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Ophele didn’t think she would ever walk normally again.

Every day was a grueling marathon, her backside and thighs battered to bits by the spanking rhythm of the horse.

They ate in the saddle and only stopped briefly at noon to allow everyone to carry out the necessary bodily functions, then were ahorse once more, pulverizing her bones to dust and making her wonder how the duke—who had to actually do the work of riding, rather than sitting like a sack of grain in the saddle—could endure it.

They had come so far, so fast, it was a little overwhelming to think how many miles she was from Aldeburke and everything she knew.

So far to the north, even the forests looked different, thick with fir and pine and other trees she didn’t recognize, hoary and massive.

She spotted a few edibles like pecan, hazelnut, and walnut; she had always loved fall back home, when she could gorge herself on the season’s produce and Azelma would bake pecan tartlets and mincemeat pies.

After three weeks on horseback, Ophele would have given anything to just walk.

The duke’s horse was immense and his back correspondingly wide, but no matter which way she turned, she just couldn’t get comfortable anymore.

In the evenings she walked endlessly back and forth at the perimeter of the camp to ease the cramps in her legs, and even when she was lying in the back of the supply wagon, it felt like the world was swaying underneath her like a ship.

Sometimes Sir Justenin joined her for her walks.

She wasn’t sure what to make of him.

He was so much older, he could nearly have been her father, and she didn’t know what such an important man could possibly want from her.

But she was grateful to have someone to talk to, all the same.

Just because she was used to solitude didn’t mean she liked it.

“Did you ever think of going back?”

she asked one night, walking carefully to avoid horse droppings.

Sir Justenin had been describing the place he had grown up, a peaceful mountain monastery that took in inconvenient children.

She thought she would have liked to be sent there.

“To the Brothers?”

“No,”

he said thoughtfully.

“Though there was a time I thought about joining them; there are worse ways to spend one’s life than contemplating the stars.

I liked learning.

And I miss the quiet,”

he said, looking at the noisy camp with mingled fondness and chagrin.

“Was it an oath?”

she asked hesitantly.

“That made you decide to join His Grace.”

“Yes.

My father was one of his father’s retainers.”

“Oh.”

Well, she had thought as much, but she still had to bite her tongue to keep from apologizing.

“That’s very honorable of you, to keep his promise.”

“Honor cuts both ways, my lady,”

he said with a small smile.

“A pledge of service also means that your husband pledged to keep a position open for me, if I wanted it.

And I thought I wanted to see the world, and serve the son of the man my father served.”

He often said that.

Your husband, as if it were a firm foundation upon which to rest their conversations.

But though Ophele had come to understand a little of the relations between men and women, it never occurred to her that anyone might want her with that strange, thrilling madness that had briefly possessed His Grace.

“It must have been difficult,”

she said, though she was a little at a loss.

Of course it had been difficult; he had survived seven years of war and eaten his own boots one winter.

“For all of you.

Is it the same for the others? Did their fathers swear, too?”

“A few, I think.”

At the end of the picket line, they turned together, reversing their course.

“Tounot for certain; his father was the duke’s bannerman, and Tounot fostered with His Grace’s father every summer.

Edemir’s lands border the Andelin, and Huber was a fosterling of Duke Ereguil’s and came up with His Grace as a knight.

Bram was a mercenary your husband hired to do some tricky work, and then he decided to stay on.

And Miche—well, as far as I know, Miche just got a whim in his silly head one day.”

Ophele giggled.

It sounded like something he would do.

“You’re all very brave,”

she said.

“I often heard the maids talking about you, back home.”

“There are many kinds of bravery, my lady.

The subtler variety is no less worthy.”

“Oh, that’s from…”

She hummed, rummaging through her memory.

Sir Justenin liked to pepper quotations into the conversation, as if he were testing her.

“Deregas.

A Primer of Virtues.”

“Aldeburke has an impressive library.”

The compliment was roundabout enough that she was not embarrassed.

