Chapter One
TALKING TO STRANGERS
Rinka
Sure, there was more blood coming from Rinka’s nose than was ideal, but at least she had made it. She was on board the rail-wheeler and on her way to join her friend Alison in Wilderise.
The day had started well enough. Rinka had packed everything she owned into the largest trunk she’d been able to find and had lugged it to the station an hour before her rail-wheeler was due. She had spent the time since pacing the platform, checking her maps and watching the passengers coming and going, wondering how they could be so nonchalant about the whole thing.
Rinka had never left the city of Arcas Dyrne before. Her family left the orcish strongholds for the city generations before she was born and never looked back, her mother insisting that the orcs who remained were “uncivilized” and “barbaric.” And while most city dwellers took at least the occasional holiday to the coast, Rinka’s mother found those people to be “lazy” and “unscrupulous.”
Truth be told, Rinka’s mother was a judgmental old hag.
Rinka had freed herself from her mother’s house two years earlier when she moved in with a human number-cruncher named Alison Lennox. Their flat had been small but comfortable, and it had been a short walk to Rinka’s job at a butcher shop. A job she hated, but along with Alison’s salary, it brought in enough to pay the rent.
Until one day, it didn’t. With their landlord’s latest rent increase, they were priced out of Arcas Dyrne for good. And thus Rinka had a choice: move back in with her mother, or join Alison in a land she’d never set foot in, a wild and dangerous land she’d only seen at the picture show.
She chose the latter.
Morning light flashed from the open windows of the rail-wheeler as it rounded the final curve into Arcas Dyrne’s North Station, the great black engine billowing smoke and pulling a dozen red cars behind it. A crowd had formed on the platform, primarily human and dwarven families heading out for one of those “unscrupulous” early holidays. Rinka lifted her trunk with ease despite its size, planting it and herself just a step from the platform’s edge.
The rail-wheeler slowed. Rinka could not resist the urge to take one final look at her maps and the letter from Alison with instructions on each step of her voyage, even though she’d had them memorized for weeks. She reached into her leather satchel, but when she removed the papers, a sudden gust of warm wind from the rail-wheeler swept through the platform, sending them into the air.
“No!” cried Rinka, snatching with her strong grey arms. She came away with only one of the documents: the map of her home country, Loegria. The one she needed the least.
Rinka pushed through the crowd as they inched closer to the platform’s edge in anticipation, elbowing a dwarf in his ear (“Watch it!”) and nearly tripping over a tiny Halfling child as she followed the papers, which swirled and flapped in the breeze as if they were birds in flight. She caught the corner of Alison’sletter just as she reached the part of the platform where the first-class passengers waited, shouting an apology that frightened a lady elf in a fine silken dress back into her partner, who huffed in Rinka’s general direction.
The rail-wheeler had pulled to a stop, and the platform grew even more crowded as the overnight passengers from Landsend pushed through the outgoing travelers on their way from the station. A human man in a hurry batted the final paper—the most important one, the map of Rinka’s destination, Wilderise—out of his face and down to the concrete of the platform floor, where Rinka lost sight of it as it tangled in the legs of the passengers.
She grabbed at something on the ground, coming away with a folded and yellowed object that greatly resembled the worn map Alison had sent her, but it was only a human newspaper. The crowd thinned as the passengers began to board. Finally, Rinka spotted the map caught on the armrest of the last bench before the end of the platform. She sighed with relief as she tucked it back into her satchel, content to have everything back in its rightful place.
Her joy was short-lived.
Turning hastily to make her way back to the third-class section, she crashed face-first into a cart of luggage pushed by a human valet.
For a moment, everything went black. And then stars danced in her eyes as she blinked to refocus them. She smelt something metallic and felt a warm drop of liquid slide from her nose to the top of her lip before she felt the pain.
“I’m sorry, miss, but you should watch where you’re going,” yelled the valet. He had not stopped to see the damage; Rinka doubted the elf he accompanied would have allowed it if he’d wanted to.
Her nose hurt, badly. She wiped at her face and came away with a surprising amount of blood on her hand. She reached into her satchel for her handkerchief, staining her maps with her own blood.
“Pixie’s britches,” said Rinka to no one in particular.
There wasn’t anyone to speak to.
The platform was nearly empty now, the waiting passengers having finished boarding during her struggle. Ignoring the blood streaming down her face and the throbbing of her nose, she sprinted back to her abandoned trunk, the rush of air pulling tendrils of her auburn hair loose from its bun.
“All aboard!” shouted the conductor.
“Wait! Wait for me!” yelled Rinka as the rail-wheeler’s wheels squealed into motion.
Rinka tossed the trunk up the stairs of a third-class car just as it began to move away. But when she reached out her hand to grab the railing and pull herself on board, she came back with empty air.
The rail-wheeler was picking up speed quickly. Rinka’s reflexes were normally excellent, but the pain had sent tears into her eyes, obscuring her vision and making it hard for her to find the stairs to the next carriage as it rushed past.
“Look, Mummy,” said the Halfling child Rinka had nearly trampled earlier from the approaching stairwell, tugging on his mother’s sleeve and pointing to Rinka. The Halfling’s mother, a human woman, shook her head at the child and muttered something about the impoliteness of staring, offering no help whatsoever.
As Rinka turned to the final stairway, her teary eyes caught the motion of a figure sprinting across the platform. She couldn’t quite make him out, but he appeared to be as tall and broad as an orc. He certainly moved like an orc, covering the gap between the platform and the moving rail-wheeler in one great leap.
