5
It took hours, but I managed to make it far enough out of the village that night that I was unlikely to bump into any folk I knew on the road come the morning and have to try to explain what on earth I thought I was doing.
The very first cart I waved at stopped for me, and the driver even helped me up into the hay-stuffed back with his own hands. I spun him some story about an aunt with a sickness, how I had been sent by the family to care for her.
I don’t know if he believed me, but he pitied me enough to say he would carry me all the way to her fictional house in the city. I told him I didn’t know the exact address, that I had been told to ask about for it when I got there, and at that he did look at me a bit oddly.
I had forgotten how large a place a city must be, and how difficult it must be to find one person in the whole crowded mess of it, not like in our village where you just had to collar one old biddy to find out the affairs of the whole damn place.
He obviously decided not to ask anything further. I realized why when I saw his quick glance down toward my belly. He thought I was “in trouble,” in the way of village girls, and was leaving to spare my family shame. People didn’t usually travel unless, like him, they were delivering goods, or had some kind of dire need.
“I’m not going straight there,” he told me. “I have stops to make further out first—you caught me on my way out to the border villages. You might want to wait and find someone else.”
But I couldn’t wait. I had to be moving, to ease the roiling in my stomach and brain. “How much longer will it take?” I asked.
He shrugged. “A day at most.”
I had never been to the villages along the border. You heard strange things about them. From the stories, it was the outcasts and the oddities who moved there, close to the edges of the kingdom, people who had disgraced themselves irreversibly at home or who had other, private reasons for wanting to leave the comforts of the central villages for the straggling, struggling settlements on the edges.
I didn’t know quite why the kingdom’s borders attracted strays, and nor did anyone else seem to know, but all agreed that you didn’t go there except out of direst necessity—and, if you did, you took a stout stick with which to beat off any suspect characters.
Drivers like this one did a roaring trade ferrying goods out to them, though; for some reason, very little grew along the border. The soil was unforgiving, perhaps. The few people I had seen from those places had been small and weedy, too. Apparently, nothing thrived out there.
There were other stories, too, about something sinister that lurked around the kingdom’s edges, but I didn’t put much truck in that. My need to get to the sorcerer was such, however, that rather than take the risk of not finding someone else who seemed trustworthy enough to drive me to the city, I chose to take the roundabout route with this cart driver.
He was gruff, but well mannered, and I had no sense of danger from him. He would provide some protection. Not everyone I encountered on the road would be a safe bet, and I wasn’t desperate enough to take unnecessary risks. Not yet.
As we wound our circuitous and bumpy route to the border, the villages grew gradually dirtier and less prosperous. I looked with interest, having never seen any place but my own village before, and noticed the houses turning from brick-and-mortar to weathered boards, and the roads from cobble to pockmarked dirt.
Crops browned in the fields, and the cattle that grazed alongside the road looked thinner and larger of eye. The children grew skinnier too and chased our cart with their hands out, shouting for coin and candy, but I had none to give.
We passed through those villages without stopping, until we were right on the edge of the kingdom, a full ten hours’ ride from home, and the cart driver pulled up outside a rough-looking tavern.
This village had an odd feel about it that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. It had a scruffy, scrounging air, true, like the rest of the border settlements, but the oddness was more in the angle and mien of the buildings. They seemed poised either to run or to snarl, like so many flea-bitten stray dogs that had been kicked one too many times.
The driver cleared his throat. He had said so little that this gave me a start.
“I’m not staying here tonight,” he told me. “We’ll set off after dinner. You can sleep on the cart.”
Sleeping in a pile of hay after sitting in a pile of hay all sodding day. Delightful. But it would save me some coin. I nodded. “Are we running behind, then?”
“No.” He rubbed his nose. “I don’t like to sleep here, is all. Always drive straight through.”
“Why don’t you like to stay here?” I asked, emboldened by what was our longest conversation since setting off.
“Just don’t,” he said. “No one does.”
He was clearly done with talk, and so I shut up as well. I did help him unload some of his crates of produce, though, as thanks for the lift, and he seemed pleasantly surprised at the strength of my arms.
I asked if I had time to stretch my legs, and he nodded, but told me to be back within the hour, as he planned to finish his transaction as quickly as possible.
I didn’t want to wander too far in this unnerving place, so I took a brief walk around the tavern, just enough to shake the cobwebs, and then I huffed out a great breath and sat myself down on a wooden crate.
I made sure I could see the cart driver from where I sat, in case I ran into any trouble. I don’t know what sort of trouble I imagined would find me, but the whole village had the stench of danger about it, no less worrisome because it was so undefined.
The light of the setting sun glanced off the windows of the buildings around me in odd, disjointed patterns, like a smile missing some of its teeth. There were few people about, and they walked with their heads down and their eyes determinedly on their shoes. Gave me the shivers, like I said.
Chastising myself for my childish fears, I forced myself to stand up and walk with as much confidence as I could muster. I needed to stretch my legs further before an uncomfortable night in the cramped cart, sandwiched between the hard boards and the itchy hay. And no matter how unsavory this village felt, I would be sorry later if I didn’t take the opportunity to work my muscles a bit.
