“Careful,” Ana said as the other woman picked herself up and brushed stalks of grass from her dress.
“It’s fine,” Paul murmured in a weak voice, repeating it over and over. “It’s fine, it’s fine. I’m fine.”
“Is he going to be all right?” Tom asked. “Ah, it bloody fucking hurts!”
Ana glanced up, her expression black with anger and disgust. “He’s fine.”
Tom turned toward the wagon, cast one last look at Paul as Domonic gently helped him to sit upright and Ana held out a skin of water, then stepped over the smith’s legs.
“Sam! What happened?”
Sam spun. “We’re not sure, but we’ve lost one of the horses. Korbin’s checking out the wagon now.” One of the men cried out in triumph as a tie snapped beneath his knife. The entire wagon lurched as the surviving horse rolled away from the traces that had held it on its side, stumbling to its feet. Men surrounded it, hands raised to calm it down, its eyes white. It snorted, danced back and forth, trying to escape its wranglers, but Tom could see it calming even as he watched.
Sam must have seen it as well; he turned his back to the wagon. “How’s Paul?”
“He’ll be fine.” The tension in Sam’s shoulders relaxed. “Where’s Korbin?”
“On the other side of the wagon, looking at the undercarriage.” Tom rounded the wagon, careful to steer away from the spooked horse. He found Korbin leaning over one of the wagon’s wheels. Korbin was a full hand shorter than Tom, thin, and younger by nearly ten years. A wheelwright, he’d come to New Andover on the same ship as Tom with his new and newly pregnant wife, Lyda.
Tom took in the splintered wood of the wheel, the cracked spokes, and grimaced. “What’s the damage, Korbin?”
The young man glanced toward Tom, pushed his glasses farther up onto his nose, then sighed as he stood up straight. “Wheel’s broken, but that’s easy to fix. I made certain replacements were packed. The real problem is going to be sorting out the traces and the damage to the axle and tongue.”
“How long to fix it, do you think?” Korbin shrugged. “A few hours at least.”
The sound of thundering hooves approached, and Tom turned to see Walter, Jackson, and the escort of guardsmen pulling up near the overturned wagon, clods of dirt and grass thrown up by the horses’ feet. Walter’s horse pranced as he maneuvered it closer to the group crowded around the wagon’s base.
“What happened?” he asked.
“Something spooked the horses,” Tom said. “They bolted and overturned the wagon.”
“It was the air that spooked them.”
Both Walter and Tom shifted their attention to Paul as he rounded the back of the wagon, Ana and Arten at his side. Ana had put his arm in a sling made from someone’s apron to keep it immobile, but Paul still winced as he walked. Some color had returned to his face, but he appeared haggard, his clothes stained with mud and grass from the fall.
“What do you mean it was the air that spooked them?” Walter asked, the words twisted with derision.
Paul frowned at his tone. “It was the air. Just before the horses reared up and bolted, I felt the air get heavy, as if someone had laid a blanket across my shoulders. It became harder to breathe, and the hairs on my arms prickled.” A few of those around the wagon nodded in agreement. “I was about to whistle for a halt.”
Walter snorted. But many of the men and women who had been near the wagon before the horses bolted were mumbling to themselves.
Tom thought about the distortion he’d seen from the ridge. He caught Arten looking at him and wondered if the commander had seen it. Cutter had said something about the air as well. He almost mentioned it, but after a glance at the uneasiness in everyone around the wagon, he decided to keep quiet, at least for now. He wouldn’t be able to later. Rumors would spread, and someone would remember Cutter’s story; they hadn’t tried to keep anything the squatter had said quiet.
“Repair the wagon as best you can,” Walter finally snapped. “We’ll rest here.” He scanned those gathered, then tugged the reins of his horse, the animal dancing to the side before heading back toward the front of the wagon train, the rest of Walter’s escort following behind.
“What should we do about the dead horse?” one of the men asked.
Tom grimaced. Korbin had already gone back to work on the wagon.
“Butcher it. We may need the meat.”
Colin found Karen sitting on a small stool, milking the goats. He shuddered.
