Crossroads

Eri squeezed out from under the boulder and back into the light.

The brown grass met her like a thousand tiny knives, stabbing through her sleeves, her collar, the torn knees of her trousers. “Up here even the grass wants to kill you,” she told nobody, and lay down in it anyway, because lying down was the only thing her ribs would agree to.

She stayed there a good while. Breathing. Counting the parts of her that hurt and the parts that didn’t, which was the shorter list. Ash from the bouquet still grayed her palms.

Behind her eyes, the garden went on glowing.

What did it mean for Kraeta? Somewhere under her back, things grew. Not the stunted, apologetic growing she had known all her life. Growing like they meant it. Life could thrive here.

Just not up here.

She rolled over, which her shoulder had opinions about, and looked up. The rainbow was where it always was, banded across the sky from one edge of the world to the other: orange, pink, brown, grey. It never left. Even at night its faint glow persisted, dancing and whipping about between the ground and the moonlight. She had fallen asleep under it every night of her life.

So much life in those colors.

It was the one thing up here that had any.

It wasn’t much longer before she saw specks on the horizon, moving toward her across the field. Three of them. The one in front she would have known from a mile off, and did: squat, unhurried, walking as though the ground would wait for him.

Aris. He’d brought friends.

The second shape turned into a man pushing a handcart, and she knew the cart before she knew the man. Gregor, the scav whose story had started all this. The third she didn’t know. Tall. Armored. He walked a little apart from the other two, and his head never stopped moving.

Eri considered standing up to greet them. She sat up instead. That was as far as pride could carry her.

Aris stopped at her feet and looked down at her for a long moment. The blood dried in her hair. The hacked-off lock she’d burned for a torch. The three fat fingers.

“You’re late,” he said.

“It’s real.” It came out of her in a rush. “Gregor’s lights. All of it, Aris. There’s a garden down there. Moss that answers when you touch it. Mushrooms taller than you are, which I grant you isn’t…”

“Your hand.”

“…and it dies. Every bit of it, the moment it sees the sky. I had a whole armful and I watched it go, one fern at a time, and I want to know why, because…”

“In sixteen years I have never found the lever that stops you talking. Eri. Your hand.”

She gave him her hand.

He crouched, knees cracking, and turned it over with far more gentleness than his voice had in it. “Can you close it?”

“They’re sausages. I named them on the way up. One more day and I was going to start on the little one.”

“Then I am glad I hurried.” He set the hand down. Only then did he breathe out, a long breath, and she realized he had been holding it since the horizon. “Gregor tells me the way down is a full day’s climb.”

“I found a quicker way.”

“Did you.”

“There was some water.” She examined the sky. “A flood. A small one. I may have started it.”

“I see.”

“It worked, Aris.”

Gregor had stopped his cart a good twenty paces short of the boulder. He was eyeing the hole beneath it the way a man eyes a dog that has bitten him before.

“You opened it,” he said. “I covered that. I covered that for a reason.”

“What reason?”

“The reason being it’s a hole in the ground that goes down forever.” He came no closer. “Did you see them, though? The lights?”

“How far down did you actually go, Gregor?”

“Far enough.”

“That isn’t a distance.”

“It is when you’re running.”

The armored man had said nothing at all. He walked a slow circle around the boulder. Looked at the hole. Looked at the white treeline of the Digryph. Looked at her once, a single sweep from head to boots, like a man checking a delivery against an order. Then he turned to Aris.

“She’s found.”

“So she is,” Aris said.

“Fifteen.”

Eri looked from one to the other. “Fifteen what?”

Aris was already counting coins into the man’s palm. “Eri, this is Issah. I engaged him to bring you home.”

Issah. She knew the name. Everyone in Blackswain knew the name, and the other one that went with it. The Dragon Slayer. She had pictured someone larger. Louder. Someone who looked like he enjoyed it.

“You’re paying him? I got myself out. I was lying in a field.”

