Chapter 602 — The Days of Snowfall
Blade of Dawn · Page 4 of 4
The same drifting snowflakes fell upon this land as well.
A company of knights entered the city in the afternoon—armor gleaming, equipment superb, even their warhorses draped in the finest steel wire mail and fitted with amulet collars that soothed the spirit and bolstered endurance. They rode in along the broadest avenue of the main gate, and all along the way everyone, including the patrolling soldiers, chose reverent retreat the instant they glimpsed the insignia borne by these knights.
Those insignia, stamped with the image of crossed black longswords, were the mark of Silas Loren, Duke of the Eastern Marches.
At the head of the column, the young marquis Belk Loren, fully armored, reined in his beloved horse's pace and with it the pace of the entire company, lest his somewhat rough-mannered subordinates do injury to any pedestrians along the street (though on such a snowy day scarcely a soul could be seen upon it). At the same time he lifted his head and gazed at the towering castle on the high ground not far off.
Having lingered so long in the safety of the rear, spending his days either wrangling with that vexatious pack of local nobles or watching the Cecilians blast White Sand Hills flat bit by bit (by now he suspected those Cecilians might even intend to blow the place into a white sand quarry), Belk felt his patience and his edge would sooner or later be worn away entirely. Fortunately, at long last he had received orders—he could return to Sorinburg.
The young marquis straightened his back and greeted every gaze with the most impeccable knightly bearing, even though no thronging crowds surrounded him. He looked upon the winter streets, turning over in his mind what he would need to report once he met his father and Prince Edmond.
The situation at White Sand Hills would of course require constant reporting; the Cecilians' wish to build a new kind of road was a matter that must be brought to His Highness the Prince's attention without delay; beyond that, he must report on the quelling of banditry in two of the territories; and beyond all that... there was the matter of the lower nobility's slack enforcement of the "Serf Emancipation Act" and the "Land Exchange Law."
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