Chapter 7: Friends on the Road

Wirrin spent a day sitting on the veranda at Willamette’s, eating a lot of tasty food and staring vacantly down at the end of the last harvests in the Blavan Plains. Tellan’s caravanserai was full-up with carts and wagons waiting to take the last shipments of crops north and south.

Most of Wirrin’s morning was spent composing a short letter and finishing out the map she’d been making of how to get to Mkaer’s mountain. It was, as always, made a hassle by the fact that people in the Church were allowed to know Estanen. Wirrin had been regaled with stories of the time when the Estanen was still banned and how easy it was to send secret messages. No one who’d told her about that had been alive at the time, so she doubted the truth of it.

Wirrin didn’t visit Ettovica often enough to know what the current codes were, and what codes had been broken. So her letter was simply presented as an interesting new hiking route sent to a friend. If anyone tried to follow the route directly, they would get lost in the snow. Deciphering simply required knowledge of Wirrin’s preferred route past Felgoss.

Once she’d had a few more meals of Arin’s delicious food and slept another night in a nice soft bed, Wirrin was off again. She could have stayed another few weeks, if she’d wanted to. The river up to Toravan wouldn’t start freezing until late autumn at the earliest.

But, apparently for the first time in her life, Wirrin had something to do. She wanted to get going. So she overpaid Arin again, despite the woman’s protests. And haggled with a caravan headed south, paying only a gold sword for her letter to go south. Then it was north out of Tellan.

Wirrin travelled alone whenever convenient, a habit that had returned from her youth. The walk from Tellan to Crossing was still dry and cold, though the snow was starting to come down from the mountains in some places.

The hiding spot where Wirrin had stashed Leran’s sword was completely snowed over after only three days. But it was a spot that Wirrin had used often, and it was just as easy to find as it had been to hide.

Wirrin stopped for the first night at one of the little rest areas marked out by a stone carved with a pair of crossed hammers. As she foraged up some firewood, she thought of the siblings, their frozen corpses still laying at Mkaer’s feet in that cave.

It would have been annoying to still have them around, Wirrin was sure. She would still be on her way back to Tellan, and would have no idea where to go next.

Not to mention she would be going through her food much quicker if they were all here. She'd bought a month’s supply of pemmican and dried vegetables before she left Tellan, but hadn’t bothered stocking up on herbs. She'd get better prices in Esbolva.

Wirrin slept well, ate a nice breakfast, and headed off again.

The road packers hadn’t been through yet, and the rough sand of the road was starting to get loose with the influx of late autumn traffic. Wirrin could hear the next caravan before she saw it cresting the hilly road behind her.

Krasta waved and smiled as her cart passed Wirrin, who was walking beside the road at a much more leisurely pace. Wirrin had met Krasta quite a few times over the years, often enough that none of Krasta’s workers suggested Wirrin join them.

Krasta’s was only one of many caravans that interrupted Wirrin’s pleasant stroll to Crossing. Everyone smiled and waved, some exchanged pleasantries. Only a couple of them invited Wirrin to join or travel with them.

Caravans headed north didn't need extra hands at this time of year anyway.

Wirrin took her time, foraging for herbs and gazing out at the plains as she went. Part of it was that she didn't want to accidentally keep up with any of the caravans. The rest of it was vague regret for not taking her time in the mountains.

The plains weren't as nice a view.

Wirrin got to Crossing on the evening of the seventh day out of Tellan. It was a place with a strong identity. In the middle of the town was a big bridge across the Toravan river. Everything was made of wood, and there was vanishingly little permanent population.

As she always did, Wirrin stayed in South Crossing for the night, staying in a bunkhouse with a bunch of caravan workers who recognised her as ‘that woman who had been walking on the road’.

She ate with a lot of the same people on the dock in the early morning, then paid very little for a barge trip to Toravan. As much as she liked to travel alone, she’d hurried back to Tellan specifically to be part of this rush north.

The barge was packed to bursting with a full caravan and a gaggle of farmers headed home to Toravan for the winter. They were all pressed up against each other in the hold and even the deck at night.

Wirrin felt like a veritable elder, the number of people who offered to let her sleep in the hold instead of them. But she stayed on the deck and spent most of the slow, two-day journey watching the plains turn into forest on the east side of the river.

