A courier learned early that an army was held together by paper and fear, but a road was held together by blood and timber.
Tobin sat on the tailboard of his borrowed dray at the narrow mouth of the orchard lane, his boots hanging over the edge, scraping dried river mud from the leather with the blade of an old farrier’s rasp. The metal made a dry, rhythmic shhk-shhk against the stiff hide, sending curls of gray clay tumbling into the clover. Fifty paces behind him, through the tangled branches of Master Harl’s winter pear trees, the stone chimney of the bakehouse barn puffed thin ribbons of woodsmoke into the crisp morning air.
He was tired to his marrow. His shoulder muscles burned from levering the handcart out of the Low Sike sludge, and his left knee had taken a savage twist when the off-side mule had lunged against the trace chains in the shallows. But as he watched the orchard road, his fingers on the wooden handle of the rasp were steady.
When the grey war-stallion came trotting around the bend by the old boundary stone, Tobin did not jump down. He did not drop his tool. He simply laid the rasp flat across his knees and watched Sir Cael Ardent approach.
