On the road, all she needed was food and occasional shelter.
Food only cost a few coppers a day. Thanks to her mother’s insistence that Alena help with purchasing food for the family, Alena knew how much food should cost, and haggled until she was paying what she considered an acceptable price. She avoided the inns, where she would end up spending far more. According to her rough estimate, she could survive another four weeks of travel without problem.
It was deciding what to do that took up most of her attention.
Before, her options had always been limited. She could have pursued more active employment through Bayt, or she could have gone to university, where her chosen field of study would naturally lead her to a few specific opportunities.
Now her options were limitless. She could do whatever she wished.
So what would she do? Where should she even travel to? For now she walked south, but that was only because most of the empire was south of Landow.
Some nights, after finding a secluded place far off the road, she would light a small fire and read through Bayt’s notes. She’d broken the code, and it was easy enough for her to read without consulting her key now. She’d even taken to jotting down her own notes using the same cypher.
Part of her considered vanishing into the background of a new city. She could find employment with some time and effort, then maybe hunt down a nice man and build a family with him. She couldn’t deny the appeal of a simple life.
But when that future played out in her imagination, she found that she couldn’t summon any lasting enthusiasm. It left her feeling cold and empty. What she really wanted, more than anything, was a chance to reunite with her family.
Doing so meant taking Kye down, though.
She didn’t know how, yet, but the challenge of it excited her. Kye held every advantage, and he possessed a strength she could never match.
Just thinking of ways to bring his rising star plummeting into the abyss made her heart sing.
As she flipped through Bayt’s information, she began keeping an eye out for anything that might be related or helpful in destroying the governor. She kept her mind open, uncertain of what path would lead to his downfall.
Her first decision was her destination. There were several towns and cities near Landow, but none of them called to her. She wanted to be close enough to Landow that she could hear rumors and influence events, but far enough away that her own actions wouldn’t draw any suspicion back home.
After several nights on the road, she settled on the city of Tonno. It was a bit farther from Landow than she would have preferred, but it had the advantage of being the largest city near the Etari border. From everything she had heard, it was a busy, bustling place where she could make her mark. And Bayt’s papers detailed quite a few men and women in positions of power there. It was as good a place as any to begin her revenge.
It took her nearly three weeks to reach Tonno, but not because it took her that long to walk the distance. Once her destination was chosen, she focused on acquiring the information and skills she would need to be successful outside Landow. Her days became not just about travel, but learning.
Alena resolved to never forget the most valuable lesson that Bayt had taught her. Information, when wielded correctly, yielded power. She knew now that Bayt had made some errors. He had become too big and too public among those who lived on the wrong side of the law. When trouble had come, no doubt his name had been among the first to arise.
She could do better, and she would. So she rested when she didn’t need to, especially at the junctions where travelers gathered. As she listened, she realized that what she didn’t know about the world could fill entire libraries. She had been happy in Landow, but she had never realized how small one town could be against the backdrop of the empire.
News that never would have mattered to her in Landow was important out here. The emperor was raising taxes on goods entering the empire’s borders, causing no end of grumbling among the traders. They made their profit from buying goods cheaply in neighboring lands and selling them within the empire. The emperor’s actions cut into their profits.
She began to understand, in a very real sense, how complex the empire was. She knew it spanned almost all of the continent, and thus the world, but for the first time she learned more of how it worked firsthand. There were military units tasked exclusively with the protection of the roads. Any crime upon the roads most likely resulted in a death sentence. The units rode up and down the road, often in groups of four or eight. Alena tried to discover a pattern to their movements but failed.
When she finally came upon Tonno, she stopped for a moment to admire it. The town sat on a river that made it a popular trading destination. The river, the Alna, if Alena remembered correctly, traveled down to Etar and then to the limitless ocean beyond.
She bit her lower lip as she looked over the trading city from a small rise in the road. She wouldn’t be able to sleep out in the open, which meant she would have to find an inn.
An inn would eat through her remaining money in just a few days.
So she had to find more.
How could she go about it, quickly and quietly?
She thought back to Landow and some of the petty scams that people ran there. No doubt, some of the same would have developed here. She smiled as she considered
