“Ma’am!” one of the men called. He was perhaps in his forties, covered in mud from trying to get the wagon unstuck. “Ma’am, please help us!”
Thessa had already moved to give them a wide berth, and it took her a moment to realize they were talking to her. She hesitated. Slowing down meant that more fleeing refugees might overtake her on the road. These poor folks seemed worried about the same thing. Could she risk stopping to help?
“Please, ma’am,” the man called again. “Just one more to help push should do it. We’re all about spent and we still have miles to go.”
Thessa weighed her options for half a moment. “Where are you headed?” she asked.
“Vlorstad,” the man replied. “I’ve got an Ossan cousin up there who’ll take us in until whatever is happening blows over.”
Thessa’s route would pass Vlorstad later this evening. It was still many miles away, over the border. Traveling with a group like this might actually be safer. “Give me a ride to Vlorstad?” she asked.
“Absolutely!”
Thessa rolled up her sleeves and hurried down to the bottom of the ditch. She was no ox, but years of working the furnaces had given her a strong back and arms. She set her heavy boots against the slippery sides of the ditch, and threw her shoulder against the back of the wagon with the other four. True to the stranger’s word, they managed to rock it back and forth until the wheel popped out of the rut. Within minutes, they had freed the wagon entirely and helped push it up the next hill.
The group caught their breath there, where they were joined by the others. Thessa quickly found herself swamped by children hugging her legs and elderly men and women shaking her hand enthusiastically. The leader – the man who’d called to her – shooed them all away. “My name is Serres, by the way.” He offered his hand.
“Teala,” Thessa replied, giving the fake name she’d thought up a few miles back.
“Mighty obliged, Teala. Had half a dozen others pass right by us without so much as a glance. You said you’re going to Vlorstad?”
“Past it, actually. But a ride would save my feet.”
“No problem at all, if you’re willing to help us out of any more pickles like that one.”
The agreement was made, and Thessa was soon riding on the back lip of the wagon she’d helped rescue, sitting beside a sleeping child and listening to Serres’s wife sing softly to pass the time. It was a massive relief to be off her feet, but it also gave her empty time to think about Ekhi. She could still hear his pained screech after that musket shot and, though she had not witnessed it, she could imagine the plume of feathers and blood as he tumbled to the earth.
Her dark reverie was interrupted by Serres. “Teala, do you know what’s happening in Grent?” he asked over his shoulder. “Nobody seems to know why Ossa attacked.”
“I don’t either,” Thessa admitted. That wasn’t strictly true. If Kastora was correct, then the Ossans had decided to seize cindersand and research from the smaller city-state.
He nodded as if that was what he expected. “Where are you heading?” he asked.
Thessa sought an easy lie. “I have a friend in Havshire. As soon as I heard the cannons, I thought it was a good idea to get out of town.”
“You’re a wise woman,” Serres responded, patting a trunk lashed in place just behind him. “We did the same thing. The missus had us up at five o’clock this morning, packing everything we could fit. If Ossa has finally decided Grent’s time has come it’s best to get somewhere we can pretend we’ve been Ossan all along, right? I doubt anyone will even notice.” He paused. “Havshire is forty miles. Are you really going to walk all that way in those boots, without a jacket?”
“I panicked,” Thessa said, hoping she sounded passably sheepish. “My family was at Holikan when I was a kid. I spook pretty easily at the sound of cannon fire.”
Serres shuddered. “My sympathies, young lady. I’ve heard the rumors about that place. Glassdamned Ossans. If you’d like to stay with us in Vlorstad tonight, I can’t offer you a bed but might be able to rustle up a spare blanket and let you huddle under the wagons.”
It was better than sleeping in a bush. “That’s very kind of you,” Thessa said. She would prefer to make it into Ossa tonight, even if she had to walk past midnight, but this gave her an extra option. She could make the decision once they reached Vlorstad.
She looked down at her boots dangling off the back lip of the wagon, covered in mud. She wasn’t supposed to wear them outside the compound – they were heavy and expensive, and the less wear on them the better. The thought of Kastora scolding her for tramping through a ditch in them almost made her smile. Surely that was exactly what would happen when he caught up to her at the Hyacinth Hotel. She could hear the lecture tumbling out of him as he distractedly examined the schematics she’d smuggled into Ossa.
Checking to be sure no one was watching, Thessa drew the vellum schematics out of her boot and unrolled them on her knee. It felt a little like opening someone’s personal journal. She pushed past that thought, reminding herself that Kastora was going to bring her into the project anyway. She might as well know what it was.
Each piece of vellum was dominated by technical drawings of the phoenix channel and the compartment in which it was housed, viewed from several different angles. It looked like a weapon of war – a cannon in which energy was loaded in one end and sorcery came out the other. The margins of the vellum were crammed with tiny notes.
She was mostly left to her own devices there at the back of the wagon, and it gave her plenty of time to study the schematics. Within a couple of hours she had a good grasp of Kastora’s working theories and the materials he had used. Had anyone ever thought to use cinderite as the core of a phoenix channel before? Cinderite had its own sorcerous resonance but in a thousand years of research no one had ever found a use for it. She slid the schematics back into her boot, her mind turning as she considered ways to improve upon his design.
The sleeping child beside her soon woke, and Thessa was bemused to find him watching her. The little boy was perhaps eight or nine, curled up in a large tunic. Thessa looked toward Serres, wondering if she should alert him that his child was awake. She was, she was the first to admit, not good with kids. Plenty of the apprentices at the glassworks were as young as twelve, but she didn’t have experience with anyone younger than that since her own little sister died at Holikan.
“Hi,” she ventured.
The child remained silent.
“I’m Teala. It’s good to meet you.”
Still no response. Thessa side-eyed the child for a few minutes, waiting for some kind of reaction, but he seemed content to watch her. She eventually let her gaze drift back to the south, where the plumes of smoke stood out in the golden rays of the setting sun.
She felt a tug on her sleeve and looked down to find that the boy had produced a number of little wooden toys and laid them out on his lap. There were perhaps a dozen of them, all different animals. He displayed them without expression, as if waiting to gauge her response.
“Are those yours?”
A solemn nod.
Thessa pointed to one of the animals, a little bird with wings spread. “I have a bird. Had.” She flinched, feeling her smile slip. “His name was Ekhi, and he was a falcon. He had gorgeous brown feathers, tipped with red, and a speckled white and brown breast.”
The boy handed her the bird, placing it in her palm. Taking it between two fingers, she mimicked it flying around his head, then used it to pounce on one of the other animals in his lap. He finally cracked, a shy smile darting across his face so quickly she might have imagined it.
“Leone,” Serres called, “leave our guest alone.”
“He’s fine,” Thessa assured him.