I ran past several burning wrecks of the small farms of the Lesser Estates, my boots raising dust with each step. I could see the gnarled trees behind my house writhing in flame, and as I scrambled painfully over the stone wall, I saw the timbers give way and the roof fall in on itself.
The heat forced me back when I tried to run inside. I paced around the house like a confused animal. Stone cracked from the heat, and a screaming wail came from within. I ripped my hood off and shoved it into one of my pockets so I could breathe.
“Duram?” I cried. “Set?”
A blazing figure erupted from the front door, leaping onto the dusty ground and rolling around until the flames were extinguished.
It was Anto. His blackened form lay by my feet, rasping in pain.
I dropped to my knees. “Where are Duram and Set?”
“It hurts,” Anto whimpered.
I shook him. “Where are my children?” But he was too sunk in his own pain to answer. I turned to the burning house and tried to rush inside, but the building collapsed. An explosion of fire and smoke shoved me back.
I fell to the ground, sobbing my despair, ashamed of my failure to save my children. The house continued to burn. I had taken a man’s life. Now mine was being taken from me.
“It hurts,” Anto groaned, intruding on my grief. “Please . . .”
I stared up at the house. “Duram and Set . . .”
“With Jorda.” He looked up at me, eyes startlingly white against the blackened face, begging. “Please . . .”
The smell of burned flesh filled my lungs. “You can’t ask me . . .”
“Please . . . ,” he whispered.
So I used the axe for the second time that day.
I found Jorda’s body under the tree where he had been drinking. There was an arrow through his neck and a wineskin by his feet.
Drunkard he may have been. A disappointment to Anto, this was true. But the dirt was scuffed with footmarks. Small footmarks. He’d tried to protect my sons.
I kissed the three rings on my hand and prayed to Mara that my sons were alive, and as I did so, saw the scraped dirt of Set’s dragged foot next to the hoofmarks leading off down the dirt road.
With an apology to Jorda’s lifeless body, a whisper of thanks to Mara, I got up and began to follow the tracks, the executioner’s axe gripped tight in both hands.
The burned remains of Lesser Khaim’s southern fringe faded away into the rocky hills of sparse grass and clumps of bramble as the day passed. Weariness spread through my knees, and the miles wore at me as I doggedly moved southward.
I plowed on. I had to move faster, not pick my way around bramble if I hoped to catch the raiders. I had to hope the leather apron would also help protect me from the bramble’s malevolence.
At the crest of a hill scattered with boulders, I looked back at the many burning buildings of Lesser Khaim. Tiny figures formed a line by the river, passing along buckets of water to try and douse denser areas of town. The outer sections contained many black skeletal building frames.
I turned from it all, walking down the other side of the hill, the axe weighing heavier and heavier.
At the bottom of the hill, turning onto the old cobblestoned ruins of Junpavati Road, I caught up to the raiding party. The men rode massive, barrel-chested warhorses that looked like they could pull an oxen’s plough. They held their long spears in the air, like flagpoles, and their brass helmets glinted as they rode alongside a mass of humanity being herded south like sheep.
Somewhere, in that sad, roped-together crowd, were my sons.
I wondered how many other townsmen had tried to fight the raiders? And how many lay dead on the dirt roads of Lesser Khaim with pitchforks or knives in hands.
I stared at the raiders. Only four of them had been left to march their captives along. No doubt the rest had ridden on ahead.
Four trained men.
And me.
I would die, I knew. But what choice did I have? They were ripping my family away. What person would run from their own blood?
I killed already today, I thought, hefting the executioner’s axe. I was dizzy from exhaustion, and the mild poison of the few bramble threads that had poked through my leggings threatened to drop me into bramble sleep. But I made my decision, and moved toward the raiders.
As I did so, I pulled the executioner’s hood back over my face to protect myself from the taller clumps of bramble drooping off the rocks.
I used the rocks and boulders of the dead landscape to get close to the raider trailing the column of prisoners. I was stunned by how large the man’s warhorse was. When its hooves slammed into the ground, I could feel them from twenty feet behind.