“What was that for?” Karen asked. “Am I that hideous? I know the sun’s been harsh, but . . .”
Colin smiled. “No. It was for the goats. I don’t like them, their bristly hair, their skeletal faces . . . but most especially their awful, yellow, hourglass eyes. They aren’t natural.” He shuddered again.
Karen laughed, still milking as she glanced at the goat in question. It ripped some of the grass free beneath its feet where it was tied to the back of the wagon and chewed contentedly, ears flicking away flies. “They are rather ugly, aren’t they?” she finally said, then shrugged. “But they’re easier to bring along than cows.”
As Colin settled down to the grass behind her, the goat turning to watch, bits sticking out of its mouth in all directions, she asked, “What’s going on with the wagon?”
“Korbin is almost finished. They’re trying to figure out how to rig it so a single horse can pull it. They thought about using some of the guardsmen’s horses, but they aren’t workhorses. They’re a few hands shorter, and they don’t think they’d have the endurance. So some of the supplies are being redistributed to other wagons to decrease the weight, and Korbin is altering the hitch and harness. We should be moving again shortly.”
“Good. I’m tired of waiting. We’ve been sitting here for three hours already.” She tilted her head, squeezing a last few drops of milk from the goat’s udder, then sat back, one arm reaching to massage the opposite shoulder. Shoving the goat aside, she picked up the half-full bucket and turned to where Colin stood, brushing grass from his breeches.
Before he knew what had happened, she’d backed him up against the wagon and kissed him. Her free hand fell against his chest, where the crescent moon pendant rested against his skin. He could hear children playing on the plains somewhere close by, tossing a stuffed leather ball about, their laughter ragged with the wind. A twinge of worry pulled in his chest that someone would see them, that they’d be caught, but here in the wagon train this was as private a moment as they were likely to get until nightfall, so he let the worry slip away.
When Karen finally backed off, he said, “You smell like goat.” She slapped his upper arm, harder than he’d expected, but she couldn’t hide her grin.
Someone cleared his throat, and both he and Karen spun, guilt already burning up Colin’s neck. But when he saw Walter, he froze. The anger that he’d buried so deep during the night in the penance lock, that he’d buried again after his mother told him to stay away from the Proprietor’s son on the trek, flared up. He’d managed not to run into Walter for the entire journey so far, at least alone. His father had always been present, Colin in the background, so that they didn’t have to interact. But now the anger burned, suffused his skin with a tingling hatred, and it took ever ything he had to control it, to remain rigid and motionless, hands squeezed tight.
Karen took a small step forward, placing herself between the two, but to one side. Her eyes were narrowed, her face set. She didn’t seem embarrassed at all, merely angry. “What do you want, Walter?”
Walter’s gaze didn’t leave Colin’s face. Colin couldn’t read what he saw there, it was too controlled. Even his voice was bland.
“Korbin says the wagon is ready. We’re leaving.”
“Good.” When Walter didn’t move, she said tightly, “Was there something else?”
Walter’s eyes shifted toward Karen, glanced up and down, taking in her rumpled dress, her bare feet, the bucket of goat’s milk, then returned to her face. He almost smirk
ed, but something he saw in Karen’s face stopped him. He frowned instead, the tension in his shoulders relaxing. “No. Nothing else.”
He began moving away. Colin watched him, jaw clenched, breathing through his nose. Before he rounded the end of the wagon, he shot Colin and Karen a thoughtful look . . . and then he was gone.
Karen turned toward Colin, sighed in exasperation when she saw his face, his clenched fists and tightened jaw. “Ignore him, Colin. He’s not worth it.”
“I didn’t like the way he looked at us when he left.”
“So what? It was just a look. Now come on, I want to ditch this milk before we get started.”
“What do you think, Arten? Can we make it?”
“Yes, we can,” Walter answered, voice heavy. He shifted with impatience.
Tom ignored the Proprietor’s son and turned to the commander of the Armory. To the east, the shortened cliffs of the Bluff—over a thousand hands high at the Falls, a mere seven hundred hands high here—were broken by a huge landslide. Tons of stone had slipped free and crashed down when the cliffs had given way at some point in the past, and now a scree of rock and dirt and brush formed a rough pathway from the rumpled valley below to the heights above, a mound of dirt that narrowed to a crack in the Bluff itself about a hundred hands down from the top before opening up again on the far side, forming a cusp to the heights.
