Brightly Woven (8 page)

By the end of the week, North and I had developed a routine. It wasn’t the best, and it certainly wasn’t fun, but it was our routine, and we clung to it like a religion. I seized the maps and plotted our path through the maze of roads; I cooked, washed, and mended. North found us food and shelter. My anger toward him for taking me from my home was still there, but I could no longer ignore him or sit around waiting for my life to weave itself back together.

It was a strange experience to wake up one morning and find the leaves of the trees a muted yellow instead of their usual vibrant green. And with the change of colors came a change in the weather. The warm, sticky air was suddenly, at least to me, dry and chilled. It was days before I became used to it, and weeks before I realized that time was slowly marching forward. It was fall—a real fall—and it was beautiful.

I found a bundle of paper in one of the markets we had passed through and used the only gold I had to purchase it. I wrote letter after letter to my parents and Henry, telling them what cities we were cutting through so they would know where to reach me. There was no telling who would read them, or if the letters would even get through the line of Saldorran soldiers.

Was the village still standing? Were my family and friends all right? I was desperate for information, for any hint of their well-being. North dutifully mailed my letters—at least until we got so low on money that we could no longer pay for postage, since we had to conserve every coin we had. This presented a new problem entirely.

“We’re going to have to stop for a few days,” he said suddenly as we cut through a stand of trees. We were on our way into a small village I had found on the map, having seen no sign of Dorwan at all. “I’m thinking we’ll need at least two hundred gold pieces for food and transportation.”

“We haven’t got the time,” I said. “You wouldn’t even let me stop to wash my face in the river this morning!”

“Without any money we won’t be able to continue at this rate. Perhaps you feel differently, but I do enjoy eating real food and sleeping in actual beds. And since you
insist
on separate rooms, my poor little money bag has gotten considerably thinner.”

It had already been over two weeks since our run-in with the wizards in Dellark. I didn’t think we had time to waste, given that we had less than a month to cross the rest of the country.

I looked away, gripping the strap of my bag. “I don’t think we should stop. I want to get to Provincia as soon as we possibly can. Maybe you wouldn’t understand because you have nothing at stake—”

“Nothing at stake?” North let out a dry laugh. “If Auster takes over the country, do you honestly believe they’ll leave everything as it was? That the wizards will have any place left? Who knows what they’d do to us?”

“So you’re doing this because you’re scared for your own life,” I said. “How inspiring. Astraea would be ashamed of you. You’re supposed to be protecting her people.”

“Astraea can go rot,” North said harshly. I flinched as if he had slapped me. “She doesn’t give me food or find me a safe place to sleep at night. I do that myself.”

“You’re a wizard,” I snapped. “Can’t you just use magic to make your own food?”

“Ah, yes,” he retorted. “Because mud pies are so very delicious and the wind fills empty stomachs quite nicely.”

I gave him a long, hard glare before storming ahead. North caught up to me and blocked my path.

“Move,”
I said. “If you want to stop, then fine, I’ll go ahead by myself. You can go wander off a cliff for all I care!”

“I’m sorry I said that about Astraea,” he said quietly. I tried to step around him, but he moved with me. “I haven’t been able to find any customers in the past few towns we’ve passed through, because opinions toward the wizards have changed. A lot of people blame the wizards for the king’s death and the war. I’ll be lucky to find a few jobs here and there to keep us going, but don’t think, not even for a moment, that I’ve forgotten why we set out in the first place.”

His face was so sincere that my body seemed to unwind on its own accord, loosening all the knots and frustrations.

“Well, have you ever thought of bathing?” I asked, turning away. “No one wants to hire a wizard who smells worse than their outhouse. And who knows what creatures are living in that hair?”

“Why do I need to brush my hair, anyway?” He lifted
his arm and gave a few experimental whiffs. “And I smell wonderful. All manly and whatnot.”

Seeing my look of utter disgust, without another word, he wrapped an arm loosely around my shoulders, and the black cloak came up around us, and I was falling, falling, falling…

The moment my feet hit the ground, I pushed him away from me. North tripped over his heavy cloaks, stumbling backward until he fell onto the dirt with a startled curse.

