by Jordan Reece
He shook his fist triumphantly and overrode his companion’s attempt at an argument. “Why did the Seven Campaigns fail, back when the king’s grandparents tried to quell the Wickewoods? Why did all the campaigns fail before then? I’ll tell you why: because no king or queen ever wanted to risk losing all of the Dragons of the Blood to dervesh, so they were held back, and only the Red Guard were sent in. They marched in straight and the dervesh got behind them, and then those soldiers were the meat in those slices. You can’t fight like a human with dervesh; you have to fight like a dervesh. Sneaky-style. Those are the lessons from those campaigns of old.”
“Well, someone let the king know that we’ve got his Marchos at a table in Jumario,” said the younger man sourly. “Military knowledge like yours, Graybeard, how can you not be leading the legions to victory? Where are all of your pips? I don’t even see the one of an ensigno. But there weren’t enough of those Red Guard on the Hopcross to fight dervesh, were there? How many did you see?”
The last question was addressed to Elario. “A company of roughly thirty soldiers, on foot, and packhorses in the care of several children.”
“You can’t take the Wickewoods with thirty soldiers! You can’t do it with five hundred! You would need tens of thousands, and they didn’t come from Ruzan!” the first man declared loudly. Elario wished he had sat somewhere else than beside these quarrelsome men for dinner. But nobody looked over at an upraised voice; the common room was already at top volume.
A buxom serving girl stopped at their end of the table with a pitcher. “They were from the west, not the north,” she offered as she replenished their mugs. “I served their meals but yesterday. One soldier told me that they were stationed all the way at the Gates, most of them, three and four and five per town there. They were summoned together not long past. Divided into two companies and theirs traveled southeast to here. They took a cutter from the Gates down River Flee, marched from Frenet to Penborough, and caught another cutter down the Avys to Ballevue.”
“They don’t have dervesh at the Gates, so why would any of the Red Guard be stationed over there?” grumbled the man with the graying beard. This invalidated the entire tale to him. Shaking his head to the pitcher, he stood and walked away from their table.
The man left behind looked brighter as the serving girl moved on to people waving empty mugs in the air. The argument won, he turned his attention to Elario. “Elequa’s cock and tits, we had the Marchos of the army at our table, and the king’s own confidante!”
Elario had no desire to taunt the departing fellow. Pushing the last bite of his meal into his mouth, he nodded uneasily.
“Who knows why the Red Guard is so far south?” the man pondered, sipping at his ale. “The dervesh are doing what they’ve always done, nothing new to see, and thirty soldiers won’t stop them from doing it. It’s above me to know why, and below me too, unless I want to join up, and that gruesome a death I’ll spare myself. But what brought you here?”
“Farm work,” Elario lied. “The floods-”
“Ah, yes, you must be a Piper Hollow man! Too bad, that. Too bad. First time to Jumario?”
Elario nodded again.
“Get yourself to the weigh-master at first light if you’re looking for work. Any farmer needing extra hands will send someone down there to hire. Have a kip tonight under the awning there if you want to be the very first. It spares the money for a pallet. It’s not raining tonight.”
“I will. And where are you headed?”
“Here, and here has found me. Too little work for too many hands in Penborough; too much work and too few hands along the Hopcross. I’ll stay until harvest ends and then return home. But a shame I just missed the company of Red Guard! I would have liked to see them; it’s only been in twos and threes I’ve encountered them in the Grand Market, doing Elequa knows what. A temptation just to march behind the company and see how far they’re going, eh? Maybe all the way to Goat’s Peak?”
The man laughed, and the serving girl returned to take Elario’s plate and utensils. “They weren’t heading to Goat’s Peak,” she said brightly. “No, that lot, they’re only off to Alming. One of the boys asked me how much farther it was to walk, because nobody tells the little ones anything.”
Elario’s stomach knotted around his meal.
“To Alming?” the man repeated. “Why would they need to go there? What’s in Alming but tuber fields and apple trees and hay in the wind?”
