Chapter 45: The Two Hundred Came Back Wearing Another King’s Mail

"Count them again and tell me how many are wearing new mail."

Miralys counted from the town hall tower with the sun behind her, which is how you count properly.

"One hundred and ninety four men."

"And mail?"

"One hundred and ninety four."

Two hundred farmers leave a town with pitchforks, and eleven days later they come back in ring mail, all of them.

Nobody dresses two hundred men out of charity.

"Banner?"

"None." She lowered the glass. "And that’s the expensive part."

An army with no banner isn’t an army. It’s an accusation with legs. When those men died in the square tomorrow, there’d be no flag to name in the report, and the empire could write whatever word it liked over them.

I went down and told the smith to take the children out through the south gate.

"And us?"

"You stay, and you don’t touch a weapon."

"We’ve got two thousand pieces of armament in the square, Majesty."

"You’ve got two thousand pieces registered in a record under my seal. Use them today and tomorrow the record says mutiny." I held his eyes. "Leave them under the tarps. It’s the only way they’re still yours next month."

The smith spat on the ground and went to move the children.

The hundred and ninety four stopped two hundred paces from the low wall and came no closer.

One man came out alone, hands empty.

I knew him. Miralys had seen him in the town hall eleven days before, third row.

"His name is Odar," she said. "He was a sergeant of my father’s."

I went out to meet him halfway, Lunara ten paces behind and forty riders who stayed mounted and still.

"Majesty."

"Sergeant."

"Not anymore."

"I can see the mail."

Odar stood still and let me look at it.

Riveted ring, northern make, shoulder seam stitched in double cord. The same seam worn by the eleven men guarding twelve thousand tons at the Corven landing.

"Who dressed you?"

"A man who came to the camp on the fourth day with twelve carts and no questions." Odar had the voice of somebody who’d been rehearsing for days. "He said the empire promised us steel and never delivered, and that he would."

"And you believed him?"

"We believed him until yesterday." He lifted his chin toward the square. "Yesterday the real steel came. With a record and her name at the top."

There the rehearsal broke.

"Majesty, if we go in today, what are we?"

"Today you’re two hundred men armed by a stranger standing outside a town that just received plows." I let my hands drop. "Tomorrow you’d be the proof that the south can’t be given anything without biting."

"And if we leave?"

"If you leave today, tomorrow you’re two hundred men in new mail with no charges. And you can keep the mail."

Odar looked back at the hundred and ninety three.

"Majesty. One thing before I go back to them."

"Say it."

"The man with the carts knew my name." Odar looked at the ground. "Not my rank. My name, and my father’s, and the year I left service."

"Did that seem strange to you?"

"It seemed like the empire had finally noticed me." He almost laughed. "Eleven days later I find out the empire had noticed me twenty years ago and wrote it down."

"He’d read a file."

"He’d read my file." Odar lifted his head. "Majesty, I’ve been a nobody in a border ledger since your father’s reign. Who reads a nobody’s file and drives twelve carts to find him?"

"Somebody who needs two hundred nobodies with names."

"The man who dressed us said somebody would come today to lead us."

Something went cold at the back of my neck.

"Somebody?"

"He said we’d know the hero when we saw him."

I looked toward the square.

Roderic Alden was standing on the edge of the trough with the longsword in his hand and his shirt still filthy from unloading carts, in full view of a hundred and ninety four men who had spent eleven days waiting for exactly that silhouette.

"Odar," I said without turning. "What did they pay the man with the carts?"

"Nothing. He didn’t take payment."

"Did he give a name?"

"He said he was a carrier."

Lunara drew behind me.

Roderic came down off the trough and crossed the square on foot, slowly, sword pointed at the ground, and the hundred and ninety four opened to let him through without anyone giving an order.

He stopped beside me, in front of Odar.

"Me?" he asked.

"You," said Odar.

"And what am I supposed to say to them?"

"Anything, sir. We’ve waited eleven days."

Roderic Alden looked at two hundred men who had handed him an army without asking his surname.

Then he drove the longsword into the dirt of the square, let go of it, and stepped back twice.

"My name is Roderic," he said, loud enough to carry to the back. "I don’t remember my mother’s name. I don’t remember the village I was born in. Somebody took both from me when I was eleven so they could stand me in front of you today."

Nobody moved.

"Yesterday I unloaded carts with the smith. That’s everything I’ve ever done for Vareth." He pointed at the planted sword. "If you want a hero, you don’t have one today. And if anyone brings you new mail for free again, ask him what play you’re rehearsing."

There was one of those silences that cost money.

And from the third row, a sixty year old man with burned hands who hadn’t even gone with them started clapping alone.

The smith of Vareth.

He clapped eleven times, slowly, and then stopped, and nobody else clapped at all.

It was enough.

Odar raised a hand and the hundred and ninety four began sitting down in the grass, one by one, which is how a troop surrenders when it doesn’t want to surrender to anyone.

[DING]

[Investment tracking: negative.]

[No action registered.]

[Integrity: 29% ▲ 31%]

[Load: 77% ▼ 74%]

[HERO, the sum just came to a hundred and five.]

[Still broken. But it’s moving the same direction now.]

Bren Olvar appeared on my left with the reins in his hand and the face of a man who has just recognized handwriting.

"Majesty. The man with the carts."

"Say it."

"Twelve carts, unpaid, in four days." He swallowed. "I’ve done that arithmetic before. It’s impossible without the Chancellery warehouse."

"So it was Decimus."

"No." Bren shook his head slowly. "Decimus signs everything he takes out. Twenty years without moving a nail unsigned."

"Then what?"

"Then somebody is pulling material out of the chancellor’s warehouse without the chancellor signing for it."