Chapter 350 --350
He looked at her for a moment with the expression of someone processing the gap between what they had expected to say and what had actually happened. Then he said, "Yes, Your Majesty," and went to tell Dren.
Five of Tarven’s men were waiting at the treeline when she emerged from the carriage. They were not armed with anything impressive — two had tools that could serve as weapons if required, one had a proper knife, two had nothing. They were standing with the specific posture of people who had made a decision and were committed to it and were not going to discuss whether it was a good decision because the time for that discussion had passed.
She looked at them.
"You are witnesses," she said. "That is your function today and it is an important one. You stay behind my guards at all times. You speak when asked to speak. If something happens that requires you to move quickly, you move in the direction my guards indicate without stopping to evaluate the instruction." She looked at each of them. "Is that clear?"
Five nods.
"Good." She turned to Petr. "Lead."
---
The forest was difficult in the specific way that old forest is difficult — not impassable, not even particularly treacherous once you found the rhythm of it, but requiring consistent attention. The ground was uneven in unpredictable ways. The light was low and green and played tricks with depth perception. Twice she stepped on ground that felt solid and was not quite, the soft give of accumulated leaf matter over hidden depression, and both times she caught herself without incident, but the incidents reminded her to keep ninety percent of her attention on her feet.
The remaining ten percent she spent listening.
The forest was not quiet. It had its own sounds — birds, wind through the high canopy, the distant sound of water somewhere to the north, the small movements of things that lived here and were not particularly concerned with the passage of humans through their territory. Underneath all of it, once she had been walking long enough for her ears to calibrate, she could hear the garrison.