A laugh bubbled up inside me. Encouraged by this, Owain continued, “North kept looking at you out of the corner of his eye. It’s not proper to speak with ladies if they haven’t spoken to you first, or I would have asked you what you were doing with him.”
“I didn’t know that,” I said, wondering where he could possibly have heard such a thing.
“I read it in my knighthood guide.” Owain pulled a small book out of his pocket. It was old, maybe from the time of my grandfather. “Anyway, lass, if you’re with North, you must be something special.”
“I’m not with him by choice,” I said, idly playing with the strings on my bag. “I’m only with him for as long as it takes to get to Provincia, and then I’m on my own, regardless of what he wants.”
Owain laughed again. “That’s good news for me! Maybe I’ll steal you away when he’s finished.”
I had to smile at his enormous grin.
“All right, lass. I’ll grab the wizard and bring him back here. Then we’ll be off.” He patted my head, and I was glad to have made him so happy.
“Are you a knight, Master Owain?” I asked as he reached the door.
Owain’s face rearranged itself. For a single second, it was devoid of any of his former cheerfulness—a blank slate of fiercely withheld emotion. Then his muscles relaxed. “Perhaps in another life, lass,” he said, shutting the door purposefully behind him.
CHAPTER FOUR
I didn’t realize I had fallen asleep until I awoke to an unfamiliar ceiling above my head and a floral bedspread beneath my cheek. Blinking at the early-morning light, I wiped away the last remnants of sleep and said my prayers. My muscles ached from the cramped position I had slept in. The bedsheets beneath me were perfectly tucked in. It was as if no one else had been in at all.
I sat up straight. No cloaks, no bags, no boots—no men. I had been left behind.
A sharp knock on the door startled me from my thoughts. The small face of Mrs. Pemberly appeared in the doorway.
“Oh, bother!” She opened the door wider. She was carrying a heavy tray of food. “I thought for sure Owain had come back last night….”
“He didn’t come back at all?” I asked.
Mrs. Pemberly shook her head and set the tray down on the small table.
“Hungry, my dear? I wouldn’t mind some company for breakfast….” After not eating the night before, I was ravenous. As we chatted, I couldn’t shake the image in my mind of Owain, hunkered down next to the little old woman, sipping tea and eating eggs. She asked me where I had come from and where I was going and, when the opportunity presented itself, counted off her ten grandchildren on her fingers, pausing when she momentarily forgot the sixth one’s name. When we were finished, she went about her day, and I was left alone to worry.
There was nothing for me to do in Owain’s room. I must have plotted and replotted our path to Provincia a dozen times, looking for the shortest way possible.
“Are you looking for something to do?” Mrs. Pemberly asked when I finally came downstairs. “I have a package that needs to be delivered, but I’m waiting for two of my guests to arrive—I would hate to miss them.”
“Of course,” I said. “Do you happen to know anyone else who might need help today? I need to earn a bit of money.”
What I didn’t say was that we needed to earn a lot of money, and I doubted North could do it alone. If he was going to leave me behind to fight a dragon—a dragon I would have given anything to see with my own eyes—then I wasn’t going to have any qualms about taking the day for myself. Besides, I wanted to be able to buy my own food, to have some sense of independence while I was bound to the wizard.
The old woman rested her hand on her hip. “Emmaline Forthright, perhaps—though she can be a tough bird to haggle with. She’s the one you’ll need to deliver the parcel to. Let me just write a note to her.”
Armed with the parcel in one hand and the note in the other, I passed into the bustling streets of Fairwell. It wasn’t difficult to retrace the path Owain and I had taken to get to Mrs. Pemberly’s inn; the only real danger I faced were the carts of pumpkins and enormous horses that had very little regard for the humans passing before them.
When I finally managed to cross Main Street, I found a small boy sitting beside the road with tears streaming down his cheeks. He had been struck by a wagon; I could tell by the bruise forming on his face and the way he clutched his arm against his chest. At his feet were piles of sand that had escaped from torn burlap sacks.
