Six

In which Jonathan and Bess escape the people hunting them and discover money.

Jonathan stood staring at the empty space of rubble where the village used to stand. Nothing recognizable was left - they’d only found the place by the landmarks. The woods far away on the one side, the grassy knoll on the east, the mountains far in the distance to the west. Only the dirt track remained, running between heaps of rain-beaten ash that used to be huts. Bess sat in the dirt beside him, beyond tears in her shock. Nothing. How could there be nothing? Hawkstream Barony lay deep in the kingdom, invulnerable to attack, protected by both Eastmarch and Northmarch. Now their tiny farming village lay utterly desolate, with no sign of who had done this or where their fellow villagers were.

They just wanted to go home. What did you do when there was no home to go to?

Gathering their small bundle of foraged food, they set off down the dirt track in a haze, going vaguely northeast. The immensity of the destruction found no purchase in Jonathan’s mind. He couldn’t understand why someone would do this, or even how. Bess’s fingers linked through his, and he tightened his hand on hers, hanging on. Their feet brushed a rhythm on the dusty road: Gone, step, gone, step, gone, step, gone.

The hunters found them as they reached the woods, the baying of the dogs forcing Bess and Jonathan into a frantic run, pursuit growing ever closer. A huge mass of fur tackled Bess, and Jonathan attacked it with a yell, dragging the dog away and plunging his sword into its belly. They held off the other dogs until the hunters arrived and spread out around the two peasants.

“He wants them alive,” their leader called.

Not that he - whoever he was - would get them alive, Jonathan thought with a growl. He’d sooner walk into the Cinderstrand then go back to that fortress. The hunters tackled him from all sides, and he fought frantically, grabbing hair, biting skin, clawing after the sword fell from his hands until he grabbed a knife off one of his attackers. They pinned him down, and Bess knocked them away with a scream of rage and defiance, giving him the moment he needed to roll over and strike out. Two men were down, then another. Jonathan grappled with the last, his determination compensating for his lack of skill. The hunter could not use deadly force, and Jonathan could. He felt a little sorry for the man, who looked worse for wear and had the dirt and leaves of the trail in his clothes and greasy hair. He was a fighter, Jonathan thought, and when the peasant put the dagger between his ribs, the hunter only looked peacefully resigned, giving the young man a look of respect before closing his eyes in death.

They pillaged the hunter’s gear, finding fresh clothes in the men’s packs along with food and weapons. Bess pulled off her tattered dress and traded it for trousers and a green tunic that went almost to her knees. She belted it tightly and used a dagger to cut off the sleeves to a more manageable length. Jonathan picked neutral green and gray for himself, glad for clothing that would blend into their surroundings.

Some of the dead men’s leather armor fit Bess better than the stuff she stole from the castle, and Jonathan helped her into it, tightening buckles until it fit her figure. She picked a short sword off one hunter and belted it around her waist, adjusting the frogs* until it hung comfortably.

Jonathan fitted himself out well and comfortably, taking a pair of boots to replace his own tattered ones. He kept his own sword, but picked up a bow off one of the men to use for hunting later. He had a little skill there, though his father had mostly taught him snares.

He blocked the thought hastily, and the feelings that came with it. They weren’t useful for surviving. The hunter’s cloaks were folded on top of their bags - utilitarian garments made of a single rectangle of cloth that draped comfortably around the shoulders and was held in place with a pin. Bess’s cloak swallowed her a little, but left her arms free to move, and Jonathan watched her as she braided her hair back, impressed by the change in her and how well she wore the garments.

Last in the pouches, they collected several small bags of gold, silver, and copper coins. Piling it on a rock, they gaped at the glittering metal. They saw a few coppers from time to time, and a nobleman had once tossed Jonathan a silver coin for tending to his horse, but all the villagers traded in goods, not money, and paid their lord in produce from the field.

“We look like bandits,” Bess suddenly noted, looking around at the dead dogs and hunters, the pillaged packs, and the shining pile of coins on the rock between them.

“They were hunting us, and we defended ourselves,” Jonathan replied. “It’s simple as that.”

“Should we take the money to someone? The baron, maybe?”

“What would he do with it? We’d probably get arrested for thievery and murder.”

Bess nodded in agreement, staring down at the coins. “I just can’t think much about all this being ours. What do we do with it?”

Jonathan turned the silver over in his fingers, wondering what all this was worth altogether. “We buy things, I guess.”

“How many chickens do you think it’s worth?”

Jonathan sat back, troubled. Money might be unfamiliar to them, but they knew about value, so many eggs from one villager for one pound of the goat cheese Bess excelled at making. As far as Jonathan was concerned, Bess’s goat cheese was very valuable, but probably not gold or silvers valuable. Coppers, likely, but how many? You could fleece a stranger who didn’t know what a bushel of apples was worth, why not a peasant who didn’t know the value of their coppers?

“We won’t show how much we have,” he decided out loud. “We’ll get by on as little as we can manage, and see how the people who know about this react.”

“I’ll just hide the gold, then,” Bess nodded, wrapping the bright coins up in a bit of cloth and carefully tucking them away. They hid half the silver, too, then divided the rest of it between them, gathered their belongings, and vanished into the forest..

*Yes, I said frogs.  No, that is not a typo. The leather apparatus used to suspend a sword from a belt is called - of all things - a frog.