Chapter 159 Provocation

The Countess had been home but a few days; Windsor Yves's killer was still uncaught — and now the Lohenheim army's horse ranch came to trouble.

"Lilac — do you think it's going to rain? Why are dark clouds up in the sky?"

Brendan and Carl were to report to the barracks daily now; Leon had moved back into his own mansion; and the eldest, on the eve of departure, must hand everything over into Gareth's hands, and choose besides the five hundred guards he would take with him. For days running, Lora couldn't catch the face of a single brother.

Her father wouldn't let her out of the house, and just now she was in the courtyard, training the dogs to find things.

"Aiden — run out and ask what's happened in the south suburbs. That's no rain-cloud; it has the look of fire-smoke. Ah well — autumn air dry, everything brittle; fires come easy."

Lilac was busy airing the young lady's thin silk quilt — once a fortnight — and it would be ready for use by October.

"The south suburbs? Isn't that where our guard camp stands? I've even been out to that horse ranch..."

Aiden was only thirteen, his voice still a boy's. He came charging head-first into the inner court with no hello or by-your-leave, ran full tilt into Lucy with her arms full of quilt — and before anyone could scold him, he was crying out:

"My lady — it's the army ranch that's on fire! The young lords have all rushed over. But don't you worry — it won't reach the city."

"The ranch on fire? However does a sound ranch catch fire?... Golden Lion! Golden Lion — his wound's not healed, he's strapped in that frame — if fire comes he can't even run... No — I have to go out to the ranch!"

Lora tossed the two meat pasties from her plate to Belle and Chance, one apiece, stood up, and headed for the house:

"Lucy — dig out my guard's uniform. Aiden — go find Shawn. Tell him I'm for the ranch."

The four of them were barely out the mansion gate on horseback when urgent hoofbeats came up hard behind. The riders, seeing it was Lora, reined in with a whoa and slowed — it was Corin with a few of his men.

"My lady — you're for the ranch?"

Dressed in a guard's uniform — no guessing needed that this was no shopping trip.

"You too?"

"Joren was shot dead chasing the fire-setter. The General's sent me over to take over his brigade. If you're going, keep close to me." Corin laid one whip-crack on his horse's haunch, and the animal spread its hooves and ran.

Soon the ten of them were out the city gate, gallop and trot, for the guard camp's ranch rolling with thick smoke.

The camp itself hadn't burned, but it stood hard by the ranch, and the smoke lay thick through it. A knot of guards ringed two men lying on the ground — one already covered, head and all, in linen, the other with a medic crouched at his side, bandaging him.

"Corin's come! It's Corin!"

The Grey Wolf guards all came stirring alive.

Watching Corin go over to them, Lora did not dismount; she put her horse toward the ranch instead.

Roland and Brendan stood amid a crowd of men. The mountain wind had fed the blaze; most of the horses had been saved — but the stables, and the fodder only just stacked up against winter, had burned to nothing.

Brendan said it hot and vexed: "It has to be the Windsors! Can't get at the real killer, so they take it out on the ranch. Half a month to the hand-over — where do you buy back fodder by the mountainload overnight?"

"And here's what I keep finding strange: the War Office always drags and drags on fodder and grain — this time the hay came down so pat, months of it, all at once." So Fyfe spoke up beside them.

Set the two things side by side, and the affair couldn't be unhooked from the Windsors: the extra fodder had come down for the very sake of this one fire — to swell the Lohenheim army's shortfall.

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And the charge of careless oversight would swell with it.

Lora stood back and heard some of it, then made for the room where Golden Lion had been penned.

That row of wooden buildings still smoldered; a few guards went on beating down the open flame with branches.

"My lady — don't go over; the Sixth young lord is there." Shawn's eye was sharp: he had already made out the tall horse with the golden coat, Leon and Lyle and the two horse-masters standing about him.

At the sight of Golden Lion, Lora at last let out a long, deep breath.

"Sixth Cousin — how is Golden Lion?"

At her voice Leon turned, and smiled: "Well enough — only his mane got singed by the fire. Thank heaven a warhorse is trained to it, and no great fearer of fire. By the time I came, the two horse-masters had already got him out."

"It's well he's had his two months of treatment — Golden Lion's leg is near enough whole; watch him trot, it comes easy to him now. Only a pity that frame and windlass went up in the fire." The horse-master still felt the loss of it.

