They Counted Me Like Cargo, So I Took the War novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Mud and Rank

A Varran captain tips Seren's breakfast into the mud and demands chains, Corvus rules that the prince walks free, and an envoy arrives to void the marriage as unbedded, with a witness outside their tent tonight.

Seren woke on the general's cot, and the general was asleep across the doorway of his own tent.

Corvus lay on his cloak on the bare ground with his sword under his hand.

Anyone who wanted the prince in the night would have had to step on him first.

Seren didn't know what to do with that, so he got up and stepped over him.

Corvus's eyes opened as Seren's boot cleared his chest.

"Breakfast's by the horse lines," he said, and closed them again.

Someone had left Varran clothes folded on the chest.

Black wool, a black shirt, a belt with no knife in it.

Seren's wedding coat hung steaming by the brazier.

The camp ran down the east bank in rows of red tents and smoke, and every man in it turned to watch him walk.

He had grown up being watched.

He had never been watched.

At the cook fire a big man ladled porridge into a wooden bowl and held it out without looking at him.

Seren took it.

A captain with a broken nose stepped in front of him and knocked it out of his hand.

The bowl rolled into the mud and lay there, steaming.

"Dogs eat off the ground," the captain said. "Eat, cargo."

The men around the fire went quiet.

Seren looked at the porridge.

He looked at the captain.

"Did I kill someone of yours?" he asked.

The captain hadn't expected a question.

"My brother," he said. "Harl Bridge. Your archers put six arrows in him in the water."

Seren knew Harl Bridge.

He knew it better than the captain thought.

"Four thousand of ours on the west bank," he said. "Two thousand of yours trying to cross. The order came from Highcourt on the first of October."

The captain's jaw moved.

"I wrote to my father on the second," Seren said. "I begged him to pull back and open the granaries instead. I said the Wend would feed both armies if he let it."

"Liar."

"He burned the letter at supper. I watched him do it."

The captain stared at him with his nostrils white.

Then he turned to the crowd and shouted it.

"Hostages wear chains in Varra. Put him on a pole by the horse lines."

A dozen men started to get up.

"I'm not a hostage," Seren said loudly. "Read your own treaty. I'm the general's consort."

"By your law, that makes me a lord of Varra, and you are standing in front of my breakfast."

Nobody sat back down.

Nobody came at him either.

Every face around that fire had turned up the slope, and Seren turned too.

Corvus was coming down between the tents in his shirtsleeves, with his sword belt over one shoulder.

The men opened in front of him like water.

He stopped beside Seren and looked at the bowl in the mud.

"He walks free in my camp," he said.

"Anyone who lays a hand on him answers to me. Not to his brother. Not to the king. To me."

The captain went red to his ears.

"General, his people killed..."

"I know who they killed," Corvus said. "I was there."

He looked down at Seren.

"Eat something. You're shaking."

"It's cold," Seren said.

"It's spring," Corvus said.

Then he put his hand on the back of Seren's neck.

It was huge and warm and rough, and it covered the whole nape, his thumb at the hairline.

Corvus steered him two steps away from the fire with it.

Every hair on Seren's body stood up.

He could have pulled away.

He didn't, and Corvus felt him not do it.

The general's thumb moved once, slowly, under Seren's ear.

Then he let go and walked off toward the horse lines.

Seren stood there with his neck burning.

Behind him the captain picked the bowl up out of the mud himself.

He looked at it a long time.

Then he handed it to the cook, and the cook filled a clean one, and the captain held it out to Seren.

He didn't say anything.

Seren took it, and he didn't say anything either.

A bald man with a grey beard and a crossbow on his back sat down on the log beside him.

Two fingers on the man's left hand were stumps.

"Garrow," he said. "I'm his second. I clean up after him."

"Is that what this is?"

"No. This is me being nosy."

Garrow nodded up the hill at the general's tent.

"He's slept on the floor across that door all night. He doesn't do that for kings."

Seren ate his porridge so he wouldn't have to answer.

It was terrible, and he finished it.

"You're all right, Highness," Garrow said. "You stood there like a man who knows exactly how much trouble he's in."

"I always know exactly how much trouble I'm in."

"Good. It'll save time."

Then a horn blew at the ford, three short notes.

Garrow was on his feet before it finished.

A carriage sat in the middle of the river under a white flag, with two clerks on the box.

A thin perfumed man in a velvet hat climbed out on the step: Aldric's chamberlain.

He unrolled a paper and read it to the whole east bank.

"His Highness the regent petitions to void the marriage of the third prince."

"Unbedded by the third night, by the law of Caerwen."

He rolled the paper up and smiled at Seren across the water.

"The crown's witness will sit outside the general's tent tonight. To hear."

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