Page 2 of Devour
Not everyone takes kindly to a strange child with magic beyond their understanding.
I pray that I will not have to protect her from these seemingly kind souls, but the knife in my belt feels extra heavy just now.
“You’re fools,” her husband mutters, breaking the silence. We turn to find he and his son wiping their hands of the grease, raising from the ground where he had tinkered with the wagon.
I watch carefully as he replaces his tool chest on the back of the cart, wringing my fingers together.
He huffs. “The axel is cracked. We were able to reenforce it, but… it may not hold.”
The man’s son glares at me as he climbs aboard the wagon. “We can continue on, but I don’t know for how long.”
“We ride until the cart breaks,” the old woman says with a sharp nod. She sniffs and grips her skirt to climb aboard.
I release a relieved breath.
I look to Astella one last time for confirmation. She looks over her shoulder to the forest of half-dead trees. There are three ravens watching us from the top of the lifeless limbs.
Her smile is sad, as usual. She grabs my hand, and we enter the carriage together.
For the last few weeks, Astella and I have been camped out in an old, abandoned village, surviving on the crumbs left behind and a small pile of dried meat. It wasn’t a good life, by any means, but if you have breath, you have hope.
And Astella and I have held dearly on to hope.
We restart our slow rumble down the dirt road. Troy and his son, Thomas, sit up front, steering the cart close to the desert, but it isn’t long until the path verges toward the tree line. Lorraine sighs, staring wistfully at the dark dunes.
“We missed the last boat,” she says absently.
I don’t understand what she means, at first. The pause stretches so long I begin to wonder if it was more to herself than to me, until she finally continues.
“In Ruthend. There were boats taking refugees to the southern cities. We waited, hoping things could still turnaround. We thought there would be another. Another boat. Another chance to flee before things went bad. There wasn’t.”
I meet Astella’s eyes for a long moment. A silent moment where we share our sorrow for this woman’s loss. For the whole city.
Before the cart broke, they’d told us about the riots in Ruthend. Burning of supply ships and fights in the streets. Things have been tense for years, while hunger grew. I had always thought it was the towns on the edge of the desert that struggled the most. Towns like mine.
Now, it seems, even the cities are falling apart.
We let the silence stretch on for miles as we bump over the uneven dirt road.
“Where will you go?” she eventually asks us. “What is your plan?”
When we saw the horse and carriage rolling toward our village yesterday, I’d thought I was seeing a mirage. It was a blessing to find Lorraine. And finding us must have felt like a curse to them.
They were kind enough to offer us a ride farther south, but we hadn’t elaborated on our specific plans.
I pause a moment to consider before answering her question.
“Braissid,” I answer, naming the most southern city on our continent. “We have family there.”
It’s a lie. I have no family left at all.
Astella has extended family hidden in the mountains between here and Braissid. That is our actual destination.
“Do you two think you’ll be able to cross the mountains alone?”
Is it any worse than the desert?I think. But she does have a point.
The trek to the free cities south of the Gorian Mountains is far and difficult, even in the best of times. With limited food, thepredators of the wilds, and no experienced guides for hire, it’s nearly impossible.
