The northern wharf terminated at Low Sike, where the paved granite quay gave way to an open gravel ramp that sloped gently into the river shallows.
Here, where the river broadened over a series of submerged limestone ledges, the current slowed to a steady, muddy crawl. Willow saplings grew thick along the drainage ditch, their bare brown switches shivering in the Flood Month wind that blew off the northern chalk downs.
Four massive draft horses—deep-chested roan geldings with hairy fetlocks and broad, muscular quarters—stood knee-deep in the cold shallows, lowering their muzzles to drink.
Beside them on the gravel ramp stood Steffan Kell, rinsing a greasy wooden grease-bucket in the river foam. He was a thick-set man of thirty with broad, freckled hands, wearing a stained bull-hide apron over his patched woolen smock. A wooden paddle smeared with yellow mutton tallow hung from his belt beside an iron hub-wrench.
Behind the horses sat four heavy freight wagons.
They were not the flimsy farm carts seen in the vegetable market. These were northern timber drays: eight-spoke wheels bonded with inch-thick iron tires, bed timbers of cured white ash, and high sideboards reinforced with forged iron corner gussets. Each wagon could haul three tons of stone or ninety bushels of dry grain over broken corduroy roads without throwing an axle.
“Ho, Master Hale,” Steffan called out, seeing Jon descend the gravel path. He wiped his greasy palms on his leather apron, his breath steaming in the cool air. “If you’re looking for the coal dray, they haven’t finished weighing at the south depot. Master Garrick bought three cords of charcoal before the carters even unstrapped the tailgates.”
“I am not looking for charcoal, Steffan,” Jon said, pausing to run his eyes over the lead wagon’s running gear.
He crouched by the forward wheel of the first dray, inspecting the iron hub.
The iron axle-tree was thick as a man’s forearm, clean of rust, bedded in tallow that had been freshly driven into the linchpin box with a grease paddle. Jon touched the iron tire where it gripped the felloe; the gap was less than the thickness of a thumbnail, without the dangerous wobble that indicated loosened rivets.
“You keep good spindles, Steffan,” Jon remarked, straightening up.
“A carter who doesn’t grease his spindles walks home on his own shins,” Steffan replied with a broad grin. “My father drove these same four drays during the border campaigns twenty years back. He told me: treat your draft horses like your own brothers, grease your axles before every ford, and never take a royal treasury voucher when you can get silver coin in hand.”
“Your father was a wise carter,” Jon said.
He looked past the horses toward the northern horizon where the post road climbed into the low, rounded chalk hills.
In his second life, these four wagons had vanished within six hours of Sir Cael’s arrival.
A royal baggage master, accompanied by four mounted Oath Guards with drawn swords, had ridden onto this gravel ramp with an imperial requisition scroll stamped with the three white lilies. They had seized Steffan’s four roan geldings, overloaded the wagons with iron catapult bolts and spare cuirasses, and driven the teams mercilessly along the rocky river road toward the upper gorge.
By the second night, two of the horses had broken their hocks in the flint rubble, and the baggage master had cut their traces, leaving the wagons abandoned in a flooded roadside ditch while Steffan Kell died in the mud trying to protect his remaining beasts from being butchered for camp rations.
“Steffan,” Jon said, turning back to the carter. “Where are these four teams scheduled to haul tomorrow?”
“Downriver to the flour mills at High Sike,” Steffan said, nodding toward the southern reach. “Miller Ardent’s estate manager booked sixty sacks of hard winter wheat. Two trips back and forth, forty copper pence a turn. Good honest work, and the road along the levee is mostly dry.”
Jon drew a heavy leather coin purse from inside his coat.
He did not open it on the gravel. He loosened the drawstrings within the fold of his coat, withdrew four broad silver thalers—heavy, milled imperial coins stamped with the old king’s portrait—and held them in his palm.
Steffan’s freckled face tightened. His eyes dropped to the silver, then darted up to Jon’s face.
Four silver thalers was the equivalent of forty days of continuous hauling on the levee road. A teamster could feed four heavy horses on oats and clover through an entire winter on that much silver.
“What’s this for, Master Hale?” Steffan asked, his voice losing its easy humor. “You aren’t hauling grain to the capital.”
“I want the four wagons,” Jon said calmly.
“To buy them?”