“Are you all right?” I asked. My eyes were focused on his small face, but my hands had found the piles of sand. Cliffton. I had thought I would never see or feel sand this rough again. I forced the images of fire and tortured faces to the back of my mind.
The boy nodded, but his breathing had become erratic.
“Your arm—is it hurt?”
This time he nodded, and when he spoke, his voice was scarcely above a whisper. “I got kicked by a rottin’ horse and dropped the bags. Mrs. Forthright’ll slaughter me for messin’ up her deliveries.”
“Mrs. Forthright?” I repeated. I tried to salvage as much sand as I could into the bags that weren’t badly torn. They were all labeled with the glassmaker shop names. “We’ll have to talk to her about that then, won’t we? I was just going to see her myself.”
“Why would you want to do that?” the boy whispered. A few minutes later, when I handed the near-empty bags to the middle-aged woman, I understood why.
“And what is this?” she demanded. The boy cowered behind me. “I give you a simple task—”
“He’s hurt his arm,” I cut in. “I don’t think he’ll be able to deliver the sandbags today.”
“And what a little genius you are,” the woman practically snarled. Her fingers raked her dark hair out of her eyes. “What in the seven sodding hells are you doing here?”
I handed her Mrs. Pemberly’s parcel and note and watched her sneer of anger turn to appraisal.
“So you’re looking for work, then?” she asked. “Off home with you, Geoff! I’ll be speaking to your mother tonight about this!”
The boy turned and ran as though the four winds were at his heels, leaving me the sole victim of scrutiny.
“I’ll work the entire day for you,” I said. “For a hundred pieces.”
The woman let out a strangled laugh. “Do you have any idea how much that is?”
“I’ll do every delivery, and I’ll do them quickly, without a single complaint,” I swore.
“Little girl, I make that much in a month!” she said. “You’ll do all that for ten pieces.”
“Sixty,” I said. I was in the position to bargain. The city relied on glass to stay alive, and no glassmaker could make his creations without the sand.
“I can find another boy just as easily for twenty.”
“And I can go faster and take more at once for fifty.”
“With those weak arms? You’ll be lucky to get four deliveries done. Twenty-five.”
“Forty, and I’ll mend the poor excuses for curtains you have in your store window and that dress you’re wearing.”
Mrs. Forthright caught her tongue at my final offer, glancing down at the frayed hem of her old dress. I gave her a hard look, already frustrated by how little I would make from such hard work.
“Forty,” she agreed at last. “But if you drop a speck of sand on the way to any of the deliveries, you’ll be gone without a single piece. And don’t think I’ll give you directions—you are here to make my life easier.”
I fought to hide my smile. “Where would you like me to go first?”
The task was simple enough, but it didn’t make carrying the bags any easier. I had helped Henry load his father’s wagon with mud barrels hundreds of times, yet the distance we had been forced to walk with each bushel had been minimal. Fairwell’s strange streets seemed to constantly double back on one another, and for the first time in my life, my sense of direction abandoned me. I wandered helplessl
y from one street to the next, relying on chance to find the shops I needed.
I had wanted to love Fairwell so badly, to take in everything it had to offer. Now I was ready to smash in the glass signs and sculptures outside each shop. When the sun reached its highest point in the sky, not even the rainbow of light they created could put the smile back on my face. Finally, after I passed the same glass shop half a dozen times, a little woman with an enormous grin stuck her head out her door to ask if I was lost.
I handed her the delivery slip on which Mrs. Forthright had hastily scribbled the address.
“You’re nearly there,” she said. “Two streets over—you’ll have quite a battle trying to get through the crowds, I’m afraid.”
“Why?” I asked, shifting the bag’s weight on my shoulder. “Did something happen?”
“The men are leaving for the capital,” the woman said. “They were summoned last night to prepare Provincia’s defense. Just manual labor, of course, but the Wizard Guard needs the able bodies to do it for them.”
“What about Fairwell’s defense?” I asked.
