Thomas walked long that first day, wanting to put as much distance between him and the brigands as possible. He followed the queen’s road for the most part, slinking off into the forest whenever he heard fellow travelers. No sense in risking more tax collectors.
The queen’s road was beaten and packed, the fall of wagon wheel, horse shoe, and boot having trampled most of the grass and weeds that survived to punch through the road’s compacted earth. Even with the recent rains, most of the road drained rainwater into the ditches erected here and there throughout the entire road system.
“Gotta love engineers,” Thomas joked, figuring that the runoff ditches were placed where flooding was considered likely centuries before, when the roads were first constructed. Certainly, he encountered enoug
