“Toll road,” he said. “Fifty silver to cross.”
Maertyn shrugged his shoulders. “I do not carry money.”
“That’s too bad,” the brigand replied. He lifted the broken sword.
Anryn flared at the outrage of being robbed in broad daylight.
“This is a public road,” the prince argued, as if it were Professor Lawson’s freshman seminar. “My fath—the King guarantees the right of every man in Ammar to walk on it.”
“You are not going to talk someone out of robbing you,” Maertyn started to say.
Before he could get the rest of the remark out, the one with the sword lunged for them. Maertyn stepped back, the broken edge just missing his chest. The other two rushed toward them with fists and sticks.
Determined never to be stabbed again, Anryn jumped back and swung his blade fast and wide.
One of the brigands tried to grab the tip of it. Anryn felt only a slight resistance as metal met flesh. The tips of the man’s fingers went flying.
Out of the corner of his eye, Anryn saw Maertyn swing his walking stick. It caught the side of the sword-carrying brigand’s face with a sickening crack. Blood flecked into the snow.
The third brigand, thus far unharmed, took one look at the blood in the snow and panicked. He ran back over the bridge toward the village. The fingerless one made another lunge for Anryn, only noticing his missing fingers when he struggled to make a fist. He cursed and broke off, making a run for the trees.
Anryn started to chase after him, but Maertyn grabbed his shoulder and held him back.
“What are you doing?” Maertyn asked. “They only wanted to rob you... Now they will not.”
“How can you be sure?” Anryn asked.
Maertyn went to the man he’d downed with his walking stick. He used his foot to turn the brigand over. Anryn saw that Maertyn had dislocated the man’s jaw. Kneeling down beside him, Maertyn jammed his fingers inside the man’s mouth. He yanked the joint back into place with a sharp crack.
“This is true, what I said? You will not rob us now?” Maertyn asked the man.
“Mercy,” the brigand groaned around his wounded jaw. “Mercy, please... We only wanted money.”
Maertyn turned to Anryn. He raised his brows, expectant.
“You can’t be serious,” Anryn said. “I’m not going to pay him. He tried to rob us!”
“He is hungry. He is only going to rob someone else until he can eat,” Maertyn said.
For a moment, Anryn thought of leaving Maertyn there with the brigand. Let the peasants stay together if they insist on being absurd! the prince thought.
Then the brigand on the ground began to sob. The sound reminded Anryn of the witch of Dorland. That piteous man had wept at the stake when the prince read out the death sentence. Anryn remembered how the sobs echoed in the town square. No one was there to speak for the witch. No one was here to speak for the brigand—save Maertyn, who did not even know him.
Anryn reached into his pocket and fished out a silver coin. He tossed it in the snow beside the brigand. Only then did Maertyn push himself to his feet with his walking stick and continue on over the bridge.
They stayed the night in one of the houses huddled close to the riverbank. The cottages were humble wood and stone. A few had arched awnings over their doors from which the villagers hung decorations. Anryn saw scraps of faded red cotton hanging outside a few doors beside Winze dolls—sticks of birch tied together to resemble a man, decorated with glass and blackened with ash from the hearth. Former soldiers, he supposed, trying to claim their status and ward off the ghosts of those they killed in wartime.
Maertyn did not want to stay at any of the houses with the banners or Winze dolls. He chose another house instead with barrels stacked out in front, guessing rightly that they would find at least beer there. Anryn paid the man who lived in this house another silver coin, which bought them a roof for the night, a small meal of salted fish, and some more beer for Maertyn. Anryn chewed his food and tried not to think about whether a meal for the Prince of Ammar had cost someone else in the house their supper.
Not long after settling down for the night, someone knocked on the door to the house. Anxious, Anryn stood, then relaxed when he saw that it was only a woman. She was wrapped in an old, stained veil with a wreath of dried flowers anchoring it to her head. Though she was alone, unescorted by husband or son, the man who owned the house let her in. After a furious whispered conversation by the door, she approached Anryn.
The woman bobbed up and down three times, sending some brittle dried petals from her flower crown onto the floor. She held out her hand to Anryn, the silver coin the prince had thrown to the brigand in the palm of it.
“My lord, this one is too new. Too shiny and too heavy,” the woman complained, her voice tremulous and thin. “The merchants we buy from will wonder how we got it. There will be trouble.”
Anryn took back the coin. The prince had been reared to courtly manners, to always treat the lesser sex with graciousness and respect. But he couldn’t stop himself from berating her: “There is already trouble, woman. When the King learns of highway robbery on the roads here, the judiciary court will arrive to dispense penalties to these men. And those who harbor them.”
“Mercy, lord,” the woman begged. “There are children here with no fathers. If the courts come, they will lose their mothers, too. There is no church here to do penance... They’ll burn us as witches...”
Prince Anryn felt Maertyn’s eyes on him. Watching to see what the prince would do. Those eyes were the first thing Anryn could remember clearly after his mad dash up the mountain. Before that, it was all the flash of the assassin’s knife, the fire of the witch’s pyre crawling up his arm—and the wind, the terrible wind, crashing down from the sky when the witch screamed.
Anryn clung to the memory of Maertyn’s eyes. The prince wanted to keep those eyes on him for a little while longer.
The prince fumbled at the buttons of his shirt. The buttons were mother-of-pearl, polished to a milky shine. He pulled off three of these and gave them to the woman.
“Blessings on you, lord,” the woman said. She handed him the dried flower crown from her head.
Anryn kept the coin, but threw the flower crown into the river when they left the next day.
ANRYN FELT A STAB OF hope when they finally came into sight of Amwarren University. He squinted and found the high stone spire that housed Professor Lawson’s office. Of all his father’s councilors, Haley Lawson was the one he trusted most. Unlike other men on the King’s council, the professor earned his place through wit and diligence—and he always told Anryn that the prince could do the same. The professor would help him suss out who could be behind the attempt on his life. Anryn hoped the professor would tell him that Maertyn had been wrong about his father’s role in it.
“You grind your teeth when you are thinking,” Maertyn complained. He stopped in the road, and Anryn nearly collided with him.
“I do not,” Anryn said. He stepped around Maertyn and plodded on.
The prince was unused to such blunt criticism. In four years living outside of his father’s shadow, no one had dared complain about Anryn to his face. Even Gruffydd the Younger would not dare. Though Anryn supposed Griff would be more likely to say it behind his back. He did love to gossip.