“Do you agree with his definition?”

She loved this kind of conversation.

Sir Justenin was so patient and encouraging, she forgot to be nervous, and he was a very methodical thinker.

He often trapped her with her own logical inconsistencies, and it taught her to think more thoroughly, to consider not just the words on a page, but all their implications, and everything that must follow, if they were true.

Like the travelers.

They saw occasional travelers on the roads, but as they drew close to the river, there were more.

Ragged families with hand carts, single men with heavy baskets on their backs, and twice, huge wagons bogged down in the middle of the narrow path, blocking the way and requiring the knights to hitch up their own horses to pull them free.

A vast migration had begun, and though she had heard the duke and his men talking about it at night around the fire, until now she hadn’t thought through what it meant.

All these travelers wanted to be the duke’s people.

They wanted to settle his lands, they would pay taxes to him, take oaths of loyalty to him, and he would be responsible for protecting them.

Riding on mules, seated in wagons, or tramping barefoot through the mud, they were coming, to build new lives, to till the soil and raise their families.

And if they wished to belong to the duke, and she was his wife, then it logically followed that they were going to be her people, too.

Ophele closed her book and watched.

Few of them were actual beggars.

Beggars would never make it so far.

It must cost a lot of money to uproot a life and buy food and supplies to journey for months.

But some of the travelers had clearly underestimated the cost, or run into misfortune, and when she saw a woman with a young child sitting in the shade by the side of the road, she couldn’t be silent.

The child did not look well at all.

“Your Grace,”

she made herself say.

“Can we help them?”

“Who?”

He glanced over, following her eyes.

He and his knights were not indifferent to the people they passed on the road, but she knew they were pushing hard to reach Tresingale, worried about what they might find there.

“We have somewhere to be, Princess.”

“But that little boy looks sick.”

She would have gone to help them herself, if she could, but Ophele was well aware that she was of no practical use to anyone.

“They’re on their way to your valley, Your Grace.

She wants to be one of your people.”

His black eyes flickered.

After more than a month on the road, he was looking very shaggy indeed, with a thick black beard darkening his jaw and making him almost a stranger.

She wasn’t sure whether it made him more or less easy to talk to.

“Tounot!”

He called up the line, and the curly-haired knight swung around on his horse.

“Go see if you can help the woman back there.”

There were others that needed help, too.

An elderly man with swollen ankles, a family that had broken a wheel on their cart, and too many other hungry-looking travelers to count, but after the third time she timidly asked him to help them, he flatly refused.

“We can’t stop for everyone,”

he said curtly.

“They’re responsible for their own lives, Princess.

They chose to leave their homes and come here uninvited, indeed, against my orders.

They passed a dozen towns on the way here where they might have stopped for help.”

“But maybe some of them didn’t have any choice—”

she began.

“I have people I am responsible for waiting in Tresingale,”

he interrupted, looking down at her sternly.

“People who have already sworn their loyalty to me.

Some of them have risked their lives for me.

I will keep faith with them first.”

Once again, she hadn’t thought things completely through.

The duke met her eyes as if he were waiting for her to produce another objection, but he had already offered enough counterarguments to silence her.

She looked down at her lap, her eyebrows drawing together as she thought about the problem.

Honestly, there were too many things she didn’t know to offer a solution.

They pressed on.

The horses devoured the miles to the Brede and then followed its winding course to the bridge at Gellege, a plain but impressive structure that was so large, a shout from one side of the bridge would have been inaudible from the other.

And that was the narrowest place on the river she had seen.

The Brede River was called the devourer of armies for a reason.

For most of its dark and churning length, the further bank was only a smudge on the horizon.

“Your Grace!”

shouted one of the men at the gatehouse on the far side of the bridge, and the duke rose up in his stirrups, lifting a hand.

“What’s the password!”

“Hawthorne!”

The word boomed out like thunder.

The duke knew how to make himself heard.

