Captive Magics

33 - Hungry Fields

The sun rose on the roads to Oran-Thell, turning the loose dust golden where it lay across the ground, and up the legs of two travellers who were hoping to go unnoticed. The woman had veiled her hat to keep the dust off her face and she quite suddenly lifted a fistful of scarf beneath it to clamp over her mouth.

"Still feeling queasy?" Leander asked. Lissy nodded, the whites of her eyes flashing beneath the veil as she darted a glance at him. Leander changed his grip on the hand cart with their trunks in it. If he didn't know how exhausted she was he would have asked her to sort out their luggage, because he could feel blisters forming on the pads of his fingers, but her shoulders sagged and her face, below the veil, was grey.

Grey in part because of the smell making them both feel sick after a bad meal the previous day: the road ran straight between fields of unidentifiable vegetables which had rotted into a black, festering mush. It was like this everywhere they had been since arriving, the people thin and unfriendly and the fields spoiling. And they weren't much better themselves. He was already worn from the journey, and only able to imagine how much energy Lissy had expended if she was no longer able to maintain her regular good spirits. She looked like a wilting plant, and he wondered for the dozenth time whether it would be better if they rested for a bit or if they pushed on and away from the smell.

Lissy said something which Leander didn't quite catch.

"What?" he shot her an anxious look. Her hand lowered the scarf for a moment.

"Something up ahead," she told him. He wouldn't have been able to see it without glasses but with them he could see plainly a set of low buildings with a larger one set close to the road.

"It's an inn, I think," he said. At that moment there was a rumbling as a cart sparsely packed with barley clattered past, three men hulking over it as if it were a pile of gold, and fixing Lissy and Leander with challenging stares. They disappeared off into the distance gripping their cudgels.

This was Avarti: hostile and hungry, and the foreigners were alarmed by it. It had become immediately clear that their first great obstacle would be the price of a meal, not capture. But they were only a day from the capital. Surely there they could sell the gold they had brought for a better price, and things would get much easier.

It seemed to take an age, but eventually they reached the inn, which was large and impersonal, clearly used to a lot of travellers needing a stop on the outskirts of the city, and they took their room with undiluted relief. Leander found somewhere to change gold for money at extortionate rates and returned with nothing but food on his mind. The doorframe was small and he had a near miss in his tired, uncoordinated state as he almost ducked too late below the jamb. Lissy was sagging into a chair by the window, as though undecided whether to sit or stand.

"Are you alright?" he asked, setting the clinking bag of currency on the sideboard. Her face turned slowly to him.

"Hmm?"

"What are you looking at?"

"Nothing, really," she told him, and finally slumped into the chair fully. "I didn't...I didn't think, when we came here, it would be like this..." she gestured beyond the glass to the hard-faced people moving about. Beyond the cluster of buildings, the fields stood stark and rotting.

"You thought we'd be hunted down and instead we're at risk of starving?"

"Or food poisoning." She nodded.

Starving they could avoid for now, because Leander had ordered a meal to be brought to their room. Two maids filled the old-fashioned bathtub as he picked over the food suspiciously, but none of it seemed rotten. He ate well and fell into a doze.

From the inn and beyond, a constant rhythm of humans and horses played out in conversations and jangling harness, to ebb and flow as it had throughout the day. People came and went to and from the city, and the inn was a mixing point for many. None of this had any effect on Leander, uncomfortably folded into a chair not meant for sleeping in with his neck held awkwardly. He was unaware of everything.

Several drops of water hit the floorboards sharply, followed by the sounds of water swirling around someone who stood and placed one foot carefully outside the bathtub, then the other foot too. Leander woke in a panic, hand flying to the jabbing pain in his neck when he moved too suddenly.

"The water's warm for you," Lissy said from behind the screen. "Thank you for letting me go first."

"Not at all," he toldher, massaging his neck and contemplating where he could get a razor from. Tomorrowthey would enter the city with new identities. It deserved a good shave.