A horse walks the way a person dances on tiptoe — the make of a horse's legs takes hurt most easily. Golden Lion was whole again, and that apparatus was certain to serve other horses in the years coming.

"The fodder fire isn't out yet. They say it only came onto the yard two days ago. The hand that set it — if not the Windsors, then the killer of Windsor Yves."

Lora's face went wondering: "Joren wasn't shot down with a flying arrowhead? I'd thought..."

"A tripping-rope brought Joren's horse down, and the wild arrows killed him — there's no making certain it was that Hugh Kestrel. Yvonne — you should not have come out. The Windsors aren't the simple thing we took them for. Half a month left... they can't wait it out."

Leon went some way toward doubting his own reading: had the action not been set a month out, perhaps no such trouble would have come of it.

"Don't think that way. Move the moment Windsor Yves dies, and we only nail ourselves down as the killers. The step being taken — better to keep on showing them our soft side..."

Roland, catching sight of that familiar figure from far off, came over and took up the thread from her:

"Months of hay given out at one go, and the soldiers' pay and winter uniforms held back unissued — the Windsors aren't afraid of tearing the skin off the face either. We can't keep showing weakness: Gareth has already led men and laid hold of their cargo boats at the docks."

"Is Tanner Marlow's word to be trusted?" Leon asked.

This was an official he'd crossed paths with some few times — Sheriff at Goldhaven, and everywhere squeezed and pressed upon by Windsor Reginald, the southern marcher duke. When Windsor Yves was killed and they went digging into the Windsor case, Leon had recommended them to Tanner Marlow, the Sheriff of Goldhaven.

"To be trusted entirely. Windsor Terence and his people killed certain League merchants — under the Empire's law, goods of theirs unclaimed for three months go forfeit to the state. Windsor Reginald used the power of his post and carried off nine parts in ten of the goods — and those boatloads chanced to be contraband the court has expressly banned."

Roland gave a cold laugh: "Three boatloads of white silver, traded against our three months of fodder. The Windsor house will be downing its regret-medicine by the bowlful tonight."

"We go by the book, and the fodder being burned, we must cry our grievance loud all the same — the louder the better, so Felix has his footing to make arrests. Let him put a little terror round him before he leaves, and the Exchequer people won't be looking down their noses at him either."

"Rest easy. Tonight's taking of men in Curved Alley — we have it all in hand." The two said no more; their eyes only settled on Lora.

Seeing them deep in talk she had no part of, Lora walked out in front of Golden Lion, dug out a piece of sugar, and fed it to him.

The second piece she hid shut in her palm for Golden Lion to find. His muzzle rootled this side, that side — and when he found it, he was delighted past all measure, snuffing softly without stop, and rubbing his face against Lora's.

Lora went off into a giggle herself.

So her brothers had been moving all along. When it came to the court-game of pit-tricking, what she knew was far too little.

Felix had not been sitting idle these days. Two shaven-headed, tattooed young thugs made trouble at the North Market — the same old bullying of the common folk everyone had seen a hundred times over, making off with a man's whole cartload of charcoal — and Felix had men seize the pair on the spot, hale them to the vegetable-market corner, and try the case then and there.

A sheriff trying a case out in the open street was a rare sight. From the platform, Sheriff Felix's voice rang out:

"At any time whatsoever — whatever violence these men have done any of you within the bounds of Lohenheim — report it, and where the report proves true, the government will make part-payment of the loss."

And with that, the people's whole heart for coming forward woke up on the spot. In the end the two thugs were sentenced to the birch, and the sentence was carried out then and there at the North Market.

But this had goaded the pack's chieftain past bearing. With the Windsor house's wink behind him, that same day he had a line tattooed down each arm — "These fists thrash the Fairfax drowning-dog" and "These feet kick the Odenheim bare-pelt wolf" — and went swaggering with all his might through street and lane.

A whole pack of shaven, tattooed young thugs smashed and robbed through the markets; at the soldiers' coming they broke up in one clatter like a startled flock, and pelted the soldiers with stones as they went.

Felix gave a cold laugh, Roland's very own:

"Tonight we seal Curved Alley — and if I don't kill these rotten horses of the herd, I, Felix, will never go up to the capital!"