They doubled their pace. Whatever hopes had surrounded the escape from Southwind were replaced by a nervous tension. Their prisoner was strung up to the mustang, his bonds attached to the saddle by a length of rope. The horse led the way, tugging him along. Asher and Finn followed with Galen lurking at the rear.
The man’s screams soon diminished to a constant moan. Asher watched the back of his greasy, dark head, dreading his turning around to show the gruesome smear that was his new face. The boy assumed that the pain would numb at some point, but he wasn’t sure.
As the sun drifted overhead, they marched in subdued silence. Galen watered and fed the prisoner only enough to keep his legs moving. His face crusted over, and the bleeding seemed to stanch. Asher waited for the man to die. The man kept going.
Night hadn’t quite fallen when the monotonous landscape finally changed. Figures came into view, and they weren’t trees. They moved. They were wagons, horses, humans—citizens of the Queendom, and not from Southwind.
“The Free Way,” Galen announced. “It connects the Queendom from coast to coast. Keep off the pavement.”
The great road was a famous landmark, and the boys knew of it even with their bare-bones education. The Old Queen—one year dead—had seen the project completed in her youth, uniting the lands of Grass and Tree for the first time. Patrolled by Stalwart Knights, the Free Way was made to be a safe path for honest wayfarers.
Asher and Finn approached in wonder, as though it were a portal into another world. A strange material was laid out over the earth, hard and smooth, like one long piece of stone that stretched on into infinity. Most travelers headed in the same direction, bound for the capital. Asher wondered if Farmer had taken him this way on their flight to Southwind. Perhaps his mother had since left Riverdale by this road. She could have gone anywhere in the world.
Galen nodded to passers-by, but they avoided his group, probably because of the staggering, bloodied giant with a knife stuck in his head.
Words were spare as they worked their way north.
★
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The Queen of Grass and Tree (Southwind Knights #2)
Teen Fiction★ Book #2 in the Southwind Knights series. If you haven't read Book #1, stop now! ★ Southwind is in uprising, and Asher is lucky to escape alive. With an orphaned Finn and the exiled Healer, he journeys north to the Queendom’s ca...