Arten shook his head uncertainly. “It’s hard to say. It’s definitely the best option we’ve seen for reaching the upper plains since the Falls. The only option, truthfully.”
“What have the scouts reported about the Bluff farther north?”
“It continues, with minor rockfalls and a steady decrease in height, but they haven’t seen any evidence that the Bluff itself ends anytime soon.” He caught Tom’s gaze. “If we’re going to make it to the upper plains, this will have to be it.”
Tom sighed, scanned the rockfall again.
He didn’t like it. It was too steep, especially near the top, near the mouth of the slide, where the Bluff cupped it to either side, the collapse forming a fairly large indentation in the facade of the cliff. The wagons would never make it.
“If we go slow,” Korbin said from behind him, “and have the wagons switch back and forth across the length of the scree, I think we’ll be fine. But it will take most of the rest of today to scale it.” Walter stepped forward, fists clenched. But he kept his voice calm, controlled. “We need to reach those heights. For the Family. For the Company. We need to lay claim to that land before anyone else.”
Tom bowed his head, closed his eyes, and swallowed the gritty taste of grass and dust in the back of his throat.
“You heard the Proprietor,” he said. “Secure everything loose inside the wagons, tie everything down. The slide is mostly rock. It’s going to be rough.”
Everyone who’d gathered to argue and listen in dispersed, a sense of excitement passing through them in a low murmur. They’d been following the Bluff for ten days, the scenery barely changing. There’d been no viable location to set up a settlement—no rivers, no lakes, only narrow streams and creeks, all meandering southward toward the river they’d left behind. They’d run out of the dryflatbread, and most of the smoked meats, and while small game was in abundance, Tom had grown tired of the taste of rabbit and fowl. They needed to find a major water source and some larger game soon, and the reports from the scouts searching northward weren’t promising.
“What do you think?” Arten asked, stepping up to Tom’s side. Tom shook his head. “It’s a risk. I’d rather set up the town down here, but we don’t have the water resource we’d need, nor the wood. We’ve only seen copses, the trees too young to be used for anything useful. So if Korbin thinks we can make it to the top with the wagons . . .”
Arten grunted. “Let’s see how stable the rockslide is first. We can always stop and continue north.”
“I’m not so certain of that.” Tom nodded toward where Walter and Jackson stood at the base of the slide itself, the first wagon already starting to crawl up the slope along its base, angled sharply to the north; it was too steep to head directly up the side. The wagon rocked as it was pulled over the rough stone. One of the guardsmen led the wagon, cutting through any tangled undergrowth in the way. “Walter’s intent on getting to the upper plains. He’s been searching for a way up since we left the Falls.”
“And he’s right.” When Tom raised his eyebrows in question, the commander added, “To the Court, the difference between having a settlement down here or up there is significant. The Bluff is a boundary, and the Carrente Family position will be stronger if Walter can establish a town, or even an outpost, on the far side.”
The wagon had reached the edge of the slide, and both men watched in silence as its driver and the group of men around it turned it so it could head back toward them, a little higher up the scree. Tom drew in a sharp breath when a few rocks gave way beneath one wheel, the stone clattering down the short distance to the grass, but the horses didn’t falter.
Once the leader was on its way, a ragged cheer erupted from the rest of the men and women still on the ground, and the second wagon started out.
“I’ll feel better about it once we’re all safely at the top of the Bluff,” Tom said, then searched for Ana. He found her at the third wagon, with Korbin and his wife, Lyda. He headed toward her, smiling as Ana reached out to touch Lyda’s growing stomach; Arten moved away, toward Walter and Jackson and the rest of the Armory.
“Has he started kicking yet?” Ana asked.
“Not yet,” Lyda said, her voice soft, her face radiant in the sun, a glow that Tom had seen in Ana’s face when she was pregnant with Colin, a vibrance that had shown through no matter how sweaty, grimy, or dirty Ana’s hair and face had been.
