The Last Banner

Chapter 3: The Tenth Day

The rider who came out of the dark was not an enemy. He was worse: a man with a wagon and an empty book.

His horse was a bay mare with galled flanks and the Crown’s brands burned deep into her shoulder, four of them, one over the other until the hair grew white. Behind her, a two-wheeled cart stood tilted into the ditch, its canvas hood black with soot and wet leaves.

"Harrowden?" the carter said. He didn’t get down. He had a sheepskin coat tied across his lap with hemp rope, and his feet were wrapped in sacking. "Reeve’s house. Point it."

Leon didn't point. Bren Ostler stepped up beside him, his boar spear still tucked under his arm, the socket fresh-pinned with cold iron. Bren smelled of sheep tallow and the slaughtering shed, but he didn't run. That much, at least, had stayed settled between them.

"Reeve is at the well-house," Leon said. "What's in the cart?"

The carter looked at Leon’s apron, then down at the bare tongs Leon still held in his left fist. "Iron. If there’s any in this valley that hasn't been buried under the turnips."

"There's none for you," Bren muttered.

"The Crown bought it when it bought the dirt under your boots, boy," the carter said without heat. He reached into his sack-coat and brought out a horn ink-bottle, dry at the cork, and a stump of grease-pencil. "Muster is dawn. You're the smith?"

"I’m the smith's boy."

The carter spit into the mud between them. A dark, thick drop that didn't spread. "Old man's dead, then?"

"No."

"Then you’re the boy who marches, and he’s the one who stays and shoes horses until his heart bursts. Go tell him to blow the hearth out. The order came down from Westreach three nights ago: every chimney between here and the river goes cold. We don't leave fires for Vessian outriders to cook bacon over."

The serjeant's words from the chapel floor—*they count smokes at night*—settled behind Leon’s teeth like gravel.

"He won't douse the hearth," Leon said.

"Then the bailiff will pour brine down the flue and nail the doors," the carter said, gathering his reins with fingers swollen red as turnips. "The Seventh went under at Causine, lad. It isn't a dispute over sheep pastures now. The King's moved the line back to the high ditch at Eastvale, and everything between here and there is pasture for whoever gets to it first."

He didn't wait for an answer. The cart groaned out of the ditch, the iron tires shrieking against the axle-tree, and trundled toward the village green where the tallow-lanterns still flickered like yellow grease on a wet plate.

---

The hearth went out with vinegar and well water.

Garrick didn't let Leon touch the buckets. The old man took the wooden bailer in his single hand, dipped it deep into the barrel by the door, and poured it directly onto the cherry-red bed of the coals.

A sound came out of the hearth like a beast dying in a thicket—a high, wet hiss that filled the shop with yellow steam and the sour stench of charred coke and iron scale. The walls wept black water.

"My father put that fire in," Garrick said through the steam. His face was gray, the hollows beneath his cheekbones filled with the cold shadow of the chimney. "The year of the three frosts. Forty years, Leon. Never let the heart of it go white."

Leon stood by the vise, his father’s sword already bound to his back with an old harness-strap that smelled of cow sweat. In his side pouch lay Dace's halved shell bead, three square horse-nails, and the piece of mountain ash Elena had given him.

"You don't tell them," Garrick said, not turning around. He leaned against the stone hood, his good hand resting on the wet iron lintel.

"The serjeant told me."

"The serjeant knows what happens to an iron-worker who gets taken. You're not an armorer. You're not a farrier. You're a ditch-digger from the high moss who doesn't know which end of a hammer hits the wedge. You say that to the cornet, you say it to the file-leader, and you say it to the priest when he comes to write your kin down for the casualty-penny."

"They'll see my palms, Da."

Garrick reached into the cold slag, brought out a handful of gritty, sharp ash, and took Leon’s right hand in his own. He ground the ash into the calluses, hard, until the skin split along the knuckles and the blood mixed with the dirt.

"Now they're ditch-hands," Garrick said. His breath was short and hot. "A smith who can't hold a cold chisel is just another hungry mouth in a levy company. They don't look close at men with bad fingers."

He let go. The hand throbbed, dull and thick, the blood dripping once onto the cold anvil face.

"Don't write," Garrick added, his voice dropping into the empty space where the bellows should have been breathing. "The reeve reads the mail to the square once a month. The women listen. You write when you're three days out from the valley on your own feet, or you don't write at all."

"Da—"

"Take the bread," the old man said, pointing with his stump toward the table. "Elena brought two loaves of rye and a crock of rendered lard. It'll keep five days if you don't drop it in the mud. Go on. The horn's blowing at the oak."

---

The village square at dawn did not look like an army. It looked like an eviction.

Seventeen boys and four grown men who had outlived their brothers stood in the mist by the parish horse-trough. Willem Fen had his billhook wedged into a split ash branch for a haft, bound round with green willow bark that was already beginning to dry and curl. Tam Cambres was there on a clean-legged chestnut cob, wearing a boiled leather brigandine that still had the oil-paper sheen on the rivets. His father had not come down from the Hall to see him ride; only the steward stood at the cob’s head, holding a leather valise and looking at the ground like a man who had stolen a silver spoon and hadn't found a place to drop it.

Elena was not at the oak.

Leon looked once, toward the low stone wall where the drying sheds began, and saw only Widow Maren sitting on an upturned turnip crate with her empty apron laid flat across her knees. She wasn't watching the boys. She was watching the road east, where the trees grew small against the gray sky.

