”

“Am I going to be hanged?”

Yannick shook his head. “Even the prime twat couldn’t get you the rope on failed theft.”

She smiled. “Audie. My name is Audie.”

“Well, Miss Audie, I’ve come here to offer you a job.”

Jeran appeared, with the gaoler shambling next to him. Yannick turned to the priest and smiled.

“I think we’ve found our scout.”

The weather was fine as the four of them set out from Camberton. Yannick had declined the Archbishop’s offer of a Constabulary escort to the border. It seemed a strange offer, given her paranoia about the rot within the Cambercian state.

Besides, if anything would attract attention, it would be a uniformed column of constables. He didn’t want Audie spooked by the presence of the same men who’d arrested her not a day earlier.

Audie was as fine a rider as she’d promised. The horse and her seemed to move as one, with a natural grace that was the envy of many a noble. Yannick had insisted that they outfit her in decent travelling gear. She would freeze to death in the rags she had been wearing in the gaol. The priest had protested, but Yannick ignored him. With the layer of street grime washed off and a decent cloak, she looked more a grown woman and less a street orphan.

He’d vetoed the Dusken Knight riding in her full armour. Instead she’d donned a set of unremarkable travelling clothes. Even without the enormous black armour, she still cut an imposing figure. In place of the armoured plate that covered her mouth and nose, she wore a cloth over the lower half of her face. Given the large halberd strapped to her horse, one could still make her out as a warrior. That wasn’t a problem in itself. Many merchants employed a guard if they could afford one - travelling could be a dangerous game.

The priest, it turned out, was a poor rider. Yannick wasn’t surprised: the man was a glorified clerk, probably raised within the city’s gates. He had traded his fine robes for the fringed sort that were the standard uniform of the lower, itinerant members of the Order: solicitors, preachers, teachers. He completed the look with a battered travelling staff, made from dark, knotted oak. With the staff strapped to the horse and a few days' stubble around his beard and the sides of his head and he would look the part.

Altogether, they looked no different from the dozens of other travelling bands coming and going from the city.

It was an uneventful ride. They kept to the Old Road. It was a wide, well-kept one, connecting Cambercia to its historic capital of Sandingham City. They passed from the low-lying, flood-prone farmland south of Camberton into broadleaf forests alive with the bloom of late spring. Audie kept them entertained, chattering aimlessly about her life in Camberton. To the horror of Jeran, she talked openly about her intimate relations with both men and women. Yannick found himself smiling at the priest’s discomfort. After three nights of gentle riding and sleeping at the comfortable merchant’s inns that lined the Old Road, they found themselves at the border.

“We stop here,” said Yannick. “We’ll approach the border on foot.”

Virgil dismounted without a word - she hadn’t said a word in his hearing, although Audie swore she had heard the Knight swear after falling off her horse. He put little stock in the rumours of them being under the Archbishop’s mind control spells. More likely was that the Dusken Knights were the product of their upbringing: raised in the Order’s isolated convents away from the influences of the secular world. Yannick could only imagine the horrors of that world, one where discipline was as important as piousness. At least mind control accepted that you had some will of your own, rather than raising a human as if they were no different to a tool.

The border was little more than a tall set of fences demarcating the forest. The crossing point itself was two hastily erected cabins, one on either side of the fence. Yannick could only marvel at the optimism of their builders. One hundred years later, they still stood, now covered in moss and creeping with ivy.

The constables manning the Cambercian side waved them through without looking.

As they approached the border, the Sandingham Guard were waiting for them in their stone grey tunics.

“Purpose of your visit?” asked a clerk. He stood with a wax tablet.

Yannick felt his heart beat faster.

“I am a merchant,” he said. “And this priest is my solicitor.”

“And the other two?” said the clerk without looking up.

“My assistant and our escort.”

The clerk glanced up at Virgil before shrugging and marking something on his tablet.

“On your way, then.”

He felt an immense rush of relief as the clerk’s attention passed to the next set of travellers coming through the border. That had been easy enough, he knew, but he was glad they would be returning through a different crossing point - in Maesbury.

Maesbury was several days’ ride north-west of Suthsea. It was out of their way, but he didn’t want to risk the Old Road again. This border crossing on the Old Road was the main choke point for merchants passing between the two capitals. If the Sandingham Guard wanted to, it would be simple enough for them to lock this crossing down. The extra days to reach Maesbury and the inherent chaos of the place added their own risk, certainly, but the ability to pass back through the border without official sanction was worth it. He couldn’t risk the Sandingham authorities catching them once they had their cargo. It would be death for all of them.

They rode the Old Road south for another day, sleeping in a small glade before branching off the next morning in the direction of Suthsea. Before long, the forest had become rolling hills of chalk and grass.

“It smells weird here,” said Audie.

“That’s the sea,” Yannick said. “You’ve never seen it?”

Audie shook her head and pushed her horse up to the top of a small hill.

“I can see it!” she cried.

Beyond the crest of the hill, the ocean glowed in the morning sun. The town of Suthsea spread out along the coast.