Wirrin had slept in the holds of barges when she was young, even a couple as cramped as this. She hadn’t minded the smell or the press of people, she didn’t much like the darkness. She preferred the view, no matter how many times she’d seen it.

Last time Wirrin had been this way, the river had been much faster. And she’d taken the barge all the way through the Dividing Range. That had been about two years ago, and she’d been headed west to Tolavsay in early spring, when the snow-melt off the mountains tore at the riverbanks.

Even for it being mid-autumn, the barge was slower than usual. In some ways it was lucky to have so many people, they needed more poles to keep away from the banks. On the other hand, it was because there were so many people that the barge was riding low in the river.

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They arrived at Toravan’s dock in the mid-evening and, despite paying for her passage, Wirrin helped get everything unloaded so that the barge could take the caravan through the pass overnight.

Wirrin nodded to the farmers and took the tall bridge over the river and into the woods. Even as late as it was, Wirrin didn’t want to stop in Toravan. She’d never liked the place, with its pentagonal wooden buildings and silent populous.

Toravan was one of two towns that had been completely destroyed during the Gods’ War. Sure the Church had built it back up, but there was no remnant of the original population left.

Wirrin had only ever stayed there once, when she first left Tellan. She’d arrived in the afternoon, stayed a full day, and then left before the sun rose to walk to Esbolva. Since then, she’d never stopped in Toravan again.

She walked through the logging camp on the eastern bank of the river and reached the old woods as the moon was rising in the early night. Once again, she stopped at a shrine to Labour to cook and sleep.

Under the canopy of the Telenva Woods, Wirrin slept in later than she had for a while. Only waking a couple of hours after dawn to the feeling of carts rattling over the loosening road.

She pushed herself up out of her bedding and paused there, feeling the vibrations of a caravan course through the palms of her hands. As she looked around, she could see no signs of a caravan near enough to be rattling the ground.

In fact, Wirrin’s whole camp was packed up by the time she even heard the caravan coming through the trees.

‘Is that Wirrin?’ a fuzzy blob of a man called from the front of one of the carts down the road.

Wirrin had met a lot of people, especially other travellers, in her life. Too many to be able to recognise a voice with any precision. She supposed it could be someone she passed on the road to Toravan, taking logs or stones up to Esbolva.

But she recognised Dartol soon enough, as the blob resolved into a fat, grinning, wrinkly, one-legged westerner. He was just as tanned as ever, his wide, monolidded eyes gleaming at her.

‘Surely it is Wirrin,’ Dartol called with the same volume he said everything. ‘Looking just the same as she did twenty years ago.’

Wirrin smiled wide. ‘Unlike some of us.’

‘Climb up, climb up,’ Dartol called as his cart reached Wirrin. ‘Can’t be stopping, don’t you know?’

Wirrin pulled herself onto the driver’s seat beside Dartol with a dramatic sort of groan. Dartol grinned at her. She hadn’t seen Dartol for about two years, since the last time she went west. But he’d been one of the first caravaneers to hire her some nineteen years ago when she first left Tellan.

‘How’s your mother, Wirrin?’ Dartol called from right next to her.

Wirrin smiled. ‘Still in the ground, Dartol. And your wife?’

Dartol laughed. ‘Just as deep, I expect.’

He gave Wirrin a one-armed, soft hug. ‘You escaping the winter, then?’

Wirrin groaned. ‘I spent the last two months in the snow. I’m going to the desert for the winter, I think.’

‘Are we not looking for Naertral?’ Mkaer’s mountainous voice thundered in her head.

‘Should I tell everyone about it?’ Wirrin thought back.

Again, Mkaer didn’t respond.

‘You should stay with me, then,’ Dartol grinned. ‘I’m off to Epatlok.’

Wirrin glanced back at the caravan, stocked with barrels of vegetables from the last harvests and boxes of stones from the mines near Toravan. Like any of the caravans going north, Dartol had more than enough staff.

Wirrin’s eyes lingered on a pair of people in the back of the third cart down. A young woman with the classic almond-shaped, monolidded eyes and light brown hair of a central-westerner. She wore a gleaming gold pendant on her chest. Sitting across from her was a figure in a heavy grey robe, hood covering their head, a golden symbol of crossed swords on their chest.

