Chương 54: Chapter 47 — The Road Home

⟨ [NOTIFICATION] ⟩ XP: 4, 850 / 10, 000 They left before the morning bell. The western road out of Thornwall was a different thing from the eastern one. Wider, better kept, the milestones legible, and the verge cut back on both sides. Summer dust lay thick on the surface from weeks of dry weather, and the ruts from cart traffic were ground smooth rather than sharp.

By mid-morning, they had passed three merchant wagons heading into the city, a family of voles with a loaded handcart, and a pair of Order couriers on pack emus moving fast in the other direction. Nobody looked twice at a cloaked figure with a guinea pig on his shoulder. On the western road, stranger things passed through before breakfast. Fenwick was in the harness. He had walked for the first hour. It made him feel good to be physically moving in the right direction.

But he had climbed up an hour out of Thornwall without being asked, since Max could walk faster with his longer strides. Max had felt the familiar weight settle and kept walking. The road was fine. He watched it anyway — the surface ahead, the verge on both sides, the faces of the travelers coming the other way. Max noticed it all. Fenwick was somewhere else. The summer heat built through the morning.

The dust smelled of dry grass and warm stone and the particular sweetness of something flowering in the verge that Max had no name for. A cart went past with a load of cut timber, the driver nodding at them from his bench. Two young rabbits chasing each other across the road ahead had gone into the grass before Max reached the spot. A hawk riding the thermals above the tree line to the south, tilting lazily in the warm air. Fenwick's distant look and grief on his face began to worry Sindy.

After they had been walking for a few hours, she tried to talk to him to see if she could get him talking; she would feel a bit better. Fenwick. The screen lit up on Max's shoulder. He angled it slightly without breaking stride. What does the farm look like? A pause. Long enough that Max had taken six more steps before the answer came.

"Small," said Fenwick. How far from the road?

"Ten minutes." Grass farm?

"Yes." Another pause.

"Mother keeps the accounts at the kitchen table. Lamp on the left side." Is there a well in the yard?

"Yes." What color is the door? The question hung. Max walked. The flowering thing in the verge gave way to the smell of turned earth from a field on the right, rich and dark, recently plowed despite the season.

"Green," said Fenwick.

"She painted it green the year I left. I haven't seen it." Sindy did not respond to that. She moved to the next question. Is the kitchen east- or west-facing?

"East. Morning light." They walked. The questions kept coming, small and practical, and Fenwick answered each one in the same flat voice, and the thread stayed in his hand. By late afternoon, the road had thinned — the merchants mostly behind them now, the traffic down to locals moving between the smaller settlements.

The camping spots along the road showed use: fire pits with fresh ash, the ground around them worn flat, rings of stones that had been used and reused across enough seasons that the stones had blackened halfway up. People are still moving. People are still going places. The western settlements hadn't gone quiet the way the eastern ones had. A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation. Not yet.

The hunger bar sat at nine when they made camp in a hollow off the road, screened by a stand of ash trees with the last of the evening light coming gold through the leaves. Max began his watch. Fenwick lay down without eating and was asleep in minutes. Sindy's screen lit, soft in the dark. Mortal Protection Services. by Kiltedfrog. Max settled his back against the ash tree nearest the road and listened. He had heard this one before — it had been read a few times.

Max listened as Jim and the abstainer set out to save humanity. This story had a ton of twists and turns and was one of Sindy's favorites for its multi-POV aspect. The story continued while Max watched the road, only occasionally glancing at Fenwick, who had acted so strangely that day. He watched the road through the trees and listened to the story go on around the sound of Fenwick breathing. The fire burned down. The stars came out.

Something small moved in the grass at the edge of the hollow; Max tracked it without moving, and it went on. The second day was warmer. The road climbed through low hills in the morning, the surface changing from packed dust to a mix of gravel and clay that crunched differently under Max's feet. The hills were golden with dry grass, dried out from the long summer, and the sky above them was the deep blue of a season that hadn't decided to end yet.

Sheep on the hillsides were harvesting the grass for the market and prepping for the upcoming cold season. Fenwick was in the harness. Still quiet. Max walked the road, watched the sky, and felt the hunger bar sit at eight without saying anything about it. The jerky was in the pack. He was keeping it. There would be time for that later. For now, the road was the road, and the hills were the hills, and Fenwick was somewhere he couldn't reach, and Max noticed all of it. He watched Fenwick for a long time.

