Chapter 1442: About the edges(1)

They broke their fast that morning on dried plums , the last of some family’s hoard, most likely, traded to Owen by Pip and little Branden in exchange for the old arming sword the boy had claimed for himself after the Ford.

It would be months yet before the trees bore fruit again. The blossoms of spring hung thick and pale on the branches around them now, delicate as a promise not yet kept, but it was only come summer that plums would swell heavy and dark where those flowers presently bloomed.

These must have been the last the family kept in their larder, Vilon reasoned, popping one between his cheek and gum. It was dry as its name implied, tough as old leather at first bite, and only after some patient chewing did the lingering sweetness of true plum finally emerge, faint and stubborn, like a memory of sun resurfacing from a night of storm.

The gift had been well meant. It was also, Vilon privately thought, a poor trade.

A fine sword given away for a fistful of shriveled fruit , and he’d half a mind to admonish his squire for it. Even with a mace already at his hip, a second blade was never dead weight. A man could always find use for steel he didn’t strictly need, right up until the moment he desperately did.

He’d learned that lesson written in his own flesh. The fingers of his left hand still ached stiff where he’d gripped that spearhead bare-fisted during the fighting at the creek, had he not worn his gloves that day, he’d have fewer fingers to complain about, rather than merely aching ones.

When one of the bandits had driven a spear through his shield and knocked him clean off his horse, his sword had gone tumbling somewhere into the mud, and he’d been left scrabbling in the muck with nothing but a dagger to answer a spear’s reach. Had he carried a second blade, he wouldn’t have wasted those precious heartbeats searching the ground like a man hunting for a dropped coin.

He’d meant to say something of this to Owen. But the stocky lad had only wanted to give his childhood friends a proper parting gift before the road carried them apart, and Vilon hardly had the heart to shovel dung on a kindness so plainly given.

It was Owen’s sword to trade as he pleased, after all, a man’s property was his own to squander, gift, or lose, and no one else’s business how he chose to do it.

After the meal they spent a lazy hour breaking camp, packing their no longer meager gear with the unhurried rhythm of men who had nowhere urgent to be, before swinging up into their saddles and setting off down the road once more, with nothing to occupy them but the scenery rolling past and the easy, comfortable silence of each other’s company.

The road curved round an apple orchard heavy with the same pale spring blossom, and there two farmers , husband and wife both most likely, taking a moment’s rest from their labor in the shade, lifted their straw hats in greeting as the riders passed.

Vilon nearly forgot to return the gesture, so unused was he to receiving it.

No one had ever greeted him so freely on the road, not back when he’d ridden nothing grander than Old Chestnut, nor even earlier still, trailing behind his father with dust in his teeth and no coin to his name. He glanced down at himself , at the stallion beneath him, the armor across his shoulders, shield strapped heavy at his back , and understood, all at once, precisely what these strangers saw.

I suppose I finally look the part of a knight.

He should have felt some flicker of pride in that. Knighthood was meant to carry pride the way a scabbard carried steel. But Vilon had grown up with little enough on his back to begin with, and he found he carried even less of that particular weight now than he ever had of coin.

He raised a hand and saluted the farmers in return, wondering, not for the first time, what the pair made of two armored strangers rattling down their quiet country road.

Not long after, the orchard gave way to a vineyard climbing the gentle slope beside the road, row upon row of young vines strung along their wooden frames like soldiers standing at careful attention, their leaves still small and tender with the season. A handful of workers moved between the rows, bent low, tending growth that wouldn’t see harvest for months yet.

Past the vineyard the ground leveled out again into groves of squat, silver-leafed olive trees, their branches gnarled even on trunks that couldn’t have been more than a decades old, and beyond them stood the low stone bulk of an oilery, its walls stained dark at the base where pressed oil had seeped into the stone and never quite let go.

"I never thought I’d see so many," Vilon said, astonished. He’d heard more than once how rich and bountiful Yarzat was, and he’d expected villages here and there with modest herds grazing about, but he hadn’t expected to see taverns sprouting up like mushrooms after rain, one every three or four leagues along the road. A road that was paved with stone besides, ringing out like two bricks knocked together each time Chestnut’s hooves came clattering down upon the hard rock beneath them.

And there were so many orchards, so many olive groves and vineyards stretching out in every direction, that Vilon could scarcely credit it.

"The village headman says they all started appearing about six or seven years back," Owen offered. "Some even a decade or more. Lot of things started changing round a decade and a half ago, or so the old folk in my village always say. I wasn’t born yet myself, so I can’t rightly swear to it, but they all agree things got a fair bit better than they used to be."

If Vilon’s memory served, that was about when the King of Yarzat first came to power here. That much he knew, at least, even if the finer details escaped him. On account of him being an Ezvanian and all.

"Do you know which lord owns all this?"

"No lord that I know of.’’ Owen replied ’’ Some belongs to the crown, you can tell by the falcon sigil nailed up on the wooden posts, but most of it’s merchants’ land. Ned’s cousin worked one of the vineyards come autumn, belonged to some merchant or other. When it’s grape harvest time they hire on far more hands than usual. He’d leave right before summer and come back early winter, pockets jingling with a handful of silvers for a season’s work.

Mama had planned to send me along with Ned’s cousin too, but then the war happened and I went south with the king instead, and then you came along, ser."

"Did your brother go, then? While you were off soldiering in Oizen?"

Owen shook his head. "No, he had to mind the herds and work the fields. Sis can hardly manage that alone, being a girl and all, so Mama figured they’d make do with six hands rather than eight for the summer harvest. But with me gone from home besides, they barely had hands enough left to bring the grain in before it rotted where it stood."

"Then why not slaves?" Vilon asked, watching the vineyard rows slide slowly past. "Land this rich, this much labor needed each season. Seems the sort of place a man would keep a good number of them, rather than paying free hands to come and go as they please."

Owen frowned, chewing the question over the way he chewed everything, slowly and without much urgency. "Don’t rightly know, ser. Maybe there just aren’t enough of them to go round?" He scratched at the back of his neck, clearly reaching for an answer he didn’t fully believe himself. "Or maybe it’s simply cheaper, hiring a few hands on for a couple months out of the year, than buying and feeding and housing enough slaves to do the same work year round?"

Vilon made a low sound in his throat, unconvinced. He knew too well how cheap flesh could be bought and sold, how little it truly cost a man to feed a slave set against what a free hand would rightly demand in honest coin for the same labor, and the sums Owen had offered didn’t sit easy against what he’d seen of that grim trade elsewhere in his years.

And yet, turning the matter over as Chestnut carried him onward, he found himself supposing it was a far better thing regardless, to see honest folk toiling of their own free will beneath this warm sun, than to ride past long rows of chained men and women, iron collars biting into their necks, driven along by an overseer’s lash as they stooped to gather olives or grapes or whatever else the season demanded of them.

He had seen his fill of that particular misery once already, more than his fill if truth be told, enough of it that the memory still sat sour in his gut on quiet nights. It did his heart good, he thought, to see so little of it here, on a land that seemed to grow richer and kinder to the eye with every mile he put behind him, each turn of the road revealing some fresh orchard or vineyard or a village too well fed with many fat sheep, and too well roofed to have suffered under any lash he could see.

Whatever else might be said of this King Alpheo and his upstart crown, whatever grumbling old blood might still mutter into their cups about broken houses and stolen thrones, the man had at the very least built something here that didn’t reek of chains and open sores, and for a hedge knight who had ridden through enough ruined country to fill a lifetime’s worth of bad dreams, that alone was worth more than he’d expected to find on this stretch of road.