it safer here? There are guards—”
“Guards won’t stop her. Walls won’t stop her. You can’t wall out mist, and the strongest shield forged won’t stop a spell. The Thorn can’t be more than a day behind her puppet, and she either knows or suspects we’re here. So thank the Bright Lady that the Thornlady tried a glamour on an ugly girl, and let’s get out of here now.”
“But what about Wistan?” Odosse asked, too flustered to care about the insult. “He’s so frail, and it’s so cold. He’ll die, Brys.”
“He might. But if we don’t go, we all will. Risk the baby or die yourself, it’s your choice. I’m leaving before dawn either way.”
The intensity she saw in the sellsword’s green eyes convinced her as much as anything he said. “All right,” Odosse said, defeated. “Give me an hour to pack and ready the babies.”
“Meet me by the south gate. An hour, not more. Or I leave without you.”
It was well into the afternoon when Odosse returned to the bakery. Mathas was sleeping, as was his custom; he’d wake around midnight to begin the next morning’s bread. She wished she could leave a note for the baker, thanking him for his kindness and apologizing for her sudden departure. The days she’d spent working for him were the happiest she’d had since leaving Willowfield, and better than some she’d had there. This could have been a life for her, and a good one: stable, warm, welcoming. She felt real regret at having to leave it behind. But she didn’t know her letters, and Brys would have scoffed if she’d asked him to write it for her, and there was no time left for the luxury of sorrow.
She passed through the empty kitchen quietly, and went upstairs to gather the children.
12
The trouble with dead men, Albric decided, was that their brains were dead too. Whatever magic animated their bodies and put breath back in their lungs did nothing at all to revive their wits. That was the only reason—the only reason—that he sat out here on a bare wagon bed, freezing his balls off and waiting for the gods-cursed baker to leave his shop.
They’d had the girl. They’d had the girl, the false knight, and the child—that helpless, defenseless, deadly child. All three of them unsuspecting and ripe for the taking.
It had taken weeks to get this close. Weeks of greasing palms and buying drinks and feigning interest in idiots bragging about their “bravery” across the border, when none of them had done more than knife an unarmed crofter and burn down his hut. Weeks during which Albric had wondered if the Thornlady intended to do anything but stand back and watch him do the work that his lord had paid her for.
But, finally, he’d found their quarry: a black-haired freesword with a baby, his identity confirmed by the girl with the Langmyrne accent who was said to be caring for that child. Most of Albric’s sources thought the girl was a doxy who’d been cast aside when her soldier-lover got bored—and the real wonder, they said, was that he’d bedded such an ugly wench in the first place.
Albric knew better. He knew what she was, if not precisely who, and he knew who that baby had to be. Wistan. The closeness of it galled him.
The girl had been right here, living inside this bakery, walking to the same doors with the same baskets every day. It would have been the simplest thing in the world to swoop in and spirit her away. They wouldn’t even have had to hurt her; they could have snatched the baby while she was gone and left her unharmed. She’d been a baker. Bakers started their rounds early, more in night than morning. There wouldn’t have been a soul awake to see the deed, nor a candle’s worth of light to show it. A half-wit could have done the job.
But the gods had ordained that nothing in Albric’s life should be easy, and so instead of executing a clean little snatch-and-grab on the baker’s girl and the baby, Severine’s rotwit hound had spooked her out of Tarne Crossing.
He knew why it had happened, although that did nothing to lessen his annoyance that it had. Tarne Crossing lay in Leferic’s domain, and the embattled Lord of Bulls’ March could scarcely afford to have his most trusted servant kidnapping and killing his own subjects at whim. Leferic had issued strict instructions that they should minimize casualties—and, given the