Nothing

"Ah...."

Celandine observed the man curiously who just came out from the chamber, going downstairs. She noticed the small hand batch on his black robe, wondering what that might be meaning. 

Suddenly everything around her changed.

They traveled dawn to dusk, past woods and orchards and neatly tended fields, through small villages, crowded market towns, and stout holdfasts. Come dark, they would make camp and eat by the light of the moon and the lamps. The men took turns standing watch. Celandine would glimpse firelight flickeringthrough the trees from the camps of other travelers. There seemed to be more camps every night, and more traffic on the kingsroad by day.

She somehow knew it was a dream.

Morning, noon, and night they came, old folks and little children, big men and small ones, barefoot girls and women with babes at their breasts. Some drove farm wagons or bumped along in the back of ox carts. More rode: draft horses, ponies, mules, donkeys, anything that would walk or run or roll. One woman led a milk cow with a little girl on its back. Celandine saw a smith pushing a wheelbarrow with his tools inside, hammers and tongs and even an anvil, and a little while later a different man with a different wheelbarrow, only inside this one were two babies in a blanket. Most came on foot, with their goods on their shoulders and weary, wary looks upon their faces. They walked south, toward the city, toward the The Royal Palace and only one in a hundred spared so much as a word for the Seller and his charges, traveling north. She wondered why no one else was going the same way as them.

Many of the travelers were armed; Celandine saw daggers and dirks, scythes and axes, and here and there a sword while she thought they were normal people. Some had made clubs from tree limbs, or carved knobby staffs. They fingered their weapons and gave lingering looks at the wagons as they rolled by, yet in the end they let the column pass. Thirty was too many, no matter what they had in those wagons.

One day a madwoman began to scream at them from the side of the road. "Fools! They'll kill you, fools!" She was scarecrow thin, with hollow eyes and bloody feet.

The next morning, a sleek merchant on a grey mare reined up by the Seller and offered to buy his wagons and everything in them for a quarter of their worth gold. "It's still war, they'll take what they want, you'll do better selling to me, my friend." The Seller turned away with a twist of his crooked shoulders, and spat.

  Celandine noticed the first grave that same day, a small mound beside the road, dug for a child. A crystal had been set in the soft earth and a few leagues farther on, Praed, a big shouldered scary man with a giant axe, pointed out more graves, a whole row freshly dug. After that, a day hardly passed without one.

  One time Celandine woke in the dark, frightened for no reason she could name. Again, there were reasons that she knew it was just a dream. She was afraid what would happen if she met her family in the dream.

   The night seemed oddly quiet to her, though she could hear the Seller's muttered snores, the crackle of the fire, even the muffled stirrings of the donkeys. Yet somehow it felt as though the world were holding its breath, and the silence made her shiver. She went back to sleep clutching her tiny sword. Of course, she didn't remember how she had got that.

  Come morning, when Praed did not awaken, Celandine realized that it had been his coughing she had missed. They dug a grave of their own then, burying the sellsword where he'd slept. The Seller stripped him of his valuables before they threw the dirt on him. One man claimed his boots, another his dagger. His mail shirt and helm were parceled out. "Arms like yours, might be you can learn to use this," he told him. A boy called Tarber tossed a handful of acorns on top of Praed's body, so an oak might grow to mark his place.

Celandine wanted to ask them what was the point of these things, what was point of going to the The Royal Palace. But no one seemed hear her, as if she were invisible.

Maybe she were.

  That evening they stopped in a village at an ivy-covered inn. The Seller counted the coins in his purse and decided they had enough for a hot meal. "We'll sleep outside, same as ever, but they got a bathhouse here, if any of you feels the need o' hot water and a lick o' soap."

Celandine did not dare, even though she smelled as bad as the Seller by now, all sour and stinky. Tarber and his friends joined the line of men headed for the tubs. Others settled down in front of the bathhouse. The rest crowded into the common room. The Seller even sent Dummy, one of the Tarber's friends, to out with tankards for the three in fetters, who'd been left chained up in the back of their wagon.

Washed and unwashed alike supped on hot pork pies and baked apples. The innkeeper gave them a round of beer on the house. "I had a brother took the black, years ago. Serving boy, clever, but one day he got seen filching pepper from m'lord's table. He liked the taste of it, is all. just a pinch o' pepper, but Ser Malcolm was a hard man. You get pepper on the Garden?" When the Seller shook his head, the man sighed. "Shame. Lync loved that pepper."

The Garden wasn't a real garden, it was a bunch of mountains which aparted South and North Leafstone along with Anceps.

Celandine sipped at her tankard cautiously, between spoonfuls of pie still warm from the oven. She wanted to remember how her mother used to make food for her, but shame, the witch really had cleared her brain.

The inn was full of people moving south, and the common room erupted in scorn when the Seller said they were traveling the other way. "You'll be back soon enough," the innkeeper vowed. "There is no going north. Half the fields are burnt, and what folks are left are walled up inside their holdfasts. One bunch rides off at dawn and another one shows up by dusk. King Nrikawn can be the King now, but there are still people who worship his brother like a God."

"That's nothing to us," the Seller insisted stubbornly. "Nrikawn or Moriah or the Legend, makes no matter. We take no part."

Celandine chewed her lip and kept quiet, listening with rapt attention. 

"It's more than the King and the Lord of Life," the innkeeper said. "There are wild men down from the Mountains of Anceps, try telling them you take no part."

"Fool's talk." The Seller spat.

"The man I heard it from, he saw it himself. A man rode on the back a wolf, he swore," a yellow haired man spoke out loudly. 

"Swearing don't make it true, Hod," the innkeeper said. "You keep swearing you'll pay what you owe me, and I've yet to see a copper." The common room erupted in laughter, and the man with the yellow hair turned red.