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Tansi
But she didn't have a choice. It was time to go again. This time, at least, she'd had a bit of
warning. No one would be following her,
unless that ranting idiot of a barkeep got up enough courage to do it himself.
Tansi picked up her pack, slung it
over her shoulder, and turned once again toward the long road.
Her cloak wasn't doing much to
keep the rain off the rest of her, either.
The sky had clouded over on the second day of her latest journey, and by
the fifth day... Cold rain, ankle-deep mud on the road and in the fields, and
no villages within a day's travel.
Not that she would have stopped in
a village to wait out the weather; this close to her old home, someone might
recognize her, and then there would be trouble. No, better to keep her distance from the villages. The river was not far, and perhaps there she
could find a boat heading west.
There was something about this
rain that... well, wasn't right. It
wasn't out of season, or too heavy, or too cold, but... it wasn't right. The trees along the edges of the road looked
strange seen through the falling rain, taller and darker and wilder. A mist hung close to the ground, drifting in
long tendrils of an oddly bluish color.
And... the river was close. With all this rain, it should have been
running fast and fierce -- and loud.
But Tansi heard nothign but rain and her own footsteps through the mud. It was as if the river had disappeared, or
been removed.
The rain was a mere drizzle now,
hardly heavier than the mist that still hung over the ground. It didn't obscure her view of the road that
ran out of the trees and away to the west... toward Shalentown, she
thought. That was how the river went,
at least, and nothing else about the shape of the land itself had changed. The old road -- the muddy, cart-rutted one
she'd been walking these last several days -- stopped abruptly at the edge of a
road like a ribbon of black wrapping the hills.
I can't be lost, she thought. I know the countryside here too well... I've
lived here for years. That road was not
here last summer.
The bluish mist swirled and curled
around her ankles, but it didn't drift across the road.
That was the first hint she had
that something was not-right about this mist, as something had been not-right
about the rain. Tansi looked back the
way she had come, and the mist was still there, over old muddy road and muddy
fileds and the ground between the tall, wild trees. Only the new road was free of it.
Magic, then. Not something the locals, with their fear of
anything unexplained or unexplainable, would care to investigate too
closely. Walking on this magic-made
road might be too risky, but walking along its edge could still give her a
measure of protection...
As long as no one else was
travelling this road too.
The next morning dawned clear and
warm, with promise of a hot autumn day to come. The ground was still quite wet, though, and she thought that it
might be worth the risk to walk on the road itself, just to get out of the
mud. The new road was flat and hard
underfoot, and reflected the growing heat of the day. It wasn't long before Tansi was reminded that wearing leather in
the heat was no better than in the cold and damp.
The sun was almost at noon when
she heard a loud rumble coming up behind her on the road. She quickly stepped off the road again, and
turned. Something was rushing up the
road toward her... a cart without horse or harness, it looked like, painted bright
red. As it sped past, the three men in
the back of the cart-thing called and whistled at her where she stood staring
at their conveyance.
Tansi shook her head. What a waste of magic, to make a stinky
horseless cart and then turn it over to a bunch of rowdies...
She stopped at midday, to eat a
little and to rest. Her legs hurt, her
arms hurt, her back hurt. She felt like
an old herbwife, hobbling along on her staff, instead of the (by appearance,
anyway) young mercenary woman that she was.
When she resumed walking, she
stayed to the side of the road, in case more stinky horseless carts should come
by.
Sometime later, from the other
direction came a cart that seemed ordinary enough... except for the three
animals hitched to it: a cat's mane and
tufted tail, and a cat's paws, on a beast with a deer's wedge-shaped head and a
water-bird's downy wings -- these clipped to prevent escape, no doubt. In body they were like both deer and cat,
and each had a short, hacked-off stump of horn above and between its eyes.
The cart driver himself was like
any small merchant from Shalentown, dressed in plain but well-made brown and
blue, with a wide hat against the sun.
He cracked a whip over the backs of his beasts, and they increased the
pace of their softly padding footsteps for a moment before slowing again.
He drew the cart to a stop as he
reached where Tansi stood; the beasts immediately lowered their heads and
closed their eyes. "Nuffrun ro
eer, aya?" he said to her. "Doon stah ta ro?"
His accent was unfamiliar --
definitely not from Shalentown -- but she was fairly sure that he'd asked her
if she was from around here, and what she was doing standing at the roadside.
"I'm travelling to
Shalentown," she said.
"Shay'tun?" the driver repeated. "Nun tha nae eer." He peered at her closely. "Sor nae?"