Jon reached the stable-yard arch three strides ahead of Corporal Morvath, catching the lathered leather cheek-strap of the courier’s roan mare before the exhausted beast could slip on the wet flagstones and go down on its knees.
“Easy, girl, easy now—stand to the cobbles,” Jon murmured, laying his scarred right palm flat against the mare’s heaving, foam-flecked neck so the calm warmth of the house boundary steadied her racing heart.
Eighteen-year-old royal courier Tobin hung half out of his drenched saddle, his right boot caught in the iron stirrup-bow and his teeth chattering so hard inside his mud-splattered oilskin cape that he could barely unclench his fingers from the reins. Yesterday evening, after Sir Cael Ardent had refused Jon’s boiled beef in the taproom, the knight had sent Tobin galloping back up the dark north highway toward the royal rear-guard relay post at Oak Ford with a sealed dispatch packet—fifty miles there and back through driving autumn rain.
In the previous seven loops, Tobin had returned to the River Lantern stable yard at nine o’clock on the evening of Day 2, riding down the main paved high road with a clean coat and reporting that Marshal Ors’s main siege train was still encamped four leagues north of the river while light bog-scouts probed the Low Sike marsh.
