* * *
The road spooled south through farms and forests. The first night they slept beneath the pines a quarter mile from the road. The second, they found a crossroads inn at a farming village. The third night found them in Kalls, a modest town mixed with humans and norren.
They entered the Norren Territories on the fourth day. Patchy snow dusted the open fields and low hills. A few times a day, a wandering clan appeared on a ridge or stoked fires from the protection of a draw, but offered neither greeting nor threat.
Dante had passed out one loon to Blays and, after some thought, gave Mourn and Lira the other two. Cally could always make more later. And if either the norren or the woman turned out to be a traitor-in-waiting, Dante could just destroy his, severing the links between them forever. Because the sapphire loon, it turned out, was a hub for them all: by rotating the jewel 90 degrees, Dante could choose which of the others to communicate with. Including, if he returned the sapphire to its original alignment, with Cally.
He saw no forts or walls in the Territories. Few villages or proper buildings of any kind. Nothing, in other words, that would present a threat to an incoming army.
The road turned southwest. Short green winter wheat fought the last of the snows. They crossed out of the proper norren lands and into the unsettled boundaries of the south. For a full day, they walked their mounts along flat stretches that either had been, soon would be, or were currently being plowed. Oxen, workers, and short, sturdy houses dotted the fields of brown and green. Mourn watched them steadily, tipping back his head as if trying to place an elusive smell. Townsmoke rose from the clear horizon. An hour after dark, they reached Shan, the local capital, and bought up five rooms at a fieldstone inn. Dante chafed at the price—they could easily have made do with three—but they had appearances to keep up.
Fann led them up a well-trod dirt path the following morning. With the sun approaching noon, Dante stopped in front of a roughstone manor. Three round towers filled out its body, four stories high and equally wide. Two-story connectors linked the silo-like wings. In the fields beyond, wooden barns and outbuildings stood above the young green fields.
A light breeze ruffled Dante's hair. He glanced at Fann. "I guess you should...announce us."
"Don't be silly, my lord." Fann gestured up the gravel path. "We're in Tantonnen now. If you send your servants ahead to 'announce' you, the locals will look at you like you've asked for a golden toilet."
"We should get one of those," Blays said. "I've always thought our silver seats were declasse."
"Any other helpful advice?" Dante said.
Fann tapped his delicate fingers together. "They're not fond of shaking hands. Perhaps because theirs are always so dirty. In any event, doing so will brand you as an outsider. Furthermore, deposit your boots at the door unless you would like the head of the household to deposit his between your buttocks."
"I think that's enough." Dante dismounted and crunched up the path. He thumped the knocker of the banded wooden door. A middle-aged man appeared in the doorway, stocky and stubbled, his round gut and swollen biceps placing equal strains on the fabric of his brown doublet.
"Is Lord Brant in?" Dante said.
The man smiled. "Unless I've been overthrown in the last five minutes." He turned and bellowed back into the house. "Jilla! Have I been overthrown recently?"
"You will if you don't knock off that hollering," a woman called back.
Brant chuckled and turned back to Dante. "Looks like I'm still the lord." His gaze dropped to the two brooches on Dante's chest. "You must be what's-your-name. From Narashtovik."
"Dante Galand." He didn't offer his hand.
"Thought you'd be older. Well, come inside. Your friends, too. I'll send a man to see to the horses."
Dante had plenty of time to take in the household as he picked the knots from his boots and placed his footwear beside the door. Hard winter light gushed through the windows of the large round room. The windows were glass, and fine-stitched rugs covered nearly every inch of the wooden floors, but there was a simplicity to the room beyond the informality of the baronet who owned it. Above the fieldstone fireplace, a ho rested across two pegs, displayed as proudly as a knight's blade.
"The same one my ancestor used to first break these fields," Brant said, catching him looking. "Scrub off the rust and I'm sure it still could."
"Nonsense," a woman smiled from the stone staircase. "You'd rather churn the dirt with your own teeth than let that old thing touch open air."
"I said it
could
," Brant said mildly.
