Rhia walked the prairie road for twenty-five days before she got to Cerretour. She spent the first four days in the company of strangers; wagons and riders and pedestrians spooling in and out of Tellemont, the dust and bustle of a major highway. Everyone was in motion, everyone carrying something: luggage or cargo or passengers or, in Rhia’s case, a single sealed letter tucked into a hidden pocket in her pack. She slept along the roadside and lit her tiny fire within shouting distance of other tiny fires.
On the fifth day, she crossed an arched stone bridge over the river and the travelers around her dwindled.
On the eighth day, she might have seen one person, a dot scraped up over the horizon far ahead, visible for less than an hour, then gone.
On the ninth day, the paving ran out. From there on, her only company was the occasional flock of ground-nesting birds she startled off the prairie floor and into the roofless sky.
Meek spring seared away into summer. Her black jacket came off and went into her pack, meticulously rolled to keep it from dust. Sweat evaporated. Her pack straps creaked with salt. Her woven sun hat desiccated, releasing a wisp of sweetgrass scent. During the day, everything was dun-colored: the road, the wildlife, the smear of dust limning the horizon, the grass, her bare shoulders as they bronzed in the sun. She stopped lighting fires at night, ate cold meals, and read a book in the wobbling globe of light cast by her small tin lantern. Later, in the full dark, she was kept awake by the sounds of small animals, each movement amplified by the drying grass. When she slept, she dreamed of wildfires.
Every morning, she woke to a fingernail-scrape of apricot across the eastern horizon, picked up her pack, walked until dark, read or watched the blurring smear of stars until she fell asleep, and did it again.
Whenever a sputter of creek burped out of the hard ground, she topped off her waterskins and splashed her face. Water flickered tantalizingly at the periphery of her awareness, hidden deep in the earth below the prairie, too far and sparse for even someone with Rhia’s degree of Talent to sense clearly. She could only feel the presence of water within about a quarter-mile, and the prairie was wide and dry.
She had never gone this deep inland before. Most of her deliveries took her along the main roads, or to the shipping ports that studded the coast. The delivery itself was unusual—one letter, instead of a parcel or sheaf of papers or cart of goods. The outside was sealed with a thick wax stamp and a purple ribbon banded lengthwise in silver and gold. Despite being many years outside the Temple gates, her mind still recognized that color combination as Temple colors . . . but the Temple rarely sent their messages by Courier. Silver and gold were also rich-people colors.
It was probably a coincidence.
She didn’t know what the letter contained, but she never knew what was in the packages she carried, and after four years as a Courier, she had (mostly) trained herself out of curiosity. Confidentiality was part of what you paid for when you contracted the Three Kingdoms Courier Service to take possession of an item for you and deliver it downtown or to another province or into another kingdom or across the continent.
Occasionally it was a dangerous job, but mostly it was a boring one. Lots of walking, long hours, and little company, which she preferred. Rhia was good at her job because it gave her what she wanted—solitude, mobility, self-direction, a perpetual reason to leave. It was comforting to know there was a departure at the end of every destination, curled inside it like a shoot resting inside a seed.
On the evening of the twenty-sixth day, a scruff of darker brown broke the tawny dust on the horizon. It grew as she approached: a cluster of shabby wooden buildings, and beyond, a sweeping curve of knobby trees that suggested a waterway.
Maps of this part of the country were light on detail, but even so, she knelt in the middle of the road to spread hers out and make sure she’d read it right. A Courier didn’t earn her rank by having a poor sense of direction, and it’s not like there were any other nearby settlements she could be mistaking for this place . . . But it’s barely a skin tag, surely it can’t be—
Cerretour, the map insisted, and capped the word with a symbol that meant village or small town.
Rhia looked up from the map, squinting down the road. There weren’t more than a couple dozen buildings, along with a few big barns and outbuildings that were probably jointly owned and used by the whole community. On one side of the settlement, crop fields were laid out in a neat grid. Beans, probably, or turnips, this time of year. On the other side, a single building, dark and square, sat alone out in the middle of the prairie. Rhia couldn’t imagine what that was for.
Who would pay a Courier’s rates for a delivery to this little two-horse town?
Everything was getting that honey-soaked tint that came right before sunset. The grassland around the settlement glinted. Windowpanes flared. A warm breeze lifted off the prairie floor, carrying a voice from the village—far away, too indistinct to really hear, a long sliding vowel. The tail end of a name, perhaps.
Someone’s down there, at any rate. Rhia began to walk.
