Chapter 335: Battle Of The Seven Cheeses

"You won’t."

"No," he agreed. "I won’t."

She turned in the saddle.

There was one more figure on the steps.

He had come out last. He stood at the very top, in his long black coat, with his hands at his sides and the dark behind him. No lantern touched his face. She could see only the pale oval of it, and the faint shine of his eyes. Shadows lay pooled around his boots, very still, like dogs at a door.

She turned Shadowmere, and walked him to the foot of the steps.

Thorne came down.

He came slowly. He did not speak. He stopped on the last step, so that his face was level with hers, and for a moment they only looked at each other. The air between them was very cold, and very quiet. Somewhere behind her, Agnes took a breath and let it out.

He lifted one hand.

It was cool, and dry, and a little rough. It settled against her cheek, and his thumb moved once along her cheekbone, light as a breath. His eyes held hers. They were very dark. They did not look away.

"Come back to me," said Thorne.

It was hardly more than a whisper.

"I will."

"Promise."

"I promise."

"I will be at the door."

"I know."

He nodded, once. His hand did not move for another second. Then, reluctantly, it fell away, and he stepped back onto the step, and was the Shadow King again, cool and still and composed.

"Brothers," he said.

"Thorne," said Draeven.

"Don’t die."

"We will do our best," said Kaelen, "to be annoying for a long time yet."

"See that you do."

Draeven lifted a hand. It was a small gesture, a salute of sorts. Then he turned the bay’s head toward the gate, and the others fell in behind, and the horses’ hooves rang together on the stone.

She looked back once.

He was still standing on the steps. A tall dark shape in the grey half light, with the first pale thread of dawn coming up behind the palace. He did not wave. He did not move. He only watched.

She watched him until the road bent.

***

The sun came up over a country she did not know.

It rose slow and gold across a long, rolling land of fields and hedgerows, and the light poured across it in long bars, picking out every furrow, every drop of frost, every thread of smoke from a far cottage chimney. The air smelled of wet earth and woodsmoke and the cold, sweet scent of apples. A flock of starlings wheeled overhead in a dark scattering ribbon.

They were not on the royal road.

They had left it in the first hour, turning off at a crooked stone marker and following a narrow track along the edge of a river. It was Draeven’s choice. The king’s road is watched, he had said. Carrick’s men will have eyes on every mile of it. We will take the river path. It is longer, but it is empty. We will still reach the village by dusk. Nobody had argued.

It was a good road.

It wound lazily beside the water, between willows and low stone walls, and the river ran alongside it, brown and quick and glittering. Mist lay in the hollows. A heron stood in the shallows, grey and motionless, and watched them pass with a cold gold eye.

Morgana had never seen anything so beautiful.

She had not known. She had grown up in a village at the edge of the northern hills, and the only roads she had ever known were the lane to the market and the long dusty track to the capital, which she’d walked once, in the autumn, with a bundle on her back and her mother’s last coin in her shoe. She had not looked at it. She had been too afraid.

She looked now.

She looked at everything. At the lacy edges of the frost on a spider’s web. At a ploughman and his team of oxen turning the dark earth in a distant field. At a boy on a wall, kicking his heels, who stared at the three riders as they passed and then shouted something she didn’t catch. At a village in the distance, small and neat, with a church spire like a needle.

"Is that...." she began.

"That is Marrow Cross," said Kaelen.

"What is it famous for?"

"Oh, a great many things."

"Such as?"

"It was the site of the Battle of the Seven Cheeses."

She turned in the saddle.

"The what?"

"The Seven Cheeses." His face was perfectly grave. "A great and terrible conflict. Two rival dairy lords, each in possession of a very fine wheel of cheddar. A dispute over a pasture. Blood was spilled. Rennet was weaponized."

"Kaelen."

"Seven wheels of cheese were rolled down Marrow Hill at the enemy. Two were lost to the river. One was eaten, in a moment of weakness, by the Duke’s own cavalry."

"That isn’t real."

"It’s in all the histories."

"It is not," said Draeven.

He had not turned his head. He rode a little ahead, easy in the saddle, with his hood back and his eyes on the road. His voice was dry and level and utterly without expression.

"It is not in any history. There was a rebellion at Marrow Cross, two hundred and twelve years ago. A tax revolt. It was put down in an afternoon. Nobody died." A pause. "A cheese was involved, but only by coincidence."

"Ha," said Kaelen, delighted. "I knew it."

"You made the rest of it up."

"I improved it."

"Brother, you cannot improve a tax."

"I can improve anything."

Morgana laughed.

She couldn’t help it. It rose up out of her, helpless and bright, and she put her hand over her mouth. She felt Shadowmere’s ears flick back at the sound. She saw Draeven glance over his shoulder, quick and startled, and saw the look cross his face, a small soft thing, quickly hidden.

"You’re doing it on purpose," she said, to Kaelen.

"What, me?"

"Telling me a wrong version of the story. So I’ll laugh."

"I would never."

"You absolutely are."

"It’s working, isn’t it?"