Idris lifted the chest with a grunt and made his way out of the tent. She followed. Outside, it was snowing. Seraphina tilted her head toward the sky and felt snowflakes brush her cheeks and cling to her hair. She forced her thoughts to stay positive.
A two-wheeled cart drawn by a sturdy horse waited. She didn’t need to see it to know what it looked like. It was the most basic type of cart the military used. It was plank-sided and iron-banded, with a canvas tilt stretched over wooden hoops to keep the worst of the weather off the load. She could smell the tarred linen as she approached the vehicle.
Idris heaved the medicine chest into the back, causing the planks to creak under its weight. Then his hand found her elbow.
“Up,” he said. “I have you.”
Seraphina climbed in one-handed, the other arm cradling the bucket against her ribs. Idris steadied her at the waist until she had her footing on the bed of the cart, then guided her to sit just behind the driver’s plank, with the chest at her back and the canvas low over her head.
“You might not want to hold onto it too hard,” he said, chuckling. “Or I’ll have to get more snow soon.”
“Right. You’re right.”
She pushed the bucket away, but not far enough to lose it from her shadowed sight.
Idris climbed up the front, gathered the reins, and clicked his tongue against his teeth. The horse leaned into the harness, the shafts groaned, and the cart began to move. Soon, its large wheels rattled out through the castle’s main gate, and the sounds of a camp in chaos faded behind – boots splashing through mud, angry shouts from men who’d just found out their captain was dead.
“Where to?” he asked.
“North. There’s a convent in the Holledau, in the woods above the Abens.”
He stuck to the main road, and Seraphina didn’t comment, since for once she was traveling with someone who had the right papers. The wind hit the cart from one side, then the other as theroad bent and the snow grew heavier. She tucked her chin into the collar of her cloak.
They’d been traveling for an hour, perhaps, when Idris turned and spoke in a low voice.
“Checkpoint ahead. Stay down. They won’t check the back.”
Seraphina lay on the bed of the vehicle, drawing her hood over her face and her knees to her chest, making herself small. She looked like a lump more than a person.
They slowed. She heard voices, the stamp of a horse, the dull ring of a halberd butt against frozen earth.
“Papers,” a man said.
Idris handed them over. “Medical supplies for our troops at Neuburg. Surgeon Gharbi, attached to the Quartermaster General’s office.”
The man clicked his tongue as he studied the papers for a minute before returning them.
“Go ahead.”
“Thank you.”
They lurched forward again. Idris said nothing, only drove, and the sway of the cart lulled her to sleep. They were moving slower, the wheels sluggish through the settling snow, the horse less sure-footed when met with patches of ice.
The man stared at the gunpowder cartridge and the musket at his feet. He’d dropped them without meaning to. The logical thing to do was to bend down and pick them up, but something was stopping him, a force outside of himself.
“Huber, what’s wrong with you? Snap out of it.”
His partner was right next to him, yet his voice sounded as if they were separated by a glass wall. Huber wanted to tell him that he was trying. He couldn’t utter a sound.
Instead, he was compelled to look up, into the face of the woman with the scarf.
Huber wanted to tell his partner to run.
Seraphina woke up with a start. Her heart hammered as she scrambled to get herself upright. She pulled the hood off her head and sank her fingers into her hair, tugging at the roots until the sting chased away the last remnants of the dream.
Huber. The name sounded familiar. She’d seen herself through his eyes. No. Impossible. The woman with the scarf didn’t look like her. Tangled hair that had come out of the braid, so dirty that its color was questionable. Sallow cheeks, a frame too thin and sickly hidden under a heavy cloak, a silk scarf sitting askew between a sharp nose and a wide forehead. That wasn’t what Seraphina looked like, so it couldn’t have been her.
“Dreams make no sense,” she whispered.
