Iano proves to be a more stalwart travel companion than I would have thought. Our first twenty-four hours of travel are defined largely by being utterly, penetratingly soaked. The rain does not so much fall as simply envelop us, above, around, below, and soon inside as well. Despite my heavy felted cloak, within a half hour even my undergarments are soaked, making my seat squelch in the saddle with every rise of my horse’s shoulders.
The few times I steal a glance at Iano, his face is set and grim. He’s traded his jeweled hairpin for a kind of gallant horsetail under a black hood, festooned with a golden tassel. Between that, his expensively styled tack, and the graceful longbow and quiver slung over his back, we’re clearly marked as some flavor of nobility, but I’m hoping we can pass for merely well-to-do travelers and not two princes off on a highly inadvisable mission.
Our first night of camping finds us in a small clearing off the road, huddled under a questionably rigged tarpaulin. The rain streams through the canopy, collecting in the center of the tarp and making it sag until a steady trickle pours between us and puddles on the ground.
Iano doesn’t comment at our miserable shelter, but it’s eating away at me. Woodcraft has been a staple of my life since before my first breath, but I’m realizing too late it’s not exactly hereditary. I’ve heard enough of Mama’s tales to repeat them in my sleep, and I’ve read the collection of Woodwalker handbooks more than the average Woodwalker, but there can be no denying that I’m severely lacking in hands-on experience. Climbing trees and knowing birdcalls is one thing, but it’s another thing entirely to stand holding a rope, befuddled by cold and stiff fingers, trying to recall which knot is used to lash together a bivouac. Is it a slipknot, and if so, which one? Is it an eight on a bight? For that matter, how does one tie an eight on a bight without a manual?
As I’m gnawing on these intricacies, Iano gives a little start and slaps his neck. He pulls his hand away to reveal a crushed mosquito. When we first left the palace, he produced a jar of oily cream that smelled of lemon balm, but a few intrepid insects haven’t been deterred by it.
“How soon does rainshed fever develop after you’ve been bitten?” I ask.
Iano grimaces and wipes his palm on his cloak. “A few days, usually, but we’ve gotten a fair distance away from Tolukum—the danger of fever diminishes in the outer hamlets. Nobody really knows why.”
Perhaps it’s the recent series of events that does it—the dead birds on the ground, Eloise’s sickness, the mosquitoes in the window—but the answer strikes me like a lightning bolt. That same curiosity Eloise and I mused over not long ago now seems plain as day. I twist to face him.
“How long have those giant windows been up in the palace?”
“The atriums?” He scratches his new bug bite. “The first went up during my great-grandmother’s reign, perhaps seventy, seventy-five years ago. That was when our factories first started producing sheet glass. The next few were added a decade or so later, and then the biggest was completed about fifteen years ago.”
“And there’s been a rise in rainshed fever since then?”
“Only around Tolukum,” he says.
“Right. Iano—has anyone noticed how many birds strike the glass of the palace?”
His face creases with confusion. “Well, that’s unavoidable, I suppose. One does hear them occasionally—”
“Not occasionally,” I say. “All the time. All day long, every day. Do you know how many dead birds I saw along the palace foundation?”
“What were you doing at the foundation?”
“Wallowing in despair, thanks to our interaction at Bakkonso. There were dozens, Iano, just in that little section, and I’m sure there are more all over the terraces and windowsills.”
“Well, what of it?” he asks. “That’s the responsibility of the staff—to clean up refuse like that. What does it have to do with rainshed fever?”
Something very Silvern is waking up inside me, and ethnocentric bias be damned, I know my folk would have made this connection before now. “Those songbirds eat mosquitoes, Iano. As you’ve put up more and more glass in the city, you’re killing off more and more birds. Fewer birds means more mosquitoes, which means higher chances of a person being bitten by one that’s infected. That’s why it’s only in the city, not the villages. It’s your glass, Iano.”
He stops scratching, his gaze going unfocused. He stares blankly at the trickle of water streaming from our drooping tarpaulin.
“That seems . . .” he begins. “I mean, how can we really know for sure?”
“I know that killing off a single type of animal in those numbers is going to tip nature’s balance,” I reply. “That’s something my folk would never overlook.”
A flicker of disdain crosses his face. “Well, we can’t all be your folk,” he snaps, mimicking my antiquated phrase. “And I’ll have you know Moquoia has its own foresters, not so different from your fabled Woodwalkers.” He pauses, thoughtful, while I hold back the biggest scoff of my life.
“Though,” he adds after a moment, “I’ll mention it to the staff when we get back to Tolukum. Perhaps they’ll have a more definite estimate of how many birds they collect.”
“You should cover the glass,” I say. “Or at least string mirrors inside.”
“That will be a difficult expense to justify.”
“Even if it brings down the cases of rainshed fever?”
He gives me a resigned look. “If,” he says. “That’s a very big if.”
