They left three days after Ser Edwyn arrived.
Not because they needed three days to prepare, one would have been enough, but because Edwyn moved at the pace of a man who had never once in his life felt genuinely rushed, and by the time he’d settled his tab with the innkeeper, found his spare saddle blanket which had somehow ended up in the hay loft, and said a lengthy goodbye to the innkeeper’s wife who he apparently knew from somewhere, three days had passed.
Mikal said nothing about it.
Alex said nothing about it.
Edwyn seemed not to notice.
They rode out on a cool morning with light cloud overhead and the road south toward Highgarden stretched ahead of them, and Alex felt something shift slightly in his chest, the particular feeling of a thing that had been theoretical becoming actual.
“How long to Highgarden?” he asked.
“Five days at a steady pace,” Mikal said.
“Four if we push.” “And from Highgarden to Lannisport?” “Ten days.
Maybe twelve.” Mikal glanced at him.
“Why?” “Just working out the whole distance.” Edwyn leaned over from his horse.
“Fifteen days total, give or take, if the roads are good and nobody’s horse throws a shoe.” He said it cheerfully.
“The roads from Highgarden north are well-maintained.
Tyrell money keeps them that way.
Once you cross into the Westerlands it gets rougher.” Alex filed that away.
Fifteen days.
He’d known intellectually that Westeros was large, he’d seen maps in his previous life, read descriptions in stories, but knowing it and feeling it were different things.
Fifteen days of riding just to reach one city in one corner of one kingdom.
“How long from Lannisport to King’s Landing?” he asked.
“Overland?
Three weeks at least,” Mikal said.
“Most people sail it.” “And from King’s Landing to Winterfell?” Mikal looked at him sideways.
“Why are you asking about Winterfell?” “I’m trying to understand how big everything is.” Edwyn laughed.
“A month on horseback.
Maybe more in bad weather.” He scratched his beard.
“I knew a man who rode it once.
Said his horse aged ten years on the journey.” Alex thought about that.
A month to reach the North from the capital.
Two months to cross the whole kingdom north to south.
Armies marching slower than riders, supply lines stretched across distances that made everything harder and more expensive than anyone in his previous life’s stories had ever properly conveyed.
He’d read about battles and sieges and rebellions in Westeros as though they happened in a space about the size of England.
The reality was considerably larger and considerably less convenient.
They reached Highgarden on the fourth day.
Alex had expected something grand.
He got something grander than that, walls that seemed to grow out of the hills themselves, towers visible from two hours away, the Mander gleaming below it in the afternoon light.
Even from the road, even passing at a traveller’s respectful distance, the scale of it was different from anything he’d seen.
“Is it always that big?” he said, before he could stop himself.
Edwyn snorted.
“What did you expect?” “I don’t know.
Smaller.” “Nothing in the Reach is small,” Mikal said, with a slight note of Reach pride that Alex hadn’t heard before.
“Tyrells don’t do small.” They didn’t stop at Highgarden itself, no reason to pay city prices when they had supplies enough, but Mikal rode to the traveller’s gate to ask after the Tyrell caravan.
He came back with a flat expression.
“Left four days ago,” he said.
Edwyn sighed.
“Knew we should have skipped the inn.” “You said you needed the blanket.” “I did need the blanket.” Mikal looked at him.
Edwyn looked back without visible remorse.
Alex looked at the road north and thought about the ten days ahead without the safety of a Tyrell caravan around them.
“We find company on the road,” Mikal said, to both of them.
“We don’t travel alone between here and Lannisport.
Understood?” “Agreed,” Alex said.
“Obviously,” said Edwyn.
They found their first companions the same evening, two household knights from a minor Reach lord, heading north for the tourney, glad enough to share a fire with a known face.
Edwyn apparently knew one of them from a tourney three years back and they talked until late about nothing in particular.
Alex sat at the edge of the fire and listened.
The household knights talked differently from Mikal and Edwyn.
Not badly, they were perfectly civil, but there was a particular ease to them, the ease of men who had a lord behind them and a guaranteed wage and didn’t need to calculate every decision against what it would cost.