Then: "Max worried." Two words. New ones. Outside the evening sessions, outside any story. He had found them himself, somewhere in the three days since the letter, and he put them out now because the silence had gone on long enough. Fenwick looked up. He looked at Max — at the road ahead, at the small, earnest face turned slightly toward him, at Max's expression. Something in his chest came loose. He breathed.

He found something specific and looked at it — the road, the gravel surface, a stone the shape of a flattened egg half-buried in the clay — and held it until the wave passed.

"Thomas found an injured bird once," he said. Max's head tilted. He kept walking.

"Fledgling. Fell off a cliff on the south side of the valley — there's a rock face above the south pasture, birds nest in it every spring. He saw it from the top." The hills rolled past on either side, warm and golden.

"He climbed down to get it."

"Down?" said Max.

"It was a bad climb. He was eleven. He got to the bird, got it into his hands, and on the way back up, he slipped and came down hard on a ledge and broke his arm." Fenwick watched the road ahead, his voice even and careful.

"They found him sitting on the ledge with the bird tucked inside his shirt. Keeping it warm. He wouldn't let go of it to climb, so they had to bring a rope down and bring them both up." The gravel crunched. A lark somewhere above the hill to the left, its sound bright and incongruous.

"The bird lived," said Fenwick.

"He kept it in a box in the kitchen until it could fly. Weeks. Then he took it up to the top of the same cliff and let it go." He stopped for a moment.

"He said it needed to go back where it came from." Max walked.

"He was always doing things like that," said Fenwick.

"Always the first one in. Always the last to leave anything behind." The road curved, and the hills opened up ahead of them, a wider valley taking shape in the distance, the blue smudge of a tree line at its far edge.

"I'm walking beside the one the prophecy was written for. The one the Order of the Eternal Flame summoned. The one the Order has been waiting for." He looked at Max.

"Thomas would have climbed down a cliff face to rescue you and broken his arm doing it and thought it was the best day of his life." The lark was gone. The road was quiet.

"I never told him," said Fenwick.

"I should have written it. I had the words, and I didn't write them." Max walked beside him. The hunger bar sat at eight, and the afternoon light lay warm across the hills, and neither of them said anything else for a long time. On the third day, Max walked through the night.

The road was cooler in the dark, the dust settling in the absence of traffic, the smell of it changing from dry summer warmth to something damper and greener — dew coming in off the fields, the night-blooming things in the verge opening up, the particular freshness of a summer night in open country. Fenwick slept in the harness, one hand through the strap, his breathing slow and even. The hunger bar was at six. The stars moved overhead in their slow arc, and Max watched them without thinking about it.

An owl somewhere to the north, its call low and periodic. The sound of a stream before they reached it and after they crossed the small stone bridge. The temperature drops an hour before dawn and then slowly climbs back. Fenwick stirred as the first light came up, grey and soft over the eastern hills behind them. He sat up in the harness and looked ahead. The road curved west through low hills he knew. The air smelled different here.

Maybe it was a certain flower that was part of the forest or a specific tree, but what Fenwick smelled most here was home. The smell of the valley coming up through the morning air, grass and river water, and the faint sweetness of his mother's flowering hedge that had been there since before he was born. He was close.

"Half a day," said Fenwick. Max looked at the hills ahead.

"Yes," said Max. They kept moving. The three of them pointed at the same thing, moving together, the road unrolling ahead of them in the early light. Fenwick was not fixed. But he was present. And they were almost there. ⟨ [SYSTEM PRIVATE LOG] ⟩ [Sindy — Private Log — Day 76] Three days. On day one, I asked him about the farm. He answered in single words. I kept asking. The door is green. She painted it the year he left. He hasn't seen it yet. Day two, Max said, "Max worried," and Fenwick told us about the bird.

Thomas was eleven. He climbed down a cliff with a broken arm and kept the bird warm inside his shirt the whole way. He let it go from the top of the same cliff. ▌ Becca, if you're reading this: ▌ Max learned a new word on his own. ▌ Worried. ▌ He learned it for Fenwick.