But the drawbridge didn’t budge.

“Beg pardon, m’lord, it’s the other one!”

“Grimjaw!”

Sir Miche shouted gleefully from behind them.

“I told you if you added that to the rotation, I’d reassign you to Kiel Gorge!”

The duke bellowed.

“Drop the bridge, you fu—”

He glanced down at Ophele, who was looking fascinated, and declined to complete the sentence. “Now!”

The drawbridge lowered.

Glowering, Remin Grimjaw spurred his horse forward, the saddle spanking Ophele’s tortured backside like she had done something to deserve it.

Inside the gatehouse, soldiers crowded around to welcome them, including the wit with the password, who the duke kicked lovingly in the back of the head.

At last, they had crossed the Brede.

* * *

Nothing appeared to be on fire.

In his dreams Remin had seen black smoke rising from miles away and descended to the valley to find burning huts, burning wagons, burning horses, and dead men, all the sights he was accustomed to seeing in the Andelin.

But from the rolling foothills at the southern end of the Berlawe Mountains, he looked on distant Tresingale and saw a pastoral paradise, every bit as beautiful as he remembered.

From the heights, the valley stretched before them like the pleats of a fan, lush and verdant from frequent rainfall, so green it dazzled the eye.

Dark stands of old-growth forest carpeted the sides of the mountains, and the mountains themselves were almost relentlessly scenic and reminded Remin of old white-headed soldiers, marching away to the northeast.

Soon it would be warm enough that the dark things in those mountains would begin making their way to the valley, and the city walls would need to be up by then, with solid gates.

They had already begun the spring planting.

He could see it on the north side of the city, dark acres of freshly turned soil in slightly uneven furrows.

War horses did not turn into plow horses overnight.

There were more crofter’s cottages lining the town’s only road, carefully spaced so that there was room for each cottage to turn into a proper city house one day.

One drunken night in Segoile, he and Tounot had gone out and measured the lot sizes for three blocks of Aben Road, to give themselves a base measurement in planning Tresingale.

There were his sheep, white dots on the green hills.

There was a wagon track veering down toward the river, the area where they had found clay.

There was another trail winding west into the trees, a quarry site they had begun to build last winter.

His men had been busy.

He had to fight the urge to kick his horse into a gallop and race down to the town.

His town. His city.

“That’s Tresingale,”

he told the princess, who had closed her book and was looking at the town with her solemn-owl face.

“Probably smaller than you imagined.”

“The valley is beautiful,”

she replied, which was a clever way to sidestep the subject.

“You should have seen it before.

I left two hundred men here, midwinter, and most of them were sleeping on the floor of the cookhouse.

We’ve a dozen more cottages than when I left and it looks like they’ve been busy on the wall.

We’re going to be doing nothing but hauling stone this summer.”

He hoped the oxen had arrived.

Remin had dozens of items on his mental lists that he wanted to check, and Edemir maintained even longer lists, endless catalogues of tasks and plans that extended years into the future.

Even the horses seemed to know that home was nearby and picked up the pace as they descended, watching the trees break to provide tantalizing glimpses of the town.

There was a palisade under construction on the north side of town, and another around the storehouse, the only building of substance.

Its stone walls were three feet thick and contained all their food, weapons, armor, and other crucial supplies.

He was half-tempted to keep the princess in it.

The sun was westering toward evening as they rode into town amid distant cries from laborers at the city wall and a few people taking their turn watching the sheep.

He felt his heart lift.

Most people would still be out at work, but Wen should be in the kitchen and Genon would be along as soon as he got word the duke had returned.

“There’s the storehouse,”

he said to the princess as they approached.

“Over there is the cookhouse, it doubles as a barracks right now, until we get an actual barracks built.

Kitchen’s on the back.

We have a camp cook that can make something edible out of almost anything.

Plain food,”

he added, as a warning.

“It won’t be what you’re used to.

