Lora of Two Worlds

Leon and his party traveled by boat up the river, while Corin and his few dozen men rode along the bank.

Their horses were bound for Little Penn Village, there to be shod — and the newly shod beasts could try their legs on mountain roads as they went.

The Lohenheim garrison’s pasture could no longer take their own horses, and this trip carried a second purpose besides: to find, somewhere along the Yarrow, ground that suited raising horses, build a pasture there, and turn the herd out.

There was only the one official pasture anywhere near Lohenheim. Not that nobody kept private horses — but private horses were all kept well away from the city.

Since the Great Rebellion, Augustburg’s horse administration had fallen into the chamberlains’ hands. In the obedient domains the horse administration still sat with the garrison commanders — but private horses ran wild there, more often than not outnumbering the official herds, and such horse governance as there was lived on the daylight side of the paper.

As for the strong domains — the crown could not govern their armies, let alone their horses. Fifty thousand domain troops kept at least a hundred thousand to a hundred and fifty thousand warhorses, at a cost in silver every bit as great as the men themselves.

To keep an armament of that size afloat, the marcher lords, over and above the crown’s dual-tax schedule, piled on fees of every name and color.

The Eastern Capital, a spare capital, sat under the crown’s close eye and could not run so wild — which was why its military strength ran plainly below the domains of the north country. All this Leon had seen with his own eyes as he passed through the northern domains: whoever means to grip military affairs must grip first the horse administration that underwrites a fine cavalry.

By degrees, too, he had come to understand: perhaps the horseshoe had never been a steppe secret, hidden away from the Empire’s army — perhaps it was the Empire’s own kings, reign upon reign, who had no wish to see the horseshoe spread once horse administration had slipped their fingers.

Never mind that it would eat into the realm’s scarce iron — with domain cavalry grown stronger, what profit in that for any king?

As for himself, he meant, of course, to run the other way.

It was Lora’s first visit to Little Penn Village. The great difference between this farm, tucked between hill and water, and East Manor was that it could not be taken in at one glance. No broad linked fields, and the crops ran thin.

The virtue of it: the iron furnaces all sat down in the mountain folds, and a body who did not walk in would never see them.

”This is better than I imagined. I’d only ever seen it described in words — and you’ve gone and built the thing.”

Lora looked down at the furnaces in the fold. Here the cast-iron loaves went through the shear-steel process and came out steel of a juster carbon content — and that was the very stock for forging the great war-blade and the saber.

The dozen-odd smiths here were men ”dead and risen again.” In Rawsford, their home place in Westreach, they were dead on the books; here in the Lohenheim jurisdiction they had entered the registers under new names.

And so they were no longer hereditary artisans — goldsmiths and smiths who could not shed the craft-register nor quit their home county — but tenants of Little Penn Village.

”To answer my lady: there’s spare ground alongside, and new furnaces can go up whenever you please. The coal’s all stowed in the caves. The one fear is that if gold and iron come to smelting at the same time, the coal may not keep pace.”

Since part of the gold ingots had been shifted down the mountain, Lorne Chase had moved himself to the foot of it.

The old commander would not come down — he was past taking the jolting about — and stayed guarding the Navel Hollow with his hundred-odd men.

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More to the point, they meant to go on hiring stonemasons, under that name, for the recruiting of reliable reserves.

Lora laughed. ”This is only the beginning. We won’t lean forever on the north’s coal and iron cakes — the heartland and the south hold plenty of ore of their own.”

”I have heard it said, my lady, that you keep a book of secrets, with every gold and silver treasure in the realm marked out plain as a peddler’s route...” Lorne Chase read the faces of Lora and Leon as he went, and chose his words carefully:

”My thought is that such talk must not be allowed to run on. Else some day it comes to the sovereign’s ear — and that book, my lady: do you hand it over, or do you not?”

”A book of secrets... there truly is none. That was only a thing we said in jest — who ever saw a book drop out of the sky?”

