Altfor looked around with every step, certain that there would be soldiers of the enemy looking for him, sure that he was being hunted in the same way that he and his friends might have hunted a deer or a fox.
“Friends,” Altfor spat. He had no friends here. He had no one. The courtiers who had professed their friendship in the past had been quick to side with his uncle when he’d taken the dukedom, and had either died at his side or run.
That Altfor had run too was a minor point. His life was worth preserving.
The question was how to do that. Already, he’d taken one step toward it, dressing in colors stolen from one of Royce’s soldiers so that he could move unmolested by that army. Now that he was further south, he tore away the tabard and the insignia, knowing that they would put him in much more danger than they saved him from. He stomped them into the dirt, hating that he’d had to wear them in the first place.
“Bad enough that I have to dress like some kind of… commoner, without having to dress like I owe him any allegiance,” Altfor muttered. A part of Altfor cursed the day he’d ever met Royce, and cursed his father for putting him in a fighting pit rather than just hanging him out of hand. Cruelty had its place in keeping people in line, but sometimes the best thing to do was simply make sure that someone was dead.
“I’ll make him regret not making sure I was dead,” Altfor promised the world in general.
To complete his disguise as a commoner, he took off his sword and wrapped mud-stained scraps of cloth around it, so that it looked more like a stick he was simply leaning on. He took a slender strip of gauzy cloth and wound it around his eyes, so that people might think he was just some blind beggar or peddler. Anyone who actually called him that though…
He kept walking, and the very fact that he was walking seemed like a part of his humiliation. A duke’s son should ride. No, Altfor corrected himself, not a duke’s son; he was a duke, and always had been, whatever his fool of an uncle had thought about it. He was, and would be again. There was no way the world could turn out in any other way.
“There are plenty of other ways,” Altfor grumbled as his foot caught in a patch of mud, almost stumbling him into more of it. As if on cue, it started to rain, plastering his hair to his strong, noble features.
Probably no one would recognize him as noble now. Altfor wasn’t sure if that made it more or less likely that they would stab him and try to steal all he had. Commoners were fair game in this world, after all.
It was a frightening feeling being alone, with only his own sword skills for protection. Altfor thought that he could best most men, because he’d had all the training that a lord’s son should have, but what would that count for if there were more than one man, or someone with a crossbow, or just a peasant willing to throw rocks? Altfor would have killed for a retinue right then, but merely wishing for something didn’t make it happen.
“Just like wishing for revenge doesn’t give me it,” Altfor said. He had to go out and take it. At least, he had to go out and find the right people to help him get it.
The right person, because there was only one person who mattered now in this: King Carris. The king had a vested interest in not seeing his dukes unseated by rebels, and certainly not by rebels claiming to be the rightful king. If Altfor could get to him, then there was every chance that the king would give him back his dukedom, and probably Royce’s head on a pike into the bargain, pathetic little fraud that he was.
Briefly though, Altfor’s memory flashed back to the white light that had spread out from Royce to his men, inspiring them and driving them forward in that last push of the battle. There had been nothing fraudulent about that. That had been the kind of thing that the old king, Philip, had been able to do in stories. Of course, his father had had his nursemaid beheaded just for telling Altfor those stories, but that had only made the memory stick harder.
“He can’t be,” Altfor said. “He can’t… can he?” He shook his head. “No. In any case, it doesn’t matter.”
What mattered was that he had to walk all the way to the capital, and his feet were already aching with the miles he’d wandered. Where was the fairness in life when he had to walk? It was as if the whole world were set up just to put the likes of him down, in spite of his natural station.
He walked on through the rain, keeping off the main road heading south, knowing that bandits and deserters were more likely to target people there. Altfor had no wish to fall victim to some idiot who thought he could just take whatever he wanted from a duke.
