The river kings' road by Liane Merciel

Author:Liane Merciel [Liane Merciel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SF
ISBN: 9781439159156
Published: 2010-03-08T10:00:00+00:00

11

Odosse wasted no time after Brys’ warning. That same morning, as he lay sleeping in their room at the Broken Horn, she went out to find a bakery.

The brightness of the morning dazzled her. It was a cold clear day on the cusp of winter, and though there was no snow on the ground, the world was filled with a brittle whiteness and a clarity that broke her heart. The beauty of it lifted some of the gloom that had begun to settle over her. She went out into Tarne Crossing with a lifted chin and a renewed resolve that she would find a way to survive here.

She hadn’t realized, until Brys told her to go, just how much she had hoped he would somehow make all of her problems disappear. It was a child’s wish, and Odosse would have chastised herself for it if she’d recognized it before it was gone. He wouldn’t—couldn’t—stay with her and Aubry forever. Nor did she really want him to; it was increasingly obvious that he was nothing like the knights of song and story. Of course she’d have to find her own way in the world.

It wasn’t even that she liked their shadowy existence in the Broken Horn. It was just easier to hide there, clinging to a half-believed illusion of safety, than to go out and face the ugliness she’d seen in Tarne Crossing.

But that wasn’t a real life—it wasn’t any kind of life at all—and it turned her stomach to depend on dead men’s money. She needed her own work, her own place to live.

A bakery was the best place to find that. Odosse had no other skills. And, she thought, in a travelers’ town it might not be impossible for a Langmyrne girl to find work.

Tarne Crossing, like all the border towns, swelled during the winter. Travelers wanted refuge from the frozen roads, freeswords wanted to heal the wounds of the past year’s fighting and train for the next, and crofters in isolated cottages wanted the safety of walls and guards around them. Winter was a hard time, with wolves and wild men hungry in the woods. When the weather warmed, people would go back to the fields and the roads, but until then it was good to be in a town.

There were too many outsiders for Tarne Crossing to shun them, no matter how hotly tempers burned against the Langmyrne. All Odosse had to do was follow the sellswords and merchants to see where they bought their morning bread, and she knew which bakers were friendly to foreigners. Those were the ones she approached with her tale of woe.

Odosse gave them her real name—it wasn’t in her to lie more than she had to, and she doubted she’d remember to answer to a false one—but she claimed both babies as her own. Twins, she said, their father gone or dead. She told one baker that her husband had been a good, honest farmer, killed when his hatchet slipped chopping wood and the cut sickened.

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