Chương 20

There were five of them in the travelers' line when Brindlewatch finally fell behind. Two girls. Three boys. Kira counted them twice on the road out, partly because she liked knowing the shape of things and partly because numbers made the whole arrangement feel more manageable. Herself. Sela. A lanky farm boy from the east end of Brindlewatch's territory who still looked startled whenever anyone addressed him directly.

Another younger boy from a hamlet Kira had not caught the name of, all elbows and nerves and determined attempts not to cry in public. And a dark-haired boy with a serious face, maybe a year older than the others, who had barely spoken three full sentences since leaving the square. Five newly called from one village circuit stop. That, even Kira understood, was probably high. She had learned enough from overheard talk and Maelis' plain explanations to know the numbers did not usually cluster like this.

One seed in a village testing was fortune. Two was the sort of thing people remembered. Five across the larger route would be lucky enough. Five this early in the circuit made the whole thing feel weighted. Teren, who apparently could not go a full morning without doing visible arithmetic at the horizon, said as much by midday.

"It's front-loaded," he muttered, mostly to Maelis but loud enough that Kira caught it while pretending not to listen.

"Two girls and three boys from the first major stop. Statistically ugly." Maelis did not even look at him from her place at the head of the little procession.

"Meaning?"

"Meaning if a betting man were foolish enough to wager on divine distribution, he'd put his money on very few finds in the next two villages."

"You are not a betting man."

"No," Teren said.

"I'm a man with pattern anxiety."

"That has never been in doubt." Kira, walking beside Sela, hid a smile. The road itself was easier than the tension of leaving had been. They had a wagon for supplies, the younger boy and the quieter girl rode in it in shifts when nerves or distance got the better of them, and the officials kept a pace somewhere between practical and merciful. Brindlewatch's outskirts gave way slowly to open country. Fences stretched farther apart. The land flattened in long productive swells. Farmsteads sat at broader intervals.

The roads were better maintained than Kira might have expected and busier than she had imagined possible before arriving in this world. The five newly called, Teren had pointed out dryly that morning, would now get to experience two more testing festivals from beginning to end whether they wanted to or not. Kira had noticed immediately that Sela did not want to. Or rather, not in the clean exciting way she had wanted Brindlewatch. Sela's core-seed joy had not vanished.

But it had been joined overnight by something heavier and more human: the ache of distance made real. The first morning away from home had hit her harder than the testing itself. Every bend in the road made Sela look back, as though some impossible arrangement of field and hedge might still offer one last glimpse of home. Homesickness, then. Sharp and immediate. By the second hour of the road, Sela had gone mostly quiet.

So Kira nudged her shoulder lightly with her own and said, "On the bright side, you now get to experience two more testing festivals without the personal terror of waiting your own turn." Sela gave her a flat look.

"That is your idea of comfort."

"It's not my best work," Kira admitted.

"But it is technically a benefit." That earned the smallest laugh.

"You really think that helps."

"I think being miserable with additional context is better than being miserable without it." Sela looked away toward the road, but Kira caught the smile before it faded.

"You're strange."

"I've been told." That was enough for the moment. By afternoon the younger boys had started talking to one another in the broken, cautious way strangers of the same age did when trapped by circumstance long enough that silence became more awkward than trying. The quieter older girl still kept mostly to herself. Teren drifted in and out of inattentive conversation with all of them while visibly tracking six other lines of thought. Maelis remained what the road made useful: calm, exact, and impossible to hurry.

It was sometime after the midday halt, when the newly called were eating from wrapped packets and the officials stood a little apart near the wagon, that Kira saw Maelis draw Teren aside. Not dramatically. Not secretly enough to draw suspicion. Just far enough that they would not be overheard by accident. Kira did not move closer. She did not need to.

Her hearing and attention were more than adequate from where she sat with Sela on a roadside stone, pretending to care deeply about the stitching on her borrowed travel bag. Maelis spoke first.

"I've sent word." Teren went still at once.

"To whom?"

"To the Church of Ariana." That got his full attention. Not playful. Not academic. Full.

"For what?"

"A favor." Teren stared at her for a second, then let out a slow breath.

"Maelis."

"She cannot go to the capital."

"No," he said immediately.

"Obviously not."

"Nor can the Vale girl, if I can prevent it." That made Kira sharpen. Sela, who had not heard, was tearing her bread into tiny pieces she did not seem to realize she was making. Teren rubbed one hand over his face.

"What exactly did you ask for?"