When they said this, only a handful of trusted men stood by. What none of them thought of was this: on the day of the mutiny, the guards come back from Yorvik, meaning to prove the Odenheims’ strength, had let out the tale as well — that the Odenheim lady kept a book of secrets, and that the gold and silver written down in it ran far past the wealth the family had had swept away.

And the Odenheims had got East Manor back in short order — proof, as it were by itself, that the ”book of secrets” was no fable.

A master with strength in his arm, and the guards under him naturally glad of it — bragging, they never forgot to puff up the young lady’s ”book of secrets” a size or two.

This talk had never stirred Shawn, Corin, and the rest of the true believers one inch. But to a man like Lorne Chase, who woke with his eyes open asking how best to hide himself, it sounded like the sky falling in.

Seeing that neither Leon nor the young lady had answered, he hastily balled his fist, dropped to one knee:

”Your man spoke out of turn!”

”No — you spoke rightly, and we were the careless ones. That is a real weakness in our hedge; left unpruned it will grow into a disaster.” Leon raised a hand and lifted him up by way of courtesy:

”Our own people have grown used to our jesting — none of them carries your fine eye. We’ll go back and remind them all: no more talk of this vain thing.”

Lorne Chase had not served the master long. He had seen for himself the will to root out the household faction and raise the Empire up again; all the rest of his picture came secondhand, from Linn and Claude Sheffield.

Today, seeing the man take counsel as readily as he gave it, his heart set still more store by his master.

Lora, like Leon, had no notion that the excuse she had first found for herself was by now blown all over the province — else Lorne Chase would never have heard it on his few trips into Lohenheim.

”Lorne Chase, come along with us — you know these mountains better than we do.” Lora pointed at Ruth standing beside Claude Sheffield:

”Might I beg your daughter to be my companion?”

The Chases had not been in the plan at first; but his one word of caution had reminded Lora what their particular gift was — the patience to keep their heads down under the crown’s very nose, hiding and protecting themselves beautifully.

Ruth showed more warmth than her father. She had the two of them packed before evening, ready to go out with the boat at dawn.

Little Penn Village to Lornmere was fifteen leagues — just a day’s run for a river boat.

They tarried one extra day at the village, and Corin’s horses all got their shoes. When the boat set off, the horses ran along the bank.

Prince Roderic of Valmar had a youngest daughter, Rosalind, whom King Godfrey the Iron Crown by decree betrothed to Marten, ninth son of General Malduin, vice-commandant of the river-host of the Southmark.

On the wedding day, the whole of Valmar town emptied into the streets, every soul out to see what play the prince’s palace little chili-pepper would act, marrying into the general’s house — to their Ninth Blockhead.

And who should come to fetch the bride but Prince Hubert; and when it came time for the couple’s bows, the one bowing opposite Rosalind was — a rooster!

That was more than Rosalind’s temper could swallow. She smashed up the wedding hall, flung her coronet back at the prince’s mansion, and went home.

But Prince Roderic, his face black as thunder, sent her back to the general’s house.

This round of royal matchmaking was no common thing: several other princely lords and young princesses of the blood had been betrothed in the same decree.

That second month, Prince Harwin of Gar had risen in treason and been stripped to commoner rank. To bind and soothe the feudatory princes, King Godfrey had gone in for decreed matches and liberal gifts.

Prince Roderic, unwilling to stir trouble at so touchy a juncture, did no more than press General Malduin to fetch Marten home.

Weeping loud, Rosalind was married into the general’s house.

Only once inside did she learn that her mother-in-law, born a Farleigh of the merchant quarter, stood low among the Malduins — bullied by the old madam, by the mistress of the house, and by the mistresses into the bargain.

And the reason her husband was called the ”Ninth Blockhead” was the same: a boyhood spent taking it in the back court had made him a man of few words.

Rosalind might curse Marten for a wretch to his face — but no one else had better try it. The elder Madam Farleigh was a good soul, so Rosalind flipped the switch on full protect-the-mother-in-law mode and went to war with the Malduin family’s back court.