The woman gave me a sad smile and patted my arm. “Exactly, my dear, exactly. What do they care so long as they’re safe in their castle? In the past, we’ve suffered through years of fighting and destruction, but none of our calls for help were ever answered. There’s a crime in that, you know, a real tragedy. I don’t think any of our men should go.”
But they did, by the hundreds. I found the large street not by her directions, but by the sound of smashing glass and humming voices. I abandoned the bag on my shoulder in front of the nearest shop and pressed my way through the crowds to the very front.
The children in front of me threw flowers, and petals showered down from above, but there was no way I could tear my eyes away from the broken glass in the road. Every now and then, a glassblower would present one of his or her creations, bending down to place it on the road. The men, dressed in everything from dress coats to torn trousers, smashed the figurines to pieces beneath their boots.
It went on this way for some time, until every piece of glass had been ground into a fine dust and mixed with the fallen petals. When the last man had finally passed, a group of women came along and began to brush the dust into bins.
“What’s happening?” I asked the woman next to me. Her little girl chewed on the end of her braid and pressed her face into her mother’s skirt.
“It’s tradition,” the woman said, patting her daughter’s head. “You’ll have to excuse her. She’s never been without her papa for long.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said, looking down at the girl again.
“The glass and petals,” the woman continued. “They’re refired into new shapes and forms. It’s meant to show that even if the city is set forth into ruin, it can always be built back up. We’re a city of re-creators, you know. It’s in our blood to start again.”
I didn’t know what to say to that, but it seemed somehow appropriate to me that we were standing on Restoration Road.
With the deliveries finished and my money collected, I ran back to Mrs. Pemberly’s inn. The woman caught my eye as I ducked back inside and shook her head. The wrinkles on her face deepened with her frown.
“They’re still not here?” I asked, my fingers fiddling with my necklace.
She shook her head. “I’ll send them up as soon as they get back.”
The hours went by, and there was still no sign of either North or Owain. A dragon isn’t an easy job, I reminded myself. But it was half-past six, and I was ready to start traveling again. We had wasted too much time already.
Half sprawled across Owain’s creaky bed, I wrote a letter to Henry. I told him about the wizards, about the fight and earthquake in Dellark, the rover beetle, and Fairwell’s destroyed bridge, but there was no way to explain the strange headache I had, or the hollow feeling at the pit of my stomach. Examining the letter, I saw that my words were disjointed and angled; none of my o’s were fully rounded, and I hadn’t dotted any of my i’s.
I don’t know what to do, I wrote. I want to look for them, but I’m too scared to go outside. Does that make me a terrible person? One of them—or both—could be terribly hurt, and would anyone know? I’m not sure when I’ll have time to write again, or if this letter will even find you at all. Write to me if you can, please, at this address! I miss you very, very much.
I crossed it out hastily, guilt welling up inside me. I didn’t want Henry to know any of it, but every word of the letter had been true, and seeing my heart splayed out in words made me feel only worse.
Several hours later, I found myself by the lonely window in Owain’s room with my reassembled loom and ten rows of blue. Mrs. Pemberly had brought me dinner and even cookies, though they weren’t nearly as delicious as the ones that emerged from my mother’s oven. At that point I would have given anything—a finger, my best dress, my loom—just for a taste of her cooking. I would have devoured it, even if it had been coated with dust.
The room had darkened abruptly, and all I had to light my work were three candle stubs that were melting quickly. Still, once my hands began their usual routine, it felt like coming home again. When the rain finally started to fall, I opened the windows and listened to the droplets as they hit the roof and windowpane. For the first time in days, I felt like myself.
But just as quickly, a different storm blew in, one of hearty laughter and heavy stomping.
“I think I know which room is mine, boy!”
“Didn’t know you could read!”
“How ’bout you read my…my…”
“Ha! Still a quick wit, I see!”
I dropped the thread without a second thought.
Thank you, Astraea, I thought, releasing a heavy sigh.
