Chapter 159: Fields of Green
"Entry for two?"
"Yes please," Ralph said. He smiled widely, but there was a lingering exhaustion in his eyes that he didn’t want to hide. He held Soleia’s hand tightly. "My wife and I have been on the road for a while."
"A honeymoon?" The guard keeping watch at the border raised his eyebrows. "That’s awfully lucky of you."
Soleia froze, afraid that Ralph might have misspoken. After all, most peasants did not have the luxury of going for honeymoons, but Ralph rubbed her shoulders comfortingly. He leaned in and spoke with the cadence of a Raxuvian native, handing the guard a token. Soleia didn’t even realize he had that with him.
"You can say that. We went to visit the lakes to pray for children. Now we must return to help my family with the farm!" Ralph laughed, and Soleia also smiled, cuddling closer to him, a blush highlighting her cheeks.
After a week of travel on foot, Soleia’s heart had managed to regain some semblance of calm at Sir Ralph’s casual displays of affection.
And there were a lot of casual displays of affection. But it wasn’t as though he had done them on purpose― it was simply the easiest disguise they thought of. One lady and her knight would raise eyebrows, and so would a pair of adult siblings.
No one batted their eyes at a married couple traveling together. After a week of hard travel, Soleia and Ralph looked no better than the hordes of weary travelers trying to enter Raxuvia’s borders in time for their spring harvest. When people asked for their names, Ralph went by Ronald, and Soleia became Susan.
The guard relaxed his shoulders when he heard the familiar dialect and saw the familiar crest on the token. This man’s family worked for one of the lords, and it would not be wise to delay their entry.