In the distance, Altfor could see a village, and rumbling in his stomach had him heading toward it without thinking. It was the kind of small place that he would have passed by without thinking had he been on horseback, or perhaps passed through with a retinue, pausing only to take the best wine from the inn and bed some peasant girl or other. As it was, he was on foot, so he trudged into the place.
People instantly looked at him in a way that made him feel unwelcome, and it wasn’t the fear that he was used to. Altfor could use fear; it was the next best thing to respect, and far better than love. This though… the looks there just felt like disgust.
A man came out into the street in front of Altfor, if you could call a peasant thug like this a man. He was a fat, sweating thing, of the kind that Altfor might have cut down for fun before now. In fact, he considered it now, half reaching for his sword before he realized it was a move that would leave him trying to fight a whole village’s worth of people.
“We don’t want your sort here,” the man said. He shoved Altfor. “Do you hear me?”
Altfor took a step back, about to come back with a retort, but the man shoved him again, this time sending Altfor stumbling.
“Are you deaf as well as blind?” the fat man demanded. “We’ve no room for beggars here. Get on with you!”
He gave Altfor a kick for good measure as he scrambled up, and that was too much. Except it couldn’t be. No matter how much he wanted to lash out, to kill this oaf, he couldn’t risk the fight. So he ran instead, back to the back roads, swearing as he kept heading south that he would raze this village the first chance he had.
Altfor kept walking for so many hours that he lost count. He was so hungry he thought his stomach might collapse in on itself from emptiness, and thirsty enough that he was willing to drink stream water rather than wine. He did so, and it tasted like the freshest, purest thing he’d ever had.
“You don’t want to do that,” a voice called. “At least, not downstream of a farmer’s sheep pens.”
A young man stepped out, and his garishly colored clothing said that he was one of the traveling folk, not some ordinary peasant. Generally, Altfor considered the tinkers and itinerant players a nuisance when they were on his lands, but at least they were better than the Picti.
The young man wore a long knife that was almost a short sword, with a sling wrapped around his forearm, ready to throw stones at any game that came into sight. He was on the other side of the stream, but it was only shallow at this point, and Altfor considered his chances of successfully robbing him.
“I’m Colm,” the young man said. “And you’re no more blind than I am, are you, friend?”
That was enough to make Altfor pause; not so much the sharpness of the observation, as the fact that the young man had called him friend.
“No,” Altfor admitted. He took off the strip of gauze. “What gave me away?”
“We’ve a harpist who actually is blind back at camp. You don’t interact with the world the same way.”
“At camp?” Altfor said. “There’s a whole camp of you near here?”
Maybe it was just as well he hadn’t robbed this young man yet. He didn’t want a full camp of strangers hunting for him, especially not when they probably knew the roads better than he did.
“Just over the way, in a copse of trees,” Colm said. “Look, who are you, stranger, and what are you doing all the way out here?”
Altfor knew better than to tell the truth. The traveling folk had no more reason to like him than anyone else did. Still, he had to say something.
“My name is Al…dis. Aldis. My village was back on, well, I suppose it was Duke Alistair’s lands in the end. He burned it, the whole thing. Now I’m heading south. I figure I can try to petition the king, see if he has a place for me.”
“Probably in a dungeon,” Colm said with a laugh. “The king doesn’t exactly listen to peasants.”
“Aye, well, I’ve some use as a soldier,” Altfor said, half drawing his sword so that the young man could see that he wouldn’t be easy to rob. “Maybe there will be work for me in his army, or in a mercenary band, or some such.”
“You were a soldier but you weren’t one of the ones doing the burning?” Colm asked.
Altfor shrugged. “Sir Alistair wasn’t a man I wanted anything to do with.”
That part was even true, in its way.
“Ah, a man of conscience,” Colm said. He looked thoughtful for a moment or two. “I’ll tell you what, Aldis, how about you come back to camp with me, and we’ll get some food in you? I think we’ve a proposition for you there that might help all of us.”
