Chapter 31: Peasant Bootcamp and the Shovel of Reality

Morning light came through the dusty windows of the Boar & Barrel Inn in thin, dirty shafts, the kind that make every floating speck of dust visible and every stain on the floorboards impossible to ignore. The room smelled of stale ale that had soaked into the wood so many times it would never fully leave, and underneath that, faintly, of woodsmoke from a fire that had gone out sometime before dawn.

Duke Balmarrat Matthew sat at the heavy wooden table with his face buried in his hands. His hands were large enough to cover it completely, and from behind them came a long, low groan, the kind of sound an old bear might make when it realizes winter has come early. He had spent the entire night hoping, with the particular desperation of a man clinging to the last thread of a plan gone wrong, that the sight of Princess Aurelia tumbling out of a sack of horse leashes had been nothing more than a stress-induced hallucination brought on by too little sleep and too much responsibility.

It had not been a hallucination.

Aurelia was sitting across from him now, perched on a wooden stool, swinging her legs back and forth with the cheerful energy of someone who had not yet understood the size of the trouble she'd caused. Beside her, her younger brother, Crown Prince Julian, sat in visible misery, tugging at the collar of an itchy wool tunic he had clearly never worn before, glaring down at a bowl of watery porridge as though it had personally wronged him.

"We have to turn back," the Duke said, his voice muffled through his fingers. "I will ride to the capital myself, throw myself at the King's feet, and beg for a quick execution. A quick one. That is all I ask."

Alistair, the Duke's assistant, was pacing the length of the room so fast his spectacles nearly flew off his nose. He was a thin, nervous man whose ledgers were usually his refuge, and the events of the last twelve hours had left him without one. "We cannot turn back, my Lord. We are already a full night's ride from the capital. If we reverse course now, we lose days we cannot afford, and the eastern border remains exposed the entire time. And even if we wanted to, we cannot simply put Her Highness on a horse with a single guard and send her home — the provincial roads are crawling with bandits this time of year."

He stopped pacing and pulled at his own hair with both hands. "We have committed treason, my Lord. Accidental, unbelievably foolish treason, but treason all the same. The penalty for kidnapping royal blood is to be drawn and quartered."

"I have not been kidnapped, Alistair," Aurelia said brightly, swinging her legs a little faster. "I am an eager volunteer."

"You," the Duke said, dropping his hands and fixing her with a flat stare, "are a massive liability." He exhaled slowly. "If we cannot turn back, then you cannot travel as a princess. You need a disguise, and you need one now."

He flipped a silver coin across the table to Alistair. "Go down to the innkeeper. Buy the cheapest, most foul-smelling peasant clothing he has. If it has been washed within the last month, I don't want it."

Alistair made a small whimpering sound and scurried out the door. Ten minutes later he returned holding a bundle of gray, moth-eaten fabric that smelled strongly of wet dog and old turnips, the kind of smell that seems to exist independently of whatever is producing it.

Aurelia wrinkled her nose at the bundle. "Uncle Balmarrat, surely a plain traveling cloak would be sufficient?"

"Put it on," the Duke said, in a tone that closed the subject.

When Aurelia came back out of the washroom, she was almost unrecognizable. The oversized, roughspun tunic swallowed her narrow frame, and the trousers beneath it were cinched at the waist with a length of frayed rope in place of a belt.

The Duke studied her for a moment and pointed at her head. "The hair. It's been washed in lavender and rosewater. Peasant children do not smell like royal gardens, Aurelia. They smell like animals and woodsmoke."

She sighed, took the greasy, battered flat cap Alistair had found, twisted her long auburn hair into a tight knot, and jammed the cap down over it. Then, without being asked, she reached into the cold hearth, rubbed a smear of ash across both cheeks, and looked up at the Duke expectantly.

"Better," he said, though a vein was visibly throbbing at his temple. "Now, the rules. Julian, you are 'Jules,' apprentice to a scribe. Aurelia — your accent alone will get every one of us killed the moment you open your mouth, so from this point forward, you are Aura."

"Aura," she repeated, crossing her arms. "And what, precisely, is my profession?"

"You," the Duke said, "are Jules's orphaned, feral, strictly mute younger sister."

"Mute?" Aurelia's arms dropped to her sides. "I am not permitted to speak for five days?"

"If you value your life, and mine along with it, you will not utter a single syllable until we reach Dian Village," the Duke said, and something in his tone made it clear that this particular point was not open for negotiation. "Now get your things. We have a long road ahead of us."

✽✽✽✽✽✽

The Duke's military carriage hit the main provincial road with all the grace of a boulder rolling downhill.

Unlike the King's personal carriages, which rode on carefully forged steel-leaf springs — thin, curved bands of tempered steel stacked one on top of another beneath the carriage bed, designed to flex and absorb the shock of uneven cobblestones before it ever reached the passengers — the Duke's carriage had been built for an entirely different purpose. It was a war carriage, reinforced to survive artillery fire and to keep moving through deep mud when a lighter vehicle would have been swallowed whole. What it had in durability, it made up for in absolutely no suspension whatsoever.