"Assistance training two girls." He blinked.

"That's all?"

"That is all I could safely commit to a message carried by road."

"And you chose Ariana."

"I chose a church that does not crumble when handed danger and does not confuse gentleness with weakness." Teren huffed out something close to laughter, though there was no humor in it.

"That describes more than one."

"Not more than one I trust in this case." Now he looked properly troubled. There were many expressions Teren wore easily. Amusement, curiosity, mild irritation, charm, intelligence too sharp to comfortably sheathe. This was not one of them.

"You're sending them to the Blades."

"The church that trains them," Maelis corrected.

"That is not a meaningful distinction."

"It is when one intends to survive the outcome." Teren looked toward the road, toward the five newly called, toward Kira without letting it become obvious.

"You think it's that bad."

"I think it will become worse." He was quiet for a long moment. Then: "Running?" Maelis folded her hands loosely before her, priestly calm laid over hard practical choice.

"Between the next two villages, yes. Homesickness is common. Even for those with seeds. Some decide the road is not for them. Some leave in the night. Some vanish at the first crossroads and reappear in their mothers' kitchens by dawn."

"That does happen," Teren admitted.

"We will permit it to happen." That was the first line that made him truly flinch. Agreement hit him harder than disagreement could have. It made him complicit in a thing with edges sharp enough to cut doctrine.

"And the others?" he asked.

"They continue with us."

"Do you trust them not to notice?"

"I trust the road to divide attention. I trust fatigue. I trust adolescent self-involvement. I trust that a story no one wants examined too closely is often safest when it resembles a story everyone has seen before." Teren exhaled slowly through his nose. Then, because he was Teren and his mind always eventually moved back into mechanism, he said, "Seventy miles?" Maelis nodded once.

"From the next town." That made him wince outright.

"You're sure?"

"No," Maelis said.

"I am certain only that the capital is impossible." That ended the debate before it truly began. Teren looked at the ground for a while after that. When he finally looked up, the argument had drained out of him, leaving only reluctant acceptance and the residual static of a man who knew exactly how ugly the alternatives were.

"The Church of Ariana," he said quietly.

"Not just any branch."

"No."

"The Blades."

"Yes." Kira had read enough by then to know Blades was not the church's word for soft hands and patient tutoring. He barked a short laugh without joy.

"Well. If one must hide two dangerous girls in plain righteousness, I suppose there are worse places."

"Very few." That, Kira thought, was not reassuring in the least. But it was useful. She now knew three things. First, Maelis was planning around her with the kind of long vision that belonged to women who served gods for a living. Second, Sela had somehow been folded into that protection. And third, whatever waited seventy miles beyond the next town was not a school in the ordinary sense. It was a forge. Sela looked up then, perhaps finally noticing Kira had gone still beside her.

"What?" Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere. Kira glanced at the half-shredded bread in Sela's lap and decided, for the moment, that not every truth needed immediate company.

"Nothing," she said. Then, because she still meant to be kind: "You're destroying that bread like it insulted your family." Sela looked down and groaned softly.

"I didn't even notice."

"See? Progress. You've moved from generalized sorrow to targeted destruction." That got another reluctant smile. Good enough. The next town rose out of the grainlands like something built by patience and wagons. Kira saw it first as a change in the land itself. Not in architecture, not at first. In scale. Fields spread wider here than around Brindlewatch, broader and more disciplined in their geometry.

The crop—some local wheat-equivalent, tall and pale-gold and moving in great rippling sheets under the wind—covered enormous swathes of ground, broken only by roads, drainage cuts, wind fences, and the occasional farmhouse or milling structure. It was the kind of landscape that made a kingdom's bread possible. When the town itself finally came into view, it sat low and broad among the fields rather than above them.

"Gleanrest," Teren said, mostly for the benefit of those who had never been here before. Sela, beside Kira, went almost perfectly silent. Of course she had never seen another town. That realization hit Kira strangely hard. Sela had known Brindlewatch and the Vale farm and the shape of roads in stories.

Now here was a whole second center of human life, bigger than the first, different in its smells and geometry and movement, and Sela was seeing it for the first time while already no longer belonging entirely to her old world. Kira understood that kind of threshold. Gleanrest looked larger than Brindlewatch, though not by so much that the comparison felt impossible. It was a farming town grown fat and practical off grain rather than mixed stock and river traffic.