“If you’ll excuse me,” Elario said, getting up with his satchel. Neither the man nor the serving girl took notice of him.
The Red Guard was going to Alming. It could not be that there was another reason why but the box in Elario’s pocket. With his heart beating fast against his ribs, he hurried out of the common room rather than approach the innkeeper. He imagined thieves were after this eye in the box, not the king’s own Red Guard!
They would make Winchistie today, Alming tomorrow, to find Jazan Repse dead and Elario recently gone. Elario needed to get to a cutter! Any cutter! And as quickly as he disembarked in the harbor in Penborough did he need to board an aerial.
The less he was noticed here, the better it would be. Evening had arrived but people were still standing around the inn, some of them hanging on a fence at the stables and laughing as a groom fought with an obstreperous horse to pick its hoof. A few glances landed on Elario and just as swiftly left him; he doubled over, pretending to adjust his boot, and once no one was looking, slipped away.
Two hundred paces from the Hopcross, he ventured into the trees. The air stank from the Muckwater Creek, which ran beneath the wooden bridge to Jumario, but the breeze was carrying the worst of the stench away. In the last of the day’s light, he laid out his cloak beside a tree and settled down atop it. Tugging his travel blanket from the satchel, he covered himself from the growing chill. He had not expected to need the blanket, but being stuck in Penborough during the contagion, often without a place to sleep at night, and later coming home with the inns closed for death or quarantine, he shivered the nights away without one.
He rested there as the light faded, listening to the dull gurgles of the creek. A peddler’s covered wagon rolled over the creaking bridge, arriving by evening and too late for safe travel. Although the couple in the driver’s seat couldn’t see Elario, he saw them. The woman was in a state, berating the man and shaking her finger in his face. “I told you to stop in Winchistie! Where is your head? Now you’ve worn out the horses, making them run so! Do I need to stay awake every Elequa-cursed minute so you don’t make such fool decisions?”
The man slouched deeper in the seat. They drove past to the inn. Then there was no one else but an eerie whistle from the Wickewoods.
Chapter Five
Elario was on the Hopcross the moment it was safe, and walking so fast that he built up a sweat within minutes. The distance between him and the Red Guard was growing by the pace, yet it was not great enough to bring him any comfort. To get mixed up in some kind of royal or military business . . . It was a frightening prospect, made even more so by his utter and total ignorance of that world. He was a farmer, for the love of Elequa! He worked hard, paid his dues, and minded his own business. His world was small, and he preferred it that way. He did not want to be of interest to people he didn’t even know, or to have something of interest to them in his pocket.
Even in the storm of his agitation, he was distracted by the beauty of one of the dragontrees on the side of the road. It had come to life. Tiny pink buds lined the branches along the two wings of the tree. They were curious things, the dragontrees, obeying no season but their own counsel. An oak or sing-sung dropped leaves in autumn to stand bare all winter, and greened in spring. A forest pine never changed regardless of the time of year. Then there were dragontrees, which flowered at random in any season, even the dead of winter. As the landscape stood in stark black and white, the dragontree was garishly radiant in pink or orange or yellow, purple or blue or red flowers. One dragontree
might regularly flower in winter but be flanked by trees that blossomed only in spring. After a long time in this pattern, these three trees could suddenly change to sit there skeletal for a full year or more, and then blossom all together in the summer. It was impossible to predict them, and nobody knew why they did this when all other trees could be relied upon to adhere to nature’s order.
Dragontrees grew where dragon fire had scorched the soil, the stories said. That was why they so often grew in lines, dragons of long ago flying above and spurting fire down to the earth. What truth there was in that, nobody knew. Dragons were gone from Phaleros for thousands upon thousands of years. They existed only in those stories.
Perhaps this particular tree would be flowering upon his return to the Hopcross. That was a happier thought, though it slipped away once the tree was behind him. His mind turned back to darker matters.
