Chapter 13: Two Hundred at the Gate

"Then I'll need a bigger pot," I said. "Tell the Captain we cook for guests."

Mechthild Sturm smiled at me for the first time.

It was a small, kind smile, and it was the worst thing I saw at that fair.

"He'll bring his own food, Highness. He always does."

She walked away down the quay with her two finders and my knife in her sleeve.

We left Hessa before light.

On the fourth evening we rode into Velde under the first heavy snow of the year.

Anke was standing in the lodge doorway when I rode into the yard.

She wasn't looking at me.

She was looking past me, up at the White Teeth, where the salt road climbed to the gap.

The gap was gone.

Everything above the Hollow Cross was one white slope, and the snow kept falling on it.

"Gerd," she said, without moving her eyes. "Is the pass shut?"

Gerd got down from his horse slowly, with his bad leg.

"It's early," he said. "Three weeks early. I've never seen it this early."

"Is it shut?"

"Aye, girl. Till April."

She looked at me then.

"You swore," she said.

"I know."

"You swore to me in that study, with his maps on the floor."

"The fair was the only place we could sell. Six hundred people would have had no salt by midwinter."

"I know why you did it. I'm not stupid." Her voice didn't rise at all. "I'd have done the same."

"Then..."

"That's what I can't stand," she said.

She turned and walked into the house.

She didn't speak to me for eleven days.

She worked, though.

Every night the forge yard rang behind its shutters, and every morning there was something new laid on the bench under a sack.

The two finders at my gate had ridden down the valley the morning after the snow, to meet their Captain.

The widow worked too, down by the river, in the dark, where nobody but the town could see.

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