Wen’s used to feeding an army, not gracing a nobleman’s table.”

He paused, giving her an opportunity to protest this, but as always, she let it pass in silence, looking at the tiny settlement.

Tresingale was to Trema what Trema was to Granholme.

There wasn’t even a cowshed in Tresingale yet.

“What will happen to all the people we saw coming here?”

she asked.

“We’re still discussing that,”

he answered, reining in his horse, who had spotted the stable and wanted hay.

“Technically, they’re Firkane’s problem.

But we’ll see what we can do for them.”

It would take a lot of time and money either way, and he had to bite his tongue to keep from cursing the Emperor aloud.

He had started this flood with his talk of open lands to the north.

They were Remin’s lands, and they weren’t open yet.

“And…the bandits?”

“I’ll deal with them,”

he said, grim lines deepening in his face, and lifted his hand to greet Genon, who was pelting toward them on his gray mare.

If he’d thought about it, Remin would have warned her about Genon beforehand.

It would have been a kindness to them both.

“Genon!”

Remin swung down from his horse, reaching for the princess to set her down beside him and then striding forward to clasp hands with the surgeon.

Genon was a big man, vast in the way some men could be big without being fat, burly and heavy-boned with forearms like hocks of ham.

“Still alive.”

“Too cursed stubborn to die.”

Genon clapped his shoulder.

“Thought you’d never get back, it’s been tense, Your Grace.

Been feeling like we’re out here naked with our boll—that is, it would be nice to have more defenses in place,”

he hastily amended, glancing at the princess, who was hobbling toward them and trying to hide it.

“This is my wife,”

Remin drew her forward, noting the line of pain between her eyebrows.

No matter what she said to the contrary, the ride had been grueling for her.

“Princess Ophele of House Agnephus, Lady of Aldeburke, and now my duchess.

Princess, this is Genon Hengest, our surgeon.”

“Pleased to meet you.”

Her eyes were round as she looked up at him.

Remin was used to Genon, so he hardly noticed the man’s wounds anymore, but they were a graphic illustration of the reality of war.

Thirty years ago, Genon had been doused in boiling oil while assaulting a Vallethi fortification.

The upper right quarter of his head, including his right eye, was a melted mass of silvery-pink scars that extended down the right side of his body, pulling his shoulder into a permanently crabbed position.

“It’s my honor, my lady.”

Genon bowed and gave her a glimpse of the scars seaming the top of his head.

“I’ve known His Grace a long time, it will be a pleasure to serve his lady.

You ever need anything, I’m your man.”

“Thank you.”

She was staring, her fingers knotting together in an anxious gesture that Remin recognized.

He was willing to let her timidity pass, to a point, but he was going to have to talk to her about that.

He would not allow her to embarrass Genon.

“I have heard of you, I think,”

she said hesitantly, so softly even Remin didn’t catch all of it, and he was right next to her.

“Some of…Genon minding the valley.

And…good hands.

On the way here.”

“Is that so?”

Genon gave a booming laugh, having made out enough of it to understand it was complimentary.

“That’s kind of you to say, my lady.

There’s a lot of work to be done.

But we’ve kept His Grace’s croft ready against your arrival, to make you as comfortable as we can.”

The look Genon was giving Remin from his one yellow eye was as good as words: see to your lady and then come talk to me.

There was news, and it could wait, but not for long.

And as much as he wanted to plunge straight into the work of the valley, his first responsibility was to his wife.

“I’ll find you in the cookhouse shortly,”

Remin said, catching the princess’s elbow and steering her toward the cottage.

“Tounot, have some of the lads bring the princess’s things up.

The rest of you, be about your business.”

The princess nodded politely to Genon and moved with Remin, picking up her skirts and tiptoeing to keep out of the mud.

His cot wasn’t far, the second one down the narrow lane, a thatched cottage with a recent coat of whitewash on its thick daubed walls.

Weeds and scrubby dandelions filled the front yard.

