I found myself whistling under my breath, more for the small measure of company the noise gave me than for any desire for a tune, and wound my way through the buildings, keeping to the main road and the lit path.
Abruptly, I reached the end of the village. Usually, buildings would trail away from a village center, getting smaller and farther apart, until they dissolved into farmland again.
This village, however, just ... ended. Even the road petered out, coming to a halt just beyond the shadow of the last house. Dandelions grew luxuriantly in the gaps between the last few cobblestones. There were no wheel marks or hoof prints in the mud beyond, still a little illuminated by the last gas lamp.
It occurred to me that this village had an extraordinary number of gas lamps for how poor and hardscrabble it seemed, and was better lit than the roads back home. Almost as if they were frightened of the dark.
I peered ahead into the gathering dark. I couldn’t see anything more frightening out there than fields and the shapes of cows, but a prickle at the nape of my neck told me to go no further. If I squinted, I could see what looked like a thick, swirling fog on the horizon, pale against the darkness. It was a desolate place, and the blessing of the sorceresses’ magic seemed scant out here.
I was not sorry to leave that town behind.
We stopped each night after that to rest the horse and ourselves. At night, I used the little coin I had to purchase a room in the least expensive inn I could find, usually dimly lit and evil-smelling, with portraits of the king in varying degrees of quality glaring down from the walls.
The cart driver stayed somewhere better, I am sure, but I never knew exactly where. He helped me down at the end of each day, brushed the hay off his hands and stomped off, leaving me to find my own way.
I woke every morning in a panic, washing up as quickly as I could and running out to the cart, fearful that he would have traveled on without me. But he never did. He was always there to help me back up, grumpy but polite. It could have been a lot worse.
On the evening of the fourth day, the driver called back to let me know we were nearly there. We had reached the very last village before the city. I found it hard to feel too much excitement, however, because waking up in a pile of hay is not an experience I’d wish upon anyone, and one that I’d had more than enough of by then.
My hair was a mad red tangle, and my skin was covered in red pinpricks from the thousands of little needles, as if I’d germinated another thousand freckles overnight.
Still, despite all that, I felt a tingle of what might have been anticipation. After all, it was the city! I’d never expected to see it in my lifetime. I twisted about and raised myself up as best I could to see over the driver’s head, but my first impression of the place was still framed by his ears and the wisps of hair either side of his bald pate, which detracted from the grandeur a little.
I saw yellow stone walls, with an expanse of tents and market stalls spread out before them. The walls were so high that if the city itself hadn’t been on a hill, I wouldn’t have seen a thing.
As it was, though, the whole thing rose up like the crown of a hat with a wide, flat brim, and I could see roofs and chimneys of all colors poking out all the way up to the castle perched on top, upright as a trussed pork chop. If you squinted, you could see the sun winking off the guardsmen’s spears.
As usual, the driver left me to my own devices once we had found a spot for the cart and he had unharnessed his horse. I was down to my last bit of coin, barely enough to pay for a room and board, so I thought the sorcerer had better either rip my heart out as soon as I got there to save me the trouble of sleeping and eating, or put me up for a couple of nights.
One good thing: the pain was much easier the closer I came to the city. It was like gradually getting over a bad head cold—I could think more clearly and breathe more easily. The tug at my gut, which sometimes felt a lot like desperately needing to go to the privy, had eased, but the anticipation of growing closer had set my belly to grumbling and growling as if it were waiting for a good beef dinner.
This last village was the most prosperous of any I’d seen, which made sense, since it was so close to the city. The people were friendly and open faced, and looked well fed. We found a pub. I bought a gray, greasy bowl of bone soup and a mug of warm ale. I sat apart from the driver, who wanted little to do with me when I wasn’t on his cart (not that I could blame him), and I listened.
One of the advantages of looking plain and nondescript is that it allows you a sort of invisibility sometimes, where a pretty woman would draw attention.
“Thin times,” one hairy-chinned fellow was saying. I looked down at my soup, which was little more than dirty water with a lick of oil on top; it seemed to add weight to his words. A lone cube of onion bobbed in the center.
“Getting worse,” said his friend, bald except for a few strands of hair slicked across his dome.
“It’s because they’re buying less, up there,” said the first one, jerking his head in the vague direction of the city. “I think,” and he leaned in close, but, in the way of drunkards everywhere, his whisper was louder than his speaking voice, “that They’ve come up with a way to make everything they need themselves, without coming outside the walls.”
The way he said “They,” you could hear the capital letter.
“The magic-workers?”
I stiffened and listened more intently. We called them by a different name, of course, but he had to be talking about the sorceresses. And my sorcerer.
“Who else?” said the bearded man.
“I don’t see how,” said the other, sucking at his remaining teeth. “Never heard anything about them making food and such. Just potions and hexes and murderous brews. Things for the nobles. They’ve been buying their foodstuffs from us for a hundred years or more.”
“Then how do you explain it? Three carts of my peaches, rotted, because I was told they didn’t need the usual order. Told by letter, no less. They didn’t even bother to say it to my face. Twelve years I’ve been supplying them!”
A man at a neighboring table with a shock of pale hair chimed in. “Parsnips! Turnips!”
For a moment I wondered if this was some strange way of swearing in this particular village, but then he went on, “Wurzels! Carrots! All useless. I held them back for the usual city order, and it never came. Now they’re tough as feet and smell as bad.”
Who would have thought that those hoity-toity sorceresses—and my sorcerer—would have had anything to do with something as everyday as fruits and vegetables? It was hard to imagine them sniffing at peaches like housewives and poking apples to see if they bruised. Why would such powerful beings need to concern themselves with foodstuffs? Surely they had other servants who could do the job just as well?