The roads feeding into it were wider from constant wagon use. The outbuildings were bigger. The storehouses were taller. The mills—there were at least two visible from the approach—gave the place a structural confidence Brindlewatch had not possessed. Families had clearly arrived early to meet the testers. Many of them came from farther out than the Vales ever had to travel.

That showed in the wagons clustered near the town edge, in the cookfires already gone to coals by the roadside, in the worn patience of people who had made a day or more of reaching this place and intended to wring every drop of usefulness from the trip. The families also looked larger. More children. More cousins. More aunts. More older siblings drafted into carrying baskets, watching little ones, or pretending not to care about the outcome while caring desperately. Sela stared openly. Kira nudged her.

"You all right?" Sela nodded too quickly.

"It's just…" She looked again at the town, the grain fields, the long lines of waiting wagons, the milling crowds.

"It's real," she said. Kira followed her gaze. Brindlewatch had been one world. Gleanrest proved there were many. By the time Gleanrest had fully absorbed the arrival of the officials, the newly called, the wagons, the families, and the work of setting up another testing circuit, Kira had come to understand something else about the route: nothing happened quickly, but everything happened with purpose. The first day in a new town was not for spectacle. It was for order.

Maelis and Teren greeted the local authorities, then the temple stewards, then the families who had arrived early enough to be useful, and then the ones who had arrived early enough only to be worried. Farmhands helped pitch the travelers' tents and testing canvas in the same practical spirit Kira was beginning to suspect governed half the kingdom. Men who had not been officially asked to help helped anyway because that was what men with carts and spare hands did when a thing needed doing.

Women redirected children, settled bundles, traded information, and somehow kept the whole business from becoming complete chaos. The town adjusted around the incoming ritual like a body making room for a familiar strain. Kira and Sela, for the first time since Brindlewatch, were mostly left to themselves. That alone felt strange. Not unwelcome. Just strange.

They walked the town the next morning after breakfast, officially because there was nothing else for them to do while testing preparations dragged on and unofficially because both of them needed movement. Sela was still carrying the deep ache of homesickness, though it had softened from raw pain into something more wearable. She still went quiet at odd moments. Still watched families too long when parents cuffed sons on the shoulder or sisters braided one another's hair in doorways.

But Gleanrest was new enough, and big enough, that even sorrow had to keep making room for curiosity. They got looks. Of course they did. Plainly out-of-towners. Plainly newly confirmed. Kira suspected most people in Gleanrest had enough experience with the testing circuit to identify the signs in half a glance: church-issued travel clothes, the odd in-between posture of village youths already slightly separated from their homes, the look of people who had not yet learned what to do with their new category.

Kira got the extra looks. That part no longer surprised her. Men looked. Women looked. Older people assessed. Younger people stared and then tried to conceal it. Her eyes drew attention most immediately. The bright electric blue alone would have done it. The faint tracer-lines around her collarbones and wrists, visible in the right light, did the rest. Still, as before, nobody made much of her ears. A few glances touched the slight upper taper. None lingered there long enough to become a question. Interesting.

Maybe it really was a social rule. Or maybe the world was simply broader here in what it was willing to accept at a glance. Either way, Kira appreciated it. Gleanrest gave her her first clear view of the other races she had only read about and half-remembered from the dizzying catalogue she had skimmed while choosing a body. A squat, broad-handed merchant near a grain stall looked distinctly dwarven: compact, dense, and visibly unwilling to let height have the final word.

Kira kept that assessment firmly to herself. Two children darted between wagons with quick-footed ease and hand-to-face proportions that suggested halfling, especially when one of them turned and shouted something bold at a human woman twice his height without the least concern for hierarchy. Later, near the mill road, she saw someone small and fine-boned, with alert eyes and a clever face that suggested gnome—or something adjacent enough that asking would only reveal ignorance. So she did not ask. Not yet.

She observed instead. Humans were clearly dominant here, but the others existed in numbers large enough that no one treated them as spectacle. Difference registered, then made room for more practical concerns: work, family, money, bearing, who had grain to sell and who looked like they might overcharge for it. Nice. She had spent the previous night, and much of the road before it, reading. All three books had been finished. Not just finished. Absorbed. That still startled her every time she tested it.

Her new mind did not merely read quickly. It took in information with a ruthless efficiency that bordered on predatory. If she let herself move at full speed, comprehension snapped together with unnerving completeness. She had gone back several times just to make sure she was not tricking herself. Each time the results had been the same. Slow-read a page, close the book, and the page remained in her with unsettling fidelity. The book on Archus she had read more than once. That one she kept private.

