The Greenway south of Fornost, late in the autumn of the kingdom’s twilight.

They went south because south was where the work was, and the work was the only thing left that paid. Behind them the grey crown of the North Downs held up the banners of Arthedain over Fornost Erain, the last seat of the line of Isildur; ahead the land stopped being a kingdom by slow degrees and began to be a grave. The Greenway carried them down through it — the old north-south road that had once moved the wealth of two realms and now grew grass between its stones. They passed steadings gone to thorn, shrines untended, a standing stone with the King’s seven stars cut into it by some hopeful hand long dead and nearly eaten now by moss. The people they met on the road were hollow-eyed and few, and watched the southern horizon, because the southern horizon is where the trouble comes from.

It was on that road that the beggar found them. Maeric, he gave his name as — a ragged man with the straight back and ruined hands of a soldier who had been somebody once, before the wall and the hunger and whatever came after. He carried no alms-bowl but a folded contract, and when he held it out he held it with both hands, level, and waited — not offering it the way a petitioner offers a plea, but presenting it the way a courier presents orders: arms straight, eyes forward, the form correct and the ranks behind it entirely gone. Muscle memory from a life the road had stripped away, observing ceremonies no one had asked for, in rags on an empty road. He spoke for a lord: a watch-post on the Cardolan side, abandoned these years, was to be looked at, and there was coin in the looking. He did not say much about the lord, and what he did say did not add up to a great house — a man who sends a beggar to do a herald’s work is a man with no heralds left, keeping up the shape of lordship with nothing inside it but need.

The warband took the work, because the warband needed the work, and thought no more of it than that. Maeric named no master beyond a lord of the southern country, and named even that without warmth. There were such lords spoken of on the Greenway that autumn — men who fed the folk the King had forgotten, and were owed for the feeding ever after; one in particular, whose name the carters would give you readily enough by daylight and not at all once the fire burned low. Whether the folded paper had come from his hand, Maeric did not say and the warband did not ask. The coin was real, and the road was long, and a man does not hold a contract up to the light with winter coming on.

A letter overtook them on the road that week, from Edrig son of Mallor — a Cardolan man who had shared Thirwen’s trench and his hunger in the bad years, and who fights now for anyone with the coin, even, they said, for the Witch-king. He sent supplies, a little silver, the warmth of an old comrade; or the first quiet turn of a debt. Thirwen took it and did not ask which. So they went on south, a little richer and a little more beholden, and did not hold that up to the light either.

Next week: the warband reaches the border town, mends a wall for its supper, and goes out to the watch-post the contract named.