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She nodded. He was quick, this young man, and restlessly observant. Traits she admired, because she possessed them herself, but it was disconcerting to be the one who was observed and analyzed. “Born in Oraki, but spent a lot of time in Marata.”
“I’m Cody, by the way,” he said.
“Jayla.”
“Did you bring family with you, Jayla? Meeting family there?”
She shook her head and gave the briefest possible answer. “On my own.”
He looked like he wanted to pursue that line of questioning but read the clear warning in her guarded reply. So he merely nodded and asked, “Assuming they manage to rebuild the bridge, what kind of job will you be looking for in Corcannon?”
“I don’t know that I’m going to be too picky,” she said. “As long as the work is honest and the pay is reasonable, I’m open to anything. Not sure where to start looking, though.”
“There’s a training yard I can recommend run by a couple of men who used to be part of the temple guard,” Cody said. “You have to pay a fee to work out there, but it’s a decent place—everyone knows it—and that’s where a lot of the rich folks go to hire their personal guards. There’s a kind of cachet to being found there.”
She gestured to indicate her slim figure, her plain clothing. “And would you say I have enough cachet?”
He grinned. “I know the owners. They’ll let you in.”
She met his eyes directly, her own a little hard. “That’s a kindness to do for an absolute stranger.”
But his own expression was relaxed and easy. “That’s a courier for you,” he said. “We make friends everywhere. Pays off a lot more than making enemies.”
“I don’t look to make enemies,” Jayla said coolly. “But it takes me a while to make friends.”
He glanced around at the small camp, busy with resigned travelers trying to settle in for a long wait, and grinned again. “Looks like we’ll have all the time we need.”
The first items that came rocking over the chasm were casks of water lashed to mesh cocoons that dangled from the pulley in a precarious fashion. The casks were followed by lumpy bundles of food containing staples like bread, fruit, and dried meat. The travelers who had appointed themselves pulley-masters carefully unclipped the barrels and bags and lined them up on the bank before turning their attention to the next items snaking their way across the gap. Clearly, they didn’t figure it was up to them to manage equitable distribution of the goods.
“This might get ugly,” Jayla said under her breath as the first casks were commandeered by a group of Maratan traders. The men were burly and efficient, and it wasn’t hard to imagine them appropriating everything that made it safely over the canyon, then calmly setting up a booth to sell supplies to the hapless travelers. Well, hapless until thirst or hunger or boiling discontent led to a sudden confrontation.
“I was just thinking that,” said a voice over her shoulder, and she glanced back to see who had spoken. She recognized the tall, thin Cordelano man who had worked beside her at the infirmary. Pietro. That was his name. “Somebody needs to organize the allocation of assets.”
“If you start, I’ll help,” Cody offered.
Pietro glanced at Jayla with a smile. There was something about him she couldn’t quite place—not an air of command, exactly, not like the captain of a guard or the steward of a great household—but an ease with authority, as if he was used to shouldering burdens and showing people the way. Maybe he was a teacher or a politician, fallen on hard times. His worn clothes were so drastically simple he could have been mistaken for a beggar, but his bracelets gleamed with high-alloy metal. She’d noticed both of them this morning. On his left wrist, a carved and coiled silver band that marked him as a wanderer. On his right, a lustrous gold circlet made of woven strips of hammered gold. Man who preferred men.
“What about you, Jayla?” Pietro asked. “Will you join in our attempt to keep a decorous crowd?”
“Sure,” she said. “Where should we set up?”
In a few minutes, they’d borrowed a table and turned themselves into a tiny distribution center. Cody fetched cartons and bags as they were dumped onto the bank, and Pietro doled out portions. Jayla harried the fretful campers into forming an orderly line, and then patrolled the queue. “Hey now,” she said any time someone tried to get ahead in line, and frowned at anyone who looked rebellious.
Only twice did she have to exert a little more pressure. The first time was when a group of teenage boys followed a girl from the distribution site and tried to steal her sack of fruit. But Jayla had already noted them as potential troublemakers, and she was upon them before they could do more than snatch at the girl’s hands. They turned on her with snarls of anger, but she faced them down with a professional’s cool dispassion.
“Don’t start any trouble with me,” she warned. One of the boys feinted forward, and she hit him hard enough to get his attention without bringing him to the ground. The other two backed off, eyeing her a little more intently. She made sure they could see the soldier’s bracelet welded around her left wrist. “Just get in line if you need supplies.”
The girl scampered away while the boys watched Jayla for another tense moment. Then the largest of the three grunted in disgust and motioned to his buddies. They sneered just to show they weren’t afraid, then trotted off to the far end of the encampment.
When Jayla returned to patrol the line, everyone else was conspicuously polite. No one even bumped into anyone else for the next thirty minutes.
The second altercation came after they’d been handing out goods for almost two hours. The sun was sinking, the temperature was still a little too warm on this early summer day, and everyone was tired and irritable. Word had made it up from the embankment that the flow of supplies was about to stop for the day, though it would resume in the morning. The last few casks of water had been liberated from their harnesses and set on the ground, and Jayla could only see one more bag of food hanging from the pulley as it eased across the canyon. She was pretty certain that most everyone in camp had been through the line at least once, but the news still caused a murmur of anxiety among the travelers.
Then three men in merchant clothing calmly pushed through the crowd and picked up three of the last casks of water, shouldering them with ease. The onlookers reacted with alarm and disbelief, but no one made a move to stop them as they shoved their way back through the line.
Until Jayla stepped directly into their path and said, “No.”
They halted, but in a way that radiated menace, and formed a looming semicircle around her. They were all a good four or five inches taller than she was, muscular, their faces rough with hard travel and harder bargaining. She couldn’t tell by their coloring what their heritage might be, but she could read their bracelets, and none of them showed a soldier’s glyphs.
