Chương 3: CHAPTER THREE: WHAT SOLDIERS KNOW

He found the boot prints on the seventh day. He had been expecting to find something — had been half-looking without being able to articulate what he was looking for, the way you scan a crowd for a face you haven't consciously admitted you're searching for. The texture of his own situation suggested strongly that it was not singular. The transition had felt encompassing, the kind of event that happened to a space rather than to a person. If it had taken him, it had taken others.

If it had taken others, those others were out there somewhere, doing what he was doing: waking up in wrong bodies, learning wrong contexts, trying to function in wrong centuries. He had gone north on the seventh morning for what he was calling a circuit inspection — a tour of the northern district that included two of the outlying farms and the beginning of the road to the three villages beyond. Legitimate lord behavior: knowing your territory, being seen to attend to it.

He had brought Perrin, one of the garrison's younger soldiers, as an escort, because riding alone was the kind of thing that looked less like confidence and more like carelessness, and carelessness was not what he wanted to project right now. The road north of Greyhold was packed earth, well-used, showing the scars of the recent harvest season in its rutted surface and the chaff that blew across it from the stripped fields on either side. The morning was cold enough to see his breath.

Perrin rode slightly behind and slightly right, which was either training or habit, and had the good soldier quality of knowing when to be quiet. Marcus was looking at everything. The land quality — better than he'd expected, the soil dark and loamy in the river valley, capable of supporting a larger population than currently worked it. The water: the river was fast and clean, with a gradient visible from the road that his mind automatically flagged as potential mill site, then secondary mill site.

The timber in the hillside forests, managed adequately, which meant someone had been paying enough attention to avoid the obvious failures even if they hadn't gotten around to the optimization. All underutilized. All of it. The feudal system extracted without developing — took the yield of the land without investing in the land's capacity to produce more yield. He'd known this in the abstract, from the history he'd read. It was different, seeing it as a problem he was responsible for.

He saw the prints at the edge of the north road, in the soft mud where the drainage from the eastern field ran across the road's surface before it found the ditch. He would have missed them if he hadn't been looking at everything. They were a day old at least, edges softened by the overnight temperatures, but the tread pattern was distinctive: the deep, aggressive lug pattern of military combat boots, the kind designed for grip on loose terrain, the kind that left a print like a geological event in soft mud.

If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it. Nobody in the medieval world had shoes that made that print. He stared at it for a long time. Perrin, behind him, waited with professional patience.

"What's north of here?" Marcus said, when he trusted his voice to be casual.

"The three villages — which is closest?"

"Coppermill, my lord. Perhaps an hour's ride." Perrin considered.

"There's also a farmstead about halfway — the Wren family, they've been on that land three generations."

"And who uses this road? Regularly, I mean — not just market traffic."

"Farmers, mostly. The smith from Coppermill comes down to Greyhold market twice in a season. Travelers on the way through, sometimes. The road goes further north, into the Ironfen marches — hunters use it in summer, but less so now." Marcus nodded slowly. He looked at the print for a final moment, committing the details to memory — the size, approximately a men's eleven by his estimation, the specific pattern of the lug — and then looked away.

"We'll visit Coppermill tomorrow," he said.

"Schedule it. I want to see the villages before the winter closes the roads."

"Yes, my lord," Perrin said, and if he thought it was strange that the castellan had developed a sudden interest in village inspection, he kept the thought to himself. Marcus rode on. In his mind, running parallel to the inspection of the road and the farmland and the tree line, he was doing different math: how many people had been on the FOB at 0340 hours? How many would have been within the transition radius?

If the radius was forty miles — which was rough but consistent with the boot prints appearing this close to Greyhold — then there were perhaps two hundred soldiers within reach. Perhaps more, depending on who had been in vehicles, in the air, on patrol. Two hundred soldiers. Two hundred people from his world, from his time, from his military.

Two hundred people who were somewhere in this landscape, in wrong bodies, in wrong situations, with the full weight of their training and knowledge and identity sitting in them like a charge that needed somewhere to go. He needed to find them. But first, he needed to survive the winter. Because two hundred displaced soldiers were only useful if they had somewhere to come to, and Greyhold was only somewhere if it made it to spring. One thing at a time.

He rode back to the castle in the afternoon light and began working through the winter preparation list with the focused efficiency of someone who had decided that the work in front of him was the thing that mattered and everything else would follow from doing it well.