“Are you the field marshal?” the old man said in Adran. The Kez accent was so thick that the words were barely distinguishable. His face was wrinkled, his skin brown from the hot sun of the plateau and perhaps a mix of Deliv blood. Labor and trade went on freely between the Deliv to the north and Kez farmers on the plateau.
The old bean farmer was emaciated. He might have been plump at one point, but the skin now sagged from his cheeks and sickly splotches on his face spoke to malnutrition.
The man’s eyes held a smoldering anger that surprised Tamas.
“I speak Kez,” Tamas said in Kez.
“Are you the field marshal?” the bean farmer said again in Kez.
“I am. Good afternoon.”
The bean farmer spit at the feet of Tamas’s charger. He bared his teeth and glared, as if daring Tamas to do anything about it.
Tamas looked at Gavril. His brother-in-law, still bruised from their fight last week, just shrugged his shoulders.
“Something wrong?” Tamas asked.
“You tell me.”
Tamas shot another glance at Gavril. What was this all about?
“I can’t imagine.”
“You took my crop,” the old man said. “It was a good one this year, considering the drought. You took my wife and daughters. Your blasted men broke my son’s legs when he refused to serve them!”
Tamas scowled. Damned infantry. Even the best couldn’t keep themselves under control. He’d ordered that women be left alone under penalty of death. The food, they needed, but Tamas didn’t need his soldiers raping and killing their way across the Kez countryside.
“What company did this?” he asked Gavril.
“None of ours. The man and his son were alone in his hut when the forage teams found him. The place had been stripped bare, all the furniture broken. The boy’s legs were broken, like he says. The lad will be a cripple for life. Looks like it happened weeks ago.”
“I’m sorry about your wife and daughters,” Tamas said, “but it wasn’t my men.”
“Are you calling me a liar?” The bean farmer edged his mule closer to Tamas.
Tamas took a deep breath and reminded himself that striking an old man wasn’t the best way to end a conversation. “When did this happen?”
“Eighteen days ago,” the bean farmer said.
“It couldn’t have been us. We just arrived.”
“Then who was it? I know Adran troops when I see them.” The bean farmer leaned over to pluck at Tamas’s jacket. “Adran blues, with silver trim. I’m not a fool!”
“How many men?”
“Thousands of ya!” The bean farmer spit again.
“Gavril, any sign an army came through here recently?”
Gavril rode off a few feet to confer with one of his scouts. He came back a moment later. “Foraging teams are all reporting the same thing — the land’s been stripped clean. All the crops were harvested early, or burned, and the men have come across dozens of empty farmsteads.”
Tamas drummed his fingers on his saddle horn. The forage he’d been expecting on the Northern Expanse — gone. All of it. Nothing for his men to eat on the way to Alvation.
“Well?” the bean farmer demanded. “What do you have to say for yourself?”
“Which way were they headed?” Tamas asked.
The bean farmer seemed taken aback. “North.”
“Olem, give this man enough food for him and his son and send him back to his home. Let him keep the mule.” Tamas flicked the reins. “Gavril.”
Tamas left the cursing old bean farmer in Olem’s hands and rode back to the head of the column. Gavril came up beside him, letting his charger keep pace with Tamas’s.
“This doesn’t make sense,” Tamas said. “We don’t have any troops in northern Kez.”
“I’d say the old man isn’t right in the head, but the place has been swept clean. It would have taken a great number of men to come through and strip the plateau like this.”
Tamas gripped his saddle horn. How was he going to feed his men with no forage?
“How many?” Tamas asked.
Gavril scratched the stubble on his chin. “At least a brigade or two.”
“Wearing Adran blue, but not Adran.” Tamas mused it over in his head. “Shit! They’re trying to slip into Adro.”
“The Kez?”
“It must be. They come through here, acting like an invading army — bluff their way through Alvation and then take an unsuspecting Mountainwatch. They might be in Adro already.”
“What should we do?” Gavril asked.
Tamas let his fingers play upon the butt of one of the saw-handled dueling pistols stuck in his belt. A gift from his son. “We keep going. We catch up to them and take them from behind.”
Ricard Tumblar’s carriage jolted along the winding highway at the base of the Charwood Pile Mountain Range, headed north toward the Pan-Deliv Canal. Mountains rose above them immediately to the west, and there were more in the distance to the north, their white tops looking like frosting on peaked cakes. The carriage thumped, then clattered over a stone bridge crossing a tributary of the Ad River and then it was back to the pitted dirt road.
Adamat stared out the window and tried not to think of the jarring of the ground. The last thing he needed was to throw up all over the velvet interior.
