Free The Sable City (The Norothian Cycle) by M. Edward McNally, mimulux Page A

the hanging laces across the horse’s belly, while Tilda arranged the bags behind the saddle. As Block began to canter back toward the west, Dugan stood up across the mare from Tilda and gave her a nod.
    “ My thanks for your trouble, Miss.”
    Tilda blinked at him. His face was set seriously, no jibing at the moment, and even with the homely fur cap on his head it was the first time in a while that he had looked quite so handsome.
    “ No trouble…and my name is Tilda.”
    Dugan’s eyes narrowed. “Your Cap’n called you Matilda .”
    “ Yes, but…”
    A small smirk had begun to play at one side of Dugan’s mouth and Tilda sighed inwardly, marking her misstep.
    “… but my friends call me Tilda.”
    He nodded, still with his half a grin, and offered Tilda a hand for a pull up into her saddle. She did not accept it but swung up herself despite the fact that it still made her ribs hurt.
     
    *
     
    Over the next few days Dugan took paths veering more southerly than west. As the Girding Mountains drew nearer on the horizon the land rose and the grass of the steppe grew shorter, hardly reaching the man’s knees as he set a brisk pace afoot that the horses followed comfortably. After six days of traveling with the renegade, a full week after the battle from which he had escaped, Tilda realized that this was now the Fifteenth and middle day of Eight Month, and it gave her a start. When she had left the Islands three months ago, “next year” had seemed an awful long time away. But now there were only three and a half months remaining in 1395, and the Miilarkians were still very far from home. If they did not return to the Islands before the New Year’s Assembly of House Lords, the Captain’s mission would have failed. That suddenly did not seem like so long a time distant.
    The Fifteenth was also the day that the three travelers reached the river, or rather it was the day that the river came out onto the steppe to reach them. Though it is several hundred miles from where the Winding rises in the marshes around La Trabon until its waters join those of the Runne to the west and south, the course of the river is easily thrice its length. It snakes wildly among the foothills of the Girdings, and in some places stretches great bowing bends out for many miles onto the steppe. The travelers met one such curve at its elbow, for there the Winding flowed almost like a moat enclosing a rocky spur of high ground. A long series of ridges, hills, and plateaus together pointed like a finger due north onto the steppe, perpendicular to the main line of the mountains.
    They followed the jag of the river upstream for another day and a half, staying on the east bank though it would not have been much trouble to cross. The channel of the river was scoured-out very wide and it surely would have run booming in the spring with snowmelt pouring down from the mountains. In autumn however there was only a sluggish stream in the middle of the channel, sky-gray water where honking ducks circled and sleek beavers eyed the passersby from their wooden forts. Across the river the lower ground among the hills and ridges was heavily wooded, and more than once small clusters of rooftops and puffing chimneys were sighted. The buildings were all of stone, with tall, peaked roofs and long eaves.
    The trio could have crossed at a hundred paces but Dugan said it was a bad idea. He said all the high ground and the villages enclosed by the long bend of the Winding were the domains of the Codian Baron Mediwether de Trellane. The Trellane family had ruled here since long before the Code came to Orstaf. They were the descendants of nobles from Daul, the kingdom beyond the mountains, which had held sway over much of southern Orstaf and the course of the Winding until a century ago. The Trellanes had accepted the Code and thus become Codian nobles, but Dugan said they still ran their barony as they saw fit, and it was widely known that they did not take kindly to