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I frowned for half a second, wishing Appius would stay safe with the others, until I realized that he probably had more knowledge of the mountain pass and the wilderness around us than anyone else.
I nodded to him as he fell into step by my side, but I stayed quiet.
We moved as close as we dared to the edge of the woods, then slowed our steps, walking as silently as possible. Again, I was impressed with Appius’s ability to slip noiselessly through the woods.
As it turned out, we needn’t have worried about keeping quiet. We reached the mountain pass at the edge of the woods…and there was no one there. I crouched low and held my breath, listening for any sort of human sound at all, and sniffing the air for a hint of smoke from a campfire. There was nothing.
“I think it’s empty,” Appius whispered.
I nodded to him, then got up and stepped out onto the wide road at the beginning of the mountain pass.
It was eerie. The road was almost as I remembered it from late last summer, when I’d arrived in the Old Realm. Whoever had built it ages ago had done a fantastic job of constructing it. There were no ruts from wheels or hoof imprints from horses or oxen. And there were no footprints in the dust either, which made it clear that no one had walked this way in a long time.
“I…I think it’s been abandoned,” Appius said, speaking my thoughts aloud. “Look, there are weeds growing between the flagstones.”
Appius was right. I’d noticed there were no cracks in the road, but there were small, spring shoots poking up between the huge slabs.
“No one has been this way for a while,” I said.
With a puzzled frown, Appius and I walked a little farther toward the west, where the pass began. We were too far from where the palisade had been built to see it, and I really had no inclination to walk all the way back just to see how much of a barrier the palisade was.
When we were certain there were no soldiers, or anyone else for that matter, on that side of the path, we headed back to the point where we’d come out of the woods, then past it for a few dozen yards.
“I don’t think we’re going to run into anyone,” I said, hardly believing it. I let my shoulders drop and glanced around, trying hard to see something amiss, almost wishing for it, but there was nothing. “This might be easier than I thought.”
I hated even thinking that, because the second anyone suggested something would be easy, disaster usually happened. But truly, there was nothing on the road to stop us from walking to freedom.
Appius and I hurried back to get the others, explaining what we’d seen—or hadn’t seen—then the six of us returned to the pass and began walking up into the mountains. We walked without incident or impediment for the rest of the day. It was surreal. The journey was as carefree and easy as if nothing at all had happened to the mountain pass and we were just walking to the frontier as men had for generations.
We stopped to make camp by the side of the road as dusk fell. The things I’d been concerned about from the start were a minor problem—it got chilly after dark, and we had to figure out how much food we could afford to eat now to preserve our rations.
But we decided to only eat enough to fill our stomachs, and then we bedded down in a single clump, all of us sharing body heat and covering ourselves with our coats.
It was eerily simple.
In the morning, we debated how much food we could eat again, and we settled on consuming slightly more than we had the night before. Early spring was the wrong time to find berries or much vegetation at all, but Appius saved the day once again by pointing out fresh sprouts and tender roots of a few mountain plants that weren’t poisonous. They weren’t great as far as taste, but they meant we could stretch out the supplies we had.
I remembered from my trip in the late summer that it was more than a day from the last bridge to the end of the pass, which meant we spent almost an entire day walking along a perfectly decent path. All of the rumors we’d heard when we treated the casualties from the new army were that General Rufus and his men had caused avalanches that buried sections of the mountain pass, but we didn’t see any sign of that either.
At least, we didn’t see it until our second full day of walking. That’s when we came across the first destroyed bridge.
Or, at least, the remains of the first destroyed bridge.
“Well, shit,” Leander said as we all stopped at the edge of the cliff where the ruined bridge had once been anchored to the rock.
“That doesn’t look good at all,” Darius agreed.
That was an understatement. The bridge was gone. Well, mostly gone. The original construction had involved anchor points both on the Old Realm side and the frontier side of a chasm. Those anchor points still appeared to be in perfect shape. So much so that I didn’t think it would be that difficult for carpenters to come along and figure out a way to reconstruct the entire middle portion of the bridge.
The problem was that the middle section, the span of the chasm, was easily thirty yards across. An even bigger problem was that, if memory served, this was one of the smaller bridges we would need to get across. There would be more and longer destroyed bridges waiting for us when we made it across this one.
And hard on the heels of that thought came “we’ll cross that bridge when we find it”. I nearly laughed out loud.
“Suggestions?” I said, moving as close to the edge of the chasm as I could get and peering down.
Immediately, my stomach wobbled. It was a long way down.
“Honestly,” Appius said, sounding almost cheerful, “this isn’t all that bad. I’ve climbed far bigger cliffs before. There’s a spot about a day to the south of here that has been popular with people on holiday where you can climb to a ledge that’s easily twice the distance of this chasm.”
