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4 April 1294
Cade
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Cade stayed where he was, huddled behind the wall, feeling himself a coward, but also knowing that it would serve nobody except Aymer de Valence if he came out. He had no real idea what to do next, other than the fact that he had to do something.
Gwenllian, if she were here, would have a plan. She wasn’t very much older than he was, but she came up with ideas all the time. He’d mocked her plenty for it, but secretly it was because he was jealous. Lately she’d spent all her time with Elen instead of playing with Cade. He could admit to himself that he missed her.
But thinking about Gwenllian helped him to think about his situation and tamp down his fear. He was worried that his clothing would set him apart as a nobleman’s son, though it was unlikely, even if anyone did think he was noble, they would realize he was the son of Lord Mathonwy, the king’s brother-in-law. His father had marched away with his men yesterday at dawn. If they traveled through the night, they could have journeyed fifty miles by now, so there was no point in Cade attempting to catch up, especially on foot.
He couldn’t go home either. Bury was fifty miles from Chester and even farther from Dinas Bran. He had no knowledge of the area around Bury, not being one to memorize maps, despite the fact that it was one of the things his father insisted on him learning. He’d resisted, thinking it was stupid.
Now, he closed his eyes and pressed his fingers against them, trying to picture the region around Manchester. He’d seen the map before they’d ridden to Chester. He needed a castle with a castellan loyal to David or ...
His head came up. A radio station! In his mind’s eye, he could see the green flag that represented it on the map, located halfway between Bury and Manchester, to the east of the main road. He knew from overhearing his parents talk that their enemies had no real understanding of the communication network Uncle David had built across England. So far, in fact, Balliol had entirely ignored it. Most of David’s allies didn’t understand how it worked either, but the men and women who manned Manchester’s station would believe that Cade was who he said he was and help him reach his mother at Chester.
Excited now and more confident that he had some kind of plan, even if his mother would call it reckless, Cade, with some regret, pulled out his belt knife and hacked at the hem of his cloak to make it look uneven and worn. Then he tucked the blade into the small of his back, underneath his cloak, before scooping up handfuls of earth to pat onto himself, turning the blue wool of his overtunic muddy in color and dirtying up his face. Hoping that was good enough, he hopped back over the wall.
The village green lay in front of the castle entrance, with the parish church on the north side of it, to the east of the road Cade and his friends had come down. Michael and Livia had disappeared across the drawbridge, but the rest of the cavalry were still sorting themselves out in front of the moat. The castle wasn’t really a castle—more of a manor house—and the bailey inside, if one could call it that, was too small to house twenty horses. Which put the stables outside the castle.
First, Cade made a wide circle around the cavalry, in order to make it look like he was coming from the stables. Then, once he’d taken in the lay of the land, so to speak, he ran up to a likely looking soldier, grabbed the reins of his horse, and said in his best Saxon: “I’ll take care of that for you, my lord!”
The man was older than anyone in Cade’s family except his grandfather, and his eyes twinkled a bit. “I suppose you’ll be wanting payment.”
“No, my lord. I serve Lord Pilkington, my lord.”
“An honest boy. Those are rare enough to deserve a coin.” He tossed Cade a penny. “See he’s watered and fed.”
“Yes, my lord.”
The man walked away without a backward glance.
Cade just managed to stop himself from doing a little hop and skip at his victory. It was frightening how easily the soldier trusted. But peasants served their lords and didn’t question. His mother and father had told him that it should be otherwise, but Cade had known his whole life that if he asked a servant for something, he got it, and he didn’t have to say please either.
At the same time, ever since he was seven years old, Cade himself had acted as his father’s page and trained with the other noble children in the castle. As his father had instructed from the beginning, first and foremost a lord served his people. The worst thing a lord could do to his son was teach him that responsibilities flowed only in one direction, up to him. A man who gave orders, needed first to learn how to take them. A man who asked others to serve him, needed first to learn how to serve.
Cade led the horse away from the castle gate, which faced east, towards the stable, which was conveniently located on the southern side of the castle. Once there, he simply walked the horse casually past it, every so often checking the horse’s hocks as if the animal were injured, like he’d seen his father’s horsemaster do a hundred times. With all the commotion surrounding the arrival of the riders, nobody paid any attention to either of them. The horse was larger than those Cade normally rode, built for a knight in armor, but Cade had been riding horses since he was three years old and refused to be intimidated. When he reached the first stone wall on the southern outskirts of the village, he mounted the horse, settling into the far-too-big saddle, and gathered the reins.
If the horse had been fresh, perhaps he would have been more skittish about having a strange boy on his back, but as it was, he didn’t appear to mind his new rider. Cade didn’t have the owner’s low voice either, any more than his size, but he did his best impression of his father’s off you go, clicked his tongue, and the horse broke into a trot and then a smooth canter.
With every yard Cade rode away from the village, he felt more and more as if he were abandoning Michael and Livia. But he had learned something since he’d jumped off the tower at Chester. The world had turned out to be a whole lot bigger and more complicated than he’d imagined. He was one piece of a very large puzzle, and he thought—hoped—that by riding south to the radio station, he was putting himself into his proper place.
