I gave no reply, merely tried not to wince.Fortunate.After last night’s news, that word cut deep.
Rhama, I saw, was studying me closely. He looked tired; days-old stubble dotted his jaw. “You should know,” he said evenly, “that the ocean is a…different beast. These mountain springs, the pools in your practice chambers…” He paused, seeming to grope for the right words. “Just remember your training. It takes time, and respect.”
If I hadn’t known better, I’d have thought he was concerned. But though Rhama had taught us for years, he’d never been one to display much warmth. No doubt he was thinking of Zennia’s accident, of how displeased Shearwater would be with another…
I searched his expression, burning to ask more questions about my friend—I was leaving anyway, they couldn’t punish me for impertinence now—but he seemed to sense it and flattened his features. The minute shake of his head that followed made it clear I’d be getting no answers from him.
The squat guard, whom Caerig introduced as Egard, hiked up his sword belt. “Let’s go,” he said brusquely. “The sooner this one gets to where she’s going, the better.”
And the sooner you’ll get paid,I wanted to shoot back,and can spend your wages in the dice and ale houses.As the pair walked past me, I thought I caught a stale whiff of drink.
Once the three of us were installed in the coach, Rhama leaned in and held out a sheet of parchment, stamped with the Institution’s official crest. “A letter of passage, in case you’re stopped on the road. Informs anyone who cares to know of the purpose of your journey and why there is an Orha with you.”
Egard pocketed it, shooting me another suspicious glare.
Before Rhama moved away, he caught my gaze, holding it just a fraction too long. There was meaning there. A reminder of his warning.
And perhaps, I imagined, something a little likeGood luck.
—
Despite Egard’s thinly veiled hostility, he eventually let me glimpse the map he carried. The journey was fifty miles as the crow flew, but with our route requiring a loop around the southern foothills of the Cradle, we’d be on the road for more like sixty-five. Five nights in coaching inns until we reached Port Rhorstin.
Before he could snatch the map away, I traced down the coastline with my eyes to the Saltwoods, to the city of Pontarth and the tiny village markedYstren.
My birthplace.
A knot had formed in my insides. My mother might still be there, I thought, working the little apothecary’s garden my father left us after he died. He’d been killed when I was six in a pointless skirmish for a local lord who held tenured land from House Mallard. Skewered by a polearm, then dragged behind a cart. Even before I heard Zennia’s grim stories, I had reason to resent the Hundred’s deadly politicking, their bickering.
But though the thought of my mother made my eyes burn uncomfortably, I doubted she would ever welcome me back, even if I wanted to return to my hometown. The law forbade Orha lacking sanctioned employment from ever using our gifts again, and tales of the Revolt still lurked like a shadow in people’s minds. I’d be shunned, the object of deep suspicion, forced to wear laconite everywhere I went.
It wouldn’t be much of a life at all.
My sparse belongings barely filled the leather case they’d been packed in—by one of the Instructors’ servants, maybe—and I hadnothing, no books, to pass the time on the journey. Egard and his companion, who it turned out was called Belamy, amused themselves with card games and crude chitchat, neither of which I had any interest in joining. Instead, I stared out at the passing scree slopes and stands of birches, by turns mesmerized and terrified to see the world outside Arbenhaw.
This was a world hostile to my kind. Though Arbenhaw had felt akin to a prison, it had also, for a decade, been my home. The bell tolls directing our movements every day. The Instructors: harsh, but always there, like strict parents…That was all gone. And it made my chest hurt a little.
As we trailed through Glangell, the great forest hugging the mountains, I tried to stave off my anxiety about the island, and my misery over Zennia, by daydreaming about running: imagining myself leaping out of the coach and disappearing, living amid nature, using my gift to draw up water.
But I knew the likely reality would be starvation. Winter was on its way, and nobles hunted in these woods. I’d eventually have to buy food, seek out shelter. And with laconite everywhere, humming whenever I came near, I’d quickly attract attention and be questioned.
I shivered as I watched fir trees flit past the window. Arbenhaw had been a veritable hotbed of rumors, and one was that therewereOrha living in the wilds. Rebels. Insubordinates who called themselves the Cage.
I knew it was one of the few rumors that were true, because I’d seen the headlines screaming across the pages of the news pamphlets that Zennia—and I, more reluctantly—had pickpocketed during our rare trips to town:Brutal Assassination Blamed on Cage Terrorists. Cage Strikes Again in Queendom’s Capital. Regent Shrike Vows to Root Out Rebels.
And then, of course, there had been Owyn.
Zennia and I had sometimes whispered about running. Made up silly stories about where we’d hide out. Then, for the first and only time during our training, one student had absconded. An older boy called Owyn.
He had been sixteen, Zennia and I only twelve. Someone found out later, from a pamphlet plucked out of a gutter, that Owyn had been caught in just two days. They’d made an example of him, said he’d wanted to join the Cage. He hadn’t turned up at Arbenhaw again. None of us knew what had happened to him. Those suspected of being linked to the Cage tended to disappear without trace.
Egard grunted. “You look like you’re being carted to the gallows, girl.”
I met his sour gaze and gave no reply.
Daydreaming about fleeing was a welcome distraction. But in the end, I knew I much preferred a straw-and-linen mattress, a hot breakfast at the bar of a coaching inn, to roughing it in the woods, knowing that at any moment the same suspicion that had fallen on Owyn would fall on me—and the same fate, too.
—