The door to the room banged open, and two figures stumbled in, laughing and wheezing. I turned to greet them, but the words died on my lips. They stopped midchuckle, their eyes wide. They had forgotten about me.
“Hullo, Syd!” North said brightly. He was leaning heavily on Owain, who looked only a little steadier on his feet.
“Are you hurt?” I asked. “When you didn’t come back I thought that—Did you get the dragon?”
North tried to draw me into a hug, but I knew the warning signs now. Flushed cheeks, glazed eyes…and the smell. I took a step back, and he landed face-first on the bed.
I looked to Owain in disbelief, but he wouldn’t meet my eyes.
“He’s drunk—you’re both drunk!” I said. “All this time, were you just drinking yourself to rot?”
“We did the job, lass!” Owain said quickly. “Job done, dragon slayed, all merry!”
“So tell me how the job entailed drinking yourselves into stupidity?” I demanded. “You should never have left me behind! I wanted to go!”
“But it was a dragon—too dangerous,” Owain said, almost whining.
“I’ll decide what’s too dangerous for me from now on, thank you,” I snapped.
Owain shook his head, and the rain clinging to his thick hair went flying. “Took us hours to ride out there on Vesta. North gave that dragon hell—never seen so much magic in my life. Whirls of ice, fire of his own! I thought he might be burned to a crisp, but he brought the red cloak down and there wasn’t a burn on him. Then I climbed on the dragon’s back and took my sword and—” He took a deep breath. “And then the villagers made us stay and feast, because that dragon had been around for a year and no wizard had been able to kill the bloody thing until him and me!”
I clenched my fists at my side. “So North, where’s your pay?” I demanded. “If you killed this dragon, I want to see what the villagers gave you.”
North had a piece of paper in his hands and was peering at it closely. He blinked several times, trying to clear his vision.
“Henry Porter,” he began, his voice slightly slurred as he read the name on the letter I’d written earlier. “Who is this Henry? Why do you keep writing to him?”
“That’s my
letter,” I said, ripping it so brutally from his hands that it tore. “How dare you?”
“Why do you keep writing home, anyway?” North asked, rolling onto his back. “What do you tell them? How much you…you hate me and how stupid I am?”
My throat burned, but I couldn’t speak. He was the one who had taken me far enough away that I could only imagine what was happening to my home—to my friends and family.
North continued playing with the ripped edge of the letter. “’s not so bad with me, is it? I take care of you. Not like your parents. Gave you up for a few drops of rain.”
He wasn’t even talking to me anymore. My throat clenched, and I felt the letter wrinkle in my palm. Don’t cry, I told myself. Don’t cry, don’t cry…
And just as quickly, the ache in my heart gave way to a new one, only this pain was hot and burning. The tears dried up in my eyes before they had a chance to fall.
“You’re better off with me, Syd,” North said simply. “I’ll take care of you and all.”
“Well,” I said, clutching my necklace in my fist. “Start taking care of yourself, because I won’t be your problem anymore.”
“What?” He lifted his head. “Don’t be stupid, Syd—”
I tore out of the room, not letting him finish, and I stumbled down the stairs.
“Syd!” he yelled, his voice cut off as the door shut behind me.
I heard the door bang open again and the sound of a few heavy steps before a sudden crash marked the end of all further movement. “Syd, don’t—”
But I just ran harder, past a startled Mrs. Pemberly and out into the cold rain.
If it had been a clear night, I would have been halfway back to Cliffton, but the rain was hard and unforgiving, so thick that I had to stop and shield my eyes just to see the street names. Lungs burning, desperate, I forced myself to keep running.
I came to rest against the beveled surface of a building, gasping for air. The wind howled angrily back at me, as if disappointed that I had given up so easily. The rain soaked straight through to my bones and caused my stubborn hair to cling to my cheeks. I took a deep, steadying breath. The more upset I let myself become, the worse the storm seemed to be. I needed a few moments to think, I told myself, bringing my hands to my face.
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