Mouse stared out the window of the carriage, her fingers busying themselves with the winding and unwinding of a piece of thread around a pin which she had untangled from the nest of her hair.
They had not moved in some minutes, and it was like to be a good deal longer before they did again. It was a barricade that had stopped them, a protest of the servitum. It was a matter which had been a topic of much discourse the past many months, not only among the Council and the courts, but among the common people as well.
Rumor had begun to spread that there were talks of extending the servitum, an increase in the amount of labor owed an overlord by his fief, and such rumors had, quite understandably, been met with a good deal of outrage and a growing number of protests.
All this was despite the fact that no official word had been spoken on the matter, but the people would not wait for their abuse to be sanctioned before rising against it.
There were some two hundred men on the road in front of them now, a few miles past the gates of Hallovie, but if they were not dealt with swiftly, their numbers would only swell. The decision had therefore been made that they should pass through as quickly as possible, before the retinue became even more heavily outnumbered. For even though the guard were mounted, their belts hung with Arosian steel, their foe was armed with righteous indignation.
“Berries bought by the bushel bring big black bears bellowing through the birch,” said Agatha, “and the bards who bartered for the berries had better beware, for the bear’s bellow is bested by its bite.”
Mouse’s fingers methodically wound the length of thread around the prongs of the pin as she watched a boy run barefoot along the road, stopping just long enough to gawk at Sir Hugo before continuing on.
The knight bore the crest of the Arosian sun, having left the red at Pothes Mar, and sat in all his gleaming glory atop his tawny charger, his visor open so that he might better survey the scene. Around his neck hung a chain of small white mallows which Agatha had fashioned for him, though how he had managed to ride all this way without the thing falling to pieces, Mouse could not begin to understand. It reminded her of the old Arosian song, the part where the heroes rode home from battle "decked in glory, and mallows 'round their necks," and indeed, there was something about the knight, with his light brown eyes and unruly lick of hair, as though even heaven itself seemed to understand just how good he was.
“It is your turn,” Agatha said, her voice breaking through Mouse’s reverie.
She had been musing once again over the fact that it been days, closer to weeks, since it had last rained, and she could not help but feel that the flooded highway, though possibly the work of some accident of nature, was just as likely to owe to a body of more sinister intent.
“Contrary to careful chiding,” she said, her eyes following the barefoot boy as he receded toward the front of the line, ducking behind a bush, “careless children cave to the coaxing of cats, carrying cream and curdled cheese to the canonically curious creatures,” she paused, watching the boy reappear out the other side of the shrub, “and though countless crafty charlatans are content with the constant creation of—”
“That does not begin with a ‘c,’” Agatha suddenly interrupted. Mouse turned to look at the girl with a furrowed brow. “Charlatans,” Agatha said. “It begins with an ‘s.’”
Mouse drew her mouth into a line.
“It most certainly does not,” she said, unwinding the thread from around the pin. “It begins with a ‘c.’”
But Agatha was insistent in her argument.
“Shawl, shoe, shame,” she said. “They all begin with an ‘s.’”
Mouse pressed her lips together.
“‘Charlatan’ comes from the Han dialect,” she said, “and I promise you on a mustard seed that it begins with a ‘c.’”
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Agatha shook her head in stubborn defiance.
“You do not have a mustard seed to promise on,” she protested, "and 'charlatans' begins with an 's.'"
Mouse sighed, her irritation growing.
“If I had a book,” she said, “I would show you that it does indeed begin with a 'c,' but seeing as I do not, you will have to wait until we are returned to Kriftel for me to carry my point. Now, will you allow me to continue or not?”
Agatha considered this for a moment, her arms folded across her lap.
“Yes,” she conceded at last. “But I will not count the word ‘charlatan,’ and you must begin anew.”
Mouse looked away, pressing the prongs of the pin into the soft flesh of her fingertips.
