Bron remembered a time when his job had seemed simple. Keep Calea Lisan safe. Keep her safe. That was all. Of course, that idea had exploded as soon as he’d met her. It sounded simple, but it required much more than the description advertised.
Now it had expanded even more. “Keeping Calea safe” had become very complicated, involving travel to hostile territory, a temporary job guarding a clinic, the procurement of transportation, and who knew how many dozens of things Bron couldn’t begin to imagine yet.
He also wanted to keep guarding her spirit. That had been the first lesson, after all. Calea was far more fragile than she appeared, and the first time they’d met he had inadvertently wounded her dignity while trying to guard her from embarrassment. It was a fine line that he was still learning how to walk. And now, in a larger world that was vastly beyond his control, the line had become even thinner and more difficult to see.
But he watched. He could do that. He saw the way Calea interacted with the girl, Nyasha. Calea tried to hide it, but she was jealous, and Bron understood why. Nyasha was sharp as a rapier, young, quick-tongued, and good with her hands. Both of them.
In another life, Calea might have been that girl. Peasant-poor and socially powerless, but strong and smart and certain. Magic had been as much curse to Calea as gift, leading her to the Well where she’d lost…a great deal. And so Calea looked on Nyasha with anger and envy, as well as admiration that she hid even from herself.
Fortunately, Nyasha was smart enough not to pity Calea. That would have ruined any chance of Calea ever accepting her help. Instead, when her first design failed, Nyasha brought her mechanical problems to Calea. Bron stood in the hall and listened to them, and he heard the prickliness between them, but also that spark he had always observed when two like-minded Select started working together. The longer they talked and worked and planned and dreamed, the less they cared about the distance that separated them. They began to create something.
When not working together, though, Nyasha and Calea were very frosty toward each other. It got suddenly worse on the third day, the two trading barbs so spitefully that Dr. Burdock, red-faced, stood up from the table where they were eating and retreated to eat his food somewhere more peaceful. Bron said nothing, knowing his intervention would be unwelcome, but he didn’t leave. He had brought this on his own head, and he would endure the consequences.
He wasn’t sad to leave the Sanctuary for a while, though. This was another new task–trying to figure out how to get to Thyrion. In the middle of the day when Dr. Burdock felt safe enough, Nyasha was buried in her work, and Calea was too exhausted from her morning exercises to stump around for a few hours, Bron went into the village.
Averieom was still small, but it was no longer very quiet or peaceful. The clusters of anxious, tense people Bron had noticed on Capital Street during his first walk through the town had multiplied and spread until it was hard to find a street that wasn’t bustling with activity. Families were packing carts with belongings, shop-owners were setting out signs saying they had none of this supply or that, and even the children looked serious and afraid.
Reliable news was hard to come by, but rumors flew about in flocks. Stay away from the main road to Thyrion, some said, for the Thyrian army was patrolling it and looked unkindly on travellers. Beware of the byways and hidden paths, others said, because brigands and thieves were emerging from the wilderness like cockroaches in a dim room. Bron heard from one villager that the Guides and Overseer of Jalseion had all disappeared in the Cataclysm, so they should not expect any help from that quarter, and the next person he spoke to said that the Jalseian rulers were already starting to rebuild the Towers, and all would be repaired in less than a month.
The first few times he went out, everyone he spoke to recognized that he was not from Averieom, and all wanted to know where he was from and if he had news of this kin or that, if he knew what was happening in Thyrion or Falcon Point, if the roads were good or bad. The telephony and swift mail service afforded by magic was gone, vanished beyond the recalling, and everyone was desperate for news of friends and family. By now, though, the villagers Bron met knew he had no information for them but were happy to share their own.
“Hello, Bron,” the grocer, Mrs. Alver, greeted when he stepped inside her shop. The windows in the front of her store, empty of glass, had been sealed with brown paper. “I’m sorry, I have nothing to sell for gold nor love.”
“I see.” Bron gazed sadly over her empty shelves and bushel baskets. Two days ago he had bought four hothouse pears for a silver note each. The fruit had been a welcome treat with their meat and bread that evening. Calea’s money wallet still weighed heavily in his pocket, full of Jalseian bank notes that were quickly losing their worth. Few people had anything to sell, and those who did were asking dearer and dearer prices. Of course the few vehicles in Averieom were now defunct, and Bron had not been able to buy a beast of burden “for gold nor love,” as she put it.
“Are you still looking for a way to the north city?” Mrs. Alver was one of those who could not bear the name of Thyrion on her tongue. Her family was from Falcon Point, and she had lost folks in the recent war. At Bron’s nod, she went on. “Well, I won’t judge you for your foolishness. I heard there was a caravan man trying to organize a group to head that way. The wells have been gone less than a week, and already we resort again to practices from the distant past. Ah well. You’d be safer with friends, if you must go north.”
“I fear that I must.”
“Then travel in a pack. I heard he was holding court near the empty Well.”
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