Chapter 5: The Headman's Cloak

Ellory knelt in the path and laced the boots himself.

Saren stood for it with the face of a cat being washed.

"The strings go over, and under, and through," Ellory said. "There."

"This is a ridiculous system."

"Walk."

They travelled all that day through the thick parts of the Wold.

Saren stopped every hundred paces to sniff the air and name each tree.

He had not been wrong about any of them.

He had also not been right about how many years had passed since he'd seen them.

That bothered him more than the boots.

At dusk they lay on their stomachs on a ridge of bracken above Cold Ford.

The camp below was bigger than Ellory had thought.

Grey tents stood in rows along the near bank, with picket lines of horses, forge fires and a tall black banner on a pole.

A pontoon bridge of barges ran across the river to the far shore.

In a pen of sharpened stakes at the center, on the bare mud, sat his village.

Ellory counted heads until he lost track.

"Four hundred riders," Saren murmured. "Two hundred prisoners. And a man in a good tent."

"That's the Marshal. Gwenith said."

"He keeps his hounds near the pen. We must come from the river side."

"We?" Ellory looked at him.

Saren did not look back. He was watching the camp, and his jaw was tight.

"I have not said I will save anyone," he said. "I have said I will look."

"All right."

"I am looking," Saren said.

"I can see that."

They went down the dark side of the ridge and along the river reeds.

They came up in the shadow of the pen's rear fence while the guards were changing.

Ellory put his mouth to a gap between two stakes.

"Lowen," he whispered.

Nothing. He tried again.

A hand shot through the gap and seized his.

"Ellory?" a voice breathed. "You're alive. You're alive, you magnificent idiot."

Keep reading free with an account. Start The Village Fell, So the Serpent God Woke and Kept Me from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.