A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor
Chapter 1466 - 1466: A Struggling Heart - Part 5

He listened, with half an ear, as they continued their walking, expecting to hear a cry from some high standing shop owner that had seen his wares stolen, but as of yet, there was nothing at all.

'Ridiculous," Ferdinand thought to himself. 'Even if there was a problem, why would I be the one to find it?'

It was a hard fought thing not to immediately assume that Oliver Patrick would sniff it out long before he did. It was the barest effort of his remaining pride that kept him looking, but even when he saw that which was suspicious, it did not take him long to talk himself out of his assumptions.

He saw a woman, that was clearly of the wrong class, leaving the broad, well coloured and embroidered tent of a nobleman. Her dress was not shabby, there were no patches on its black material. Her skin too was clean, and unblemished. But when one had been a nobleman all his life, one could simply tell. He saw through the fact of her station in a second, and he tilted his head with curiosity at her.

She was fiddling with the flap on the tent, desperately trying to tie it, as if she were in a hurry, but apparently she did not understand the wood-peg clasp, and the rope that it thread into.

"Under and over," Ferdinand said, startling her by his sudden speech, and startling her even further when he took the fastener from her hands, and ran it through himself. Though not a soldier, he was practised at least in the typical tools of soldiery. His father had seen to that, for all the good that it had done him.

"Ah… Thank you," the woman said, recovering herself enough that she managed to see her wide dark eyes returned back to normal.

"My Lord," Ferdinand corrected. He found that he was a head taller than her, and he made use of that. He kept his eyes firmly pinned to hers, and ducked to continue meeting her gaze when she tried to look at the floor to avoid him.

"My Lord…" She mumbled back, thoroughly defeated. "Do excuse me."

With slumped shoulders, the woman made a hasty exit.

"Far too cold to be dressing as lightly as that," Thomas commented. Indeed, the woman's shoulders had been bare, save for where her black dress ran over them. Ferdinand, finally, had to compliment Thomas in his head, for drawing his attention to something that he would otherwise have overlooked.

"Cold… but her arms bore not the sign of it yet," Ferdinand said.

"No goosebumps, is what you mean to say, my Lord?" Came the voice of another retainer, a man by the name of Turin, small and almost as youthful as Oliver Patrick, but with spectacles on his nose, marring the image that he was a capable guardsman.

"Indeed. She must have been inside that tent for a time," Ferdinand said. He could see the smoke rising through the central tent chimney. Someone had kept a fire burning, though from the thinness of the smoke, they hadn't topped it up in long. The tent was warm, but abandoned, and the woman had been quite happily skulking around inside it.

Ferdinand took a closer look at the tent's sigil.

He recognized it to be of the Throckmorton House, but even that recognition took a good bit of searching through the corridors of his memories. They weren't a particularly distinguished noble house, after all, and their residence was all the way in the Capital. Ferdinand hadn't once needed to interact with them, but he'd seen their sigil memorized nonetheless, just as he had memorized the sigils of other minor noble houses.

He stroked his chin, wondering whether there was a curiosity in it. If indeed the woman had been set about doing something in the dark, for the sake of subterfuge, and she'd gone in with a mission to accomplish, then what would it be?

It seemed a question that was a bit of a stretch, for a start, Ferdinand wasn't altogether certain that she'd done something of that sort. There might have been a more reasonable explanation. And even if she had, there was no reason that she had to be acting on the orders of anyone else – as Ferdinand was quickly inclined to believe. She might simply have been thieving for her own sakes. The jewels of a noblewoman were likely to be worth far more than she could make through any sort of traditional work, after all.

'Now if Oliver Patrick were here…' Ferdinand began to think, only to cut himself off with a frown. 'A foolish thought. Why ought he be any more capable of solving this than I? I have nearly a decade in experience on him. He might have achieved the impossible, and it might be just as impossible that I would ever match those achievements, but there is no reason to believe in, in matters of the normal, he could best me.'

"Errr, my Lord, is that… smoke?" Turin said in his quiet voice, pointing in between the lines of tents, towards where a cloud of grey fumes was making its way down in between two tents, and rising up above them.

"Hm…" Ferdinand followed the finger that was pointing, glared at it for a second with the utmost calm, and then felt a sudden and violent alarm overtake him. It wasn't only the smoke, his eyes quickly saw the flickering of orange flames. "FIRE!" He shouted, as loudly as he could, before quickly realizing the foolishness of it. He wasn't a commoner who needed to resort to such means. He already had the men on hand to deal with such a problem. "Ahem – Ser Thomas. Go and find the nearest patrol of guardsmen. Inform them of the fact of a fire."

"Naturally, my Lord," Thomas said, startling his misshapen body into a strange trot that wasn't quite a jog and wasn't quite a walk, and wasn't altogether fast either.

"The rest of us shall see it tended to," Ferdinand said, speaking more calmly than he felt. They'd set up stations, with a permanent amount of water, in various locations through their encampment, knowing full well that fires would likely be a problem, especially when most tents had a fire inside them, and their canvas wasn't as fireproof as one would like.