The hems of my cloak brushed bramble as I ran at the man’s back, and the horse whinnied as it sensed me. The raider spun in his saddle, spear swinging down in an arc as he looked for what had spooked the horse, and he spotted me.
He realized I was inside the spear’s reach, and he leaped off his horse to avoid the first high swing of my axe at his thigh, putting the horse between us. I ran in front of the giant beast to get at him, but before I could even raise the axe again, he attacked.
His red cloak flared out behind him, and the spear lashed out. I was slow, but I dodged the point. In response the man flicked it up and smacked the top of my head with the side of the shaft.
“And what do you think you’re doing?” the raider demanded. He sounded unhurried and calm.
“You stole my family,” I said as my knees buckled from the blow to the head. I fought to stand, and wobbled slightly. Hoofbeats thudded behind me.
The raider used the spear to hit me on the side of my head before I could even raise the axe to try and block the movement. His movements would have been too fast for me even if I hadn’t been tired from chasing them, or my blood filled with bramble poison. The blow dropped me to the ground, blood running down over my eyes inside the hood, blinding me.
“What do we have here?” a second raider voice asked, as feet hit the ground. My hood was ripped clear of my head.
The two raiders bent over me, dark eyes shadowed by their bronze helmets, spears pinning my cloak, and me, to the ground.
I blinked the blood out of my eyes and waited for death.
“It’s a woman,” the raider I’d attacked said.
“That’s quite plain,” said the other. “Should we kill her or take her with us?”
“She’s too old to go to the camps or to sell.”
The other raider nodded. “So we kill her?”
“She doesn’t need to be part of the Culling,” the older-sounding raider said. He shook his head. “No, she’s too old to have children. She’s no threat. Cripple her so she can’t follow us, then leave.”
The older raider remounted his horse and left.
The remaining raider and I stared at each other, and then he reversed his spear. “The Way of the Six says that we should . . .”
I spat at him. The effort dizzied me. “I don’t care about your damned Way of the Six, slaver. Do what you came to do.”
He shrugged and slammed the butt of his spear into my ankle, crushing it.
As I screamed, he smacked my head. I fell back away, down into a patch of bramble, some of which pierced my clothing. The bramble threads stuck to my skin calling me down to sleep, it was enough to easily drag me away from the world.
2
TO MY SHOCK, I WOKE up with a grunt in the dark, something creaking and swaying beneath me. I’d been dreaming about a younger Set, his large brown eyes looking into mine as he struggled so hard to stumble about, learning to walk. He’d fallen, and I’d rushed out, shouting at him to be careful, and then I had woken up.
I felt for my forehead, but there was no pain or bump as I expected.
My ankle felt fine. I felt fine, except for the extreme slowness that remained with me from the bramble sleep. I’d brushed against it once before, as a child. My parents had found me staggering about in the backyard and
pulled the bramble threads from my skin carefully with tweezers. People fretted over me for nearly a week as I lingered on the edge of darkness.
I licked my dried lips and sat up.
The world kept creaking back and forth.
I heard wheels turning underneath me.
I was inside a covered wagon of some sort. Daylight peeked through cracks in wooden walls and top. And I could taste fish and salt hanging in the air.
A bird screeched outside, and I realized I must be near the coast.
My axe lay near me, as did my leather hood. Which meant I was somewhere safe.
In a daze I crawled toward a large flap, and as I reached it a hand flung it aside, blinding me with daylight.
“Well, hello there,” someone said gently. “I was just coming to check on you.”
My eyes watered, as if they hadn’t seen sunlight in weeks.
Strong hands gripped my arm. “Careful, or you’ll fall off.”
I sat on the back of a large wagon. A small deck ran around the rim of the vehicle. A woman my age, traces of gray in her hair, held my arm. Her trader tattoos, including a striking purple figure of the elephant god Sisinak holding the triple scales of commerce, ran up and down her forearms. “I’m Anezka,” she said. She squatted on the platform jutting off the back. “I was bringing you some soup. Everyone’s going to be excited to hear you woke up.”
