She felt like crying for her mother-a childlike panic, unthinking and primitive-but her mother was in a village three weeks’journey north around the vastness of the Aldwood, and it was her mother who had sold her last autumn.
She couldn’t pray. Certainly not to Jad, though she’d been brusquely converted with the others in a roadside chapel at the orders of the Kar-chite slaver who’d bought them and taken them south. And prayers to Ludan of the Wood were hopelessly beside the point, given what was to happen soon.
It was supposed to be a virgin, and it had been once, but the world had changed. Sauradia was nominally Jaddite now, a tax-paying province of the Sarantine Empire supporting two army camps and the troops based in Megarium. and though certain of the ancient tribal rites were still quietly observed, and ignored by the Jaddite clerics if they weren’t forced to notice them, no one thought it necessary to offer their maiden daughters any more.
Not when a whore from the Posting Inn would do.
It was certain, Kasia thought, gripping the railing, looking out the small window at the night from halfway up the stairs. She felt helpless, and enraged by that. She had a knife, hidden by the smith’s forge, but what possible good was a knife? She couldn’t even try to run. They were watching her now, and where could a female slave go in any case? Into the woods? Along the road to be hunted with the dogs?
She couldn’t see the forest through the streaky glass, but she was aware of it, a presence in the blackness, very near. No deceiving herself. The whispers, the watching, those inexplicable kindnesses, a never-before-seen softness in the eyes of that bitch Deana, the moist hunger in the face of Morax s fat wife, the mistress, looking too quickly away whenever Kasia met her gaze in the kitchen.
They were going to kill her two mornings from now, on the Day of the Dead.
Crispin had used his Permit to take a servant at the first Posting Inn in Sauradia just past the marker stones at the border with Batiara. He was in the Sarantine Empire now, for the first time in his life. He considered taking a second mule for himself, but he really didn’t like riding, and his feet were bearing up surprisingly well in the good boots he’d bought. He could lease a small two-wheeled birota and a horse or mule to pull it, but that would mean an outlay, over and above what the Permit allowed him, and they were notoriously uncomfortable, in any case.
Vargos, the hired servant, was a big, silent man, black-haired-unusual for an Inici-with a vivid cross-hatched scar high on one cheek and a staff even heavier than the one Crispin carried. The scar looked like a pagan symbol of some kind; Crispin had no desire to know more about it.
Crispin had refused to bring any of the apprentices with him, despite Martinian’s urging. If he was doing this crazed journey under a name not his own to try to remake his life or some such thing, he was not going to do so in the company of a boy from home. He’d quite enough to deal with without bearing the burden of a young life on a dangerous road, to an even more uncertain destination.
On the other hand, he was not going to be an idiot-or an imbecile, as Linon was altogether too fond of saying-about travelling alone. He didn’t like being outside the city walls, and this road through western Sauradia, skirting the brooding forest with the wind-scoured mountains; to the south, was not even remotely the same as it had been in densely settled, heavily trafficked Batiara. He’d ascertained that Vargos knew the road to the Trakesian border, sized up the man’s obvious strength and experience, and claimed him with the Permit. The Chancellor’s office would be debited by the Imperial Post. It was all very efficient. He just’ didn’t like how black the forest was, north of the road.
The merchants and their wine had forked south well before the border, following the path of Massina Baladia, half a day ahead of them. The decent, good-natured man-had only been going as far as a holy retreat just inside Sauradia. They had prayed together and parted company early of a morning before the cleric turned off the road. Crispin might join up with other travellers heading east-there should be some coming up from Megarium-and would certainly try to do so, but in the meantime, a large, capable person walking with him represented minimal good sense. It was one of the virtues of the Post system: he could claim a man like Vargos and release him at any Posting Inn on the road for travellers going on, or coming back the other way. The Sarantine Empire today might not really be akin to Rhodias as it had been at the apex of its glory, but it wasn’t so very far from it, either.