Page 41 of Into the West

He surely expected Kordas to counter with all the reasons he’d given for leaving Crescent Lake—that the Empire was eventually going to come looking, that they needed to put enough distance between them and the Duchy of Valdemar—and enough Gate-crossings—to throw them completely off the scent. That there was no such thing as “too far from the Empire.”

He might have suspected that Kordas would add that all the Landwise thought this was a poor place to settle. Surely someone who was Landwise would have told him this . . .

Well, maybe not. If they already knew he either doesn’t believe in the Landsense, or thinks they’re all in my pocket, or if they just don’t like him, they might not have bothered.

So instead, he simply smiled and cut straight to the chase. “Well, Hayworth, I have made it clear all along that anyone who cares to leave us is absolutely free to do so. So if that is what you want to do, I am not going to lift a finger to stop you.”

Hayworth, who had his mouth open for whatever demands he was planning to make, looked as if Kordas had actually struck him. His hard mouth worked as his brain tried to reconcile what it had expected to hear with what Kordas had actually said. And his eyes glazed over for a moment in sheer shock.

Kordas continued, concealing his glee. “Now, of course, if this means any of your people wish to stay with us rather than going with you, you are not going to be allowed to coerce them. I have explained this to all of you. While we are on the move, and until we have established something like a stable settlement, we are all equal. You cannot make life decisions for them. Only they can do that.” He looked over at Rose, who took the cue.

“Indeed, Lord Baron, and even as we speak, we are asking every member of the good Lord Hayworth’s household if they choose to remain with him or go with the convoy.”

Hayworth’s thick eyebrows furrowed, but beneath them, his usually hard gray eyes just looked dumbstruck. He’d barely gotten a sentence out and found himself outmaneuvered.

“Now, Lord Hayworth,” Isla said, with a charming smile on her face as she opened up the first of the ledgers she had piled up beside her. “Since you will be departing, we’ll need to go over the inventory of what belongs to you and what belongs to the convoy. Specifically, supplies.”

By the time it was all over, half of Hayworth’s entourage had “mysteriously” disappeared with their horses. The personal barges in Hayworth’s strings had all been detached from the convoy, reorganized, and ferried over to the other side of the river, because Kordas had no intention of making it easy for him to just trot his people back to that village and do what he’d intended to do. Given the chance, at the moment he had even more impetus to do so, since about half of his household of a thousand had elected to stay with the convoy. That village was a nice stand of already-built houses and already-worked fields. Very tempting.

So Kordas elected to put temptation out of reach. He was fairly certain that there was no way Hayworth would be able to cross the river as it was, and he had no way to build a bridge. It was too deep to ford, too cold to swim the horses across, and while the current wasn’t excessive, it was too dangerous to try in this weather.

And if he tried, he’d only find himself faced with rebellion. The freezing, wet riders would be disinclined to do anything but build a fire to try to warm themselves, not march on a village to conquer it.

Following which, they would probably curse him under their breath and ride back up the bank to catch up with the convoy.

Meanwhile, thanks to Isla’s bookkeeping, all he’d be granted besides a reasonable portion of grain and seeds was what was in his personal barge. She knew exactly how much of the common supplies he had been entrusted with, and as soon as she knew how many people were going to “leave his service” on the spot, she also knew exactly how much of those supplies she was going to order the Dolls and guards to take back.

“For your convenience, your loyalists are being moved to the western bank, where you all should be safer from the harshest weather on the way. You can keep the barges I’ve loaned you, of course; I’m not a monster,” Kordas finished, trying not to relish how Hayworth looked as if he’d just been run over by a farm cart. “That way you’ll have nice, cozy shelters to spend the winter in, and, as a gentleman farmer, I advise you to put off building anything but barns and stockpens until you’ve got enough land under plow to support all your people. Food on the table is going to be far more important than a replica of Hayworth House.” He stood up and clasped Hayworth’s hand. “No hard feelings. I perfectly understand not wanting to go any further. And who knows! We might still protect you by being a diversion. Any Imperials that come looking for us are likely to roll right past your little settlement without even noticing it.”

He worked very hard not to put emphasis on the word “little.” Call yourself whatever you like, Lord Hayworth. It still won’t change the fact that you are “King” of just over five hundred people.

Hayworth shook his hand, limply.

“Off you go, then!” Kordas continued, turning him and gently moving him toward the door with a not-at-all-subtle hand on the small of his back. “You’ll have a lot of organizing to do and not a lot of time to do it in!”

If his mind was working at all, he’d take that as the urgent need to get back to his barges and figure out how to keep from losing roughly half the common supplies that had been entrusted to him.

But from the way he looked . . . Kordas figured that he was still trying to make sense of the fact that Isla had been coolly ticking off things in her ledgers with “Yes, you can keep half that,” and “these Tow-Beasts and Chargers here, here, and here, are actually Valdemar property,” and “Now, we’ll be having that back; it came out of the Imperial Armory, as you can see noted right here . . .”

Not Poomers and Spitters, but he does have a lot of crossbow bolts and quarrels from the supplies that never made it to the front lines, and he doesn’t get to keep them all. It’s purely “coincidental” that Ilsa’s number came in at enough to hunt with, but not to take on a defended town.

If Hayworth noticed that he was far short of the number of guards and underlings he’d had when he arrived, he didn’t show it. “His people” were deserting him already. Probably the smart ones, who had figured out that his money was worth nothing now.

Well, good. If they joined Kordas’s Guard, they’d be treated decently. If they had betrayal in mind, they’d be further every day from Hayworth’s place to run to, and it would be on the opposite bank of the river.

Meanwhile, Hayworth might be too stunned by the way he’d been outmaneuvered to notice much of anything for a while. If luck was with Kordas, his lordship wouldn’t realize how badly he had screwed himself until they were long out of reach. Oh, he could hitch his own, personal horses, only a few of which were as heavy as the Tow-Beasts, and any of his tenant farmers’ oxen (if there were any left) to the barges and try to catch up. But Kordas had confiscated at least half of his towing power, so the going would be very slow, even if he decoupled some of the lighter barges and managed to get saddle horses and ponies to submit to harness and pulling.

And if he did catch up?

He’ll have to get the vote of at least sixty percent of the people here to be allowed to stay. That seemed . . . unlikely.

Not my henhouse. Not my chickens. I’ll worry about it if it happens. If he has any brains, what he will do is sit put for a few days, see what he has, organize what he has, then go back and negotiate with that village to join them. He can make a bridge out of barges for his animals if he just takes the time to work it out.

Just as Kordas pressed Hayworth out of the door, Hayworth hissed, close enough for Kordas to feel his breath, “This is trickery! I’ll get you for doing this, you—”

“Hush, Hayworth. I don’t think you’re a good enough swimmer to afford finishing that sentence,” Kordas murmured back, and pushed him through.

Things pretty much fell out with the separation of Lord Hayworth from the convoy as Kordas had expected. Kordas made sure his people were absolutely scrupulous about what they took to common stores. He even left Hayworth’s household a supply of chopped wood, because his people had a surplus. He made sure their barges were anchored firmly to the riverbank and that the charms on their herds were working properly, and even got a couple of volunteers from the mages to make a ramp into the river so they could easily pull their boats ashore if they decided to make a settlement where they were, and didn’t want to winter in barges amid the cold water and ice. Kordas didn’t actually know what would happen if the barges were completely encased in ice. Would the hulls be strong enough to survive? They did all right with simple collisions, although absolutely nobody wanted to make a test of that in rough water full of rocks and rapids. Would the pressure on the hulls by the ice just serve to pop them up out of the water to balance on the ice itself?