I moved out onto the platform with Anezka, still amazed that my ankle wasn’t hurting. Another wagon trundled along behind the one I woke up on, pulled by four massive aurochs. They looked like cattle, but far more muscular. Their long horns swooped well out before them like the prows of ships. Four aurochs also followed the back of the wagon I was on, resting from the strain of pulling. Their flanks rippled and hooves thumped the ground as they all plodded along.
Behind the wagon following us was another, and then another, and then another yet again. I counted ten before the long train of wagons curved around a bend in a fine cloud of kicked up dust. Each wagon featured its own unique mottled purple-and-green painted patterns on their wooden sides. Many had carved depictions of markets, roads, and maps of the world all expertly chipped into their sides.
“This is a caravan,” I said out loud, realizing it at the same moment I spoke it.
“This is the caravan,” Anezka said. “You’re traveling the spice road on the perpetual caravan. We move along the coast starting in Paika and go all the way to Mimastiva and even a little beyond, until the bramble of the east stops us with its wall. Then we turn back around again. There used to be many, all throughout the old empire. Now: only us.”
Mimastiva was on the coast, hundreds of miles from Khaim. Paika lay on the coast as well, far to the west. I knew of a few who’d visited Mimastiva. These were cities that, to me, were almost past the edge of the known world.
“You said that people would be excited I was awake,” I said.
Anezka’s eyes widened. “Because you’re the lady executioner, who met four Paikans in mortal combat. Everyone’s been talking about you up and down the line.”
“I didn’t fight four,” I said with a frown. “I only took on one, and he beat me badly. But yes, there were four of them.”
I looked down at my ankle. “How long have I been asleep?”
“You should see the roadmaster,” Anezka said.
“Why is that?” I asked.
“Because this is his wagon, and you are his guest,” Anezka said, somewhat formally, but quite firmly.
With her arm to steady me, I grabbed the ropes along the outside of the covered wagon’s rim and we walked toward the front.
As we approached the raised platform from where the aurochs were controlled, I could see up the line of the caravan. We were near the front. Muscled men with brass arquebuses stood on a fifteen-paces-long war wagon in front of us, with hammered metal shieldwalls protecting them.
Farther ahead, a wagon with a large fire crew burned bramble away from the road edges, the roar of the flame carrying back over the air to us. The stench of the burned limbs wafted past.
I was a long way from Lesser Khaim.
The roadmaster was a mountain of a successful, rich man, robes draped across the heft of his belly.
But if I thought him jolly, that was a mistake. His smile was tight, controlled, and his eyes shrewd. This man saw more miles pass under the wheels of his home in a year than most ever traveled in a life.
And judging by the lines in his face, he’d had a long life doing this. Like Anezka, trader tattoos ran up and down his forearms, and his ears dangled from his ears.
He had no mustaches, his lips were shaved clean, like a refugee from Alacan.
I’d heard tales of the caravan, and the coastal spice route. Townsmen who traveled south to markets were told tales of the great market of Mimastiva by other townsmen who ventured that far south, and here I was, sitting on a wagon with the roadmaster of the caravan himself.
“Welcome to the spice road,” the roadmaster said with a twitch in the corner of his lips. He did not hold the reins himself: that was done by a young man in a loincloth with massive arms who sat nearby, the thick leather straps that lead to the aurochs were draped across his lap. The driver watched the road like an owl, his eyes never blinking.
“Thank you,” I said, and moved to sit by him. Perching higher than the bramble along the road meant that a soft sea breeze cooled my skin.
From here I could see the road stretching out along the rocky coastline before us. The ocean, hundreds of feet below, slammed and boomed against the wall of brown rock. And out beyond the spray, the green waves surged around pinnacles of rock shaped like the spires of castles. And beyond the spray and foam, the sea stretched out forever: flat, unbreaking, the color of wintergreen leaves.