They complained about their lord’s steward in the comfortable way of men who had the luxury of complaining.
They debated which Lannister knights would perform best in the joust with the confidence of men who had opinions without stakes.
Alex watched Mikal’s face during this.
His father was pleasant and engaged and gave nothing away.
But Alex could see the slight set of his jaw that appeared sometimes when something reminded him of the distance between what they were and what other men took for granted.
He filed that away too.
Two mornings later Mikal pulled him off the road and into the tree line before Alex had even registered why.
They waited.
Edwyn sat his horse silently beside them, which was the most silent Alex had ever seen him.
Three men came down the road from the north.
Moving wrong, too slow for travellers, too watchful, stopping at the tree line on the far side and looking back the way they’d come.
“Scouts,” Mikal said quietly.
“For a larger group?” Alex asked, just as quietly.
“Maybe.
Or they’re watching for someone specific.” He watched them for another moment.
“We wait.” They waited.
The three men eventually moved on north without incident.
Mikal gave it another ten minutes before he took them back to the road.
“How did you know?” Alex asked.
“The way they walked.
And their boots.” Mikal glanced at him.
“Boots tell you a lot.
Travellers’ boots are worn evenly.
Men who spend time in one place wear theirs down differently.” Alex looked at his own boots.
Worn evenly across the sole, as it happened.
“What do we do if we meet a larger group?” “We don’t fight if we don’t have to,” Mikal said simply.
“And we don’t travel alone.” That evening they joined a merchant’s caravan outside a small waystation, six wagons, eight guards, a merchant named Borys who sold cloth and had the suspicious eyes of a man who had been robbed enough times to be permanently cautious.
He charged them a fee to travel alongside, which Mikal paid without argument.
“Worth it?” Edwyn asked quietly, as they fell in behind the last wagon.
“Every copper,” Mikal said.
Mikal had been teaching him things since Highgarden.
Not sword things, road things.
The kind of knowledge that didn’t come from books and wasn’t talked about in stories because it was too ordinary to seem interesting and too important to actually be ordinary.
“Never drink from still water if you can avoid it,” Mikal said one morning, when they stopped at a stream.
“Moving water is safer.
Still water sits and things grow in it.” “What if there’s no moving water?” “Then you boil it.” Alex looked at him.
“You already know to boil it?” “Anyone who’s been on campaign knows to boil it.
You lose more men to bad water than to arrows.” He filled the canteen from the stream where it ran fastest over the rocks.
“Your grandfather told me.
His grandfather told him.
Nobody knows why it works, it just does.” Alex thought about explaining why.
Decided against it.
“It works” was enough for now.
“What about plants?” Alex asked.
“How do you know what’s safe to eat on the road?” Mikal pointed at a low plant growing at the stream bank.
“See that?
Fine.
Bitter, but fine.” He pointed at something similar six feet away with slightly different leaves.
“That one will make you sick for three days.
Same family, different plant.” “How do you tell them apart?” “The edges of the leaves.
That one’s smooth.
The bad one’s got a slight serration.” He looked at Alex.
“I’ll show you as we ride.
There are a dozen common ones you need to know.” “All right.” “And if you’re not certain,” Edwyn added from behind them, “you don’t eat it.
Hunger is survivable.
Poison isn’t.” Alex nodded and looked at the smooth-edged plant and memorized it.
The two knights rode with them through the next two days, easy company on the road, filling the evenings with tourney talk and complaints about their lord’s steward that never seemed to reach a conclusion.
At Old Oak they stopped, their lord had relations with the castle there, proper beds and a proper table waiting, and they parted with the straightforward warmth of men who’d shared a road and expected to see each other again at the tourney grounds.
“Safe riding,” the older one said to Mikal, with a nod that carried genuine respect.
“And to you,” Mikal said.
Alex watched them ride through Old Oak’s gate and thought about the difference between men who had gates waiting for them and men who kept moving.
Then Mikal said they needed to find Borys’s caravan before nightfall and they moved on.