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My eyes snapped open and excitement filled me. I sat abruptly and called back, “Thank you, Larth. I’ll be ready in fifteen minutes.”
My heart beat wildly against my ribs as I got up and scrambled to wash and dress. I don’t know why, maybe it was the bizarre anomaly of fucking a woman, or perhaps it was the fact that the village represented the midpoint between the frontier and the Old Realm, in my head if not in reality, but I felt as though my adventure would truly start with the first steps I took on the other side of the village. I was eager to begin.
As I hadn’t brought all that much with me, it was quick and easy for me to pack my things and hurry downstairs once I was clean and dressed. The common room was mostly empty so early in the morning, but I could hear sounds coming from the kitchen.
Larth stood in the center of the common room with a rough-looking man in clothes that were obviously from the Old Realm.
“This is Wat,” he introduced the man. “Wat, this is Conrad Kettering. He’s off to Royersford to become a healer.”
“A healer?” Wat’s whole face lit up. “Only, I’ve got this boil on my backside that I can’t get rid of.”
I almost laughed. I was certain that at some point I’d just roll my eyes at people asking me such things. But everything was new, everything was hopeful, and I was ready to embrace the life that waited for me.
“You can tell me all about it while we walk,” I said, moving forward to shake Wat’s hand.
I couldn’t wait to get started with the rest of my life.
ChapterThree
We set out almost at once. Larth made certain Wat and I had two delicious hand pies each as we walked out the inn’s front door and started off in the direction of the rising sun. The pie was excellent, filled with sausage and eggs with a thick, rich sauce. It was so good that I didn’t mind listening to Wat list every illness he’d ever had and ask for my opinion as we left the village behind and continued along the road.
After a few hours, even though Wat continued to talk and I continued to answer a bit, my attention was taken up by the vastness of the mountains and the surprising terrain we walked across. I’d always known the mountains were formidable and that only the one pass had ever been carved between them, but I hadn’t understood why until I was actually there.
Within a few hours of the village, almost all traces of grass and trees gave way to nothing but scrub and rough undergrowth. I’d never seen anything like it before. It surprised me how quickly we left behind land that was in any way habitable and ended up in a cold, rocky wilderness, where only grass and pitiful shrubs grew. I thanked God for the pass. It was wide and paved with worn flagstones, and even with a few tight curves that wound around the edge of rocky chasms, at no point did I feel as though Wat and I were in danger.
“What do you know about the creation of this pass?” I asked Wat when we stopped for lunch at midday.
There were several hollows carved in the increasingly steep sides of the mountains we wound our way through that were obviously meant to shelter travelers on the road. The one we stopped in was well-stocked with firewood, for which I was glad. Even the midday sun wasn’t warm enough to keep the chill away, and it was still summer on the frontier.
“They were constructed a hundred years ago or more,” Wat said with a shrug. “They had different tools in those days.”
“Different tools?” I asked, shrugging in confusion.
“Metal tools,” Wat explained. “Things leftover from before the breaking of the world.”
My brow flew up at that. I knew that relics of the world that had once been still existed somewhere, but I hadn’t realized people had been able to use them as recently as a hundred years ago. Most of them were useless pieces of junk without the fuel that had once made them come alive, and nearly every relic I’d heard of had been melted down to make useful things, like plows and swords.
“They had tools that could carve the very mountains back then,” Wat said, as if proud he could educate a learned healer. “That’s how they made the road there so flat and wide.”
I nodded to the road as it crossed beside the hollow where we sat to eat. The roadswerewide and flat, come to think of it. They were the reason why we were making such swift progress through territory that would have taken weeks, if not months, to walk through before any paths had been forged.
“Someone must maintain the bridges, though,” I said, glancing ahead of us to a bridge that was easily as long as the main road through Kettering.
That bridge—and I supposed the rest of the bridges along the mountain pass—looked large and sturdy enough for whatever army had come through with General Rufus all those weeks before.
“Those of us who take travelers along the pass do our bit,” Wat explained with a nod. “The old king paid men to maintain the bridges, but this new king, King Julius, hasn’t done much to keep up the maintenance.”
I frowned, but didn’t say anything. I hadn’t heard a single thing that indicated Magnus’s brother was a very good king. Maybe it was my own loyalty guiding me, but I imagined that Magnus was ten times the king his brother Julius was.
We continued on after lunch, and I asked Wat more about the mountains and the Old Realm. As it turned out, Wat was the third generation of his family who had acted as guides through the mountain. His home was in Aktau, but he’d traveled through the mountains so much that he said they felt like his backyard.
“Travel has been sparse for the past two years, though,” he told me as the sun started to dip down behind us. “The wars took their toll on everyone, to be sure.”
My heart sped up. “Is it that bad in the Old Realm?” I asked. “We haven’t heard much on the frontier.”
Wat laughed, sending me a look as though he thought I were a country rube. It was the first time he’d looked at me that way, so I didn’t hold it against him.
“You frontier folk lead such sheltered lives,” he said. “I never did understand the frontier cities and their tendency to keep to themselves.”