At the mere mention of food, Altfor’s stomach rumbled, and he gratefully followed the young man back in the direction of what he supposed was the traveling folk’s encampment.
It lay within a stand of trees, an assortment of wagons standing there, no two of them the same. The men and women there looked as though they’d come from every corner of the kingdom and beyond it, wearing an assortment of finery that would have seen most peasants punished for copying their betters.
They were undertaking a whole host of activities in the clearing. Some were about the simple business of survival, cooking food or cleaning clothes, sorting through baskets of berries or tending to horses. Others seemed to be about far stranger things: singing songs or reciting poems, balancing on their hands or declaiming speeches. A man and a woman were engaged in what looked like a sword fight, at least until Altfor saw that they were fencing with wooden swords, trading insults as often as blows. It was to them that Colm led Altfor.
“Masis, Ferris, we’ve a visitor,” he said. The two stopped, but not before the woman had taken advantage of a moment of the man’s distraction to thrust her blade through his defenses.
“And thus dies Olwyl the Good, slain by treachery!” the man declared with a laugh, before looking over to Altfor. “Colm, who is this you’ve brought us?”
“This is Aldis,” Colm said.
Ferris held out his hand, and Altfor took it, disguising his disgust at having to treat a peasant like an equal.
“Come and sit by our fire,” Masis said. He had to admit that she was good looking, in the rough way that peasants had, and it was helped by the finery of the costume she’d picked out. “We’ve caught and roasted pheasants.”
On another occasion, Altfor would have had them hanged for poaching like that. Now though, he went to the fire and ate hungrily. There was ale too, but Altfor was more measured with that. He didn’t want to get so drunk that he would be easy prey to these people if they turned on him.
“So, where did you find this one?” Ferris asked.
“By the stream,” Colm explained. “He used to be a swordsman, but his village was burned. Now he’s looking to get to King Carris for restitution.”
“Is this true?” Ferris asked. “Before you answer, you should know that my sister Masis has a touch of the sight, so she’ll know if you’re lying.”
Altfor shrugged. “I lost everything. I have as much reason to hate Sir Alistair as anyone. I’m heading south to see if the king will help me to get something back, and yes, I can fight with a sword.”
He looked over to the woman.. Right then though, he was more interested in whether he’d told enough of the truth for her liking.
She burst into a laugh. “Oh, ignore Ferris. I can no more see a lie than he can see when he’s overacting.”
“Well, he had me convinced,” Altfor said. What he did next killed him inside. He should have been able to simply demand what he wanted, and punished anyone who failed to comply quickly enough. Instead, he begged.
“Please,” he said, “can you help me? I need to head south, but if I try to walk alone, I’ll be killed before I get halfway there. I can’t do this alone.”
“So you want to travel with us,” Ferris said, looking thoughtful.
“He can use a sword,” Colm said, “and not just a wooden one. We could do with that on these roads.”
“And he would add to the tone of the place,” Masis said, with a smile that was obviously designed to infuriate her brother. She sent another smile Altfor’s way with an altogether different tone to it, and he suspected that there was another reason to want to stay around there.
“He can have space under my caravan,” Colm said. Altfor bit his lip to keep from shouting out at the thought of being made to sleep in the dirt. It didn’t matter that the young man intended it as a kindness, it was still nowhere that a noble like him should have been made to sleep.
“Well, I suppose he can stay,” Ferris said. He smiled. “At the very least, he can improve your swordplay in the fight scenes, sister.”
“My swordplay?” Masis snapped back. “I think you’ll find that I won that one!”
“And that wasn’t even in the script!” Ferris shot back.
They went away, still arguing, leaving Altfor in the heart of the camp. It was a place that he would never have thought he would have found himself, and it seemed bizarre for someone of his standing, his blood, to be there.
It didn’t matter though. All that mattered was that he had a way to get south without being murdered along the way. He would get to King Carris, get back to being who he had always been, and then, finally, Royce would die.