On the first day the carriage rolled uneventfully through the winter countryside. An outrider went ahead to alert each next stage that we were coming. By the second day I was surprised at how good the roads were, until the coachman informed me that they had been built in the last ten years with indentured local labor under the supervision of soldiers. Before that, he said, the journey would have taken a month on a cart track.

At dusk on the third day we rolled into the courtyard of an isolated inn out in the middle of nowhere. No one bustled to assist us. The watering trough had been smashed to pieces.

An outrider came running from the stables. “My lord, the place has been ransacked and defaced.”

Vai and I drew our swords. Under Vai’s mage light we investigated the two-room inn and the stove house and kitchen behind. Every piece of furniture had been stripped out except a wooden slops bucket with a leaking bottom, filled with frozen excrement. Shattered floorboards exposed the pillars of the hypocaust system, on which were painted curses. Amulets plaited with animal bones, withered leaves, and chicken feathers caked with dried blood hung from the lintels.

Outside, Vai called over the most senior outrider, a quiet man who performed his duties and kept the younger men in line. “Speak honestly and I give my word I will hear your speech without reprisal. Why do the people here hate cold mages so much they would do this?”

The man considered his gloved hands. “My people have been living in these lands since the dawn of time, my lord. Then in my father’s youth, the outsiders came. You mages brought down the anger of the god over all the countryside.” He glanced at me. “The mage houses and their princely allies rule us now. They take our young men to build roads and to fight, and our young women to be servants and to be shamed. For this privilege, my lord, we must be paying a tithe of our furs and meat to the mages likewise.”

Snow dusted down over us. The men watched with the caution of servants. They were five and we were two, and yet they showed no sign of being eager to attack us.

Vai spoke. “Did you know there is a man, General Camjiata, who has written a legal code that outlaws clientage? A law that says no person may own another person as property or claim another community as its possession?”

“Do you mean the Iberian Monster, my lord?” asked the senior man. Unaware of how he was twisting his hands, he had almost pulled off one of his gloves.

“You have the look of a soldier about you,” I said. “Perhaps you fought in the war twenty years ago.”