Chapter 63 — Before the King Arrives

A royal visit could turn thirty miles into a very short distance.

Rainwood had begun preparing before Robert's party was even visible on the northern road, and Nightsong men multiplied at the approaches. Temporary barriers appeared at road junctions, and inspectors who normally cared about tax seals suddenly cared about clean clothing, visible weapons, and whether a cart looked respectable enough for a royal visit. Inns emptied rooms for richer guests, and market stalls were pushed into neat lines, refuse disappeared from streets where visiting nobles might ride, and anyone likely to spoil the picture was encouraged to become someone else's problem.

Rodrick's informants reported that the poor were being driven hardest, and families who had lived near the market for years received hours to move because their patched roofs and crowded yards might offend royal eyes. The order created no new housing for them; it simply moved poverty beyond the route of the procession. "Elton is clearing the southern quarter," he said. "Refugees and beggars are being pushed toward Red Pine Valley until the King leaves."

Morton's mouth hardened. "So His Grace can admire a clean market."

"Precisely."

Arlan decided to enter before the royal column, and waiting at FireStorm would leave Elton to define him first, and riding openly under House Ashenblade colors would announce his arrival to every Caron watcher in Rainwood. So they went as merchants.

Two wagons carried legitimate goods and gifts packed beneath common coverings, and the best glass remained in padded crates marked as ordinary ceramics; the spirits traveled in unremarkable barrels. If someone searched closely, the disguise would not survive, but the purpose was to avoid casual notice, not defeat a determined seizure. Wayne selected ten guards who could follow orders without looking like a formal military escort, and Brienne wore a plain cloak over armor that remained impossible to make inconspicuous.

"You could remove the sword," Rodrick suggested.

Brienne looked at him.

"A foolish thought. Forget I spoke."

They entered Rainwood on merchant documents prepared through Rodrick's network and took rooms in a modest inn near the poorer southern streets. The settlement was large enough to serve as the region's market, but not the grand city Elton's officials liked to pretend it was. Its importance came from roads: south toward Nightsong, north toward Storm's End, west into marcher country, and east toward routes that eventually reached the Narrow Sea. Traders made it important; walls and titles had followed commerce, not created it. Stone buildings crowded the central road, and beyond them spread workshops, yards, sheds, and cramped housing.

At the gate, an inspector pushed an awl through one barrel bung and wet his finger with Red Sun Flame. Wayne complained like a carter worried about leakage while Morton’s false invoice named common spirits at a price too low to invite seizure. The man let them pass after taking two coppers he never entered in his book. Rodrick noted the face, the gate, and the missing mark only after they turned the first corner.

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Their inn stood close enough to the southern quarter that the effects of the clearance were audible through the shutters, and carts rolled late into the evening as families tried to move bedding and pots before patrols returned. The advance officers were two days away. The King’s arrival remained uncertain, yet Rainwood was already rearranging itself around what he might notice.

Wayne returned from meeting an informant before sunset.

"The King’s advance officers by noon the day after tomorrow, perhaps sooner; Elton has guards on every main approach. The southern slum is being emptied."

"How?" Brienne asked.

"Whips, mostly."

Wayne also brought a name: Elton's young nephew Graeme, who had attached himself to the clearing effort because bullying displaced people offered more amusement than overseeing carts. Informants described him collecting goods under the excuse of royal preparations and using private guards to make complaints disappear.

Arlan was setting down his cup when the inn door burst open. A boy stumbled inside. Seven or eight, perhaps, and too thin, bleeding from one cheek, and terrified enough to kneel before he finished looking at the room.

"Please, please help Uncle Bor."

Brienne reached him first and lifted him by the shoulders. "Who is Bor?"

The story came between gasps, and Rodrick gave the boy water first and made him slow down enough to distinguish what he had seen from what other people had shouted. Arlan listened for the same reason he listened to scouts after battle: fear compressed distances, doubled numbers, and turned threats into completed acts.

Bor was a dock laborer from the slums, nearly eight feet tall, broad enough that two ordinary men could stand behind him. He was known locally as the Bone Crusher because strength was cheaper than a proper name when a man had grown up poor. He had no family by blood. Orphaned young, he survived by carrying cargo at the docks, unloading carts, and taking any labor that paid in food; as he grew stronger, he began taking in children who had even less than he did. More than a dozen now depended on his wages and whatever he could scavenge from the market after closing.

Graeme had seen several of the older girls during the forced clearing and decided they should come with him, and Bor had stood between them and Graeme's men. According to the boy, the first guard who tried to drag a girl away left with ribs broken; the second landed in a water trough, and Graeme then returned with more men and weapons.

"They have him in the old shack," the boy sobbed. "They say they'll burn it; the little ones are still inside."

Wayne looked at Arlan. "If we intervene, Elton knows we're here."

"If we do not, children burn because we prefer secrecy."

Brienne's jaw had gone hard enough to show the answer she wanted.

Arlan stood. "We look first; we act on what is there, not on a child's frightened version of it." The boy guided them through narrow lanes to the southern edge, with Wayne bringing the two wagons behind them.

The route to the slum showed what "clearing" meant. Doors hung open where families had been driven out. Broken baskets and bedding lay in gutters because people ordered away at spearpoint had not been given time to pack. Nightsong wanted the roads Robert would see scrubbed clean; the dirt had merely been pushed onto people he would not see.

He had not exaggerated.

A crowd stood well back from an open patch between collapsing shacks, and more than thirty armed men surrounded one building, and children cried from inside. At the doorway stood a huge man bleeding from cuts across both arms, one broken arrow lodged in his back.

Graeme sat a horse safely beyond reach. "Come out, Bor!" he shouted. "Give me the girls and crawl, and I may leave the rest alive." His men piled dry wood against the wall.

Graeme himself stayed on horseback outside Bor's reach, riding crop in one hand while his men threw stones and loosed occasional arrows into the shack. The display had drawn a crowd because cruelty conducted publicly was meant to teach spectators as much as victims.

One struck flint, and the children screamed from behind the broken door; Arlan stepped into the open.

"Put it down."

The man with the flint stopped striking.