“Don’t do that without giving me some warning!” I cried, my head still swimming dizzily.

He grunted as he picked himself off the ground.

“All right, all right,” he said. “Next time I’ll warn you when I’m about to twist the magical pillars of time and the world.”

“I don’t know what that means,” I said crossly. “But you’d better!”

“I thought you’d like twisting…,” he mumbled, picking leaves from his matted black hair.

“Twisting,” I repeated slowly. “Is that what it is? Why can’t we just twist to Provincia if it’ll get us there faster?”

North let out a dry laugh. “Don’t you think that if I was capable of doing it, we would already be in the capital by now? Twisting is extremely difficult for a wizard to do alone, let alone with someone else.”

“How far can you twist us at a time, then?” I asked.

“A mile—at the
most,”
he said. “And that’s quite a feat.”

I blew a stray curl out of my eyes. “Where are we now?”

“Our best chance for a job. Have a look.”

Dellark had been far nicer than anything I was used to in Cliffton. But even at night, this city was
grand
, far grander than anything my imagination could have produced, and for an instant I was sure we were in Provincia. Its walls and towers reached toward the sky in columns of the purest white. I followed the line of purple flags on the towers down to the moat surrounding the city. From a distance, the walls glinted in a way that reminded me of the porcelain in Mrs. Whitty’s shop at home. So smooth, like cream. It was
Fairwell
, home of master artists and their apprentices, the city that was to have been my first stop on the road to my future. I would take this chance to walk its streets, even with a reeking wizard at my side.

“Fairwell seems to have captured your heart as well,” North commented, pausing only a moment to readjust his leather bag.

I nodded. “It’s so…” I couldn’t find the right word. Even I, a world away in my little desert house, had heard stories of Fairwell’s fabulous glass sculptures. I had to find the green crystal dragons, and the blown vases large enough to fit a grown man inside. Henry would be incredibly jealous—in all of his travels, he had never once seen the white walls of Fairwell.

“Looks like they still haven’t fixed the bridge,” North said absently. In the distance, I could just make out a long, thin board that stretched over a waterless moat.

“Great Mother, what happened to it?” I asked. There should have been a drawbridge, or at least a stone entry into the city.

“Fairwell had an awful time with hedge witches a few years back,” North said. His shoulders slumped slightly. “But you probably don’t know what a hedge witch is, do you?”

“They take care of the gardening at the palace?” I tried.

“What we all wouldn’t give if they did.” The wizard chuckled. “They’re rogue women with magical ability, shunned by the wizarding community for their practices. They usually live on the outskirts of cities and steal shipments in and out of them to survive.”

“So there are no…male hedge witches?”

“No, we just call them rogue wizards or something of the like.”

“Well, that hardly seems fair,” I said. “Why are only the women singled out that way?”

“They got that name because for a very long time, female wizards were banned from learning most magic. It’s not that way anymore, of course, and you’re almost as likely to see a female wizard now as a male one,” he said. “About two hundred years ago, after the last great war with Auster, there were few magisters left with the skill to take on apprentices. At the time, the Sorcerer Imperial decided that the male wizards would be the ones to receive schooling, so that the next children of children would have a selection of magisters to choose from. Many women were unhappy, to
say the least, and left to create their own communities where they taught themselves and one another. Those women and their descendants never came back to proper wizarding society.”

“What are the hedge communities like?” I asked.

“Tightly knit, highly secretive,” he said. “Though I’ve never seen one myself. I’ve only come across one male wizard who grew up within a hedge community, and he wasn’t forthcoming with details.”

“Who?” I asked.

“Who do you think?”

I stared at him. “Dorwan…?”

North nodded. “Explains quite a bit, doesn’t it?”

“How do you know so much about him?” I asked. “He doesn’t seem the type to share.”

“I met him when we were both still young,” he said. “Look, Syd, it’s not something I’m proud of. I’d rather not talk about it.”

“Did you train with him?” I asked. “Did he have the same magister?”