“The job was to find you.” His hand closed on the coins. He still had not looked at her a second time. “Terms didn’t say where.”

“That’s robbery.”

“That’s the rate.”

Gregor made a sound that might have been a cough.

She decided, then and there, that she did not like the Dragon Slayer.

It wasn’t the money. It was that he had looked at her once, found nothing worth a second look, and gone back to the horizon. She had grown up under a look like that. She knew exactly how much she hated it.

“Brought the cart,” Gregor offered, into the silence. “In case you couldn’t walk.”

“I can walk.”

“Or in case you couldn’t, you know.” He waved a hand. “Anything.”

She walked. She lasted a quarter mile on pride alone, and rode the rest of the way in a handcart that smelled of rust and old onions, asking the armored man questions. How long was the dragon, nose to tail. What did it eat, because there was nothing out there to eat. Was the blood warm. Had he kept a tooth, and could she see it.

She got one word out of him in the better part of a day’s travel, and the word was “No,” and he never said which question it was for.

The crossroads came up as the light went.

Thirty krosah. Two days on the road, one night in a ditch.. One girl who rescued herself.

Easiest money he had ever made. Then again, nobody had warned him the job came with a full day of the princess asking about dragons. He should have charged more. The old man had been waiting on the north road as arranged, with the scav and his cart in tow, unable to sit in a castle while someone else did the looking. Issah had not charged extra for that company, either.

Gregor set the cart down where the town road split from the castle road, and the girl climbed out of it slowly, one arm tight against her ribs, refusing the hand Aris offered. She stood with her back to the castle road. Issah noticed that. He noticed most things. He didn’t yet know what it was worth.

Aris turned to Issah. “The Lower Tavern, if I need you again?”

“No.” Someone ought to know. If he didn’t come back, someone should be able to say which way he had gone. It was the only kind of will a man like him could leave. “I’m gone a while, starting tomorrow. East. Past the Ancient Wood.”

He knew it was a mistake before he’d finished saying it. He knew from the way the girl’s head came around.

“East past the Wood,” she said. “But that’s…”

She stopped. Gregor had taken his hands off the cart handles as if they’d gone hot.

“That’s looking for the unicorn,” the scav said, very quietly.

“I know what it’s called.”

“You don’t seem the type.” Gregor was eyeing him the way you’d eye a man standing too near an edge. “Not for that. And not for the other thing, neither.”

“What other thing?” said the girl.

“You know. Them that come back.” Gregor glanced over his shoulder at the empty road. “Green thumbs. Walk out east with nothing, come home, and inside a year the farm that never grew a turnip is feeding half a valley. Or some uncle nobody ever heard of dies across the sea and leaves them a fortune. Or they start carting grain and can’t put a foot wrong. Saw the unicorn, people say. Got their wish.”

“That’s a tavern story. Has anyone ever counted them? The ones who came back?”

“Couldn’t say, Princess. I’ll tell you what I have counted. I’ve been turned away from every green thumb gate between here and the coast. Walls up. Dogs out. Men on the lane wanting to know your business. They’ll sell to anyone with coin, through other men’s carts. But they don’t buy from the likes of me, and they don’t talk. Whatever they found out there, they came home very keen that nobody else should find it.”

“And for every one of them,” Aris said mildly, “a few hundred who simply never came home. It is a poor wager, Issah. Whichever end of it you’re after.”

“I’m not after either.”

“Then why?” The girl again. Of course the girl again. “Why would you go?”

Issah ran the sum. It was a habit, and it took no time. Gregor would not walk east past the Wood for every krosah in Kraeta. Gregor would not walk east past his own front gate if something growled. Aris had put up the coin for half the work Issah had ever done and had never once sold a word of his. And the girl was Aris’s pupil. Sixteen, three broken fingers, a princess with a castle to go home to.

He added it up, and it came to nothing. No harm in telling these people.