“It is a beautiful sight,” the roadmaster said, noticing my gaze.
“I never thought I’d see it in my life,” I whispered. I wondered if Duram or Set had seen this as they were being marched west.
I leaned forward to hide my face in my grief, and the roadmaster leaned close and touched my shoulder. “What is your name, Lady Executioner?”
“Tana.” I swallowed. “Tana the lost. Tana the homeless. Tana the abandoned. But not Tana the lady executioner. I’m not that thing.”
“I am Jal,” he said softly. “Where are you from, Tana?”
“Khaim,” I told him, and then I corrected myself. “Lesser Khaim.”
“Ah, Khaim.” He nodded. “I think I remember Khaim from when I was just a boy. I was still sitting on my father’s lap when he led the last caravan through. Sometimes I think I remember the start of that journey, or the greater cities of the Jhandparan Empire. I know I remember seeing a great palace that had fallen to Earth, tilted, its foundational plane shattered like a plate! And the bramble, it gripped the city like a giant’s fist, it did.”
My grief broke a little, hearing his memories. “You are that old?”
Jal laughed at me. “I am that old. Yes. Hopefully old enough that I’ll die before I lose the title of roadmaster to the title of bushmaster, which is what they will call me when even the spice road on this coast becomes choked by damned bramble.”
I looked out on the road, and thought about what came next. “Where do you head?”
“Paika,” the roadmaster said. “And you will too.”
He said this so firmly, I jerked to stare at him. “What do you mean?”
“The men who delivered you here said you attacked four Paikans on your own. They said you demanded your family back and fought to the near death. So I have to imagine that a person who did that, would not then turn around and head back to where she came from.”
As he spoke, he turned and looked at me with a larger smile.
“I will not be going back to Lesser Khaim,” I agreed.
“The men who brought you to me thought so. Paika is the greatest city in the west, and where your family most probably will be taken. And Paika is a carefully guarded city. You cann
ot enter without an examination, and papers, and a writ, unless you are like me and have dispensation. The Paikans fear people like you coming in to try and find their families. Yes, a person who attacks four of them would go to Paika with someone like me, who could get you inside, I think.”
I shook my head in frustration. “I didn’t attack all four of the raid—I mean Paikans. The stories are wrong.”
“Of course they are. They’re always wrong. Stories are for the listener, Tana. And it is what the listener makes of them that truly matters. The captured men who saw you attack the Paikans, they told us they found their courage. If one woman could attack four horsemen, then they could do the same. For two days and two nights they plotted, and then finally . . . attacked!”
I couldn’t believe what I heard. But it had to be true, didn’t it? Or I wouldn’t be here. “And they succeeded?”
“They killed three of the Paikans and took their gold, their weapons, and their horses. Then one of them rode back to find you, where you were deep in the clutches of bramble sleep.”
“How long?” I asked. Jal waved a hand at me and ignored the question.
“When I saw them outside Mimastiva, they had you on a travois pulled behind a horse. They wanted to ride back to their homes along the coast as fast as they could without being slowed down, so they gave me a captive Paikan horseman in exchange for food, and coin for us to take care of you. We will ransom the raider back to Paika for good coin.”
Up ahead the aurochs plodded forward. The wagon groaned and creaked along.
“How long have I slept?” I asked again, fearing the worst.
“Three weeks, I think. Maybe a month. We made bets to Deka on whether you would wake. You are lucky to return to us. Even luckier that the man who picked up your body to bury it with honors heard you still whispering in your sleep.”
I rubbed my arms. “Whispering?”
“Names, I was told. Those close to you?”
“Family,” I said, feeling the loss once again. Would it be possible to find my family then, after a month? Or would they be scattered to even stranger lands? I bit my lip and looked at Jal. “The stories I have heard say the caravan is an expensive place to ride. Wherever I am, you can’t carry any goods for trade, right? What are you asking for the price of my passage?”