Book Two: Chapter 11 Warmth and Road

Book Two: Chapter 11

Warmth and Road

Sera drove the first hours in silence, and Milo let her do just so. He was good at it, better than most grown men she knew. He sat on the bench beside her with the cat basket next to him, his hands in his sleeves, and watched the country go by, and he did not fill the quiet with nonsense talk the whole first morning. The road ran out of Millhaven through fields still holding their frost, past the last farms she knew by name; the wheels found every rut the autumn had on the heavy road, and the boy beside her let the heaviness be true without once asking if she was all right.

In the late afternoon he dug into Bess’s parcel and handed her things without comment – a piece of Roen’s bread, a boiled egg that had been soaking in a savoury dark marinate made of fermented beans of a sort, a honeycake wrapped separately from the rest, a concession to the boy to sweeten the road.

“She packed for a week,” Milo said, inspecting the depths of it. “We’re travelling three days.”

“She packs grief rations. Double the food, in case… a case of the feelings occur.”

Milo snorted at the jumble of words coming out of her and looked immediately guilty about it. Sera felt the corner of her own mouth move for the first time since the letter.

“You’re allowed to laugh,” she said. “He’s not dead, and he’d be insulted by a quiet entourage, anyway. My father thinks silence is a thing that happens to other people.”

“What’s he like?”

She considered the road ahead. “Loud, but precise, in both word and action. He can tell what a thing costs by picking it up. Temperamental, I don’t know if I told you the story, but he once broke a man’s jaw at a market over an insult to my mother and then finished negotiating the price of wool with the man’s brother, and got the better of him, because the brother was rattled and my father wasn’t.” She clicked the reins absently. “He inspects things instead of saying he loves them. I’m sure he already inspected you at the inn, but still stand straight and have opinions; he can’t stand a boy without opinions.”

“Hm, I do have opinions.”

“I know. It’s why you’ll do fine.”

Milo sat with that a while, visibly turning it over. Then: “Roen said your father tried to buy the ale recipe.”

“Twice in one evening. He’ll try again from his deathbed. If he offers you money for it, the answer is no.”

“How much money do you mean?”

“Milo.”

“I’m asking for information purposes.”

“The answer is no, and I’m telling Roen you asked.”

He grinned, and she almost did, and the cart rolled on through the cold bright afternoon, and it was, in its way, exactly what she had let him come for, though she’d never have said so and he’d never have made her.

• • •

They stopped the first night at Threnholm, where the innkeeper knew Sera by her trade and gave them the good room without being asked to.

The talk in the common room was of soil. Sera listened to it over a bowl of stew that would have made Roen wince. Two farmers by the fire, going at it low and steady – the field down the road gone sour, the well’s water tasting of metal, and an ewe dead with nothing wrong with it that anyone could name. The people were not panicking, but they were starting to piece together that something was spreading and telling themselves it was the weather or an ailment of the ground.

“It’s the same at home,” Milo said quietly, not looking up from his bowl. He’d been listening too, a habit he had picked up just by being near Sera. “Before the dead patches. That’s how it started on our farm, the well went strange first.” He turned his spoon over. “They should stop watering from it.”

“You could tell them.”

“They won’t listen to me. I’m just a boy from a strange place to them.”

“A boy who had the same thing happen to him.”

“They don’t know that.”

Sera looked at him, the boy who had watched soil sicken once already and cost him whatever he had, sitting in an inn a day from home recognising the smell of it in other people’s worry, and she made a decision that had nothing to do with kindness to them, but rather to Milo.

“Then they’ll listen to me,” she said, got up, and crossed to the fire.

“Evening,” she said to the farmers. “Couldn’t help hearing that the well that’s gone to metal, how long?”

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The older one looked her over from head to toe, the travelling attire, the pouch at her waist. Having already seen the merchant cart earlier, he decided she was interesting enough that the question was worth answering. “Three or four weeks, maybe.”