“Me? A shop?” Dnara blinked at the impossible sounding idea.
“Sure,” Athan shrugged. “Why not? You’re going to have to get coin somehow. I could provide the herbs and other materials, and you could mix the concoctions.”
“But, I’ve no formal training,” she argued, unsure if the idea made her nervous or excited, or if it were possible to feel both.
“Neither have I,” Athan said with a wink.
Yes, she certainly felt both. Nervous. Excited. Anxious? And his wink only added to the muddle of new emotions dancing within her chest. Kept though she may have been, living in the tower had been a simpler affair, and as they breached the inner city, she could only stop and stare at the open market square as more people than she’d seen in her lifetime went about their daily business under a dreary cloak of misty fog.
“At least the rain’s letting up,” Athan said as they paused at the corner of a stone building where the gate’s entryway street ended and a large cobblestone promenade began. “Fog should break up soon, too. Then it might not be a half-bad afternoon.”
Dnara subconsciously nodded along with Athan’s weather observations, but her attention focused intently on the sights and sounds of the bustling market street. Her eyes didn’t know where to look first and darted around the multitude of shops, cart stalls and people. Feeling dizzy, she shut her eyes for a moment and simply listened to the voices, from the merchants hawking their wears to buyers haggling down the price. A waft of warm, corn-scented air drifted into her nose, sweet and buttery enough to make her stomach rumble with hungry curiosity. As Athan had predicted, the afternoon sun broke through the clouds and warmed her face. If this was the world existing in blight, then she welcomed its existence in exchange for the secluded forest that had been her cage.
But then the clouds recovered the sun and shouting carried across the street. Dnara opened her eyes to see a crowd gathering, circling and pressing in around the large, vibrantly decorated, oxen-drawn wagon from before. For whatever reason, the townspeople were not happy with the man who owned it.
“That’s three times the price of last month!” a man’s angered voice rose over the murmuring crowd.
“I understand the truth of that, friend,” the wagon’s owner replied in a loud voice, his hands raised in a search for calm. “But last week, there was much competition to be had. Now, as I hear it, I am the only seller of unsullied wine in town, and we all know that the Sarcisian family vineyard produces the best wine in all of the four kingdoms of Ellium, from the Axe Blade Mountains to the Elvan lands of Greenwood Dale. Fit for the Red Keep, this wine is, but to you I brought it, and for sale at half the Red Keep’s price!”
Four kingdoms? She’d thought there were five. Hadn’t she read it in a book? There was the Pel’Kothor Steppe in the north where the Orc’kothi tribes roamed beyond the Axe Blade Mountains. Next, the lands of Carnath in which she stood. To the south, Orynthis, and beyond that the Elvan lands of Greenwood Dale. And far to the east lay-
“Thief!” a woman shouted from the crowd, followed by more heckles and boos.
“Now, now,” the seller tried to speak, until something flew by his head.
“We’d best move on,” Athan suggested, tugging slightly on Treven’s bridle. “Before they start tossing more than corn cobs.”
Dnara followed Athan onto a side street just as more shouts rose from the crowd and town guardsmen joined the fray. Treven’s hooves clopped on the stone road until it turned back to gravel and dirt on the next right they took. Farther from the busy market thoroughfare and the angry crowd, the town was quiet, feeling almost empty aside from the few people they passed on the street and a woman hanging shirts from a clothesline stretched between second story balconies on either side. None paid them any mind or greeted Athan as had Tobin and Beothen, which suited Dnara just as well. She hadn’t seen any signs of slaves or blackropes in town, yet, but it would be better to remain unremarkable and quickly forgotten.
Athan paused at the next intersection, giving the through street a quick glance before continuing. The sign at the corner read Butcher’s Alley. Dnara paused to look herself.
“I don’t see any thorns,” she muttered.
“What?” Athan asked as they continued onward to the west end of town. “Oh, thorns?” He laughed. “That means thieves.”
“Oh.” And she supposed it would make sense to avoid such thorns. “What did he mean about the recruitment at the docks?”
“Kings Guard,” Athan replied. “They’ve started pulling aside any able bodied man between fifteen and forty seasons, looking for new conscripts in the great war against the blight!” He made the last part sound as if he were a recruiter himself, and the war a noble quest. “They’ll take women, too, if they think them fit for duty. Better to die by sword than by childbirth, they’ll tell them.”
“I don’t like either option,” Dnara said. “And how would the blight kill you with a sword?”
“Good question, that.” Athan stopped and looked at her in silence for a moment, opening his mouth to speak but shutting it again. Treven scuffed the dirt impatiently with a hoof and Athan pointed at the building behind her. “The women’s bathhouse, m’lady.”
All questions of war and blight were forgotten at the mere thought of a hot bath and being clean again. She glanced up at the wooden sign above the door. It had no