The woman was his wife, Jilla. While she made introductions, Brant trundled off to dispatch riders to inform the local lords of the group's arrival. After a lunch of pork, potatoes, and the best bread Dante'd ever tasted, Brant brought their horses back from the stable and led them on a tour of the estate.
"We'll have dinner tomorrow," he told Dante, rolling atop his cracked leather saddle. "And tonight, of course. Imagine me taking you in and then leaving you to fend for yourselves!" He laughed, voice carrying on the flickering wind. "That's when we'll speak, I mean."
"That's fine," Dante said. "Our time isn't so precious just yet."
"Still, I'll try to help you make the most of it. I have a rough idea why you're down here. I'm sure your offer will be a right one. But don't bet your winter on it being snapped up."
"Don't tell me they're afraid of the king."
"Why would they be? All he's got is an army. And a mountain of gold. And a kingdom of people who think no more about beating a norren than a donkey that's stepped on their foot."
Dante laughed. "I'll modulate my expectations accordingly."
Brant filled the rest of the day with small talk about how winter had treated him, his expectations for the approaching spring, and questions about Narashtovik, which he hadn't visited in twelve years, meaning he'd seen none of its resurgence with his own eyes.
"Last time I saw the place, it was empty as an old man's mouth," he said during their post-dinner discussion, his socked feet propped on a chair. "You make it sound like it could sit next to Setteven in the jeweled crown of Gask."
"Not quite yet." Dante sat down his beer, a blueberry- and clover-tinged lager Jilla had brewed over the winter. "But 'The Dead City' is getting to be a more ironic name by the day."
Brant nodded, uncharacteristically quiet. "Things change fast, don't they."
Dante went to bed not long after. His room was snug and draft-free. In the morning, Brant brought them to town after breakfast to show off Shan's windmills and irrigation canals. It was a simple place. Built to last. If war came, Dante hoped it spared these windy fields.
Brant's fellow baronets arrived that afternoon. Like Brant, most of the six lords showed signs of long days on the farms despite their noble titles, their forearms ropy, their faces tanned and lined. Their opinions were as large as their shoulders. Their appetites, too. At the long feast-table that took up most of the lower floor of the second wing, they sat at attention while Jilla blessed the food (a stripped-down version of the ritual that involved a couple words and a couple flicks of saltwater from her fingers), then fell to the meal like it would be their last, disassembling roast chickens and vegetable pies faster than the two servants could bring out the next dish. Steaming bread appeared by the platter: puffy white loaves; round disks studded with nuts and grains; moist, crumbly slices embedded with raisins and dripping with butter; flatbread smeared with almond paste.
Dante assumed this wealth of breads was just an extravagance of the feast, but over the next few days, he learned it was entirely standard for Tantonnen. Almost every meal involved their staple crop in some way, be it in the wrapper of boiled pork dumplings or in the pan-fried slabs that Tantonners carried as portable meals, pie-like medleys of boiled meat, raw nuts, potatoes, and vegetables all mashed up and held together with a glue of oily dough. These were the most perfect invention Dante had ever seen.
As normal for such gatherings, the lords' dinnertime talk stayed light—how the last snows had treated them, the town cloudsman's predictions for a mild spring. Finally, the farmers toyed with chicken skins, juice-soaked bread crusts, and their fourth beers of the night.
Unprompted, the oldest of the men, a thin and wind-chapped man named Raye, pointed a chicken bone at Dante. "So what is it you want from us?"
Dante swallowed beer to clear his throat. "You've heard, I'm sure, of the recent unrest."
"I'm sure."
"We're not friends of any war, but we are friends of the norren. We fear that, if invasion comes, many innocents will starve."
Raye bunched up his gray brows. "Do you think? Most I've seen do plenty well leeching off the land."
"Plenty of them live in towns just like you or me," Dante said. "If an army marches on its stomach, towns and their granaries are the stepping-stones they use to cross the river of conflict."
"Now that's a pretty metaphor," said a fat lord named Vick, his tone much drier than his beer-foamed beard.
Blays clunked down his mug. "That's because he's too dumb to say stuff straight. Thing is, civilians
will
starve. You've got food here. We want some of it and will pay money to buy it."
"Oh," Vick said. "When you put it like that, it makes sense enough."
