I knew from Brother Gamut that a small room adjacent to the kitchen served as an apothecary, where he dried and ground his herbs. Glass bottles lined the shelves. Inspecting each label, I chose the ones I thought most valuable. If the abbey had any silver or gold adornments—candlesticks and such—I would have taken those instead. But I hadn’t seen anything worth stealing.
I found a second leather bag and filled it to bursting with glass bottles, careful to wrap each in linen bandages.
When I reached the stables, the horses grew agitated, perhaps still unsettled by the smoke that lingered in the air from the church fire. One of them was Arcus’s massive, fiercely elegant white stallion. He snorted and stamped and rolled his glinting eyes at me. Instead, I approached a yellow-coated mare that greeted me with a blink of her soft brown eyes. I stroked the space between them and was relieved when she didn’t shy from my heat. In minutes I had her saddled.
We left the stables and rode west. As the mare proved steady and I found my seat, I lengthened the reins, the muscles of her back rippling. A sensation of freedom shot through me, heady and wonderful, and I squeezed my legs tighter, eliciting a burst of speed from the mare’s flanks. Every breath exploded in my ears as I waited for a shout from behind me or the jolt of hooves clattering across the forest floor.
But then I crossed the western boundary Arcus had set, and the quiet woods folded around me like the arms of an old friend.
The mare found a path through tall, fragrant pines and leafless oak and sycamore trees, and I let her follow it.
I would find a port city where I would sneak onto a ship. Tevros was northwest of Tempesia, but I wasn’t sure how far or where it was from here. As I considered which direction to go, my stomach rumbled out a reminder of a more immediate problem.
I leaned over to check on the leather satchel that held the food—and cursed. It wasn’t there! It must have become dislodged when I’d let the mare gallop and would be too hard to find in the dark. I struggled not to panic.
If I had better control of my gift, I could use it to hunt, to roast a squirrel or winter hare where it stood. But that kind of deliberate use was well beyond me. I’d have more luck making a trap, but I had no knife to cut twigs or branches, as it was in the same satchel as the food. I could only hope the path led to a village.
Rather than riding into a gorge, we stopped for the night under a canopy of pines. The next morning, I watched the sunrise paint the mare in streaks of gold, like butter melting on a soft piece of freshly baked bread.
“I’m going to call you Butter,” I told the horse with a pat. She snorted softly in reply.
While Butter ate withered grasses, which I hoped wouldn’t make her ill, I gathered some edible roots for a meager meal. My throat was parched with thirst, but there was no sign of water until the afternoon of the second day, when a distant rushing noise brought Butter’s ears up. A lively river churned over rocks. After drinking our fill, we followed the river’s course until it veered over a cliff. From there, we turned south and found path after winding path as the sun set again.
It was eerily quiet. An acrid, burning smell tainted the clean forest air. It wasn’t the smell of freshly burning wood, but the stale echo of things burned and left to decay.
We came upon a maze of wooden buildings, houses, and shops that were broken and charred and caving in on themselves.
Soldiers had been here.
I barely breathed. If there was even a chance that they waited anywhere nearby, we would turn and leave as swiftly as we could. But I couldn’t afford to pass up the possibility of food if any was left in some abandoned larder. I was already weak with hunger. And it was clear the village was abandoned.
One of the houses was less damaged than the rest. Inside, I found turnips, a few potatoes, a half-melted round of cheese—worth its weight in gold to my ravenous eyes—and a metal flask. I gathered it all quickly and remounted Butter, riding for another hour before resting.
The next day, we found a thin stream covered in ice. I broke the surface and filled my flask. I ate the cheese, but the turnips and potatoes were too hard and would need cooking to be edible. There was little shelter on the next stretch of rocky land, so we kept on without resting until night fell.
I was a jumble of aches and bruises, barely upright on the horse’s back, by the time lights flickered on in the distance, appearing and disappearing between the trees like playful spirits.
The trees gave way to a clearing, where a dozen wagons were arranged in circles around campfires. I halted and slid off the horse’s back in the cover of the pine boughs, well out of the firelight.
People were sitting in clusters, turning spits made of tree branches. My mouth watered as the juices from a skinned hare dripped into the fire with a hiss. They divided the rich-smelling meat into portions, but to my frustration, they didn’t take out sleeping rolls or retire for the night in their wagons after eating. Instead, they gathered at the center of the clearing, jostling for the best seat on one of the fallen logs that had been pulled into a semicircle around a fire. A woman with chestnut hair, her face carved in strong, striking lines, came forward and invited a girl of about nine or ten years old to choose a tale.
I sat on the ground on a bed of pine needles, my back against a tree trunk. Butter stood a few yards behind me, content to rest.
The girl chose the origin story, how the Frostbloods and Firebloods came to be. With her hands in her lap, the old woman seemed to grow taller and statelier in the dancing orange light. All faces leaned toward her, their excitement palpable as they listened.