Exile’s Bane by Nicole Margot Spencer

what good it did me there. My father had taught me to thrust, to slash, and numerous simple defensive moves. I was his only daughter. The daughter he’d preferred to have been a son.
    There were perhaps a dozen Roundhead musketeers in the round helmets they were named for, armed with matchlock muskets and the inevitable yard-long cord of smoldering matchcord, which they used to set off the charge in the musket pan. Live embers hung beside each man, little pink eyes in the mist. Each musketeer wore a bandoleer, as did our Royalist troops, hung with charge canisters, one canister per shot. Among the musketeers were a few pikemen carrying stout ash pikes with steeled points, to spit us on, I supposed, angry at their presence in Lancashire, which was my country and Royalist to the core. One particularly churly-looking musketeer cocked his head suddenly, then swung around in our direction. His smoking cord held over the firing pan of his musket, he aimed directly at our little refuge.
    We dared not move or even breathe. My fingers ceased their gentle caress of Kalimir’s soft muzzle.
    Of a sudden I could see my feet. The fog was rising.
    There was long silence when no one moved, either in the ranks beyond us or around our little shelter. Another long moment went by. I prayed my stallion would continue to stand still.
    “Move on. We not be shooting at ghosts now, Turner. Need to save our shot,” bawled the Puritan captain.
    The musketeer dropped his matchlock with a scowl, and on they marched, the fog closing behind them. Peg and I looked at one another in shocked wonder. We waited, our feet cold and mucky in our ruined house slippers. After five, maybe ten minutes the fog rose until it hung above us, like a raised curtain.
    “Thank God it waited to do that,” Peg whispered, watching the eerie fog lazing above our heads.
    “It started while they were here. You did not see it?”
    “Holy Mother, no.”
    We mounted and moved on, wanting to gain ground while we could see. Within two miles, the road ascended again, the Roundhead troop long gone ahead of us.
    By the time we came to the west branch of the River Croate, a half-mile or so above Bolton, the sun had peeped out. We stopped there to rest the horses and let them nibble at the thick tufts of grass that grew along the riverbank.
    “Since we have gotten this far, we may have eluded the house guard, which is certainly after us.”
    “Or that Roundhead troop scared them off.”
    “Probably.” Or at least conveniently, if Wallace is leading the chase.
    “So is it Thomas Reedy’s house we are headed for?”
    “It is the only place I know to go, Peg.” I patted Kalimir’s sleek shoulder. “Thomas has told me often enough that it would come to this.”
    “Oh, he did, did he?” She studied me with disapproval. “Be thee careful around Thomas. His heart is dark.”
    “I well know what he is.” I dismissed her concerns with a wave of my hand.
    We went the next mile without incident. Then, coming up the incline that overlooked the city, a distant hum sprang up, like a far-off market crowd. Astounded, for I had heard of no market held here since the rebellion began two years ago, I topped the rise.
    My mouth fell open in a groan.
    Behind dilapidated walls, the high-peaked roofs of Bolton lay below us in a shallow valley. Dim sunlight reflected off hundreds and hundreds of metal helmets moving through the tight streets toward the central square.
    “Go back. Quickly.”
    “I cannot see,” Peg said, reining her mare around with Kalimir. “What is it?”
    “Rigby’s Roundheads massed in the city. It looks like thousands of them.”
    “That many?”
    “The same helmets, the same smutty dress, the same Roundhead Puritans that kept us for months within our walls,” I complained, fuming with the injustice of an occupied Bolton.
    I reined Kalimir to a stop some distance back the way we had come, beyond sight of the town.
    “They would love to get hold of us, would they