There were several young women managing the tables, and one piled up a trencher for me, handing it across the table hastily, as if reluctant to have any contact with me at all. I thanked her, which caused some giggling among her friends. She looked as affronted as if I had mistaken her for a whore, and I quickly took myself away from there. I found a corner of a table to sit at, and marked that no one sat near to me. A young boy setting out mugs and filling them with ale gave me one, and was curious enough to ask me where I had come from. I told him only that I had been travelling upriver, looking for work, and asked if he had heard of anyone hiring.
‘Oh, you want the hiring fair, up the water in Tradeford,’ he told me familiarly. ‘It’s less than another day’s walk. You might get harvest work this time of year. And if not, there’s always the King’s Great Circle being built. They’ll hire anyone for that as can lift a stone or use a shovel.’
‘The King’s Great Circle?’ I asked him.
He cocked his head at me. ‘So that all may witness the King’s justice being served.’
Then he was called away by someone waving a mug and I was left alone to eat and muse. They’ll hire anyone. So I appeared that wayward and strange. Well, it could not be helped. The food tasted incredibly good. I had all but forgotten the texture and fragrance of good wheaten bread. The savoury way it mingled with the meat juices on my trencher suddenly recalled Cook Sara and her generous kitchen to me. Somewhere up the river, in Tradeford, she would be making pastry dough now, or perhaps pricking a roast full of spices before putting it in one of her heavy black kettles and covering it well, to let it slow cook in the coals all night. Yes, and in Regal’s stables, Hands would be making his final rounds for the night as Burrich used to do in the stables at Buckkeep, checking to see that every beast had fresh clean water and that every stall was securely fastened. A dozen other stable-hands from Buckkeep would be there as well, faces and hearts well known to me from years spent together in Burrich’s domain and under his tutelage. House servants, too, Regal had taken with him from Buck. Mistress Hasty was probably there, and Brant and Lowden and …
Loneliness suddenly engulfed me. It would be so good to see them, to lean on a table and listen to Cook Sara’s endless gossip, or lie on my back in the hayloft with Hands and pretend I believed his outrageous tales of the women he had bedded since last I had seen him. I tried to imagine Mistress Hasty’s reaction to my present garb, and found myself smiling at her outrage and scandalized offence.
My reverie was broken by a man shouting a string of obscenities. Not even the drunkest sailor I had ever known would so profane a wedding feast. Mine was not the only head that turned and for a moment all normal conversation lapsed. I stared at what I had not noticed before.
Off one side of the square, at the edge of the torches’ reach, was a cart and team. A great barred cage sat upon it and three Forged ones were in it. I could make out no more than that, that there were three of them and that they registered not at all upon my Wit. A teamster woman strode up to the cage, cudgel in hand. She banged it loudly on the slats of the cage, commanding those within to be still, and then spun about to two young men lounging against the tail of her cart. ‘And you’ll leave them be as well, you great louts!’ she scolded them. ‘They’re for the King’s Circle, and whatever justice or mercy they find there. But until then, you’ll leave them be, you understand me? Lily! Lily, bring those bones from the roast over here and give them to these creatures. And you, I told you, get away from them! Don’t stir them up!’
The two young men stepped back from her threatening cudgel, laughing with upraised hands as they did so. ‘Don’t see why we shouldn’t have our fun with them first,’ objected the taller of the lads. ‘I heard that down at Rundsford, their town’s building their own justice circle.’
The second boy made a great show of rolling the muscles in his shoulders. ‘Me, I’m for the King’s Circle myself.’
‘As Champion or prisoner?’ someone hooted mockingly, and both the young men laughed, and the taller one gave his companion a rough push by way of jest.
I remained standing in my place. A sick suspicion was rising in me. The King’s Circle. Forged ones and Champions. I recalled the avaricious way Regal had watched his men beat me as I stood encircled by them. A dull numbness spread through me as the woman called Lily made her way to the cart and then flung a plateful of meat bones at the prisoners there. They fell upon them avidly, striking and snapping at one another as each strove to claim as much of the bounty as he could. Not a few folk stood around the cart pointing and laughing. I stared, sickened. Didn’t they understand those men had been Forged? They were not criminals. They were husbands and sons, fishers and farmers of the Six Duchies, whose only crime had been to be captured by the Red Ships.
I had no count of the number of Forged ones I had slain. I felt a revulsion for them, that was true, but it was the same revulsion I felt at seeing a leg that had gone to gangrene, or a dog so taken with mange that there was no cure for him. Killing Forged ones had nothing to do with hatred, or punishment, or justice. Death was the only solution to their condition and it should have been meted out as swiftly as possible, in mercy to the families that had loved them. Those young men had spoken as if there would be some sort of sport in killing them. I stared at the cage queasily.
I sat down slowly at my place again. There was still food on my platter but my appetite for it had faded. Common sense told me that I should eat while I had the chance. For a moment I just looked at the food. I made myself eat.
When I lifted my eyes, I caught two young men staring at me. For an instant I met their looks; then I recalled who I was supposed to be and cast my glance down. They evidently were amused by me, for they came swaggering over to sit down, one across the table from me and one uncomfortably close beside me. That one made a great show of wrinkling his nose and covering his nose and mouth for his comrade’s amusement. I gave them both good evening.
‘Good evening for you, perhaps. Haven’t had a feed like this in a while, eh, beggar?’ This from the one across from me, a tow-headed lout with a mask of freckles across his face.
‘That’s true, and my thanks to your Capaman for his generosity,’ I said mildly. I was already looking for a way to extricate myself.
‘So. What brings you to Pome?’ the other asked. He was taller than his indolent friend, and more muscled.
‘Looking for work.’ I met his pale eyes squarely. ‘I’ve been told there’s a hiring fair in Tradeford.’
‘And what kind of work would you be good at, beggar? Scarecrow? Or do you perhaps draw the rats out of a man’s house with your smell?’ He set an elbow on the table, too close to me, and then leaned forward on it, as if to show me the bunching of muscle in his arm.
I took a breath, then two. I felt something I had not felt in a while. There was the edge of fear, and that invisible quivering that ran over me when I was challenged. I knew, too, that at times it became the trembling that presaged a fit. But something else built inside me as well, and I had almost forgotten the feel of it. Anger. No. Fury. The mindless, violent fury that gave me the strength to lift an axe and sever a man’s shoulder and arm from his body, or fling myself at him and choke the life out of his body regardless of how he pummelled at me as I did so.
In a sort of awe I welcomed it back and wondered what had summoned it. Had it been recalling friends