We lapse into silence for the remainder of the evening, listening to the shifting timbre of the rain on our tarp. There’s little opportunity for sleep, wet and uncomfortable as we are, and the night passes agonizingly slowly. When the first gray slips of light start to show through the trees, we get up without comment. We share some soggy walnut bread, I roll up our sodden tarp, and then we mount and continue on.
Fortunately—blessedly—we travel as quickly as I’d hoped. The coach road, by necessity, runs parallel to the coastline below the western spine of the mountains, forced to make a few lengthy detours over bridges stout enough to support heavy loads. Our track, however, splits from the main road early on our second day and takes a more direct line toward Pasul, leading us up and down steep valley sides carpeted with growth so thick you could burrow inside it. Gnarled hardwoods arch over the track, their green-hung boughs made monstrous with ferns and mosses. In the late afternoon, after a long, slippery climb over a misty ridgeline, we cross a tangible border—the fir and hemlock trees transition into aspen and ponderosa pine, the lush moss gives way to tougher lichens, and the skies ease from moody gray to hazy blue.
We’ve reached the rainshadow.
It’s bitterly cold, especially since we’ve hardly had a chance to dry out before night falls, and there’s a confident wind gusting over the ridgeline. In the last slips of daylight, we set up a hasty camp in a stand of boulders that act as a windbreak. There are no sturdy trees to lash up the tarp, but given how well that went the first night, I put my effort instead into collecting splintery lengths of tough mountain juniper for a fire. Fortunately, my firelighting skills are something I could always easily work on from Lampyrinae, and soon Iano and I huddle into our damp bedrolls on either side of a steady blaze.
I’m tired enough from forty-eight hours of hard travel and no sleep that I don’t wake at all to stoke the fire, and by morning it’s stone cold. Puffing and chilled through, limbs aching, we slap ourselves, stomp our frozen feet, and clumsily pack up camp. Our horses watch, their breath misting around their noses, probably amused at our pitiful attempts to warm up before we fling ourselves into their saddles and urge them downhill, toward warmer air.
The one bad thing about this route, I muse as we start to thaw out, is that we’re missing the redwoods. The groves of giants are all on the western slopes, south of Tolukum, where the soil is sea-breeze damp but not drenched. But it’s clear as we descend the eastern slopes of the Moquovik Mountains that the soil is now too dry and nutrient-poor to support such mammoth plant life, devoid of the fertile foothills fed by constant rainfall on the other side of the ridge. Our way is instead buffeted by pine, ash, and a heinous amount of scrub oak, choking the path and scratching our calves as our horses push through it.
“Amazing that the landscape can be so different after just a few hours of riding,” I say to Iano around midmorning. “Too bad we have to rush through it.”
“We’re not here to admire the scenery,” he says grimly.
I shut up for the rest of the morning.
By afternoon, the last of the moisture finally wicks away from my clothes, just in time for the sun to gain its full fever pitch. My absent-minded observation from earlier becomes a serious consternation. I drag my rolled-up sleeve over my forehead, marveling that in twenty-four hours I’ve gone from feeling like I’d never be warm and dry again to sweating out all the rain Moquoia has to offer.
Our third night’s camp is the easiest, with only a few requisite discomforts, and after another long morning of riding, we crest the head of a drop-off to see the border town of Pasul below. The land changes dramatically before us, the dimpled hills giving way to sagebrush flats as suddenly as if someone had taken a giant rolling pin right up to our feet, leaving us perched on a rocky cliff. This is the final hindrance to a sturdy coach road—even if a coach managed to get this far, over and through the steep, tangled slopes, it could never manage the switchbacking trail down the final incline to the flats below. We take it slowly, our horses patiently plodding around each tight turn, bringing us finally into town as the sun drops behind the cliff at our backs.
Pasul is a place that seemingly can’t decide what it wants to be, waffling between a rural outpost and bustling city. It’s too far out to support any industry beyond the mail line and quarry camps, but it’s the only bit of civilization for miles, and full of transients—ranchers bringing cattle to market, homesteaders laying in supplies, free quarriers on leave, and the odd businessperson cleaving carefully to the small reputable quarter. The main street is wide and well-kept, flanked by inns and public houses, but the alleys that lead off it are narrow and dark, with signs for less luxurious accommodations for the short on change—work-for-rent, copper hangs, and the ominous roof cots—tether included.
Iano and I make our way past the less savory alleys and head for the Sweet Pine, where Rou and Eloise and I stayed with Colm upon our arrival. It’s a grand little building, a clear mashup of Moquoian design and Alcoran building material—rounded walls of white adobe and red tile, with generous windows throughout, though the glass is made of small cut panes, not the endless panels of Tolukum Palace. There’s a clean public room below, mostly filled with well-to-do travelers and business folk. The girl at the bar asks for our names.
Partway through giving my name, I decide to lie. “V-vvvynce,” I stammer unconvincingly, my brother being the first V that pops to mind, though I suppose I could have gone with my father. “Vyncet Whitetail. And—” I glance at Iano.
“Escer Gee,” he says.