“Very well,” she said. “Caught within the confines of a cramped and cushioned carriage, a childish courtier, through a choir of complaints and criticisms, created a condemnable cacophony, the crescendo of which consequently caused considerable colic in her cage-weary and careworn companion.”
Even without looking the girl, Mouse could feel Agatha’s frown.
Mouse’s gaze swept across the surrounding landscape as the silence that had settled over the carriage was interrupted by the sound of distant shouts. On a distant hill some three miles off, she could see Hallovie. The place had been built for the simple purpose of collecting taxes on the surrounding farmland and keeping an eye on those who might pass between Pothes Mar and Silkeborg, hoping to avoid the toll, but like many villages in the empire, it had quickly outgrown itself, and the result was a town that had expanded upward rather than out, building on every available scrap of land and filling in every gap leading up to the curtain of the keep with angular buildings that hugged the narrow, sloping streets.
If she craned her neck, she could just make out the gates leading into the city, and though she could not see them from such a distance, she knew that atop those gates stood four points, a herald to all those who might pass through. Beware all who enter, they warned, for here dwells the Empress’s justice, and those who abuse it will be subject to the law, even unto death.
Mouse had stopped at Hallovie once before on a visit north, back when she was no more than a child, and she would forever remember it as the place where she had first seen a sow’s head parted from its body, hanging rather grotesquely, at least to her seven-year-old eyes, in the window of a butcher. She thought she would be sick at the sight of it and imagined that she would never again be able to eat pork of any kind for all the rest of her life. However, such a notion had dissolved the moment she discovered the divineness that was potatoes crisped in bacon fat.
The carriage suddenly lurched back into motion, sending Mouse’s shoulder painfully into the doorframe. She had switched places with Agatha after the girl complained of a headache from traveling so long backward, despite having spent most of the journey asleep, and though there was certainly enough room for two to sit on one bench, they both agreed that it was a good deal more comfortable to sit catercorner.
The velvet curtains swayed with the movement of the carriage as it bumped along the uneven road, the door rattling lightly on its hinges.
“A dozen dirty dogs dodged the drunken, dozing doorman and dug determinedly in the dirt, destroying the dahlias, the daisies, and the dancing duchies," said Agatha.
Mouse closed her eyes and leaned her head back. Outside, she could hear the din of the protest growing louder, the sound of men shouting and wood splintering, of objects being hurled and blades being drawn.
She did not like a crowd. At the best of times they were unpredictable, and at the worst, deadly. Emboldened by their numbers, angry men became violent ones, and grievances against the crown became justifiable cause for belligerence.
“Even the erudite eschew effective employment in the evenings,” Mouse said, hoping to distract from her growing disease, “electing to engage in erotic entertainments and—"
There was a loud thump, as something striking the side of the carriage.
“—and enact effusive efforts to epitomize the ever elusive—”
There was another thump. This time, Mouse opened her eyes and looked out the window.
On either side of the carriage, a thin line of guardsmen held back men armed with tools of the field and baskets of rotten produce which they hurled at the passing caravan. Mouse looked out into their angry faces and felt a wave of nausea swell inside her stomach as she forced herself down lower into her seat.
She was frightened.
She watched a man pull his arm back and send a cabbage flying at the head of one of the knights, only narrowly missing him, while another chased a hog into the road in the hopes that the beast might frighten the horses and derail the caravan. Dogs barking at the heels of their masters snapped and lunged.
Mouse’s eyes went to Sir Hugo, the man riding along, undaunted by the fray, with a chain of mallows around his neck, a beacon of fortitude in the chaos. His head turned slightly toward her, as though he could sense her fear, and it was in that moment that Mouse noticed two men pushing through the crowd toward him.
Mouse opened her mouth to cry out, but before she could, the men had broken through the line, one grabbing the reins of Sir Hugo’s mount, trying to wrench them from the knight’s grasp, while the other came up from behind and, finding the opening in the knight’s armor just below his arm, drove a hack-made spear up into his flesh.