“No,”
he said. “When I was with my magister, Oliver was the only other student he had.”

“Who in the world is Oliver?”

North gave me an exasperated look.

“He’s the current second-in-command of the Wizard Guard, ranked number two just behind the Sorceress Imperial, who is ceremoniously ranked number one. He
hates tea, enjoys moonlit walks through Provincia’s palace, and is a spectacular git,” he said. “Now that we’ve played twenty questions, would you mind dropping it?”

The thin scrap of wood covering the moat could barely support our combined weight. It dipped dangerously beneath us as we crossed into the silent, dark city. There was no one around, save for the two guards on either side of the entrance. Both were fast asleep and snoring in high, extended wheezes.

From the outside, except for the demolished bridge, the city had seemed unspoiled, marred by age and hedge witches, but no worse for wear. Inside the walls, however, it was a very different story. The outer ring of buildings had sizable pieces of roofs and entryways missing, some completely torn away and left as rubble on the ground.

North led me through the streets, and slowly the buildings began to appear whole again. The sounds of actual life in the distance reached my ears.

“It won’t be as bad once we get farther in,” North said, as if sensing my thoughts. “The people here gave up waiting for repairs and just moved farther inside, where it was harder for the hedge witches to reach them. We just passed the streets with all the glass blowers.”

“So you come here often?” Somehow, I wasn’t surprised.

“It’s gotten worse over the years,” he admitted. “The king neglects—
neglected
—this part of the country for far too long, and now it’s fallen into this mess.”

If my mother had heard him say such a thing, she would have boxed his ears for being so disrespectful. I bristled on her behalf.

“I’m sure that wasn’t the case,” I said. “It might have been the fault of his
advisors
, but not the king.”

After blocks of dirty, broken-down buildings and uneven streets, the light of the inner city was like a beckoning fire, a fire that became rowdier and louder and drunker the closer we got. One entire block was made up of pubs and taverns; we saw drunk patrons thrown out of one pub only to stumble into another right next door. There wasn’t a place of worship in sight.

“We’re going to get something to eat,” North explained, as we stood beneath a wooden sign that read
THE STUBBORN DRAGON
. “I’m hoping my friend is here tonight.”

“Please don’t drink,” I begged, but he didn’t hear me. Instead, he pushed a path for us through the crowd inside. Someone was banging an unidentifiable song on an out-of-tune piano. Occasionally North would recognize someone and give a curt nod or a smile. He reached back to take my hand, but instead I slipped it into the pocket of my dress.

“Waaaaayland, I thought you had abaaandoned us!” a woman purred. “Where did you find such a precious little doll? Got a sitting gig?”

“Just a friend, Anna,” North said in a smooth voice. “Speaking of friends, I heard a rumor that Master Owain has been around these parts. Has he been in tonight?”

“Why do you want to talk to
him?”
She pouted, sliding off our table.

North smiled. “Business. You know how it is.”

“I’d know if you told me more about—” she began, but never had a chance to finish.

“If it isn’t Wayland North, finally back to make an honest living!” came a voice behind us, a deep baritone. “That is, if you’re really here for business.”

The man was a great mass of muscles and stringy blond hair. He looked to be twice my age, with the beginnings of a beard, uneven and slightly darker than the hair on his head. A shirt of old, rusted chain mail covered his broad chest. He wore mismatched metal wrist guards that scraped along his side and snagged the frayed bottom of his wrinkled undershirt. When he grinned, his teeth gleamed in the faint light of the tavern like a wolf’s. If his eyes hadn’t betrayed how overjoyed he was to see North, I might have thought he was ready to devour us both whole.

“Honest is probably not the word I would have chosen, Owain, old friend.” North clasped the other man’s hand, and Owain pumped it up and down enthusiastically.

“Hah! So you haven’t heard yet!” Owain crossed his arms over his chest. “I’ve gone straight. Only good, clean jobs for me now.”

“So, in other words,” North said, “you’re living in poverty?”

“When am I not?” Owain scoffed. “Seemed foolish of me to try to live like a knight but not work like one.”