It must be glaringly obvious that we’re lying, but she writes them down anyway, making me spell out my foreign vowels. Most folk in town speak at least a little of both Eastern and Moquoian, but the Silverwood is a long way off, and nobody in Alcoro takes epithets like we do. She hands us a key and directs us to the second floor.
The room is small and neat, with two narrow rope beds and a potted agave plant in the window. I want to fling my bruised, achy body onto the mattress and sleep for a day, but we both have things to do if I’m going to ride out into the desert tomorrow morning. We deposit our bags and head back out—he to inquire about a coach and driver willing to travel alone into bandit country, me to clean out the town’s general store of its nonperishable goods.
Before the sun rises the following morning, Iano helps me get dressed in the fanciest Moquoian ensemble I’ve been gifted. It’s a rather offensive shade of raspberry, with long tails on the jacket and cabochon buttons the size of my thumbnail along the calves. I suck in my stomach as I fight to fasten the jacket over the waistcoat.
“I must admit,” I say breathlessly as Iano fruitlessly twists my hair into something that will hold a pin, “I find your clothing very restrictive.”
“You walk too loosely,” he says, tugging at my scalp, as if it might make my hair grow. “You walk like you have saplings for legs. The silk is meant to allow the wearer to walk gracefully with minimal effort—it creates the posture for you.” He stabs the pin through the knot he’s managed to fuss up and stands back, looking unsatisfied. “It looks a bit like a toddler got into his father’s jewelry box.”
“Well, let’s hope the Sunshield Bandit isn’t up on her court hairstyles.” I pick up the walking cane. “Can you carry the box? I’m going to have a hard enough time getting down the stairs in one piece.”
He hefts the crate of our supplies. “Don’t roll your feet like that.”
“Like what?”
“That way you arch your feet around—I’m surprised you haven’t broken an ankle.”
“That’s the way I was taught to walk,” I say snippily. “It lets you walk quietly.”
“Maybe in buckskin boots, but not wooden heels. Anyway, who are you trying to sneak up on? Try kick walking instead.” He demonstrates as he walks to the door, jutting out a foot before laying it down. “Kick walk, kick walk.” He heads through the door with the heavy crate, loud as a rockslide and perfectly balanced.
I grumble about namby Moquoians and how they wouldn’t last an hour on a scout march, ignoring Colm hissing about bias and my mother laughing that I’ve never been on a scout march, before following him out the door, kicking my heels upward and laying them down straight.
It does seem to lessen the likelihood of ankle-breaking.
That only pisses me off more.
The driver is waiting in front of her thoroughbrace coach, the luxe private kind afforded by wealthy business folk. There are several seats for armed guards along the driver’s bench and roof, but they’re all empty. The two horses up front stamp in their expensive leather braces. The horse I borrowed from Iano, a sleek palomino mare named Kuree—the Moquoian word for flax—is hitched alongside, gleaming in the first brush of dawn.
“Is that for the lockbox?” the driver asks, nodding at the crate in Iano’s hands. “You know I won’t be responsible for the loss of anything you’re bringing along?”
“We’re aware,” Iano says, handing her the crate. “You deposited the payment?”
She nods. She’d demanded full payment up front, along with a written statement saying we’d pay for any damages to her coach and team—which were almost certain to occur traveling into the rough territory of a notorious bandit, unarmed and well-furnished.
Suddenly, the reality of our plan hits harder. I swallow and finger my firefly pin—I considered leaving it behind, but it’s giving me courage, and I’ve hidden it under the knot of my cravat. Unless the Sunshield Bandit strips me of my clothes, she won’t find it.
I don’t think she’ll strip me of my clothes.
Iano wrestles the crate into the lockbox under the interior seat and tacks the fabric back down to hide the door. He steps back and turns to me, and suddenly it’s time.
He’s grave. “Veran—thank you.”
“Sure, anytime.”
“No, I’m serious. This could change everything. And listen, I’ll make inquiries around here, all right? Maybe someone will have a lead on Tamsin. So if things don’t go as planned, don’t feel like you have to stay out there. Just come back, and we’ll figure something else out. All right?”
I’m jittery, to the point where I want to make a joke to defuse the tension—Mama’s influence. What could possibly go wrong? But I can tell from his expression this won’t go over well.
“I’ll be smart about it,” I assure him.
“All right.” He puffs out his breath. He hands me a drawstring bag, heavy with coin. “Good luck.” He opens up a palm and holds it out to me, as if he’s offering something. This baffles me at first, before I realize he’s trying to mimic my folk’s gesture of thanks.
“And you.” I mirror the motion. There’s a white smudge on my thumb from the drawstring bag.
He steps back, and I clamber awkwardly into the coach, settling onto the velvet cushion. The driver climbs up into her box and clucks to her team. They amble forward, and the carriage swings on its leather bracings. Kuree breaks into a walk on her lead alongside us.
I look back through the window at Iano, but he’s lost to the cloud of dust behind us. A needle of red sunlight pierces my eye—dawn is breaking across the rugged flats. I settle back against the cushion, my stomach rocking with the carriage, as we ride toward the sun.