THUD.

The front wheel found a deep rut in the road, and the whole carriage lurched. Julian was launched nearly four inches straight up off his seat, his head narrowly missing the wooden ceiling before gravity reasserted itself and slammed him back down onto the leather bench.

"By the Gods!" Julian gasped, his face draining to a pale, sickly green. He gripped the leather armrests so hard his knuckles went white. "Is the axle broken? Are we under attack?"

"That was a pothole, Jules," the Duke said, sighing as he braced his own legs against the floorboards out of long habit.

CRACK. They hit another one almost immediately. Julian groaned and shut his eyes as a fresh wave of nausea rolled through him.

Aurelia, meanwhile, had already worked out the physics of the situation. Sitting across from Julian, she had noticed within the first hour that bracing against the impacts only made them worse — a rigid body has nowhere for the force to go except straight through it, joint by joint, whereas a loose one simply absorbs the shock and lets it pass. So she let herself go slack. Each time the wheels found a rut, she bounced lightly into the air like a ragdoll and came down soft, grinning the whole time, treating the miserable road like the best carnival ride she had ever been on.

She caught the Duke glaring at her and clapped a hand over her mouth, shoulders shaking with silent laughter, careful to maintain her mute persona even in her amusement.

The Duke pinched the bridge of his nose. "This is going to be a disaster. Neither of you has the faintest idea how the world outside the palace actually operates. We are going to run a Peasant Bootcamp, starting now."

Julian cracked one eye open, still gripping his armrest. "A bootcamp, Uncle?"

"Yes. If we're stopped by a patrol or a toll collector, the two of you need to sound like commoners, not like children who've been fed by silver spoons their entire lives." The Duke folded his arms. "We'll start with basic economics. Jules — you are an orphaned scribe's apprentice. You walk into a market. How much does a standard loaf of bread cost you?"

Julian frowned, thinking hard, clearly determined to impress. "Well — accounting for the grain yield this season, and the baker's labor, and the cost of firewood for the oven — I would estimate... one gold piece?"

The carriage fell into dead silence except for the rattle of the wheels over stone. Alistair buried his face in both hands and let out a muffled sob.

"One gold piece," the Duke repeated, his voice dangerously calm. "Jules. A single gold piece could buy the bakery itself, the baker's house next door, and the horse in his stable. If you ever hand a merchant a gold coin for a loaf of bread, he will assume you stole it from somewhere, and he will very likely follow you into the nearest alley and stab you for the rest of what you're carrying."

Julian shrank back against the seat cushion. "I — I see. Three silver pieces, then?"

"Two copper," the Duke said, rubbing his temples slowly. "Gods above, give me strength."

While this lesson was underway, Aurelia had fully committed to her role. She slouched low in her seat, planted her muddy boots on the velvet cushion beside Julian, and — for good measure — let out a long, rumbling, thoroughly unladylike belch.

Julian recoiled in disgust. "Aurelia! Have you lost your senses entirely?"

She only grinned and tapped her throat, miming her supposed muteness with theatrical innocence.

"Feet down, Aura," the Duke growled, "before I throw you out the window myself."

A few hours later the carriage slowed as it passed a farmer trudging alongside a rickety handcart loaded with small, slightly bruised apples.

Julian sat up straight, still hoping to redeem himself after the bread incident. "Uncle, allow me to handle this. I shall demonstrate a seamless blending with the local populace and procure us a snack."

Before the Duke could stop him, Julian leaned halfway out the window. "Ho there, good farmer! I would like to purchase four of your finest apples!"

The farmer, dust-covered and clearly exhausted, handed up four apples without much comment. "That'll be three coppers, young master."

Julian, who had never in his life handled a copper coin, reached into a small silk purse and produced a single, heavy, Royal-minted gold coin. He tossed it down into the road at the farmer's feet with a flourish. "Keep the change, my good man!"

Alistair made a sound that was less a scream than a full-body alarm.

"YOU FOOL!" He half-launched himself across Julian's lap and out the window, arms flailing, and managed to knock the gold coin clean out of the stunned farmer's hand before it could be picked up. He shoved three copper coins into the man's dirt-stained palm instead, snatched the gold coin back off the ground, and collapsed back into his seat, breathing hard.

"Are you trying to collapse the entire provincial economy?" Alistair wheezed, his glasses hanging crooked off one ear. "Do you understand what happens to a peasant who is suddenly seen holding a gold coin? He gets robbed within the hour. Or worse — he uses it to hire a mercenary company and starts calling himself a warlord. It has happened before."

Julian looked down at the apples now sitting in his lap, thoroughly chastened. "I only meant to be generous."

"Generosity, out here in the mud," the Duke said, "is called painting a target on your own back."

✽✽✽✽✽✽

By midday the carriage pulled off the road to let the horses rest, and the Duke reached into a heavy canvas travel sack.

"Lunchtime," he announced.