As she walked, a dot detached itself from the dark square building out on the prairie, and started down a connecting path toward the town. It grew into a recognizably human shape—a woman about Rhia’s age, with crown of light brown hair pinned up around her head, dressed in a sweeping, wide-sleeved robe.
She saw Rhia coming and waited for her where the path and the road met.
“You’re new,” she said. Her voice was as soft and light as birds lifting off the prairie floor.
After weeks on the road with only the bugs, jackrabbits, and her thoughts for company, Rhia drank in the sight of another human being like water.
“Yes, hi—I’m a Courier. I have a delivery—” Rhia gestured at her uniform by way of explanation, and realized belatedly that a sleeveless white shirt and black trousers weren’t much of a uniform. “I have my identification in my pack. I have a delivery for the mayor.”
“The headman,” the woman corrected. “Cerretour is too small for a mayor.”
Of course it is. “In that case, I have a delivery for the headman.”
“You’re not coming from the Citadel, I take it? The High Priest didn’t send you?”
“I came from Tellemont.” The Citadel was two provinces away. Leagues from here. “Why?”
“Tellemont? That’s weeks away.” The woman took a fresh look at Rhia—the sweatstains, the tousled hair, the road dust on her boots. “You came all this way on foot?”
“I could have come with a wagon train, but none were scheduled and I didn’t want to wait. The Hall wouldn’t authorize a horse. Water’s too unpredictable on the prairie.”
The woman’s mouth crooked into an expression that was half smile, half wince. “Tell me about it.”
Faced up with Rhia, the woman was a couple inches shorter, slender, with a snub nose and the deep tan and freckles of someone who worked outdoors. Sharp blue eyes, a strong mouth. The robe was fine white linen. An appliquéd band of gold, russet, teal, and blue chased itself around the collar, cuffs, and hem.
“You’re a Priest,” Rhia said.
“Nearly. I’m on my roving.”
In rural parts of the country, acolytes on track to becoming full Priests sometimes took a year away from their home Temple to travel, ministering in smaller towns and villages that didn’t have Temples of their own.
Rhia hadn’t done such a journey herself. In her experience, not many acolytes went roving anymore. There weren’t enough of them to spare from the Temples . . . and besides, among the younger generations roving was largely seen as old-fashioned.
That was the opinion Rhia had held, anyway, in the years before she uprooted her Temple-bred beliefs, cast off her robes, and fled.
“Anyway, the headman isn’t in the village right now. He left last week—he and his husband—for Columb, west of here.”
West. Rhia sighed. Like I haven’t come far enough already.
“If you’d like to leave it with me, I can attest to its safe delivery. I’ll give it to him soon as he comes back.”
“No—thanks, but I can’t. The delivery instructions are clear. Into his hands, no other.”
The woman frowned. “Well . . . come into town, then, and we’ll put you up somewhere.”
Rhia rolled her shoulders under the weight of the pack, feeling weeks of tension threading her muscles tightly together. The attraction of sleeping under a roof warred with her sense of propriety. “I couldn’t impose—”
“It’s no imposition. It would be for your safety.” The acolyte took Rhia’s wrist and tugged gently. “I’m Mireille. Come.”
Mireille led Rhia into town. The houses were all single-story, wooden construction with shingled roofs and gap-toothed front porches. A small central square was bracketed by larger buildings Mireille identified as they walked: “Headman’s house. General store. Bar.”
As darkness fell, people threaded across the porches, either going in from a day of work or coming out into the cooler evening air. Lanterns dotted the windows. There was a hum of barely audible conversation. A dry, incessant cough came from inside one of the houses.
Rhia watched the people move, mesmerized by their presence after weeks alone on the road. She expected to field some conversation, because in a town this size any new arrival would generate interest, but no one spoke to her. Cerretour seemed subdued, wrung out.
“No Temple?” she asked, more to break the quiet than out of any real curiosity.
“I’m afraid not,” Mireille said. “This far out, they get by with traveling Priests. Someone passes through twice, maybe three times, a year.”
They walked through a sea of darkness punctuated by buoys of light from the windows. Rhia noticed there were fewer lights than there were houses.
“Where are all the—” Rhia started to say, but Mireille pointed down the road. A gleam of orange light flickered in the grassland beyond the town.
“That’s a group coming off the prairie,” she said quietly. “They’re on the other side of the spring.”
She strode into the darkness. Rhia hesitated, lingering in the cast-off light pooling in the street, ...
We hope you are enjoying the book so far. To continue reading...
Copyright © 2024 All Rights Reserved
Please log in to recommend or discuss...
