Thief's War: A Knight and Rogue Novel Read Free Page A

they’ll have an alibi. But their back door’s unlocked.”
    It was, and a fire crackled in the kitchen hearth, with towels and blankets warming beside it. A kettle of hot soup hung near the blaze.
    Our clothing steamed as we helped Master Ruffo strip off his wet garments, and warmth finished what the liniment had begun. He still hadn’t straightened, but he was moving more easily as we seated him at the table and clamped his hands around a mug of soup and a spoon.
    He didn’t eat. There were tears in his eyes again, and this time the pain wasn’t physical.
    “Willy. Gone. And it’s all my fault. My curst, stubborn, self-righteous—”
    “Who’s Willy?” I asked.
    “Our grandson,” Mistress Ruffo said. “Just turned thirteen. Not old enough to know better.”
    Her voice implied that someone else was old enough to know better, and I wasn’t surprised when her husband snapped, “I already said it was my fault. What more do you-”
    “What happened to young Will?” I broke in. This was clearly a quarrel that would go on for some time. Years, mayhap.
    “The food train…” Master Ruffo pushed his soup away. “I think you’re strangers to these parts, yes?”
    “We’ve seen the trains,” Fisk said. He is wary about answering personal questions, even from friends, while committing illegal acts. “You can hardly miss them.”
    “Then you’ll know that they take laborers into the city, as well,” Ruffo said. “Draining the countryside of both food and hands. Indeed, it’s the lack of food that costs us the hands!”
    “What do you mean?” I asked. We had seen laborers traveling to the city with the food trains, but I’d given it little thought. My father describes the slow migration of country men and women into cities and towns as an unstaunched wound, bleeding the countryside dry. At least, that’s how he describes it when young men and women leave his estate, to look for jobs with better pay and more chance of advancement. The craft guilds in the towns describe it as man’s natural desire to better his lot, and ’twas happening all over the Realm. And no matter how much the landed gentry grumble, no one ends up flogged, or in these new-fangled stocks.
    “The markets in Tallowsport pay more for our crops than the local market can,” Mistress Ruffo said. “Particularly now, when there’s no new growth and winter stocks are running low. That means food here becomes expensive. When folks can’t afford to feed themselves and their families, they’ve no choice but to go with the cart trains, to get jobs in the city workshops.”
    “It’s getting so bad, we’ll be short of men to plant and harvest soon,” Master Ruffo continued. Clearly this was one thing he and his wife agreed on.
    “So why don’t you farmers, who are getting paid so much more, just pay your laborers more?” Fisk asked. “Or hold back part of your crop to sell to the local market, cheaper?”
    “This ground may look muddy,” I told him, “but down a few inches ’tis just beginning to thaw. From Oakan to Crocusa, there’s nothing for a farm laborer to do.”
    “As for refusing to sell to them, that’s what landed me in the stocks,” Ruffo said bitterly. “I’ve been talking to my neighbors, townsfolk, anyone who’ll listen, pointing out that if we can’t keep local prices down, soon we won’t be able to run our farms. When the train came through, well, it seemed like the time to put my money where my mouth was. I told ’em that our market needed my stores, and I wasn’t going to sell no matter how much they offered. They offered a lot,” he added. “Can’t say I blame most for taking it. They went away. But next day Judicar Makey and a dozen guards, Tallowsport Guards, rode up to the farm and said I’d been accused of mis-weighting my scales.”
    “I said how could I do that, since I hadn’t sold ’em anything, and brought out my scales to show him they were true. He said the fact that I had them so