Julian sat up hopefully, his stomach growling. "Excellent. I do hope the kitchens packed roasted pheasant. Or perhaps a sharp cheese with glazed pears."

The Duke tossed him a cloth-wrapped bundle instead. Julian unwrapped it and stared, baffled, at strips of dark, heavily salted dried meat and several large, pale, disc-shaped biscuits that looked, and felt, suspiciously heavy for their size.

"What... is this?" Julian asked, lifting one of the biscuits.

"Travel rations," the Duke said, already tearing a piece of jerky off with his teeth. "Salted beef and hardtack." He didn't bother explaining further, but the reasoning was simple enough: hardtack was flour and water baked until nearly all its moisture was gone, which meant there was almost nothing left inside it for mold or bacteria to feed on. That was precisely why armies had relied on it for generations — it could sit in a sack for months without spoiling, at the cost of being roughly as edible as a roof tile until it was properly softened.

"Well," Julian said, turning the biscuit over in his hands, "it certainly looks filling."

He bit into it with full confidence.

CRACK.

Julian yelped and grabbed his own jaw with both hands, eyes instantly filling with tears. "Uncle — is this a fragment of the new masonry the royal engineers have been testing? Did someone pack a brick into my rations by mistake?"

Aurelia doubled over silently in her seat, shoulders shaking with laughter she wasn't allowed to voice.

The Duke sighed, took the offending hardtack from Julian's hand, poured a splash of water from his canteen over it, and handed it back. "You dunk it first, Jules. Unless you'd like to rule the kingdom one day with no teeth left in your head. The water softens the starch enough to actually chew it."

Julian spent the following twenty minutes miserably sucking on a damp, salty rock.

The true breaking point, however, came three hours after that.

Julian shifted in his seat and cleared his throat with careful politeness. "Uncle Balmarrat. I apologize for the interruption, but might you summon the chamberlain? I require use of the privy."

The Duke stared at him for a long moment, then knocked twice on the carriage roof. "Driver — halt by the treeline."

The carriage rolled to a stop beside a dense patch of overgrown forest. Alistair reached under his seat, produced a rusted iron trowel, and pulled a handful of broad, slightly rough green leaves from a small satchel he kept for exactly this purpose. He handed both over to the Crown Prince without a word.

Julian looked at the trowel, then at the leaves, then out the window at the muddy tree line, and back at Alistair.

"I don't understand," he said slowly, a note of genuine horror creeping into his voice. "Where is the porcelain? Where is the washbasin?"

"The porcelain is in the capital, Your Highness," Alistair said, entirely deadpan. "The washbasin is that puddle, if you'd like it. Dig a hole. Cover it when you're finished."

Julian froze completely, his mind visibly refusing to process the indignity of it all — the future King of Cynthia, reduced to squatting in the dirt like any other creature in the forest.

Aurelia, by contrast, was thriving. She snatched the trowel and leaves straight out of Julian's hands, kicked the carriage door open, and marched into the woods with the enthusiasm of someone setting off to hunt a dragon.

"She's adjusting rather faster than you are, Jules," the Duke observed dryly.

✽✽✽✽✽✽

As the days blurred together, the journey settled into a kind of slow-motion chaos. The bumpy roads, the miserable food, and the constant, gnawing fear of discovery were taking their toll — not on the royal siblings, as it turned out, but almost entirely on Alistair.

By the fifth day, he had stopped bothering with his appearance altogether. His usually neat hair stood up in sweaty, chaotic tufts. His spectacles sat permanently crooked on his nose. He sat perfectly still in the corner of the carriage, rocking gently, staring at nothing in particular into the open pages of his ledger.

"Section four... paragraph twelve," he muttered to himself, voice hoarse. "Concealing a royal heir. Twenty years in the dungeon. Accessory to the kidnapping of a princess... death by hanging, or the guillotine, if the King happens to be feeling merciful that day."

"Alistair. Snap out of it," the Duke said, nudging his assistant's boot with his own.

"I am a dead man, my Lord," Alistair said, staring blankly ahead. "I will never see my mother again."

"Look out the window," the Duke said instead.

All three of them leaned toward the small carriage window at once.

The dense forest had finally opened onto a sprawling eastern valley, and rising up from it, dark against the sky, were massive columns of gray and black smoke — the unmistakable output of iron forges working at full capacity, fed by charcoal and stoked hot enough to soften metal for shaping. Even at this distance, the rhythmic clang of hammer striking hot steel carried faintly across the valley, a steady, industrial heartbeat.

"Is that... a city?" Julian asked, jaw dropping as he made out the tall defensive walls in the distance — built from rammed earth, layer upon layer of soil compacted hard as stone within wooden forms, a technique valued for how cheap and sturdy it was compared to quarried rock — and behind those walls, the sprawling, orderly grid of streets and rooftops taking shape.

"That," Duke Balmarrat said, and for the first time in five days, a tired but genuine smile broke through his exhaustion, "is Dian Village. Peasant Bootcamp is officially over. Welcome to the real world."