“I told you it wasn’t much,”

Remin said shortly, plodding across the muddy yard.

By rights, he should be taking his new bride to the ancient and beautiful manor where he had been born, one of seven separate estates that had belonged to his murdered House.

That place was gone, burned to the ground on the Emperor’s orders.

The rest of his ancestral lands had been seized.

What he had now was a peasant’s cottage.

Dark, dusty, dingy, though he could see his men had tried to keep it up for him.

The rushes on the floor looked fresh, and so did the bedding.

The bed was the one concession to his rank, an actual bedstead that took up the rear third of the small cottage, vast enough to accommodate his size.

The princess said nothing.

She stood in the simple doorway, dusty and disheveled from weeks in the saddle, her eyes moving from the small hearth to the rough table and chairs to the single heavy trunk under the window.

It was most charitably described as humble, and the contrast between this hovel and the dignified estate at Aldeburke made Remin flush with humiliation.

“Not what you were hoping for, Princess?”

he asked, tossing his own rough pack into the only empty corner.

He wanted her to be angry.

She should be angry to be brought to a place like this.

It was her father’s fault she was here, and her father’s fault that Remin Grimjaw had nothing better to offer his wife.

“You told me it would be a cottage,”

she said, blinking.

“Is there—could I have a bath before supper? I was hoping—”

“There will be no maids to draw baths for you here.”

Best she knew the worst of it now.

“If you want to wash, you’ll have to fetch water from the well.”

“I will.”

Her hands pressed together, her fingers twining an anxious knot.

“I—I was p-planning to dress for dinner, I wanted…a fresh…”

Her voice wavered, each word quieter than the last, and the last of it was completely inaudible.

“Speak. Up,”

he said impatiently.

“We don’t dress for dinner here.

There won’t be room for half your dresses in this cottage.

You’ll have to get used to living simply.”

“I know,”

she whispered.

“In Aldeburke—”

“Does this look like Aldeburke?”

Suddenly, he was furious.

“There’s no great house here, Princess.

No servants, no maids to wait on you, no groundskeepers to chase away foxes.

In a few weeks, there are going to be hungry things coming out of the mountains, and no one’s going to have time to coddle the Emperor’s spawn.

There’s nothing here, do you understand? We have nothing! We are going to have to build all of it ourselves, because your father—”

“I know!”

She burst out, her eyes round with fright.

“I know, I will do it, I will get water myself, I won’t trouble you, I just don’t know where anything is and I wanted to look nice when I meet your men, I’ll be careful, you just have to tell me and I’ll do it, I only need a bucket, a b-basin, I’m sorry, I’m sorry!”

Tears spilled from her eyes and she covered her mouth with her hand, shocking him out of his temper.

What was he doing? He had backed her up into the wall, and she was gripping the windowsill like she was about to go over it.

Automatically, he reached for her, but she ducked back, cringing into the corner.

His hand dropped.

“No,”

he said into a heavy silence.

“No, I’m sorry.

Go sit down.

You can draw your own bath next time.”

“I can do it,”

she wept, scrubbing at her face with her sleeve.

“I know you can.”

Carefully, he nudged her toward the closer of the two chairs, keeping his hands low and unthreatening.

“I’m sorry.

I went too far.

Don’t cry, Princess.

Stay here, I’ll be back.”

Ducking through the door, he closed it behind him, trying not to hear the soft sounds from inside the cottage.

He felt like a brute, and a bully, and he deserved to.

Even if she were feigning her tears, she had done nothing wrong.

He had just been so angry.

“Leave her things here,”

he said to the approaching squires, laden with the oilskins containing the princess’s books and clothing.

There was no place to put them but on the ground, in the mud.

“I’ll deal with them.

Go and see if we have a large tub in the storehouse.

Or a cauldron, from the kitchen.”

The boys exchanged glances.

“How big, Your Grace?”

Ferme wanted to know.

“Big enough for a lady’s bath.”