by Kara Timmins
That meant that his earlier premonition was correct. He wouldn’t be going back to the town where Goodwin was buried. Eloy longed for the luxuries behind him, but he visualized them as the pits of sinking sand that would take precious time away from him. It seemed overly simple, but he knew that the only way to get to where he wanted to be was to rest every night in a different place than he had the night before. Every day would bring him closer to the treasure he saw when he closed his eyes.
He reached the bottom of his cup and realized he didn’t want to be alone among a throng of people anymore. He got to his feet and felt the calming warmth from his beverage rush through his still-sore muscles.
He found Neasa and Malatic after a bit of weaving around groups of raucous people. He stopped before he got close enough for them to notice him, and he watched. Neasa and a group of people Eloy didn’t know were all listening to something Malatic was saying. Malatic absentmindedly ran his hand over the braid hanging down Neasa’s back. They all seemed enraptured by his tale until he reached a punctuated point, and they all broke out in a roaring laughter. Even Neasa tipped her head to the sky and laughed unabashed. Eloy smiled at their levity and felt guilt that his grief may have been pulling them down. He knew they understood his loss. They had lost just as much and seen the same horrors. He couldn’t fault them for finding a sliver of peace in it all, even if he couldn’t.
He closed the distance and stood at Malatic’s side. A woman to his right threw a handful of sugar into an iron pot, filling the air with the smell of burnt sweetness.
“There he is!” Malatic said and put an arm around Eloy’s shoulders.
“Looks like I missed a good story,” Eloy said.
“Ah,” Malatic said. “I’ve been around long enough to have stories for the rest of the night.”
“Well, let’s hear one, then,” Eloy said.
The others around them hooted in agreement.
“All right, let me think . . . Okay, I got one. I was out on a task for Nicanor, which meant I was ready to run and explore about for three times longer than the task was expected to take. Anyway, I’m walking around when I come upon a hog breeder’s hut in the middle of the woods . . .”
Malatic told stories throughout the night, and their laughter grew louder with every drink. Music swelled, and people swirled around them. Eloy knew he couldn’t let go of what had happened, but he let himself put the weight of it down for the night. That night, he wasn’t the boy who fled from Anso’s greedy fighters or the boy who became a man at the Bowl. He stopped being the person who had lit the salt flats on fire or who had loved a woman he was destined to lose after that fire died down. He wasn’t the one who made it farther into the forest of Valia than anyone else before him to meet a bound woman with boundless sight. In his mind, someone else had walked foolishly into an enemy camp with only a tute for a weapon. Another person had watched an entire horde of men fall to poison and betrayal. He hadn’t been the one who had watched his friend die.
He was just a man who laughed when he was supposed to laugh and drank when he was supposed to drink. Every breath came easier than the last, less constricted by the guilt, shame, and sorrow in his chest.
He gave himself that night to feel the life he was lucky to have. For now, he let himself shed the burden of his past. Just for a little while.
64
A measure of time slipped away in the blurred haze of the drink. People came and went as they stood around laughing. Eloy forgot names, if he ever learned them, and new friends moved on through the crowd to laugh with others. And then there was Pup, a man at least fifteen years older than Eloy, but he had twice as much energy. He didn’t look like a Pup with his broad shoulders and facial hair that was so thick it seemed on its way to consuming his whole face. Malatic said so.
“I get that a lot,” Pup said. “But everyone calls me that. Always have.”
Even through the buzzing effect of the evening, Eloy noticed the reaction Pup had on others around him. Eyes were quick to move to him, and his booming laughter brought smiles to those who could hear it, even if they didn’t hear the joke.
“Where are you staying?” Pup asked.
“At the Inn back over the hill,” Neasa said.
“Not anymore you’re not,” Pup said. “You’ll stay with me. I’m in the town just ahead.” Pup brought his hand up to the corner of his mouth. “Better food up there.” If Pup meant for the words to be whispered, he had clearly forgotten how to do it.
Eloy, Neasa, Malatic, and Pup made their way to Pup’s home as the first rays of morning broke over the ridge of the valley.
Eloy expected a home similar to the one he had slept in at the other town, but he knew as soon as they entered Pup’s town that it would be different. The structures of the town were taller and constructed with sturdier materials. Shiny slabs of cut tree flanked their passage through the main road. Eloy marveled that two towns so close to one another had fared so differently.
Pup pointed to a home with a tapered roof at the end of the main road. “It’s just up there.”
The house twenty strides ahead was at least twice the size of the other houses in the town. The house seemed to double in size as they closed the gap and came upon the front door.
“That’s quite the home,” Neasa said. “Yep, they give it to you when you are”—Pup snapped his fingers as he tried to find the right words—“the decision maker . . . the one they choose to deal with things . . .”
“The Town Lead?” Neasa suggested.
“Yep, that,” Pup said as he pointed at her.
He opened the door with a dramatic swing and held his arms wide.
“This is it,” Pup said. “Help yourselves to whatever you want. I’m going to bed.”
Pup disappeared into one of the rooms and left the front door wide open behind him. The three walked into the home and found an empty room with a few soft beds that fit around their bodies like smoke and pulled them down into a black sleep.