No one had forbidden daylight reading, but selective gifts from road sorcerers attached to capital churches did not need advertising. It had not been part of the standard issue. Teren had wanted her to have it specifically, and while she doubted anyone in the travelers' tent was counting covers before sleep, she still preferred discretion. So she read it at night. Re-read it, actually. Schools of magic. Ordered casting structures.

Arcane traditions associated with Archus and those that merely tolerated his clergy as useful obsessives. She had questions. Several good ones. But she was never alone with Teren, and asking them in front of Maelis or the other newly called felt like stepping too far too soon. So she stored the questions for later. That morning, another book had appeared in her bag beside the standard texts and Teren's Archonic temptation: a plain history of Ariana's church.

Like the football manual, it arrived unexplained and entirely understood. She had spent several hours devouring it before sleep finally got her. The result was that she rose more refreshed than she should have, with a head full of doctrine, legend, mortal biography, holy office, and enough information about Ariana's church structure to understand why Maelis' hidden plan felt both terrifying and exact. Ariana as mortal. Ariana ascending. Ariana's deeds. Ariana's favored servants.

The faith classes associated with her church, from the gentle and publicly beloved to the more severe and sanctified edges. Avenging Blades among them, written in history with the sort of careful reverence reserved for people too righteous to be entirely comfortable. A quick word from Maelis as the girls had dressed that morning had confirmed the source without actually naming it.

"When you're done with that," the invoker had said, not looking up from the notes she was reviewing, "share it." That was all. Kira had waited until Sela was still asleep, then slipped the Ariana volume into Sela's bag before they left the tent. It felt right. Now, as they wandered Gleanrest's streets, she watched Sela take in the town and thought about when to mention it. Not yet. Later, when the mood improved by a fraction. Gleanrest itself was worth seeing.

Brindlewatch had felt like a farming village trying to become a town. Gleanrest was a town by sheer agricultural force. Grain dominated everything. The roads were wider for wagons. Storehouses stood taller and more numerous. Mill structures hummed with industry. Great wagons laden with bundled stalks and sacks passed regularly enough that pedestrians had learned to flatten themselves against fences and walls without breaking conversation. Dust lay differently here too—paler, finer, threaded with chaff.

The town smelled of bread before there was bread. They passed market rows heavy with grain-meal cakes, seed breads, fried dough, honey, woven straw goods, oil, and tools made for harvest work. Children ran in packs larger than Brindlewatch's. The families did seem bigger here, whether because of local custom, better yields, or simply the fact that the outlying farms had farther to travel and therefore brought more of their own with them when they came into town for testing.

Sela took it in with a kind of careful awe.

"This is all one town," she said at one point, as if testing the idea aloud. Kira followed her gaze across the mill road, the wagons, the clustered houses, the broad fields beyond.

"Apparently."

"I thought…" Sela hesitated, then laughed softly at herself.

"No. Never mind."

"What?"

"I thought towns would feel more… polished." Kira smiled.

"This one feels like Brindlewatch's older cousin who sells bread in bulk and judges everybody's boots." That got a real laugh out of her. Good. Sela still was not in much of a mood to talk, though. Not consistently. So Kira let silence do its work where it needed to and, for herself, let the music run. Her playlist sat just inside the corner of her awareness, a private current under the noise of the town. New Order first.

"Blue Monday." Then Kate Bush, Depeche Mode, Eurythmics, Tears for Fears, A-ha. Later, "Personal Jesus" made her snort to herself in the middle of a grain market and decline to explain why when Sela glanced over. Nothing chosen for Sela's mood. Nothing selected to soundtrack homesickness. Just Kira's own strange little pulse of cool, sharp, self-contained music under a town full of bread and festival dust and human noise. It helped.

By afternoon, word had spread among the local youths that the newly called from Brindlewatch were about and that one of the girls among them looked like trouble in a very symmetrical way. Boys watched from corners and across streets with all the bravery of creatures hoping not to be noticed while very badly wanting to be. A few more daring—or, more likely, more thoroughly dared—worked up the courage to cross the space.

"Are you going to the dance tonight?" one of them asked Sela first, then failed not to look at Kira for the second half of the question.

"What dance?" Kira asked. The boy blinked as if the existence of dance required no explanation in a civilized world.

"The bonfire. By the east green. Young folk get the first hour before all the old ones come tramping in and ruin it."

"Do they ruin it?" Kira asked. He considered.