“To hold them.” Jon stepped closer, speaking in a low, even voice that did not carry beyond the murmur of the river shallows. “I want all four drays parked in the lower courtyard of the River Lantern before the fourth bell rings today. Horses stabled in my lower stalls, bedded on clean rye straw, fed on crushed oats from my own bins. Harnesses oiled and hung on the pegs. I want you and your brother living in my hay-loft, ready to hitch the teams the instant I give the word.”
Steffan stared at him, scratching his bristly chin with a greasy knuckle. “You want four timber wagons sitting empty in your tavern yard? For how long?”
“Five days,” Jon said.
“Five days? Doing what?”
“Doing nothing,” Jon replied. “Until the town needs to move.”
The carter frowned, looking past Jon toward the quiet roofs of the town, where the church spire rose pale against the morning clouds.
“Move?” Steffan murmured. “Why would Harth move? Sir Cael Ardent is riding up the highway. The town council is hanging evergreen boughs over the north gate for the welcoming feast. Half the boys in the upper ward are polishing their wooden swords to cheer him when he rides across the ditch.”
“When the royal company arrives, their quartermasters will be looking for four things,” Jon said, counting them off on his fingers. “Bread, iron, horses, and wagons. If your drays are sitting on this open ramp, they will take the horses by royal writ, pay you with paper vouchers drawn on a treasury that has not paid a civilian claim in five years, and drive your beasts to death in the northern flint.”
Steffan’s jaw hardened. He looked at his four roan geldings, who were now splashing their hooves in the river shallows, shaking their heavy manes with quiet snorts.
“They can’t just take a man’s livelihood,” the carter muttered, though the doubt in his voice betrayed that he knew better.
“They can and they will,” Jon said. “Unless the wagons are already under an exclusive municipal contract. If your drays are chartered to the River Lantern as emergency provisioning transports, they are classified under town hospitality bylaws. Even a royal provost cannot seize a licensed inn’s supply train without an order signed by the town magistrate, and Magistrate Kroll will not be in his office until third day.”
Jon held out his hand.
The four silver thalers gleamed in the gray light.
“Take the silver, Steffan. Bring the wagons to the Lantern. Keep the horses fed, the traces greased, and your water-barrels filled. If five days pass and not a wheel turns, the silver is still yours, and you can haul all the wheat Miller Ardent has in his granaries.”
Steffan Kell looked at the four silver coins, then at the strong, calm face of the innkeeper.
He reached out his calloused hand, taking the silver with a decisive nod.
The coins clinked together in his palm, heavy and solid. He slipped them into the hidden pocket sewn into the lining of his bull-hide apron, then spat into the wet gravel between his boots.
“The roans are finished drinking,” Steffan said, his tone brisk and practical now that the bargain was sealed. “I’ll run the grease paddle over the rear axles one more time, hook the double-trees, and bring the first two wagons into your lower yard before the dinner bell. The second pair will be in the stalls before the sun touches the church eaves.”
“Good,” Jon said. “Tell Dunstan I sent you. He will show you the oats bin and the loft bunks.”
“Aye, Master Hale.”
Steffan turned back to the river ramp, whistling sharp and low through his teeth. The four roans lifted their heads from the current, turning obediently toward the shore, water dripping from their whiskered chins in bright drops.
Jon watched the carter catch the halter of the lead horse, guiding the massive animal up the stones toward the first timber dray.
Four wagons. Twelve tons of carrying capacity. Four teams of heavy, cold-blooded northern draft stock capable of breaking through spring snowdrifts or dragging bogged carts out of the river mud.
In the dead lives, Jon had watched hundreds of townspeople attempt to flee on foot along the flooded turnpike, carrying infants on their shoulders and dragging bedding on wooden handcarts, only to be overtaken by the Host’s mounted scouts before they reached the safety of the southern forest.
A foot refugee died in the first three miles.
A town with four heavy freight wagons could carry its sick, its old women, its surgical stores, and its seed grain at the pace of trotting horses, moving forty miles behind a screen of river fog while the enemy searched empty houses.
Jon turned his back on the river and climbed the gravel ramp toward the market quarter.
The wagons were secured. The horses were fed.
The retreat, if retreat became the only mercy left to them, would not be an abject panic through the brambles. It would move on four-inch iron-shod wheels, greased with honest mutton tallow and bought with four silver crowns.