Eloy woke to a dusk-dimmed room thick with the reek of stale breath and sweat mixed with a sour version of the beverage they had consumed. He listened to Malatic and Neasa and their out-of-sync snores for a few moments before embarking on the unpleasant task of sitting up. When he finally managed it, he lost the ability to withstand the aroma of the enclosed space. He found the door, opened it quietly, and slipped out into the narrow hallway of the house.
His foggy memory told him that they had turned left from the front door to find the room, so he headed right. The large front room of the home was filled with golden light from the setting sun, and in the center of it all, in front of a wooden table the size of a door, stood Pup. He looked straighter in the spine than he had the last time Eloy had seen him, a stature that made it clearer how he had become the Town Lead.
“Good morning, Eloy!” Pup said. “Or evening, to be more accurate. How’re you feeling?”
Pup’s voice boomed a little too loud.
“I’ve been worse,” Eloy said, “but I’ve been better too.”
“I hear that. That party was a celebration worth the victory, I say. Come, I have some water for you.”
Eloy moved closer to the table and took the cup of water from Pup’s outstretched hand. Eloy lusted for the water, but his eyes fixed on the cluttered table. The last time Eloy had seen so much script was when he had been in Neasa’s home in Valia, and even she only had a few pieces. Pup had more than four times the amount of paper stacked upon each other. The water helped to clear Eloy’s mind as he walked around the room. Blurry memories came back to him from the night before of Pup talking about his political dealings with Nicanor, something about resources. Everything Eloy saw looked well-crafted—all signs of a prosperous relationship. He felt like he should fault Pup for dealing with a man like Nicanor, but he couldn’t. Pup may have reaped some rewards, but his people and town looked well cared for.
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“What is all this?” Eloy asked.
“Ah, not as exciting as I imagine you think. I’m trying to find prosperity in the wreckage. While I’m grateful that the time of Nicanor and Anso is at an end, we did a lot of dealings with Nicanor to pull the stone he needed out of the ground. The arrangement wasn’t great, but he protected the town and paid for what we had. He liked to document the deals and always insisted that the Town Lead did the same. I’m hoping there’s something in here that might connect me to someone else in his line of dealings to keep something going even though he’s gone. If we found a sliver of hope with him, we can do great things without him.”
“I believe it,” Eloy said.
Eloy moved looked around until he came to a sheet of parchment hanging on the wall.
“What’s this a map of?” Eloy asked.
“Everything,” Pup said as he moved to Eloy’s side. “Everything Nicanor was able to map anyway, which I think it safe to assume is everything around us. This is us here.” Pup pointed to a clump of triangular shapes that Eloy took to represent homes in a town.
“Where is Nicanor’s main camp?” Eloy asked.
“Here.” Pup moved his pointer finger to a spiral mark left of center on the northern part of the map.
Once Pup pointed it out, Eloy was able to orient himself on the map. Next to the large spiral mark of Nicanor’s camp was a cluster of crude-looking trees with an X through it—the forest of Valia. Below it were more triangular shapes—Neasa’s home, Valia. He saw more trees below that, but those were without the ominous cross-out.
Farther down was a line of V shapes that could only be the mountain range Eloy had spent a portion of his life looking at from all of its angles. Next to the mountains was a smaller spiral at its base with an X through it, which Eloy felt confident was the Bowl. He noticed little spirals freckled all across the map, and it gave him great satisfaction to think that they all deserved to be crossed out. Whatever detestable thing that had happened in the location of those marks was over.
Eloy stepped back and looked at the map again. The surface was almost completely marked. Even the end of the page at the right had markings that indicated civilization—a sign that Nicanor had been aware of the Vaylars on the other side of the marshland. Eloy wanted a gap, a hole of the uncharted. He willed his heart to slow. He needed to see precisely and without eager haste. His eyes swept from side to side as if in careful brushstrokes until something stood out. What he had been looking for was so big and obvious that a rush of embarrassment bloomed hot up his neck.
“What is this?” Eloy pointed to the patch of blue at the top of the map.
Pup had moved back to his table during the silence of Eloy’s contemplation and rounded back to see where Eloy pointed.
“That’s the Gulf of Miliar,” Pup said.
“What’s beyond where the map ends?”
“I have no idea.” Pup shrugged and pushed out his lower lip.
“Is there any way for me to find out?”
“No.” Pup shook his head and then laughed. “Wait. It’s been one way for so long that it’s easy for me to forget. To answer your question, I’m not sure. Nicanor and Anso have kept a firm grip on sea travel. There used to be a time when people went out into the sea quite often on ocean vessels, ships, but it hasn’t been that way for a very long time. There are towns along the water, here and here, that still make the vessels on Nicanor or Anso’s command. If you had asked me if you could go just a short while ago, the answer would’ve been no, but there’s no one to stop you now.”
“The barricade that once blocked the sea has been cleared,” Eloy said to himself.
“Huh?”
“The only way for me to go is the place that was blocked before now.”
Eloy could feel the smile growing on his face. For the first time, he felt clarity and certainty. His instincts strummed at the nerves in his body and the hairs on his arms rose. Without any doubt, he knew. Whatever waited on the other side of this body of water was where he would find his treasure. He would have to travel across a strange sea to an unknown land, but he knew this was the path the Seer wanted him to see.
Eloy looked at Pup with a smile. “I know where to go.”
The End
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