Chapter 12: The Price of Lyseni Exclusivity

The caravan appeared at the southern checkpoint just after the second bell, seven wagons wide and moving with the unhurried confidence of people who expected to be let through.

Brenys Cole was there because she was always there at the second bell, walking the checkpoint perimeter with the same deliberate circuit she had established in the first week when the perimeter was a rope strung between two fire-damaged gateposts and the guards were two men with billhooks they had never used professionally. The rope was gone now, replaced by a salvaged iron chain bolted between mortared stone pillars that Osric's people had sourced from somewhere in the eastern rubble. The men with billhooks were twenty-three in number and had received six weeks of something approaching formal training. Cole did not consider this progress, exactly. She considered it legibility — the settlement was beginning to be readable as a settlement rather than a catastrophe in progress, and readable things attracted different attention than crises did.

The first wagon carried wool bolts stacked under oiled canvas, dark from the drizzle that had been falling since before dawn. The second carried preserved goods — she could smell vinegar and brine from eight feet away, which meant salted provisions rather than fresh, which meant this was not a local forage party but something that had traveled. The horses were in better condition than most horses the settlement had seen in two months. Fed horses. Horses someone had brought from somewhere that still had enough grain to spare for the animals.