Chapter 10
A Glimmer of Silver
N orthern Kinell – 12th Luddinch 5252
Aila had never been so hungry. She and Kesley had been walking for days, keeping to the main roads that wound down the eastern coast of the Forted Shore, but their lack of money had slowed their progress. Some days, they had barely covered a few miles, instead spending hours trying to find enough food to eat, and on other days they had been too tired to walk at all.
The landscape was doing little to improve their mood. Acre after acre of hillside was covered in nothing but tree stumps, and the great majority of traffic they had seen on the road was involved in transporting timber down to the large port of Kin Dai, ready to be exported to Alea Tanton. Labour camps dotted the countryside, filled with workers who went out each day to cut down more of the vast forest that had once covered the whole of Northern Kinell, leaving behind nothing but a wilderness of tangled undergrowth and the remains of the fallen trees. No attempts were being made to plant new ones, and after seeing how the City of Pella had carefully managed its own small woodlands, Aila was sickened by the waste.
They had spent several days working at one of the camps, collecting the scraps of wood that the lumber gangs had left behind, but the hours were long and hard, and the pay had been barely enough to cover a single day’s food.
Kelsey had lost a lot of weight and, considering she had been slim to begin with, Aila worried about her health. As a demigod, Aila knew that her reserves of self-healing powers would keep her going almost indefinitely, but the young Holdfast woman was starting to look gaunt and ill. For the previous two days, they had veered away from the barren coast, and headed inland, closer to the edge of the forest and the labour camps. They had slept in a hut abandoned by the lumber gangs, huddling together in the cold night air among the miles of tree stumps.
The following morning, Aila awoke, her back stiff from sleeping on the rough ground. She allowed her self-healing to do its job and poked her head out of the shabby hut. All around was a wilderness of broken ground punctuated by never ending lines of tree stumps. To the south and west, smoke was rising from the edge of the forest in the distance, where the gangs were clearing undergrowth.
‘There’s a camp a couple of miles away,’ she said to Kelsey. ‘We should make for it.’
‘How do you know it’s there?’ said Kelsey, who was still lying on the ground.
‘Just a guess, really. If the gangs are already burning stuff, they must have slept somewhere close by.’
‘Do you think Amalia’s still looking for us?’
‘She must have given up by now. Come on, get up.’
Kelsey groaned, then scrambled to the hut’s entrance. ‘I hate this place.’
‘I know; it’s horrible.’
‘Maybe we should go back to Stoneship.’
‘We’re more than half way to Kin Dai; it’ll be easier to keep going.’
‘We should have… No, I’m not going to say it. You’re right; we need to keep going. Though, the next time I escape from a maniac god, I want it to be with someone who can carry me on their back and run all the way to Kin Dai.’
They left the hut and Aila checked the position of the sun. In the City, the sun was always in the same part of the sky, but she had become accustomed to its rise and fall every day on Lostwell. Kelsey had told her that it was Lostwell that moved, not the sun, but she wasn’t sure if that was true, and in the situation they were in, it hardly mattered.
They began walking towards the south, following a rough track between the stumps. Aila scanned the ground as she always did when they were on the move. Once, she had found a silver coin that had bought them a loaf of bread, six apples and some cheese, which had felt like a feast, and she was determined not to miss anything else that had been carelessly dropped in the mud. Next to her, Kelsey trudged on, her hunger and exhaustion keeping her uncharacteristically quiet.
‘It doesn’t make any sense,’ said Aila. ‘Why would they cut down all the trees and not plant more?’
‘They’re idiots.’
‘If they keep this up, there will be no forest left within a decade or so.’
‘Do you think the gods care? Alea Tanton needs wood, and they’d rather cut down every tree in Northern Kinell than pause to think about the bigger picture. Khatanax is finished.’
Aila nodded. ‘I’m going to steal again today.’
Kelsey said nothing.
‘No complaints? No moral qualms?’
‘Not any more, if it keeps us, I mean me, from starving. People who haven’t eaten in days can’t afford those kind of morals.’
‘That’s not what you said when we first started out.’
‘I wasn’t starving then. What’s your plan?’
‘When we get to the camp, you stay back and I’ll go in alone and check the place out. Then I’ll take on the identity of someone and help myself to whatever I can. Money, ideally, and then we can maybe rent a room with an actual bed for the night.’
After a mile and a half, Aila saw a large cluster of tents ahead of them. Small tendrils of smoke were rising from a few camp fires, and wagons and carts were parked by the side of the track.
‘Alright, Kelsey,’ she said; ‘you stay
