Kings of the North - Elizabeth Moon [35]
The few pack animals they’d come with weren’t enough for the return. They now carried supplies for the journey, supplies Efla insisted were needed for the cook back home—five mules’ worth, plus a mount for Efla.
Dorrin gave a last look at the house; it seemed to have an entirely different expression with its windows and door open, no longer grim and forbidding. Just another city house, one that might someday be full of light and music and friends, if she chose to make it so.
Their procession moved through the streets toward the bridge. This early in the morning, most of the traffic was inbound, farmers bringing produce and livestock to the thrice-weekly market. By the time they reached the city gates, Dorrin had sent Daryan to buy a poke of hot sweet rolls from a baker’s stall, and when Beclan looked longingly at someone carrying a basket of peaches, she nodded and said, “Get enough for all of us.” Guards at the city gates grinned as they passed.
“Thought I saw them peaches going in just a bit ago—”
“If they were in a basket on a donkey cart led by a man with a green ribbon on his straw hat, you did,” Dorrin said. “We’ve a long road to take.”
“Coming back for Autumn Court, m’lord?”
“Gods willing,” Dorrin said. She paid the toll for them all.
They turned onto the east river road, munching buns and fruit. Dorrin could not but think how different this was from that frantic winter journey to catch up with Kieri: then cold and dark, now the summer sun, even this early, warmed their faces and gilded the fields and orchards they passed. Mist hung in ragged streamers near the river; the soft air smelled of fruit and flowers and hay. And no reason to hurry: they came to Westbells only shortly before noon. Beyond that more lush pastures, fields of ripening grain, orchards …
The party divided naturally into three groups: she and the squires and the Marshal-General, her servants, and the muleteer with the extra horses and pack animals. That was pleasant enough and seemed safe this bright summer morning, but Dorrin had spent too many years in Kieri’s Company to ignore possible danger.
“We’ll be rotating guard positions,” Dorrin said, when they had passed Westbells. “For now, I want Daryan ahead on the road; Beclan, you’ll trail our group; and Gwenno, you’ll be flank scout on the river side. Eddes will be flank scout on the land side.”
“Surely you don’t expect any trouble here, this close to Vérella—it’s Mahieran land—” Beclan began.
Dorrin raised an eyebrow and noticed the Marshal-General giving him a stern look as well. “You’re here to learn, Beclan,” Dorrin said. “More trouble comes when you don’t expect it than when you do.” Not strictly true, in some of the places she’d been, but a good lesson anyway. “You’ll warn us of anyone coming up behind—and that includes along the rear flanks. Daryan, you’ll signal when you see any party coming along the road the other way. Stick your hand up once for every rider or the number of people in a group. Same with the flank guards. Every time we pass through a village, rotate positions. Rear guard to river-side, river to foreguard, foreguard to land-side, land-side to rear.”
“How far out?” Gwenno asked. “Should I ride across the fields?” She looked eager to do so.
“We don’t trample crops,” Dorrin said. “Where they border the road, just ride on the verge. Stay back, about halfway along our group, where you can see any hand signals I give. We want to make it clear that we’re alert, watching on all sides. If we practice that now, where it probably is safe enough, you’ll know how to do it later, when it’s not.”
The squires set off into their assigned places. Eddes, now almost up to Dorrin’s standard as a basic militia soldier, grinned at the squires until he saw Dorrin looking