They were not thieves planning to steal the eye in the box away. His uncle had stolen it from somewhere, and the king sent the Red Guard to take it back. But to involve his brother Jazan in piracy! That hardly fit with the boy that Yens described. A madcap Hydon had surely been, but he was not wicked.
Plenty a good beginning makes a bad ending, Elario thought grimly. A kind, principled boy could grow up into a mean, selfish man, if he allowed his small flaws to sprout into larger faults. Hydon’s unquenchable greed may have formed a shovel with which he buried his best qualities.
Elario should simply double back and meet the Red Guard, offer them the box and say it was sent to his father. Then they would have what they wanted; there was no need for further dealings between them. But no . . . that was placing his fate in the hands of strangers, trusting that he would be treated with goodwill and forgiveness. Something in him recoiled from it. The answers were in Drouthe, not in surrendering to the Red Guard.
The sound of trotting horses made him wheel around in fear, but it was a crop driver with a wagon full of sheep pelts. This driver was a woman, young and flame-haired. Elario had a silver bit out of his purse in an instant. He waved it in the air to her.
She slowed the horses, calling out, “You got respect for Tezina, man? Or else I’m riding on minus one you.” She parted her cloak as she halted alongside him to show the knife at her waist.
“Every honor to Tezina, the highest and more,” Elario said hurriedly. A goddess of retribution for wronged women, no man spoke her name lightly. Tezina was the province of women alone. “All I wish is a ride to Ballevue.”
She accepted the bit and tipped her head to the back of the wagon. Elario boarded, hoping his haste to be understood as eagerness to sit down for a rest, not panic. The reins snapped and the horses broke into a trot.
Her name was Rugia Natelle, Ballevue born. It was her fifth year driving for the sheep farms on the Hopcross. All of this she threw over her shoulder to him, along with the warning that she had to drop him off at the edge of the city. Like Jurra, she was ordered not to pick up passengers, so she couldn’t be seen with Elario in her wagon on city grounds. She didn’t ask his name, only where he was from, and he maintained the fiction that he was a Piper Hollow farmer working harvest from town to town. Rugia nodded with disinterest. Being unremarkable was not very hard, Elario thought. He was glad of that.
They passed a dragontree in full blossom after an hour, their heads turning to admire the resplendent purple petals gathered around centers of silver. That was another queerness of dragontrees. The next time this tree bloomed, the flowers were likely to be another color. They had their own minds about how things should go.
Lifting in the seat, Rugia trailed her fingers along the flowers hanging over her head. “Elequa’s garden, yes?” she asked. “My mother says these are Elequa’s own trees from the divine garden seeded here, so that we see a little of what heaven is like.”
“My mother once said much the same,” Elario replied, which was not the truth, but an answer designed to keep her disinterested in him through agreement. It worked, for she said nothing else. He was pleased with himself.
There were a few more naked ones beyond it, and then the line of dragontrees ended. As did the thickest of the woods, the land changing from trees with a hint of grass between them, to scrub interrupted by copses. The curves in the road straightened and began up an incline, so gentle a slope that the horses’ speed kept to its steady pace.
Traffic grew heavier in time. Fast carriages passed them to Ballevue, and crop drivers with light wagons sped for Jumario. Farmhands were going both ways on horseback, some pulling carts. A merrymaker played a flute as he walked by, waggling his eyebrows in expectation of coin. Most people shook their heads at his approach; he was not playing well. Crossly, he gave a coin to a crop driver and got in back with a harvest crew.
The incline steepened just outside Ballevue, and rather sharply so that those on foot tilted forward to keep their balance. At the summit of the hill were two tall posts, shivering in the haze and marking the entrance to the city. Rugia raised her eyebrows at Elario once the wagon neared the posts, and he dropped silently out the back. He walked the rest of the way up the hill as she and her sheep pelts vanished over the top.
At the crest, all of the city came into view below. It was a breathtaking sight. The Hopcross spilled down into the maze of Ballevue, where tight clusters of buildings sprouted up like mushrooms over a multitude of smaller hills, and jam-packed the valleys between them. Neither built on the circular nor the perpendicular, zig-zagged streets ran all through the city.