"In principle." There were others too. Not many. Just enough to establish the shape of local youth culture. A bonfire. Dancing. Young people given a ceremonial first claim on the night before adults turned it into broader village festivity. Sela, still drifting at the edge of moping whenever wonder wasn't actively occupying her, looked as if she might decline on reflex. Kira saw that and intervened before the homesickness could win by default.

"We're going," she said. Sela turned to her.

"We are?"

"Yes."

"I don't dance."

"That is not required. Standing near a bonfire while other people embarrass themselves also counts as participation." One of the boys, emboldened by this answer, said, "You should dance." Kira looked at him with enough calm to make him regret several of his life decisions.

"I should do many things. The question is whether tonight is the night for them." He went pink and retreated with as much dignity as he could salvage. Sela laughed again.

"There," Kira said.

"That's settled. We're going." Sela shook her head, smiling now despite herself.

"You decide things like royalty."

"It's one of my gifts." And because the day had given them no better plan, because the town was large and new and alive around them, and because homesickness was easier to carry when not faced directly for every waking hour, the girls kept walking through Gleanrest while Kira's private playlist ran and the world slowly widened. Kira did not trust her feet. That was the problem. Not entirely, anyway.

Technically, she had once had about ten years of walking experience in her old body before the disease took more and more of the mechanics away from her and turned movement into theory. That was the charitable version. The less charitable version was that the six years after that had been spent lying very still, occasionally moving, and learning to think of locomotion as something other people did without having to negotiate for it first. Dancing? Please. Forget about it. Did she want to dance? Very much.

With a boy? Also very much, inconveniently. The point was yes. Obviously yes. She was eighteen. Or had been. Or was again in whatever way counted now. She had a body that moved, hips that actually existed, music in her blood even when the local version of music sounded like it had escaped from a country fair and put on ceremonial ribbons. Of course she wanted to dance.

The fact that she distrusted her own knees on uneven ground and still occasionally thought too consciously about where each foot was supposed to go did not reduce the desire. It only complicated it. The reports of the evening did not help. Apparently Gleanrest's bonfire dance was one of the social highlights of the testing week, at least for anyone under thirty and hormonally vulnerable.

The young people got the first hour to themselves before parents, uncles, aunts, and the alarming confidence of older generations took over the green and turned it into more of a communal event. The music, if local boys were to be believed, would be excellent. Kira was willing to bet money it would be flute and string-plucking nonsense. Prom at a ren fair. Memorable? Sure. Weird? Abso-freaking-lutely.

A private part of her considered whether she could put on some Wu-Tang or Whitney Houston through the media overlay, keep the volume tucked to herself, and dance to something with actual pulse while Sela and the local boys spun around to bird music and no one would be any wiser. Tempting. Very tempting.

A few hours before the dance, she and Sela returned to the church tent to wash up, change, and generally pretend they had any idea what to do with themselves now that the day's wandering had turned into evening possibility. The testing for Gleanrest had finished for the day. Two full days, Teren had said that morning, because the grain town drew from a wider hinterland and more families came in early. The first day had yielded three new candidates: one girl, two boys.

That brought the road total higher still and, if Teren's muttered mathematics were to be trusted, made the next village statistically less likely to deliver many at all. The tent was quieter than the square. The new girl—the one from Gleanrest—had not yet joined them, whether from family supper or tears or simply the chaos of being newly called.

Sela sat on her cot, half talking and half staring at the shirt she had laid out for the dance, as if deciding whether to wear it or declare war on the concept of public festivity altogether. Kira sat opposite her and tried to project more certainty than she had.

"I'm telling you now," she said, "if this turns out to be three hours of flutes and courtship stomping, I reserve the right to become extremely judgmental." Sela laughed despite herself.

"Courtship stomping?"

"You know exactly what I mean."

"I don't, actually."

"You will." That got another smile. Good. More of that. The tent flap stirred, and Maelis stepped inside. She had the look of a woman who had completed a full day of official labor without once permitting exhaustion to become visible. Cloak still on. Road dust still at the hem. Order still gathered around her like a second form of clothing. Her gaze moved first to Sela, then to Kira.

"The new girl will be along shortly," she said. Sela nodded, suddenly looking as though she had just remembered she was sharing sleeping space with increasingly more strangers. Maelis' attention returned to Kira.

"If you have a moment," she said, "I would like to speak with you." Kira stood at once. Sela looked between them with the sort of curiosity friendship did not always manage to suppress. Kira gave her a look that translated loosely to I will report back if the gods announce war, and followed Maelis out.