Distant tales of the Dichotomy

“Twenty pounds of flour,” said Fel.

“Yes.”

“Why do we need twenty pounds of flour?”

“For bread.”

“We’re being hunted by an entire kingdom. We’re sleeping in ditches. We don’t have an oven.”

“Then we’ll have the idea of bread,” said Thara, hoisting the sack onto her shoulder with the dignity of a woman carrying a crown. “It’s very comforting. You’ll thank me later.”

They were standing in the yard of a dye-works in a hamlet called Dunmere, a day’s walk south of the tavern, and the sun had barely cleared the hills. It was a drab, crooked place of a dozen mud-brick houses and one muddy street. The dyer, a half-deaf old man with arms stained blue to the elbow, had asked no questions at all. He had looked at the silver moon Veyra put on his counter and the heap of goods Thara had stacked beside it, nodded once, and gone back to his vats.

It had been Seluine’s silver. Fel had not known. When they left Veilrest, the old woman had pressed a small leather purse into Veyra’s hand, heavy with coins stamped with a crescent, and told her to keep it for an emergency. Veyra had decided that a kingdom looking for them with torches counted.

They needed to move fast. They needed to be invisible. And they needed, before anything else, to stop looking like the four people on the poster.

“Flour,” said Fel again, to himself, and gave up.

The list had taken the better part of the night to write. They had sat around a smoking pot in the forest hollow, passing a stub of charcoal and a scrap of bark between them, and each of them had added a line.

Brannoch wanted food. Dried meat, hard cheese, black bread, nuts, a barrel of salted fish. He said it with the intensity of a man describing a religious vision. Veyra wanted arrows, a bundle of fresh feathers, and a number of strange hollow bone bulbs that she called singers and which she refused to explain. Thara wanted rope, a coil of fine wire, six candles, a fistful of tin whistles, a sack of dried peppers, a ball of beeswax, and what she called “the usual.”

Fel had wanted maps.

“Maps?” Thara had said. “Out here?”

“We can’t use the high road. We can’t use the bridges. We can’t use anything with a guard on it. If we’re going back to Veilrest, we’re going back through the places that nobody uses.” He had looked up. “Someone’s going to know where those are.”

Someone did.

Her name was Gwenna Tuck, and she was a peddler, and she lived in a wagon at the end of Dunmere’s only street.

She was small and brown and sharp-faced, with a rag tied around her white hair and a pipe that had gone out an hour ago. Her wagon was painted in faded blues and yellows. It was crammed from floor to ceiling with spools, bundles, tins, and ancient leather tubes. She looked at the four of them for a long, long time, sitting on the steps of her wagon with her elbows on her knees. Fel kept his gloved hand in his pocket.

“Maps,” she said.

“Of the back roads,” said Fel. “Goat tracks. Smugglers’ paths. Anything between here and the cloud peaks that doesn’t go through a town.”

“That’s a lot of nothing.”

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“That’s why we need them.”

She considered this. Then she stood, with a series of small creaks, and vanished into the wagon. They heard digging. They heard swearing. She came out with a leather tube, which she unrolled across her knees.

It was a thing of beauty. It had been drawn by hand, with a fine pen, in a dozen different colors, and it showed the whole country between Sorticia and the mountains, every hill, every creek, every thread of footpath. Little red crosses were scattered across it. Fel counted nine.

“The red marks are blockades,” said the old woman. “Went up three days ago. All the bridges. All the fords. There’s a cordon on the high road, one every ten miles, and the king’s riders are sweeping the forest in between. They’ve got hounds.” She tapped a spot with a bony finger. “They’re looking for four people.”

“I know.”

“I figured.” She did not look at the glow in his pocket. She did not look at the horns beneath Veyra’s scarf. She only looked at the map. “I figured that you’re either the best-hidden murderers in the kingdom, or the worst.”

“We didn’t kill him.”

“I know that, too.” She rolled the map up with a snap. “Corvane Vael has been burning through apprentices for fifty years. Some of them went mad. One of them went into the river with a stone in his coat. The man was reading the Weave, and the Weave bites.” She shrugged. “I’m not saying he deserved it. I’m saying that I’m not surprised.”

There was a short silence.

“How much?” said Veyra.

“For that? A silver moon.” The old woman grinned. It was an astonishingly bright, wicked grin. “But I’ll take two, and I’ll throw in the hounds.”

“The hounds?”

“There’s a trick.” She jerked a thumb at a basket by the wagon wheel. It was full of little cloth sacks, bound with twine. “A paste of crushed peppermint, ash, and the droppings of a weasel. You rub it on your boots. The hounds lose the scent for an hour.” She sniffed. “It smells like a dead cat in a mint garden. But it works.”

Thara took six.

By noon, they were ready.

It looked, Fel thought, like the preparations for a very strange funeral. Old Clatter stood in the center of the hollow with a great brown tarpaulin lashed over his shell, and over the tarpaulin a layer of moss and branches and torn dye-cloth, so that from a distance he looked like a boulder with a thick coat of lichen. His horns were wrapped in sacking. His wings were folded tight. He was humming very softly to himself, a low and worried drone, and every few minutes the whole boulder shook.

“He doesn’t like it,” said Fel.

“He does not have to like it.”

“He’s sad.”

“He is a beetle.”

“He’s a very sad beetle.”

Veyra sighed. She went to the creature’s flank, stroked it twice, and whispered something into the gap between the plates. The humming stopped. A moment later, the boulder let out a deep, trembling, grudging purr, and Fel could have sworn it winked.

Brannoch was loading the last of the packs. Thara was rubbing the weasel paste on her boots, holding her nose, and cursing. And Veyra, with a cloak the color of dead leaves and a scarf wound twice about her horns, had spread the map across a rock and was tracing a path with one finger.

“Here,” she said. “And here. And here.”

Fel looked. It was not a road. It was barely a rumor: a line of tiny dots wandering up through the hills, skirting the red crosses, crossing a river in the middle of nowhere and vanishing into a blank space marked with a drawing of a skull.

“What’s that?”

“The Weeper’s Gap.”

“And what’s that?”

“A place no one goes.”

“Is that because it’s dangerous?”

“It is because it is quiet,” said Veyra. “Nothing lives there. Nothing patrols it. It is a hole in the forest where no one can hear you coming.” She folded the map. “It will take us six days. It will take us through eight of those crosses. If we are careful, and fast, and lucky, we will reach Veilrest before the king’s riders think to look.”

“And if we’re not?”

“Then we will be dead,” said Veyra, “and Thara can have the flour.”

“I knew it would come in handy.”

Fel almost laughed. Then he caught sight of the ring through the leather of his glove, a thin, faint, steady pulse of white, and the laugh died.

“Veyra.”

“Yes?”

“If anyone finds us… if anything happens…” He swallowed. “It’s me they want. Not you. Not any of you. The poster says four, but the murder was…” He stopped. “I think you should consider…”

“No,” said Veyra.

“I haven’t said it yet.”

“I know what you will say. You will say that we should split up. That you should go alone. That you are a danger to us.” She did not look up from the map. “I have heard it. I have heard a great many noble speeches. I find that I do not enjoy them.”

“But if…”

“Fel.” Her eyes met his. “You are a stranger who fell out of the sky, and you have a ring of light on your hand, and a kingdom is hunting you. That is not a reason to leave you. That is a reason to keep you.” A tiny smile touched her mouth. “I am a very curious woman.”

He did not know what to say to that.

So he said nothing. And she turned back to the map, and in the shadow of her scarf, he thought he saw her ears go very slightly dark.