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Horacio shrugged and went about climbing into his own bedroll. “No. Should I have?”
I nearly dropped my mouth open in the dark. “So you’ve really never heard of men who are called wolves who live on the frontier?”
“No,” Horacio said. “The only thing I know about men on the frontier is that you lot only ever keep to your cities. You’ve built great walls around them, haven’t you? And no one goes in or out, except when you have faires outside the cities. You’re all daft for not traveling anywhere, you know.”
I couldn’t believe my ears. I should have settled in for bed, nursing my sore ass and chalking it all up as a learning experience, but I couldn’t let the moment go.
“What do you know about the new kingdoms in the frontier?” I asked.
Horacio laughed as if I’d said something ridiculous. “I’ve heard rumors, but they’re too ridiculous to be true. The frontier is filled with timid folk. They’re subservient to the king. There’s no way they would do anything so bold as making kingdoms or going against the king’s orders.”
Everything he said made me more astonished instead of less.
“So you haven’t heard a single believable rumor about the frontier fragmenting and new kingdoms being formed across the territory?” I asked.
“I don’t think the frontier is big enough to have all those kingdoms in it,” Horacio said, settling into his own bedroll and lying down. “There are, what, a dozen cities between the mountains and Good Port? That’s not room for much.”
I was astounded. Perhaps it was a lack of education on the part of a man from what I could see more and more with every mile we traveled was a rural area, but Horacio delivered the mail. He had to be able to read at least.
“We’ll set off tomorrow at first light,” Horacio said, turning to his side. He laughed tiredly, then added, “Fucking a man sure does make you sleepy.”
I flopped to my back and pulled the cover of my bedroll up. I was too stunned to fall right to sleep, though.
I stared up at the starry sky, blinking in wonder. They were the same stars I’d seen every night out the window from Dushka’s bed, the same stars I’d gazed at growing up in Yacovissi. But the land where I found myself now was as different as could be.
I didn’t think it was possible that people in the Old Realm knew so little about the frontier, but the next day, as we traveled across wide open land and though a few large villages, I made a point of conversing with the three maids. All of them had similar opinions about the frontier. They thought it was small, distant, and unimportant.
Horacio made a few lightning-fast stops in a handful of villages and towns along the road, and on the third and final day of our journey. I asked at each of the inns where we paused for a bit to eat and a quick wash in an outhouse what people thought of the frontier and what rumors they’d heard about the goings on there.
Very few people knew anything. A few had heard rumors of rebellion. Even those rumors had been shrugged off.
By the time afternoon began to stretch into evening and a faint glow appeared on the horizon, I was certain that the attitude of the Old Realm toward the frontier was indifferent at best and purely ignorant the rest of the time. Nobody really knew what life was like on our side of the mountain and nobody cared.
It was the very best possible situation I could have thought of for Magnus’s sake and for the sake of the Wolf River Kingdom. Through all of the kingdom-building we’d been doing, all the conflict with the other wolves and negotiations with the cities, there was a constant sense that the Old Realm would want their frontier back, and that they would fight to get it. But for the common people of the Old Realm, at least, the frontier was as much a myth as the stories of the old gods and the time before the world was broken.
My wondering thoughts about relations between the Old Realm and the frontier were shoved to the back of my mind late in the afternoon on the third day of my journey with Horacio, when we traveled through a valley between several low hills and emerged around a corner to the stunning sight of a city that was bigger than anything I’d ever imagined.
“Here we are,” Horacio said with a smile, snapping the reins over the back of the ox who had been pulling the wagon. “That’s Royersford.”
I gaped at the massive city that spread out before me. From near the crest of the hill we’d just come over, I had an excellent view of the place. It filled the entire valley, reaching toward the sea at the far end and bordered by tall hills on either side. The city wasn’t walled, and its buildings stretched up the sides of the hills that cupped the valley, like two hands holding a great gift.
It was hard to be completely certain, but the center of the city seemed to be filled with older buildings, some of which glimmered in the afternoon light as the sunset caught glass windows. A slightly newer—or perhaps just flatter—section of the city encircled that, as though people had built out from the original town in concentric circles. Those buildings had a poorer aspect to them that set them apart from the grand buildings in the center of the city.
The hillsides that ringed the city were a different story. The buildings weren’t as close together there. Even at a distance, I could tell they were fine, rich estates with large gardens around them. They instantly brought to mind the things Neil and Peter had shared with the other Sons of what Magnus had told them about the rich and titled of the Old Realm. Those must have been the estates where they’d had their revels, and where the parties Magnus and his old lover, Rurik, had been hired to entertain the guests with their bodies.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Horacio said, glancing to me with a smile.
“Yes, it is,” I replied honestly, sitting straighter so I could look at it longer as the wagon plodded on. “It’s bigger even than Good Port.”
Horacio laughed. “I don’t know why all you from the frontier call those quaint towns of your cities. That’s a city.” He pointed to the grand place with the whip he’d used now and then to spur the ox on.
I didn’t argue with him. He was right. What we on the frontier considered to be a city was roughly the size of some of the towns we’d passed and delivered mail to the days before. The people of the Old Realm might not have had a clue what the frontier was all about, but I imagined very few people in the frontier truly understood the sort of grand scale of the Old Realm.
That scale became even more evident as we crossed from the rural areas ringing Royersford into small, satellite towns that were loosely affiliated with the city, and on into the city itself. I’d never seen anything like the old buildings that rose up all around us. The oldest building I’d ever seen in Yacovissi was the town hall, which had been constructed a hundred years ago. The buildings Horacio drove me through had to be five and six times that old. And people walked among them without even caring, as if they had no idea that they were using history to scrape their boots on or to piss against.
“Well,” Horacio said at last, pulling the wagon to a stop in front of what looked like a three-story building made of alabaster marble that seemed warm in the late-day sun. “Here you are. Here’s the healer’s college.”
I’d been looking at the building across the street, but I whipped around, then blinked at the walled complex where Horacio had stopped. Through a huge, ornate gate in a wall that was twice as high as me, I could see a courtyard with a marble fountain and several larger-than-life statues. There were gardens between the wall and the building as well. I could smell the fresh tang of herbs wafting up over the wall.