Beyond it was the sparkling river, somewhat obscured by the smoke rising from thousands of chimneys. There were a hundred ways to get to the harbor, but unless one was born to Ballevue, it was best to stay upon the Hopcross to its end. It was a slow way to travel, since the road became a fair along its length, yet to get lost among the innumerable side streets was even slower.
Great Elequa! Just as Elario began to descend the hill, he spied a Red Guard plume. Then a wagon carrying baskets of tubers blocked it from view. Tightening his satchel, he continued to walk at the swift pace of the foot traffic around him.
The wagon went by. The Red Guard soldier was alone, and standing just off the other side of the road. He was watching the passerby, his hand resting on the hilt of his sword in its scabbard. It seemed to Elario what was entering Ballevue interested the soldier far more than what left.
Many surprised looks were cast the soldier’s way. Heads bent to whisper about Red Guard. He paid those looks and whispers no heed, stepping forward just as Elario passed him. A carriage with closed curtains drove between them, the Red Guard stopping the driver. “Where from?” he demanded imperiously. “Your passengers, where from?”
Elario walked on, throttling the strap of his satchel. “From Jumario!” cried the surprised driver upon his perch, one of the two horses frisking in the crush of people.
“Open the door.”
Elario sneaked a peek over his shoulder. The driver had jumped down to open the carriage door and let the soldier peer in. A baby wailed fretfully inside, a woman shushing it. Withdrawing, the soldier said to the driver, “Move along.” He held up a hand to stop a second carriage cresting the hill. “Where from?”
Dreading the possibility of more soldiers ahead, Elario looked for them along the road. There were none in sight upon the hill, or at its base where wobbling lines of inns and shops braced the crowded street fair.
Over the next hour, he cut through it. The stands sold everything from pastries to cloth to medicine to chickens. There were shoemakers and dressmakers, flower sellers and vintners and hairdressers, and upon stages were merrymakers playing music and performing tricks. Upon one was a dog balanced on its hind legs, a child running about to the observers with a hat for coins. Barkers yelled from the sidewalks, enticing people to step in to common rooms for a drink and performance; shop jacks shouted at vendors for blocking the doors with their stands, and took the stands down by force if they were not removed promptly. The vendors shouted and fought back just as heart
ily since they were forbidden to move to the center of the road where the wagons and carriages needed room to pass.
In the past, Elario lingered in the happy chaos of the street fair, but today he pushed through stubbornly with barely a glance to anything. Even the blocky farm droids failed to attract his attention. Usually he spared a minute or two to see the latest models. For entertainment, primarily; those farm droids weren’t worth half the cost, not a one of them. He had witnessed demonstrations of them both here at the Ballevue street fair and in the Grand Market. The widget dusters flew over fields to drop sulfur, but often undershot or overshot their mark; the sensors on the pickers could not always identify ripe from unripe, yanking berries from bush or vine indiscriminately. The sower failed to distribute evenly; the grapevine pruner fared better in accuracy, but was still outmatched by trained human hands.
Powered by aithra, farm droids were slow-moving and half-witted, clumsy and easily befuddled by changes in terrain. That was disastrous for farms situated on mountain slopes. Should one break, as they often did, the droid had to be driven all the way into the city to a droid mechanic specific to the company to build it. If the mechanic did not have the part, it had to be ordered from cities in the north, and that took weeks to months to arrive.
Better work was gotten out of an old horse and a young child than the expensive heap of gears and junk metal and aithra of a farm droid, yet the vendors talked them up as if they were the most incredible revolution from the finest scientific knackers in the golden ring, and would not utterly bankrupt their buyers between price of purchase and maintenance. They spouted about how much money was saved through droids, but in truth, they cost money. There were much better models of farm droids than what came south to Ballevue, but they cost the price of a farm itself. Only in the north could those things be afforded.