an unstable environment, and Josef wasn’t the kind to let opportunity pass.
From her place in the back of the cart, Nico watched Josef as he flipped the razor-sharp knife, catching it first with his right hand, then his left. Behind her, the green forest whirled by in a blur as they bounced at full speed down the road toward Gaol.
CHAPTER 9
They had to switch the wheels only once before they reached the border of Argo. The roads had been quiet and empty, barely more than cart tracks as they skimmed the northern edge of the Council Kingdoms. They had seen no one and, more important, no one had seen them.
“Well, it makes sense,” Josef noted as their cart rolled to an exhausted stop by the signpost marking the official border. “That glorified goat track was the worst excuse for a road I’ve ever seen.”
“Why should they keep it up?” Eli said, climbing stiffly off the cart. “It’s not like anyone with money goes through there. Who’d take a narrow road through the middle of nowhere now that the Council’s opened the rivers? Still”-he patted the exhausted wheels-“across the top of the Council Kingdoms in three days. I’d like to see a riverboat do that.”
“No one would ever accuse us of traveling normally.” Josef shrugged, helping Nico down. “Can the cart keep going?”
“No,” Eli said. “They’ve earned their rest. Help me out,” he said, leaning down. “After all that, the least I can do is leave them free.”
They undid the wheels and left them propped in the rocks beside the cart. Then, with a thankful farewell, Eli, Nico, and Josef set out down the overgrown path into Argo.
“All right,” Josef said, setting a brisk pace. “What now?”
“Now, we make for Gaol.” Eli reached into his pack and pulled out his map. “Argo is divided into four autonomous duchies, each about the size of a small kingdom itself. Argo’s really more like a collection of kingdoms than somewhere like Mellinor, where one king calls all the shots. That’s probably why it was one of the first major players to join the Council of Thrones. It was already used to the idea of governance by committee. Anyway, Gaol is the southernmost duchy, taking up the whole of the Fellbro River Valley just before it joins the Wellbro and they both change their names to the Whitefall River as the water enters Zarin’s territory. That’s part of why Gaol is so rich. The Fellbro River connects the northwest quarter of the Council Kingdoms with everything else. There’s enough trade coming down that waterway to keep even the greediest merchant happy, and not so much as a kernel of wheat passes through without Gaol levying some kind of tariff. Now, we’re currently in Eol, the northernmost and relatively poorest duchy of Argo. All the attention’s on the river traffic, so I expect that if we can stay on foot and on the border here we can just walk into Gaol with no questions asked.”
Josef shot him a look. “That simple, eh?”
“With us? Never,” Eli said, laughing. “If we can get into Gaol’s capital, which, I might add, is also called Goal, thanks to the stupid and confusing naming conventions of the northwest kingdoms. Anyway, if we can get in unmolested, we’ll have Slorn’s sword and be out of here in a week, tops.”
“A week?” Josef said. “You said kidnapping the King of Mellinor would take a week.”
“Give or take a major inconvenience,” Eli said, shrugging. “Kidnapping was a new area for us. There were bound to be slip-ups. This is good old-fashioned theft, and no Spiritualists in sight to mess it up. I think we’ll be all right.”
Nico and Josef exchanged a look behind Eli’s back as they followed the thief south, down the overgrown road and into the rolling hills of Argo.
It took them two days to reach Gaol’s border, mostly because on the second day it began to rain. It was a drenching, cold rain blown down from the mountains, and it made the going miserable. Eli, drowned and sulking with his blue jacket wrapped tight around him, mentioned something about stopping every mile or so, but nothing came of it. The mountain forests had stopped at the Argo border, logged to make room for sheep and cattle grazing, but it was poor land up here and the ranchers’ homes were spread thin. They passed a few farmhouses, their inviting plumes of smoke smelling of cooking and warmth, but the travelers didn’t stop. Eli had learned his lesson about nosy farmers on multiple occasions, and even a miserable, wet walk wasn’t enough to make him try one of those doors.
“Not much farther,” he said, tilting his head so the water would have a harder time going down his neck.
“So you keep saying,” Josef said. The swordsman paid no more attention to the rain than a bull does, and the water rolled off him with scarcely a notice. Nico kept in step with him, kicking her thin feet so the mud wouldn’t build up on her boots. Eli grumbled something about traveling with monsters and kept his own pace, moving his feet carefully so as not to lose a boot in the quagmire the road had become. It was a complicated process, which was why he didn’t notice that Josef and Nico had stopped until he ran face-first into Josef’s back.
“Powers!” he muttered, stumbling back. “What
Josef just nodded at the road ahead of them. Eli squinted into the rain, confused; then he saw it too. About ten feet ahead of them, the rain stopped. The road went on, the hills went on, but the rain didn’t. Eli walked forward, sloshing through the mud until he was on the edge of where the weather suddenly cut off. There, in the middle of the road, was a line. On one side, it was a miserable, cold, wet rain; on the other, the weather was sunny and the road was dry.
Squinting through the rain, Eli leaned forward until his nose was almost touching the invisible barrier separating rain from sun. “Well,” he said softly, “that’s odd.”
“That’s one way to put it,” Josef said.
Eli tilted his head back and squinted at the sky. The disconnect seemed to go all the way up. Even the gray clouds stopped at the line, swirling and turning over on each other at the border as if they’d hit an invisible wall.
“Very odd,” Eli muttered.
Josef glared at the division. He didn’t like unexplainable things. “Any ideas on what could cause something like this?”
“Well,” Eli said, tapping his fingers against his wet chin. “It could be some kind of agreement between the local spirits. I doubt it, though. Spirits have their own politics, but something this precise smacks of human interference.”
Josef frowned. “A wizard who likes sunshine, then?”
“That’d be my guess,” Eli said, poking at the line between wet and dry with his boot. “Not a Spiritualist, though. They’d consider something like this, I don’t know, rude. Not their style at all.”
Josef nodded, and they stood there staring at the anomaly for a moment longer. Then Eli shook himself.
“Well,” he said, “no point in standing in the drink when we don’t have to. That’s our road, so we might as well stop worrying and enjoy the sunshine.”
He strode forward, crossing the border between rain and sun with only a tiny hesitation. He felt nothing as he crossed, just the welcome warmth of sunlight on his wet shoulders. Now that he was on the dry side, the air was cool and bright and the dry road was solid and even, a welcome change from the rutted mud slick they’d been shuffling through all day.
Once they were all in the dry they shook out their soaked clothes and sat in the thick grass on the roadside while they drained the water out of their boots. Now that they could see the sun, it was clear that the afternoon was quickly passing, so after a short rest, they pressed on, following the road down out of the hills into a green valley.
The land on this side of the rain was very different from the scrubby hills they’d been plowing through since abandoning the cart. The brown grass and rocky outcroppings had been replaced by orderly orchards and green pastures. The road was well maintained, with neat stone walls dividing it from the farmland and not a single rut in the hard-packed dirt. In the distance, picturesque farmhouses made of gray stone and whitewashed wood nestled between the hills like plump, roosting chickens. Sleek horses grazed in green fields while roosters with deep-blue