Lyda’s hair was lighter than Ana’s, her face rounder, skin smoother. But Tom thought the differences had more to do with the difference in their ages.
“Hmm,” Ana said wryly, then smiled. “It won’t be long now though.” It was the first smile he’d seen on her face that wasn’t tainted with anger or weariness or regret since they’d left Trent. A pure smile, touching her eyes, trembling in her hands.
When she drew away from Lyda, one hand going to her chest and the hidden pendant there, Tom took her other hand and kissed it.
She gave him a questioning look, but he shook his head. The wagon beside them gave a lurch and started forward, Korbin and Lyda moving to follow. “He’s a lucky man,” Tom said.
“I was worried about her when they told us they intended to come with the wagons,” Ana said. “I thought they’d head back to Andover, since they were expecting a child.”
“Why were you worried?”
They started after the wagon, walking hand in hand, watching where they stepped.
Ana glanced ahead, to make certain that Lyda and Korbin wouldn’t overhear. “She seemed a little . . . soft. Delicate. I wasn’t certain she’d be able to handle the walking, or the work. But she’s handling it better than some of the others.”
Tom nodded. Ahead, the wagon had reached the first turn, Korbin overseeing the change in direction. The wheelwright shouted for help.
Tom squeezed Ana’s hand. “I’d better go be useful,” he said, then jogged forward. As he put his shoulder to the side of the wagon and shoved hard, he saw Ana rejoin Lyda, both cutting up ahead of the horses. And then sweat ran down into his eyes, and he focused his attention on getting the damn wagon to move.
Afternoon grew steadily into evening, and the wagons zigzagged their way up the slide, each pass getting shorter as the rockfall narrowed. The first wagon passed the neck of the slide an hour before sunset, struggling up the last section into the bowl that had sunk into the upper plains beyond, where the ground was flatter and less rugged. They reached the top of the Bluff moments later, whistles and cheers echoing down the scree from above. Tom paused to stare up at the men waving from the heights and smiled, relief coursing through him. All down the trail, people
clapped and whistled in response, the excited conversation that had died down after the first hour of climbing returning with laughter and claps on the backs. Dogs barked, tails wagging, and goats bleated.
“I told you it was possible,” Korbin said, and Tom turned, gave him a grin. Korbin smiled in return, pushed his glasses up onto his nose.
Behind him, Tom saw the ground beneath the back wheel of the wagon slip.
“Watch out!” he barked and surged forward, rock and dirt cascading away from the wheel in a small avalanche. The wagon began to tilt as he brushed past Korbin—
Then his shoulder slammed into the corner of the wagon, his feet sliding in the dirt. For a moment, he thought the ground beneath him would give way, that his weight would set the entire slope tumbling down to the plains below, but his boots found solid stone and held.
The weight of the wagon began digging into his shoulder. He gasped, sweat already sliding down into his eyes, down his back. He heard shouts as men began converging on the wagon from all sides. Korbin dodged in behind him, sending another cascade of dirt down the hill, loosening Tom’s footing briefly, and then the wheelwright added his strength to Tom’s.
“Henri!” Tom bellowed. “Get the damn wagon moving! We can’t hold it forever!”
He heard Henri curse the horses, heard the whip snap, the wagon shuddering, gouging deeper into his shoulder, but it didn’t move. Someone scrambled next to Korbin from the far side, near the front wheel, another avalanche of stone rattling down the slide. Tom blinked the sweat from his eyes, stared down the steep slope toward the wagons below, saw men surging up the fall toward them, stumbling on the rocks—
And with no warning at all, the stone beneath Tom’s feet gave way. He spat a curse as he kicked, feet digging into earth and stone, and then he was falling.
He heard Ana scream, “Tom!” her voice cracking with fear, and then his shoulder slammed into the rockfall, pain shooting up into his shoulder from his elbow as he spun and rolled, stone sliding with him. He didn’t cry out, didn’t have time. He ground to a halt a short way below and to the side of where Korbin and another man—young, no more than seventeen—were frantically trying to hold the wagon upright.
Well of Sorrows Page 14
