A Country Life

CHAPTER 2 - FARRON

A gentle knock on the door woke him. When he opened his eyes, he found it was the middle of the night, and the only illumination was a shaft of moonlight coming in through the room's one small window. The fire had all but gone out in the hearth, and the cold was seeping in under the blankets, adding to his reluctance to get up at the summons.

The knock was repeated, and this time a voice called out, "Farron, are you awake?" It sounded like Minna, one of the castle serving girls.

"One moment," he said, sleepily. Throwing back the blanket with a sigh, Farron swung his legs out of bed and reached for his tunic, which he had hung on the back of a chair to dry. He pulled it over his head and grimaced as the still-damp wool clung to his skin. As he pulled on his boots the meaning of his summons made its way through his crippling tiredness. A call at this time of night could only mean one of two things; either his father's health had started to improve, or he was dead or about to die. It had been perilously close for two days now.

Minna knocked at the door again and asked him to hurry. Probably not dead then, he thought, with a stab of hope.

When he opened the door, he found Minna waiting for him with an oil lamp in one hand, and clean blankets in the other.

"He's asking for you," she said.

Farron turned to his table and picked up a quill, inkpot and several sheets of parchment before following Minna down the corridor. If what she said was true, then perhaps his father was over the worst and on the mend. In any event, Farron thought it would be wise to write down anything his father said, in case it would help the Protectorate's yeomanry find out more about why he had been attacked in the first place. So far all they had was a body of an unknown assassin, and the crossbow and quarrels that had been in his possession, which Thom, the elderly and irascible yeoman sergeant had called "intriguing."

The castle was quiet as they walked along corridors, down darkened staircases and through sparse, echoing rooms. Most of the castle's inhabitants were away with Lord Kilvern, and they didn't meet anyone else until they had passed through the inner courtyard to the main gate, where a pair of sentries dressed in leather and chainmail stood warming his hands at a brazier. The gates had been closed since his father had been attacked, and several guards stood vigil on the battlements, looking out over the darkened land.  There had been no reports from the watchtowers of anything untoward, and there had likewise been no messages from nearby towns of anything happening out of the ordinary. Even so, everyone knew what had happened, and the fact that the entire yeomanry had been mobilised to 'seek out raiders on the boundary' had served to put the town on its guard. That in itself had made another attack less likely, according to Thom.

The guard opened the gate as they approached and they stepped out into the moonlit grounds outside the castle. They crossed the moat via a wooden walkway, then left the path that led to the town and headed instead towards a group of single-story houses a little way to the west of the castle. The moat, noticed Farron, was dry. In fact, the moat was a relatively recent addition, being less than two hundred years old. If the castle was under threat, the moat could be flooded by diverting a nearby stream, with the wooden walkway the only dry approach possible, so making the castle more easily defensible. To Farron's certain knowledge, the moat had never been flooded other than for practice, and then not at all in the nine years Farron and his father had been in the Protectorate. For the last hundred years or so, there had been little need for heavy defensive measures anywhere within the southern counties, or even within the larger Kingdoms as a whole.

All of which made this attack on his father even more unfathomable. Disputes between townsfolk, farmers or tradesmen from other towns were not unusual, and they could occasionally lead to murder, which the Protectorate's castle guard and yeomanry normally dealt with on behalf of the county sheriff. The motives for such crimes were usually obvious – jealousies, disputes over land or cattle, drunken fights – and the guilty parties tried and sentenced by the sheriff or his deputies.