Wirrin’s blood ran cold as she turned back to Dartol. He widened his eyes at her and nodded. ‘Stopping in Esbolva first, mind you,’ he said. ‘Switching food to take up the wide river.’

‘I was enjoying travelling by myself,’ Wirrin mused. ‘And it’s not like you need the help.’

‘But I’m so lonely, Wirrin,’ Dartol ginned, not looking away from Wirrin as his horses took a corner too hard and the cart tipped a little. ‘It’s all young, excitable types and these boring Church types.’

From the corner of her eye, Wirrin saw the young woman look over. Dartol only had two volumes, loud and much louder.

Wirring rolled her neck and pursed her lips. ‘Alright, fine,’ she said. ‘I’ll come to Esbolva. You’ll probably leave before I do. I’ve got some business.’

Dartol smiled. ‘Oh, what’s her name?’

Wirrin snorted. ‘Actual business, Dartol,’ she said. ‘I won’t know her name until I meet her, will I?’

Dartol chuckled. ‘Alright, alright,’ he said. ‘At least I’ll have company until I get to Esbolva.’

Dartol smiled to himself for a minute, but he was a talkative sort. ‘What’s Ogesiv like this time of year?’

‘It was nice,’ Wirrin said. ‘Peaceful.’

Dartol chuckled. ‘Just having fun being alone, were you?’

‘Babysitting some rich kids,’ Wirrin said. ‘They thought they’d find some old ruins or something.’

‘Didn’t know you’ve already found them all?’

Wirrin smiled and shrugged. ‘I didn’t need to tell them everything.’

‘They get eaten by the Snow, then?’ Dartol asked, managing to quiet slightly below shouting for what was meant to be a sensitive question. ‘That why you’ve got the melancholy?’

Wirrin frowned at Dartol for a moment. She didn’t think she had any melancholy. ‘They did,’ she said. ‘Pack of idiots, really. I kept telling them to be careful and what did they do?’

Dartol nodded along. ‘They get robbed by a pretty girl on the outskirts of the Swamp?’

Wirrin snorted. ‘I didn’t get robbed, if you recall,’ she laughed. ‘I gave her all my money voluntarily because she just seemed so desperate.’

The topic turned swiftly to all the foolish and dangerous things Wirrin had done in her teens in the west and how Dartol had ‘saved’ her from starving in the Verdant Plains so many times.

He was the same as the last couple of times Wirrin had run into him. Much more interested in reminiscing about the past than talking about the present. He would have turned seventy-two just recently, so Wirrin supposed it was to be expected.

So she spent the rest of the day in the driver’s seat of Dartol’s cart, gently disagreeing about how much trouble she’d actually been in.

‘Maybe that’s so,’ Dartol chucked. ‘But how about that landslide near the pass? You would have ended up like me, at best, if I’d not stumbled across you.’

Wirrin pursed her lips at him. ‘Alright, I’ll admit that was very good timing on your part. I did make it all the way to the Tertic river on my own, though.’

‘It’s not called that,’ a woman’s voice called from behind them.

Wirrin knew before she looked that it would be the woman sitting with the War mage. She was sat up on the cart, an open book in her lap, looking very serious. Wirrin struggled not to laugh. She didn’t think she’d ever been so earnest, even at that age.

‘Oh, is that right?’ Wirrin called back.

The hooded head turned to look. The mage’s face stayed obscured by shadow.

‘It’s called the Lasavay river,’ the woman called. ‘To call it the Tertic river is tantamount of blasphemy.’

Wirrin smiled and looked at Dartol, who was facing resolutely away, his wrinkled face scrunched up in a massive grin as he tried not to laugh.

‘Blasphemy, is it?’ Wirrin called back. ‘Against whom do I blaspheme, holy one? The river is named after the swamp, is it not?’

The mage looked back at their own book.

‘The Dividing Swamp is not named after a place the Gods smote from the face of Nesalan over five hundred years ago,’ the woman shouted.

‘She’s too young for you, Wirrin,’ Dartol said at a quite normal volume, his version of whispering.

Wirrin could only burst out laughing.