The Vampire & Her Witch-Chapter 1502: The People of Lothian (Part Two)
Further back from the boulevard, in the mouth of an alley where the noise of the crowd faded to a dull roar, a cluster of older men and women had gathered around a woman selling hot cider from a battered copper pot.
They were tradespeople, most of them, though they sat near the top of their trades in Lothian City. A cobbler who made the finest riding boots in the march, a chandler who worked with expensive beeswax, along with a woman who mended clothes for a few of the local knights, and their conversation was steeped in years of experience spent close enough to power to know when things were going wrong.
"The Hanrahans still haven’t come," the cobbler said, wrapping both hands around his cup of cider for warmth. "The Dunns arrived last night. I saw their horses being led to the manor stables, but no one’s seen a Hanrahan banner since Lord Hugo went missing weeks ago and his brother, Bastian, came to report the raids on their caravans."
"It’s the demons," the woman who mended clothes said, making a gesture with one hand to ward off evil while the other hand clutched her own mug of cider. "The Dunns and the Hanrahans were both raided. If the Dunns made it through and the Hanrahans didn’t..."
She let the sentence hang, and the silence that filled its absence was heavier than any words could have been.
"I don’t know that the Dunn’s made it through in one piece," the cobbler said, pointing out at the procession moving by. "Baron Loghlan is here, but where’s Lord Liam? He should be out front of the carriage with the bannerman, but I heard he’s still missing."
"I heard Lord Loman went missing, too," the chandler said, lowering her voice until it was barely above a whisper. "Sent west by his father before the old Marquis died. He rode out with a whole column of soldiers and some of the Temple Guard too, and none of them has come back."
"Marquis Bors’ own son," the cobbler said, frowning at the cider in his hand and wishing it was something stronger. "And Lord Owain’s brother. If Lord Owain’s lost both his brother and a whole barony to the demons, and the Dunns are falling too, then what chance do the rest of us have if they come east?"
"What chance do we have either way?" the woman who mended clothes asked. "Have you been to the market lately? A sack of flour costs twice what it did at harvest, and the price of salt pork has gone through the roof. My husband says it’s because the traders are afraid to bring their goods over the frontier roads, so everything has to come up the river, and the rivermen charge whatever they please."
"It’ll get worse before it gets better," the chandler agreed. "War always makes things worse. And if Lord Owain really is calling up a levy..."
"Three times the normal levy," the cobbler said grimly. "That’s what one of Baron Otker’s servants told my apprentice when the procession started. Three times. Where are the men supposed to come from? My shop barely earns enough to feed my family as it is. If I lose my best apprentice to the levy, I’ll have to close. And I’m not the only one."
He didn’t think anyone would be foolish enough to shove a pike in his apprentice’s hands and send him off to stand on the line against the demon hordes, but that hardly mattered. Dozens of knights, and hundreds of cavalrymen besides... There’d be plenty of boots that needed mending, and tack as well.
It wasn’t just men who could fight who’d be called up; it was everyone who could keep an army fighting, too. Cooks and ferriers, fletchers and blacksmiths... He’d been called off himself as a young man during the War of Inches, and now he was watching it all come around again.
Back at the boulevard, the procession had slowed to a crawl. Word filtered back through the crowd that something had happened near the front, a broken carriage wheel, some said, or a sinkhole in the road, and the delay sent a ripple of restless energy through the spectators who had already been standing in the cold for hours.
It wasn’t the first delay to strike the procession either. An unlucky man selling commemorative tin ornaments had seen his tableful of wares collapse, spilling its contents all over the road, and someone who didn’t know how to secure an awning had seen a gust of wind blow it right into the path of Baron Fayle’s carriage.
Of course, these were trivial delays, cleared in a matter of minutes, but the broken wheel was a much more serious issue for the procession, especially if the carriage in question was carrying someone important.
"Can you see Lady Jocelynn?" a boy of twelve or thirteen asked, tugging at his mother’s sleeve as he craned his neck to see around the people in front of him. "They say she’s the most beautiful woman in the whole march."
"They said that about Lady Ashlynn, too," his mother said with a heavy sigh before she tightly pursed her lips, afraid that the guards would overhear. "She’s in one of the carriages, love," she said, pulling him closer against the cold and doing her best to ignore the brutish-looking guardsman in Lothian blue and yellow not a dozen paces away from them.
"You probably won’t see her unless she opens the curtains on her carriage," she warned her son. "But it’s too cold for a delicate lady from Blackwell to be out in the cold. Blackwell doesn’t have hard winters like we do, you know," she said, hoping to distract her son. "They stay warm enough all winter long that it barely even snows."
"Is it true she’s going to marry Lord Owain tonight?" her son asked, refusing to move on from the topic. "Like a princess in a story?"
"Something like that," his mother said, and the flatness in her voice suggested that she knew more about the story than her son did, and that the parts she knew weren’t the kind you told children.
Near the back of the crowd, where the lines of guardsmen were thinner and the spectators had more room to move, a man in a patched wool coat was less restrained in his comments about Lord Owain’s choice of bride and how it seemed almost like it had been planned in advance for the soon-to-be Marquis to move on from the older sister to the younger one within days of the march learning that Lady Ashlynn had died.
"Killed in a demon raid," the man said with a snort. "As if anyone believes that. Trading ’em out like horses, he is. Tossin’ the older one fer tha’ younger one who don’t know any better. I bet it’s ’cause Lady Ashlynn wasn’t pliant enough fer’ Lord Owain, like a stubborn mare. He probably wanted an easier mare ta’ break an’ ride..."
His comments drew sharp looks from two of his companions and a bark of laughter from a third, but the laughter died abruptly when one of the guardsmen turned his head.
The guardsman didn’t say a word. He simply stepped toward the group with the iron-banded cudgel in his right hand swinging loosely at his side, and when he reached the man in the patched coat, he drove the weighted end into the man’s stomach with a short, efficient motion that folded the man double and dropped him to his knees on the frozen cobblestones before he turned a warning gaze on the men who had laughed.
No one nearby said anything. Most people looked away, with a few making gestures as if to say that they had nothing to do with the man in the patched coat or that they didn’t even know who he was.
The guardsman returned to his position at the line without breaking stride, and the man in the patched coat was helped to his feet by his companions and led away down a side street, one arm wrapped around his ribs, leaving nothing behind but a small dark spot on the stones where he’d coughed up bile.
The procession ground onward, slower than it should have been, and the shadows cast by the buildings along the boulevard grew longer as the sun sank beneath the western wall of the city. The gold on the temple spires, which had blazed in the morning light, now glowed with a deeper, more somber fire, as though the day itself was preparing to mourn something that hadn’t happened yet.
At the front of the column, something was wrong.
The crowd couldn’t see what it was from this far back, but the word passed from mouth to mouth like a flame running along a wick: the lead carriage had broken a wheel. Lord Owain was stranded, and the ceremony was going to be delayed...
