Chapter 7: The Gate

The torches came at midnight.

I heard them before I saw them, a low roar from the road, the sound of a crowd that had finally made up its mind.

Garrick was out of the bed of straw on the floor of his own room and into his boots before I got to his door.

"Stay in the keep," he said.

"No."

"Sigrid."

"They are my people now too."

I was in my night robe with my braid over my shoulder.

Bess was behind me in a shawl, holding a candlestick like a club.

Nan met us on the stairs with a lantern.

"It's Ashby," she said. "All of them."

"Somebody told them the princess's forty wagons of grain are in our cellar, and the lord means to keep them."

"Who told them?"

"Who do you think?" said Nan. "A rider from the capital. In a nice coat."

My brother.

He had not even arrived, and he had already poured oil on the fire.

The gate was open when we reached the yard.

They stood in the road in a great half circle, hundreds of them, all the people I had seen on the first morning and more.

Women with babies, old men with sticks, boys with torches held too high.

The flames lit their faces from below.

Garrick stepped forward, and a rock bounced off the ground at his feet.

"Don't," I said.

I put my hand on his arm.

"Let me."

"You're not safe."

"I'm a princess," I said. "They won't throw a rock at a princess in her nightgown. That would be beneath them."

Something that was nearly a laugh broke out of him.

Then I walked past him, alone, through the gate, and stopped in the road with the torches around me.

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