voice was bland.
“Korbin says the wagon is ready. We’re leaving.”
“Good.” When Walter didn’t move, she said tightly, “Was there something else?”
Walter’s eyes shifted toward Karen, glanced up and down, taking in her rumpled dress, her bare feet, the bucket of goat’s milk, then returned to her face. He almost smirked, but something he saw in Karen’s face stopped him. He frowned instead, the tension in his shoulders relaxing. “No. Nothing else.”
He began moving away. Colin watched him, jaw clenched, breathing through his nose. Before he rounded the end of the wagon, he shot Colin and Karen a thoughtful look… and then he was gone.
Karen turned toward Colin, sighed in exasperation when she saw his face, his clenched fists and tightened jaw. “Ignore him, Colin. He’s not worth it.”
“I didn’t like the way he looked at us when he left.”
“So what? It was just a look. Now come on, I want to ditch this milk before we get started.”
“What do you think, Arten? Can we make it?”
“Yes, we can,” Walter answered, voice heavy. He shifted with impatience.
Tom ignored the Proprietor’s son and turned to the commander of the Armory. To the east, the shortened cliffs of the Bluff-over a thousand hands high at the Falls, a mere seven hundred hands high here-were broken by a huge landslide. Tons of stone had slipped free and crashed down when the cliffs had given way at some point in the past, and now a scree of rock and dirt and brush formed a rough pathway from the rumpled valley below to the heights above, a mound of dirt that narrowed to a crack in the Bluff itself about a hundred hands down from the top before opening up again on the far side, forming a cusp to the heights.
Arten shook his head uncertainly. “It’s hard to say. It’s definitely the best option we’ve seen for reaching the upper plains since the Falls. The only option, truthfully.”
“What have the scouts reported about the Bluff farther north?”
“It continues, with minor rockfalls and a steady decrease in height, but they haven’t seen any evidence that the Bluff itself ends anytime soon.” He caught Tom’s gaze. “If we’re going to make it to the upper plains, this will have to be it.”
Tom sighed, scanned the rockfall again.
He didn’t like it. It was too steep, especially near the top, near the mouth of the slide, where the Bluff cupped it to either side, the collapse forming a fairly large indentation in the facade of the cliff. The wagons would never make it.
“If we go slow,” Korbin said from behind him, “and have the wagons switch back and forth across the length of the scree, I think we’ll be fine. But it will take most of the rest of today to scale it.”
Walter stepped forward, fists clenched. But he kept his voice calm, controlled. “We need to reach those heights. For the Family. For the Company. We need to lay claim to that land before anyone else.”
Tom bowed his head, closed his eyes, and swallowed the gritty taste of grass and dust in the back of his throat.
“You heard the Proprietor,” he said. “Secure everything loose inside the wagons, tie everything down. The slide is mostly rock. It’s going to be rough.”
Everyone who’d gathered to argue and listen in dispersed, a sense of excitement passing through them in a low murmur. They’d been following the Bluff for ten days, the scenery barely changing. There’d been no viable location to set up a settlement-no rivers, no lakes, only narrow streams and creeks, all meandering southward toward the river they’d left behind. They’d run out of the dry flatbread, and most of the smoked meats, and while small game was in abundance, Tom had grown tired of the taste of rabbit and fowl. They needed to find a major water source and some larger game soon, and the reports from the scouts searching northward weren’t promising.
“What do you think?” Arten asked, stepping up to Tom’s side.
Tom shook his head. “It’s a risk. I’d rather set up the town down here, but we don’t have the water resource we’d need, nor the wood. We’ve only seen copses, the trees too young to be used for anything useful. So if Korbin thinks we can make it to the top with the wagons
…”
Arten grunted. “Let’s see how stable the rockslide is first. We can always stop and continue north.”
“I’m not so certain of that.” Tom nodded toward where Walter and Jackson stood at the base of the slide itself, the first wagon already starting to crawl up the slope along its base, angled sharply to the north; it was too steep to head directly up the side. The wagon rocked as it was pulled over the rough stone. One of the guardsmen led the wagon, cutting through any tangled undergrowth in the way. “Walter’s intent on getting to the upper plains. He’s been searching for a way up since we left the Falls.”
“And he’s right.” When Tom raised his eyebrows in question, the commander added, “To the Court, the difference between having a settlement down here or up there is significant. The Bluff is a boundary, and the Carrente Family position will be stronger if Walter can establish a town, or even an outpost, on the far side.”
The wagon had reached the edge of the slide, and both men watched in silence as its driver and the group of men around it turned it so it could head back toward them, a little higher up the scree. Tom drew in a sharp breath when a few rocks gave way beneath one wheel, the stone clattering down the short distance to the grass, but the horses didn’t falter.
Once the leader was on its way, a ragged cheer erupted from the rest of the men and women still on the ground, and the second wagon started out.
“I’ll feel better about it once we’re all safely at the top of the Bluff,” Tom said, then searched for Ana. He found her at the third wagon, with Korbin and his wife, Lyda. He headed toward her, smiling as Ana reached out to touch Lyda’s growing stomach; Arten moved away, toward Walter and Jackson and the rest of the Armory.
“Has he started kicking yet?” Ana asked.
“Not yet,” Lyda said, her voice soft, her face radiant in the sun, a glow that Tom had seen in Ana’s face when she was pregnant with Colin, a vibrance that had shown through no matter how sweaty, grimy, or dirty Ana’s hair and face had been.
Lyda’s hair was lighter than Ana’s, her face rounder, skin smoother. But Tom thought the differences had more to do with the difference in their ages.
“Hmm,” Ana said wryly, then smiled. “It won’t be long now though.” It was the first smile he’d seen on her face that wasn’t tainted with anger or weariness or regret since they’d left Trent. A pure smile, touching her eyes, trembling in her hands.
When she drew away from Lyda, one hand going to her chest and the hidden pendant there, Tom took her other hand and kissed it.
She gave him a questioning look, but he shook his head. The wagon beside them gave a lurch and started forward, Korbin and Lyda moving to follow. “He’s a lucky man,” Tom said.
“I was worried about her when they told us they intended to come with the wagons,” Ana said. “I thought they’d head back to Andover, since they were expecting a child.”
“Why were you worried?”
They started after the wagon, walking hand in hand, watching where they stepped.
Ana glanced ahead, to make certain that Lyda and Korbin wouldn’t overhear. “She seemed a little… soft. Delicate. I wasn’t certain she’d be able to handle the walking or the work. But she’s handling it better than some of the others.”
Tom nodded. Ahead, the wagon had reached the first turn, Korbin overseeing the change in direction. The wheelwright shouted for help.
Tom squeezed Ana’s hand. “I’d better go be useful,” he said, then jogged forward. As he put his shoulder to the side of the wagon and shoved hard, he saw Ana rejoin Lyda, both cutting up ahead of the horses. And then sweat ran down into his eyes, and he focused his attention on getting the damn wagon to move.
Afternoon grew steadily into evening, and the wagons zigzagged their way up the slide, each pass getting shorter as the rockfall narrowed. The first wagon passed the neck of the slide an hour before sunset, struggling up the last section into the bowl that had sunk into the upper plains beyond, where the ground was flatter and less rugged. They reached the top of the Bluff moments later, whistles and cheers echoing down the scree from above. Tom paused to stare up at the men waving from the heights and smiled, relief coursing through him. All down the trail, people clapped and whistled in response, the excited conversation that had died down after the first hour of