“A man went that way,” he said. “Same reason most do. He came back. Not rich. Scared.”

Nobody spoke.

“He says there’s a place out there where things grow. Green. Fruit on the ground, more than anyone could eat. Beasts grazing on it.”

“Fruit,” Gregor said faintly. “It’s always food with them. Always.”

“What man?” the girl said.

“One who came back.”

“That’s not…”

“It’s all you’re getting. I don’t talk about other people’s business.”

She let that go, which surprised him. What she said next, she said in a careful, level voice, the voice of someone carrying something full to the brim. “Green. On the surface.”

“So he claims.”

She looked at Aris. Aris looked at her. Something passed between them that Issah wasn’t part of.

All day on the road she had talked the old man’s ear off about her cave. Glowing moss. Mushrooms taller than a man. Issah had heard every word and listened to none of it, because none of it was his business.

He began to suspect, now, that it was.

“I’m coming with you.”

“No.”

“Why not? Because it’s dangerous? I’ve just spent three days underground with…”

“Three fingers. Ribs, left side. That shoulder.” He listed them the way he’d read a bill. “I can’t afford to carry dead weight.”

He had expected her to argue. He’d heard her argue with Aris about the weather, the road, and the correct way to sit in a cart. She had a dozen answers ready for too dangerous and too far and you’re only a girl. He could see them stacked up behind her teeth.

She didn’t have one for that. Her mouth opened. Closed. Her face went red to the ears.

It lasted about a breath.

“Dead weight.” She said it slowly, like something she’d found in her food. “You walked a full day to pull me out of a hole, and you found me lying in the grass with the job already done. I have been getting myself into trouble and back out of it since I was six years old. Nobody has ever carried me anywhere. So you tell me which one of us was dead weight on this trip.”

It was a good answer. It was fast, and most of it was true, and it didn’t change a thing.

“Three fingers,” Issah said again. “Ribs. Shoulder. Talk doesn’t mend any of them.”

Her chin came up. “I’m going anyway. You don’t have to protect me. You don’t have to wait for me. I’ll follow on my own if I have to.”

He believed her. That was the problem. A girl trailing him half a day behind, alone, past the Wood, was a body he would find on the way home. And then there would be Aris’s face.

He looked at the old man. Forbid it. She’s yours. Forbid it.

Aris looked back at him mildly, like a man who had given up forbidding the weather years ago.

Issah had calculated the wrong cost. He had worked out what these three might do with the story once they’d heard it. It had never crossed his mind to work out what the girl might do about it.

“Fine.” It came out flat. “Terms. If you die out there, it isn’t on my account. Not to him. Not to your father. Not to anyone. Say it.”

Her chin came up. “If I die out there, it’s on me.”

He turned to Aris. “You heard her.”

“I heard.” The old man’s voice was dry as paper.

“I didn’t,” said Gregor, taking up the cart handles in a hurry. “I heard nothing. I was never here. Wife won’t feed me if I’m late.” He got the cart moving, then looked back at the girl. “Glad you’re not dead, Princess. Bad for business, dead customers. You figure out how to keep those glowing things alive, you cut me in.”

He went off down the town road, whistling something off-key, a little faster than a man with nothing to worry about.

Issah looked the girl over one last time. “Bring a knife. Not the kind for show. The kind that works.”

“I own four.”

Nobody said anything. Aris closed his eyes for a moment, like a man who feels a headache coming on.

Issah looked at the old man over the top of her head. “She’s a child.”

“She is sixteen,” Aris said.

“That’s what I said.”

“I am standing right here.”

Issah didn’t doubt she owned four knives. He doubted she had ever needed one. He started to go. Stopped. “Dawn. The east crossroads, out past the plains. Dawn means dawn. I won’t wait.”

He walked.

Thirty krosah up on the job. And somehow he had come out of it behind.

“You’re enjoying this,” he heard the old man say, back at the crossroads.

“Little bit,” said the girl.

He kept walking.