The problem, though, was that the city was over two days’ travel behind him now. A long way to go just to have the guards throw you into irons as soon as they saw you. A long way to go even if there was a warm bed and a cold ale waiting on you, and unless dungeons had changed considerably in the last month or so since he’d last visited one, neither would be on offer.
The village of Celdar, though, was only an hour’s walk away, give or take, for he could see it in the distance, the smoke rising from the chimneys. Well. Maybe a few hours considering the trousers. Either way, far closer. They would probably have ale, maybe even beds, though in a backwater village like that he thought it just as likely they all slept in the dirt and drank their own piss.
Still, Maeve was there. Maeve who he had not seen in fifteen years. Maeve who, if memory served, had threatened to kill him if she ever saw him again. Though, to be fair, he’d had many people—women in particular—say similar things to him over the years and some of those he had seen again and, while it had to be admitted that though he might not be flourishing, he was, at least, still alive. Probably the woman had only meant the death threat as a jest. Not that he could ever remember Maeve going in for many jokes.
Either way, there was no choice, not if he wanted to save the doomed man and the doomed boy—something he still wasn’t sure about. He might know what was coming to them, but he had no idea what he should do to help them—committing suicide by charging at fifty armed men didn’t seem like a particularly tempting option. The sad fact was that he’d never been much of a planner. Or a doer either, come to it. He had always considered himself more of a dreamer. Not the type of man who did incredible things, true, but the type of man who saw them, maybe, or heard about them over a nice pint and appropriated the best bits for his own.
Maeve, though, she would know what to do. She always had, in the past. The woman might have been a bit of a bitch—the gods could attest to that, surely—but she was also clever. Cleverer than she had a right to be. He’d seen that cleverness in dozens of her schemes over their years campaigning, even if their leader—the man currently walking toward his doom, though he knew it not—had nearly always overruled them and chosen instead the path of blood, as was his way.
He would go to her, then, and tell her of what he had seen in his vision. She would no doubt come up with some plan—assuming she didn’t kill him, of course, or neuter him as she’d joked on more than one occasion, doing a bang up job of keeping a straight face and not breaking a laugh or smile. A plan that would, no doubt, somehow enable them to save the boy and the man against all odds. As for Chall, well, that would be the end of his involvement. Once he had told her, once she had been warned, he could wash his hands of the whole affair and get back to…well, get back to getting kicked out of taverns and womens’ beds, that was what, his biggest worries bouncers and candlesticks, not swords and pissed off princes. Although, there was no denying that the bed part was becoming less and less frequent of late having, he suspected, some inverse relationship with his growing gut.
Then, resolved—or, at least, as resolved as he ever really got—Chall started down the dirt road toward the village of Celdar, pausing from time to time to defend himself against his recently-acquired trousers.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
You ask me why I chose this path?
Very well, I’ll tell you.
My father was a farmer. My mother too. Their lives spent digging in the dirt, their backs hunched at labor and for what? For more than one night when we were forced to go to bed hungry.
No, I will never be a farmer. Better to do anything than that.
Better to die.
—Maeve the Marvelous following the Battle of the Barrier Mountains
Maeve knelt in the dirt of her garden, digging her hands through the fertile soil to create a small pocket, a pocket in which she laid a seed. Then she gently pushed the dirt over, covering it. It was nothing now, nothing but a small seed that might be easily lost or forgotten. But in time, it would grow into a tomato plant, a plant which would produce food that could be eaten. A small thing, perhaps, but then small things, she told herself often, could make all the difference.
That was true, but it wasn’t the real reason why she spent so much time in her garden. She knew enough of herself to know that much. No, her reasons were much simpler than that. She liked the feel of the soil in her hands, liked the texture of it, liked, too, the knowledge that hands which had once spent so much time destroying could also create, could help make and sustain life, not just take it away.
It brought a certain peace that had been so rare in her life, one that she had desperately needed. And dirt, it had to be said, washed off far more easily than blood. So, she went about her task, smiling, even whistling a song, one she could not remember the name of.
Chall would know it.
She frowned, pausing at that thought, the tune she’d been whistling faltering. Strange, that she would think of the mage now, of all times. For fifteen years, she hadn’t given him or any of the others from her past a thought. Or, at least, she’d tried not to and, most of