Father Ansel gave them each a square of dried salt pork and a pinch of bitter earth from under the church flags, wrapped in a strip of linen.

"For remembrance," the priest said to Willem.

"I've plenty to remember without dirt in my bread, Father," Willem said, but he took it and put it in his boot.

The provost from the first day wasn't there. In his place was a corporal of the third reserve—a man with two missing fingers on his left hand and a blue tattoo of an anchor on his throat, though Harrowden had never seen salt water. He carried an ash cudgel four feet long, notched near the thumb.

"Form two files," he shouted. He had a voice like river ice breaking in spring. "Surnames from the roll. Ostler, you take the left. If you have boots with holes, put the good one on the right foot—the king’s road is mostly flint until you reach the pike-gate."

Leon stepped into the right-hand file, directly behind Willem. Bren fell in beside him, his boar spear held straight up like a fence picket, his great, meat-fed shoulders hunched as if he expected a blow from behind.

"March," the corporal said. He didn't look back to see if they followed. He just set off down the track, his cudgel swinging in time with his limp.

They passed the forge first.

The door was closed, the iron latch dropped into the keeper. Above it, the cold flue showed no smoke—only the gray smudge that had been there since Leon was a child. Garrick wasn't at the gate. The anvil sat through the low window, dark and square and silent, the first time in eighteen years Leon had seen it cold after sunrise.

They hit the river path two miles down, where the water turned brown against the gravel bars.

A figure was waiting by the footbridge where the cattle crossed in dry months.

She had her wool cloak pulled tight to her chin, the hem pinned up with a willow thorn to keep it out of the dew. Her satchel was slung over one shoulder, but she wasn't carrying herbs. She was carrying a three-legged stool and a wooden bucket of lime-water.

The corporal raised his cudgel. "Move aside, girl. We’re on the Crown’s tally."

"Corporal," Elena said. She didn't look at him. She looked at Willem Fen’s feet. "The Fen boy has an open ulcer on his heel from his grandfather’s boots. If you march him twelve miles to the turnpike today, the leg will be black before you see Eastvale, and you’ll carry his kit yourself."

The corporal stopped. His grey, sour eyes dropped to Willem’s boots, where a yellow grease was already seeping through the cracked leather near the heel.

"You're the Hart girl," he said.

"Sit down, Willem," she commanded.

Willem sat on the damp gravel before the corporal could swing the stick. She was down on her knees in the stones in an instant, her knife out, slicing the leather clean off the back of the heel with two quick, sawing cuts that made the boy hiss through his teeth. She slapped a handful of moss soaked in lime-water against the raw meat, bound it with three turns of coarse wool, and shoved the foot back into the ruined shoe.

"Walk on your toes for two miles," she said, rising and wiping her fingers on her apron. "The moss will rot the bad flesh out before night. Don't let the water get to it."

Then she turned to Leon.

She didn't touch him. She didn't reach for the unfinished silver band that hung beneath her shift, though Leon could see the round outline of it against the coarse wool of her bodice.

"The serjeant died three hours before light," she said.

Leon took a short breath. "Cole?"

"Cole took his brother's shoes and went north toward the fells. Father Ansel let him out through the tithe-barn." She stepped half an inch closer, so close he could smell the vinegar from her fingers and the cold mud on her skirts. "The serjeant told me something before the breath left him, Leon."

"Elena—"

"He said the king isn't at Eastvale. The king hasn't been in the field since midsummer." Her gray eyes were flat, hard, clear as well-water over slate. "The man who burned the rolls... the man who called the firstborn... it’s Cassian. The General took the seal three weeks ago when the southern line broke. He isn't building an army to hold the border."

"What's he building it for?"

"A shield," she said, her voice dropping so low the corporal had to lean in to hear, though he didn't dare touch her. "He’s building a shield out of flesh to keep the valley roads open until the grain harvest is across the river. He’s going to burn the south bank himself, Leon. Every farm. Every barn. Every ditch."

"Move," the corporal barked, his voice suddenly thinner than it had been at the village oak. "Get moving, the lot of you! Highwatch road before noon!"

Leon reached out, his hand—stiff and black with the charcoal Garrick had ground into it—catching her wrist for the space of a single pulse. The red ribbon he had tied there five days ago was gone, replaced by a strip of clean linen, but beneath the cloth he could feel the pulse jumping like a hooked trout.

"The ash root is in my pocket," he said.

"Keep it dry," she said.

The corporal’s cudgel came down across Leon’s shoulders—not hard enough to break bone, but hard enough to send him stumbling forward across the gravel of the ford.

Leon didn't look back until the files had climbed the crest of the Red Crag, three miles above the water.

From there, Harrowden was only five gray roofs and a line of willows. But past the village, three leagues south along the ridge where the post road disappeared into the beech woods, four separate columns of grease-colored smoke were rising straight up into the still morning air.

Not one. Not two.

Four fires, spaced half an hour apart, moving north along the line of the river.

"They're not at Eastvale," Bren whispered from beside him, his boar spear shaking against his shoulder. "Leon. Look at the smoke. That’s the high mill. That’s five miles closer than the rider said."

The corporal didn't tell them to shut their mouths this time. He was looking south too, his gray hand tight on his ash stick, his mouth working silently over teeth that weren't there.

"Double time," he said, and for the first time, he was almost whispering. "Double time to the ditch, or we’ll be fighting with our backs to the river before the sun hits the willow tops."