The Last Road by K.V. Johansen

Author:K.V. Johansen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: The Last Road
ISBN: 9781633885554
Publisher: Pyr
Published: 2019-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

The river-crossing was a slow affair. Some miracle—a settlement of a few families who lived by fishing and fowling. A handful of boats, and the families, their faces tattooed with fish, calling themselves Kinsai’s folk, but not any connection to the strange clan of the ferrymen. They had boats, far too few, and had already been packing up their meagre possessions, rounding up their geese and driving and dragging their cattle, ropes about their horns, to swim the river, in fear of the Westrons. Whether they were entirely pleased to find themselves folded into a West-grasslander flight was doubtful, but Lazlan gave them little chance to object to their boats being taken over.

Jolanan grew cold, muscles stiff, sweat drying, as they kept their watch over the ferrying. The current buffeted them, unfriendly. Fear seemed to have infected the horses. Some, when it came time for them to swim, did not want to enter the water.

Holla hung back, watching to the south, downriver. He always seemed the first to notice anything amiss in the landscape, Westron scout or bad weather or a passing fox. Jolanan walked over to him, leading Lark. He gave her a look like a sleeper waking, cold, almost not recognizing her as anyone who mattered, she could think.

Something in his hand, held against his chest. His amulet pouch. Blinked, warmth returning, seeing her properly. Tucked the token of lost Sayan away inside his shirt again.

He looked worse than that first time she had seen him. A greyness to his face, and lines—eyes, mouth—that she had never noticed before, ageing him. She remembered that brown-haired woman who had worked the harvest with them that bad year, coming to her where she struggled with an overloaded basket of wet linens she’d been spreading on the hazels to dry. Your papa’s hurt, Jo. You’d better come… The woman’s face had been like that, with the news she carried.

Had he taken some hurt…? Before she could ask, Holla said, “Kinsai’s dead.”

Jolanan felt…not nothing. Weight, pressing down. More. And more. She had thought, had hoped—Kinsai was so vast a power, compared to the gods and goddesses of the Western Grass with their small lands. Dark tales even said she had long ago devoured the lesser gods and goddesses of her shore to make herself greater, perhaps in wars against the devils. And her folk, though so few, only the two communities of the Upper and Lower Castles, numbered so many wizards among them, and scholars and seers…

The horses knew, reluctant to enter the water. The river was turned godless.

And Holla…

Gods, was he one of those Kinsai had taken as a lover, or was it only that he felt, like the horses, some pain she could not? Not the first time she had wondered if he were secretly a wizard himself. He twitched and muttered in his dreams in a language she couldn’t even name.

What could mortal folk say to comfort one another, when a goddess of the earth ceased to be? And what could she? Kinsai was only a name, a story.

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