CHAPTER 845: THE LONG WAY AROUND (PART ONE)

"Can I count on you to help me return home, even if it means we have to defy an entire march to do so?"

There was only one answer to Lady Jocelynn’s question. Sir Elgon knew it. Captain Albyn knew it, and Confessor Eleanor most certainly knew it. Stand together or abandon the noblewoman who had brought them all here, leaving her to whatever cruel fate the Church or the Lothian Marquis had in mind.

There was only one answer, but when she put it so bluntly, it was incredibly difficult to speak the words.

If the Church declared her a witch or a heretic, then the full might of the Inquisition would follow them wherever they went. They would have to seek out a High Priest or High Inquisitor in some other territory in order to clear her name from the trumped-up charges that a corrupt Inquisitor could lay against her.

And even if she escaped the charge of heresy, she would still have to escape Bors Lothian, his sons, and all the barons and knights of the march who could turn against her. If the Lothian Marquis was her enemy, there would be nowhere in the march that would be safe for her.

"You said that you couldn’t follow the River Luath back home," Eleanor said gently, hoping that it would be easier for the two men to voice their support if they understood Jocelynn’s plan better. "What do you have in mind instead? How will you flee through the countryside in the depths of winter?"

"I know it won’t be easy," Jocelynn said, nodding her thanks at her cousin. "But I see one path that may be open to us," she said as she placed a finger on the map where Lothian City was marked. "When the time comes, we’ll need to be swift, but if we leave in the dead of night, then we should be able to arrive in the Village of Maeril in time to catch the first ferry across the river Luath."

"From there, we cross into Dunn Barony and work our way north," Jocelynn said, flipping pages in the book until she found one that displayed the barony in detail. "I don’t have all the Dunn hamlets marked here, but there are more than twenty of them scattered across the barony now. We can move from hamlet to hamlet, avoiding the larger villages wherever possible."

"Why avoid the villages?" Sir Elgon asked with a frown. "The Dunn Barony is closer to the demons than most territories in the march, and the hamlets are barely defended. Just look at how many of them suffered grievous losses in the recent raids," he said. "You would be safer if you could reach villages with proper walls and a well-defended keep."

"I know," Jocelynn said with a heavy sigh. "I’d love nothing more than to take the safer road through established villages and towns, but the hamlets are missing something besides stout walls that make them safer for us. Or, at least it makes them safer from pursuers."

"No temples?" Eleanor asked with a raised brow. "That’s true, but they still have at least a local priest. They might only carry the status of acolytes, but the Church would never allow a permanent community to form without some kind of representative present, especially that close to demon territory."

"No, it’s not the Church that the villages lack," Jocelynn said with a slight smile as she shook her head. "It’s pigeons. I’ve spoken to Lord Liam Dunn about the hamlets, and he said that they pass messages via fast rider because some demons are skilled at intercepting carrier pigeons. That means the people in the hamlets can’t spread word about our movements faster than we can ride, and even if they send someone to a village with pigeons, they still can’t use pigeons to inform the other hamlets to be on the lookout for us."

"It’s an advantage, my lady," Sir Elgon admitted as he tugged at his mustache. "But it’s not as great of one as you think it is. The first messenger to reach a village can alert both the Town of Dunn and Lothian City. Within two days, three at most, every village in the barony could have orders to hunt you down. By the fourth day, those orders will likely be relayed to every hamlet in the barony."

"We can be fast, my lady," he said cautiously. "But even if we avoid the places where they have messenger birds, we’re only buying ourselves a few days at most."

"Not if we kill the horses," Albyn said, much to the horror of Sir Elgon. "I know it’s cruel," he said quickly. "But Lady Jocelynn just said that these hamlets pass messages by fast rider. Keeping fast horses is expensive. I wager they only have two or three horses who can act as messengers at most. The rest of the horses in these hamlets are likely slow draft beasts, if they use horses at all. I hear they keep oxen for pulling plows in the more rugged areas."

"If we kill their horses, we can silence their messengers," he said confidently. "After all, these are mostly common farmers. They won’t risk traveling the roads on foot through darkness just to carry word of your passage."

There was something about the way Albyn said it that stilled everyone else sitting at the table. Perhaps it was because he spent much of his life at sea that he didn’t see anything wrong with killing horses in order to stop messengers. He didn’t live side by side with a well-trained warhorse the way Sir Elgon did, and he hadn’t grown up with the sort of privilege that Jocelynn had to learn how to ride from a young age, with a horse of her own that she’d considered her best friend after Ashlynn for several years.

But as Jocelynn looked at the captain’s eyes and the confused look forming between his brows as the rest of the table stared at him, she realized it went beyond not having a history of affection for horses.

Albyn had suggested killing horses because it was a practical method of removing a threat, and because the people he had chosen to protect were more important to him than the lives of a few horses or the sorrow and loss he would leave in his wake. To Albynn, it was an obvious solution, and he seemed genuinely confused at why everyone else seemed so shocked by it.

Which made Jocelynn very, very glad that the captain was on her side, even as she wondered what else he would do if he decided it was the best way to protect her from harm. Because wherever the good captain’s limits were, she was fairly certain they were far beyond killing a few horses to stop a message from getting out.