"But not why Narashtovik gives a sheep's shit," Raye said.
"We sympathize over common suffering," Dante said. The faces of the baronets were cowlike, slump-jawed. He clenched his teeth and let a long breath through his nose. "I'm from Mallon. A few years ago, I hardly knew a thing about Arawn, except that he'd scythe off your head if you spoke his name over open water. Because anyone who
did
talk about him—the real Arawn, the Arawn of Narashtovik and Gask—got their head hacked off. Whipped, at the very least. Which is funny, because that's exactly what happens to any norren slave who decides he doesn't want to be a slave anymore. Why does Narashtovik support the norren? Because Setteven is full of shitheads. Maybe they'll march. Maybe they won't. But if they do, we want to be there to pick the norren back up as soon as the king's done stamping on their backs."
That drew a few wry chuckles. Brant smiled and scratched his neck. "None of us are too happy about those tax-mad shitheads, either. They could cut our levies in half if they weren't so obsessed with clinging to every scrap of their creaky empire." Brant leaned back, chin inclined. "I'd be happy to sell whatever wheat I can part with. But it won't be as much as you want."
"Why's that?" Blays said.
"Everyone needs bread when the swords come out," Vick said. "And when food's needed, farmers need it most of all. They're the first ones the men with swords come running for."
Dante gazed at his plate. "Leaving you with little left over to sell."
"That's the shape of it," Brant said.
"Of course," Mourn piped up, "the bandits don't help."
At some point during the dinner, Mourn had left his satellite table to stand against the curved wall, being careful not to lean against its tapestry of a deer silhouetted on a ridgeline. As a result, he was directly behind some of the lords, who had to turn their heads like owls in order to join the others in staring at him.
"Bandits, you say?" Brant said.
Mourn nodded. "The norren bandits. Unless they are human bandits doing a very clever job of pretending to be norren."
"You know that how?" Raye said slowly. "You running with them?"
If Mourn was insulted, he didn't let it show. "They've left signs all over your roads and fields." He nodded at Vick. "If you're who they mean by 'the fat one,' they're going to take your eastbound caravan this weekend."
Vick bolted up, knocking back his chair. "You
are
running with them!"
"He's been with us for weeks," Dante said. "Before that, he belonged to a clan that lives a hundred miles from here."
Brant gestured Vick back into his seat. "There anything you can
do
about this? Or just tell us things we already know?"
Mourn glanced between Dante and Blays. "That's up to my chiefs."
"How much have you been losing?" Blays said.
"Between guards, payment, and product?" Brant shook his head at the ceiling. "All told, a tenth of what I take out of the ground."
Blays drank the rest of his beer to hide his grin. "Here's the deal. We take out the bandits, you sell that ten percent to us. At half market rate."
Raye scowled. "Two-thirds."
"Half."
"Sixty per—"
"Raye, you're missing sixty percent of your brain," Brant said. "Half's a whole lot better than none." He extended his hand to Dante, then shook with Blays and Mourn as well. "You clear the roads, you got your grain."
That settled the matter. With the business of business complete, the assembly turned to the business of getting drunk. By the time Dante got to bed, head spinning, he had all but forgotten they'd pledged to rid Tantonnen of an entire clan of norren.
Hangovers made the morning slow to materialize. Dante picked over his breakfast of toast and eggs and sweet soppy cheese. Blays joined him, took one look at his plate, and set his head down on the table.
"What did we commit to?" Dante said.
Blays didn't move. "Ask that shaggy mountain of ours."
"Are we going to have to kill a bunch of norren, Mourn? Because that doesn't strike me as a very productive way of helping them."
Mourn looked up from window where he sat reading one of the manor's books. "I don't know."
"What do you mean, you don't know?"
"I mean in a very literal sense—I don't even know whether Blays is going to vomit in the next five minutes. How should I know how it will go with a gang of violent bandits?"
Dante rolled his eyes. "How were you thinking it would go when you butted in last night?"
The norren shrugged his heavy shoulders. "That depends on the clan. I'd listen if someone told
me
we'd be overrun and butchered unless I stopped stealing."