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The first time is a bundle of flat bread.
Ashe had tried so hard to avoid crossing this line. He had begged shopkeepers to let him carry messages and been chased away. He had begged butchers to let him haul offal and been thrown out on his ear. He had begged the one noble he had seen in weeks for alms with shaking thin hands, but the moment the woman had reached for her coin purse a dozen equally grubby and equally withered beggars where pushing up beside him, buffering him from all sides, over taking him. The noble, watching one sad boy become a dozen vagrants all swarming like carp, had fled without dispensing a single coin.
Ashe doesn't blame her or them. There isn't a point. Everyone is scared and desperate and so so hungry. The capital is doing better then most places in the Kingdom and but even so the streets are clogged with people, the houses that had once held them sealed and marked with white chalk if they have been converted into make shift sick houses, or black if they hold festering plague riddled corpses. The lichyard nuns work day and night and still people die faster then graves can be dug. Every church in Fhirdiad that once given out alms and food is either another make-shift sick house now or abandoned. By the King's order the army's stores had been opened to dole out grain to the populace, but that had started to run thin weeks ago, and despite promises of aid from Adrestia, from Leicester, even from Gareg Mhach, no caravans have been able to make the long trek to the distant north of the Kingdom. Ashe knows that bandits are ravaging the land, relishing the fact that the King's army is to disorganized or sickened to stop them, yet still people murmur hateful curses for the Emperor and the Archbishop and everyone else, full of resentment that they have been abandoned by their so-called allies.
The night news that prince Dimitri had fallen ill hit the streets people had gathered outside the palace gates for a vigil that had nearly turned into a riot when prayers for the prince's swift recovery had become cries of blame at Adrestia and the Central Church and all the others. The knights had intervened to disperse the crowd, avoiding disaster, but it was a near thing.
Ashe knows that the only the knights are all that is keeping even a semblance of order in the capital. With half the civil watch hiding in the barracks, afraid to come outside and the other half to sick or to dead to do anything, lone knights have taken up the patrols that groups of four or five of the civil watch would had once have carried out. They ride about unafraid, many barely out of sick beds or on the verge of being forced into one themselves. Brilliant in their plate armor, even with sweaty faces and blood peaking at their lips, Ashe always stops to gaze at them as they pass and he is not alone. Whole crowds pause what their doing and turn to follow a knight's passing when one is near, bending their heads in respect or even dropping bows. A ripple of action always follows that passing, as people move with more purpose, their heads held higher, their steps more deliberate. As if some piece of that knight's strength had been passed out like an alms, something to vitalize them in the absence of bread or water, and to keep them going when all hope seems lost.
There is no knight on the street now. Ashe wishes there was. He has seen a knight's mere presence make muggers and pickpockets halt their dirty work and return what they had been ready to steal. He wants to be reminded that this is wrong. He wants to be reminded that duty remains even in the darkness. He wants an example honor and nobility and piety to banish the persistent wiggling thoughts. He wants to be better then this. He wants to be the boy his parents asked him to be as they died. Already he is struggling to remember his father's face but his rasping voice as he had gone is still heavy in Ashe's ears. Be a good lad now, look after your brother and sister and keep them right with the Goddess.
Ashe wants to be good. He does. But Denna and Wyll haven't eaten in two days and he hasn't eaten in three and the stack of flatbread is just sitting right there at the table's edge and the baker has turned to speak to a woman in a dress that hangs baggy on her form but is doing well enough to have clean hands and a few coppers to her name and-
He stops thinking. Stops trying to reason with himself. He creeps forward and his fingers close around the edge of the flatbread. The woman lets out a surprised yelp and the baker spins but Ashe is already running on unsteady legs, sprinting away from the store and down the street and through the mud.
A feeling he can’t understand swells up inside his chest, as if his heart where cinched in a too tight sack. His faces tingles, his neck tingles, his fingers feel numb and he as he turns down an alley and keeps going headless of the muck that squishes between his toes he feels like if he jumped now the wind would carry him away, whipping him about like a banner. He wants to laugh. He wants to sing. The circle of bread are warming against his chest and crinkle under his fingertips and Denna wont cry tonight and-
He trips and falls, rolling along the filthy ground of the alley, and he feels his shoulder blades scrape, the skin that had gripped them opening like dried fruit peels. Ashe doesn’t care. He kneels there in the street and examines his prize with panting breath. He doesn’t care that it’s lightly streaked with dirt. It’s warm warm warm-
He tears off a mouthful with his teeth but doesn’t chew, swallowing the lump of bread whole. His body is a drum being struck and he does it again and again, and the third bite he chews and savors. His mouth is to dry to salivate, but his eyes prickle with tears. He doesn't care that his stomach already quavers on the verge of being sick. How long since he had something warm and salted and filling? To long. Months and a lifetime.
When the soft clatter of plate armor enters Ashe’s hearing he freezes. He turns, a piece of bread still caught between his teeth and gazes at the knight standing in the alleyway’s mouth.
The knight stares at him. Ashe stares back. His knees throb angrily and refuse to lift him up to his feet, to let him flee.
Ashe closes his eyes and waits for the blade to fall. He prays to the Goddess to look after Denna and Wyll. He prays for forgiveness and mercy. He prays that his father wont be to mad at him. He prays that hell will at least not be a wet, cold, and hungry place.
When the knight’s armor clatters again Ashe opens his eyes and watches in stunned disbelief as the knight walks away, his blue cloak retreating the only thing Ashe’s mind can hold.
“Not here.” The man’s gruff voice says to someone Ashe can not see. “Try another alley.”
And then he is gone.
Ashe turns onto his side and immediately throws up into the muck. Then, when he has his shaking and quivering under control, he stands, brushes as much dirt from the flatbread as he can and staggers back to the hovel where he and his siblings have taken refugee.
He never forgets for as long as he lives the look in the man’s eyes or the rush of the sword not falling.