By midday everything was ready, and Erwin’s column left the riverside inn behind, following the Kingsroad toward King’s Landing.
The company split in two.
Erwin rode up front with the five men in mail, along with eighteen farmers driving three wagons loaded with vegetables, food, and ale, the whole group moving at an easy pace.
The rest of the sellswords, Griff included, rode under Willem’s command, trailing Erwin’s wagons by roughly two miles.
By now, the men understood well enough why Erwin had hired them, and why he’d had crates filled with rocks and dirt back at the inn.
The plan was simple enough.
Erwin himself was the bait.
On the surface, three wagons hauling vegetables and food bound for King’s Landing.
In truth, a few crates dressed up to look like treasure, meant to draw the bandit gang holed up in the kingswood out into the open.
Once they took the bait, the trailing riders would come thundering in and finish the whole gang off in one stroke.
“Half-baked plan if I’ve ever heard one.”
Griff drawled the words from atop his horse.
“A gang that’s held the kingswood for years without getting wiped out has eyes planted all through this stretch of road.
Traffic through that inn never stops.
You can bet every move this lordling’s made has already reached the bandits’ ears by now.”
“Hiring half an army out in the open, then thinking a few crates of dirt will draw a snake out of its hole?
That’s not a plan, that’s a boy playing at one.”
Willem, riding nearby, had held his own doubts the moment Erwin laid the whole plan out in front of everyone.
He didn’t think it would work either.
He’d nearly spoken up when Erwin said he meant to serve as the bait himself, but Erwin had cut him off before he could, saying he knew exactly what he was doing.
Out of respect for the man paying him, Willem had let it go.
Turning it over again, though, Willem found a way to make his peace with it.
If Erwin had made such a show of the whole thing, word would already be halfway to the bandits by now.
And if the bandits didn’t take the bait, there’d be no ambush waiting for them at all.
Erwin’s safety would take care of itself.
That was good enough for him.
“Ha!
Let the boy be naive, I say.
If the bandits don’t bite, all we have to do is ride along nice and easy and still walk off with good coin.
What’s there to complain about?” one of Griff’s men said, grinning.
Griff laughed along with him.
“Too right.
This might be the softest job we’ve ever taken.”
Willem could only hope the same, so long as Erwin came out of it whole.
The five sellswords riding with Erwin himself weren’t thinking much different.
To them, a lordling like this was all talk and no sense, full of himself and empty of anything useful.
If he’d truly wanted to lure bandits out, he should have had someone quietly slip a few crates onto the wagon out of sight, made a mystery of it.
Not have farmers filling crates with stones in plain view of the whole inn yard.
Still, an easy ride for good coin wasn’t something any of them meant to complain about.
Erwin himself rode at the head of it all, sitting tall on his horse, looking altogether pleased with the world.
The horse beneath him was one of the mounts he’d summoned from his own collection, a swift white courser, tall and powerfully built, coat pure white without a fleck of any other color, draped in barding that caught the light and made him look every bit the lord he was pretending to be.
Strange thing was, whatever bonus the game had once given his riding skill seemed to have followed him here too.
The moment he sat any mount of his, it felt like man and horse had become one and the same, letting him guide the animal exactly as he pleased, even pull off the kind of riding he’d only ever seen done on screen.
The same held for the ornate Seventh Legion plate he wore.
It looked heavy enough to slow a man down, but he moved in it as freely as if it were plain cloth, barely feeling the weight of it at all.
His Grand Marshal’s blade swung just as light in his hand, and even the larger two-handed weapons he’d tried pulling out moved the same way, no heavier than they had any right to be.
Perks of being a game character, he supposed.
Between the fine armor, the striking horse, and a face handsome enough to make a man jealous, since even his own features had come through with the character model intact, everyone around him found themselves thinking the same thing.
A true lord’s son, and enough to make an ordinary man feel small standing next to him.
They rode in silence for better than an hour before Erwin suddenly threw up a hand and called the column to a stop.
“We camp here.
We’ll press on tomorrow.”
“M’lord?
There’s hours of daylight left yet.
Here?” one of the sellswords asked, unable to make sense of it.
They could easily have pushed on for hours more.
“You heard me right.
I’m tired.
We camp here.”
Erwin pointed to a stretch of open grass just off the road.
“There.
Set up there.”
The sellswords had nothing to say to that beyond a look of pure bafflement, but an employer’s word was an employer’s word.
They set the farmers to work raising camp, while one man among them, skilled at mimicking birdsong, sent the signal on to the riders trailing behind.
“What in seven hells?
We’ve barely gone any distance and they’re camping already?”
The riders behind caught the birdcall from a distance, checked it twice against the signal they’d agreed on, and started grumbling the moment they confirmed it.
“Enough of that.
Get to your posts.
Stand your watches in the order we set, and keep your eyes open.” Willem shot the complainer a hard look, and the men dismounted, found a spot out of the wind, and began setting up their own camp.
Griff and his two only sneered at the whole business.
“What’s there to grumble over?
The longer he drags this out, the more coin we make off it.
Let him waste all the time he likes.”
“Too right.
Best he drags it out for the rest of his life.
We’ll happily live off him that long too.
Ha!”
The sellswords traded jokes back and forth in twos and threes.
Watching it all, Willem’s worry over Erwin only deepened.
Up ahead, unaware of any of it, Erwin used the cover of everyone busy with camp to pull two sellswords aside, hitch up the wagon carrying the crates of “treasure,” and head deeper into the trees.
Before long, the two men’s faces darkened.
Dried blood, gone black with age, stained patches of the ground ahead of them.
Something had fought here.
This was, in fact, the very spot where Erwin had run into the three bandits before.
The blood belonged to the men he’d killed.
As for the bodies themselves, there was no sign of them left.
A night had passed.
Whatever hadn’t already found its way into some forest scavenger’s belly was long gone by now.
“M’lord?” One of the sellswords couldn’t help calling out at the sight of the blood.
“Nothing to worry about.
Get the crates off the wagon and empty the rocks and dirt out of them.
Then clear out of the trees, somewhere you can’t see this spot from.”
Empty the crates?
Had this lord gone properly mad this time?
The two men traded a helpless look, then did as they were told.
Once they’d gone far enough that Erwin could no longer see either of them, he pulled a shovel from his pack, another oddity out of his old game, a farmer’s tool that had once dropped from the pumpkin patches of Tirisfal Glades, shaped like nothing more than an ordinary spade.
“The lengths a man goes to, just to get a few bandits to take the bait.”
Muttering to himself, he found a well-hidden spot and started to dig, then packed the rocks and dirt back into the crates.
Some time later, sweat beading on his brow, Erwin had the crates filled and locked shut again.
He pulled a gold coin from his pack and tossed it into the hole he’d just dug.
“All right, you two can come back now!”
He called it out loudly, toward the trees.