They found a ride with a farmer through the fields north of town. The midday sun was high overhead, but at this time of year it wasn’t too hot. The fields were planted and sprouting, and the farmer was proud to point out which ones were wheat or corn or watermelon or a dozen other crops. Nyasha knelt at the edge of the half-empty cart, pressed against a strapped-down crate, and looked out on everything with interest. She was determined to press Averieom into her memory and always hold on to the good things, and the fields of dark brown earth and tiny green sprouts were beautiful and worth remembering.
“Say, you’re from Jalseion, aren’tcha?” The farmer looked back at Calea and Bron. “You know anything about magic and the wells?”
Calea nodded, her back to the side of the cart and her legs stretched out in front of her. She had been strangely quiet since the goodbye at the Sanctuary. “I know something of magic.”
“You think the land’ll go infertile again now the wells are gone? Folks are mighty worried on that thought. If the desert all returns, how will we live?”
Calea shrugged. “Anything is possible. It might be that the magic in this part of the world has only moved somewhere else. I know nothing of agriculture, but perhaps since the land has been fertile so long, moisture will remain in the cycle. I suppose the children of this world will live as they always have–on the edge of survival, searching for all the scraps they can find to feather their nests.”
“That’s sorta poetic.” He looked at her side-eye for a moment, then turned back to watch the path ahead, touching the back of his horse with a furled whip. “Haw, now.”
At the edge of the fertile land, where the northern desert began to encroach on the fields and meadows, they descended from the cart, strapped their packs on their backs, and thanked the farmer. He farewelled Nyasha by name, though she couldn’t recall ever knowing his. Perhaps that was why he had been willing to take them so far beyond his own holding, to the place where sand and earth mingled. Nyasha could offer only a smile and thanks in return. Then she turned her back on Averieom.
The road ahead was rocky and barren, but she knew the way, and she wasn’t afraid. Nyasha led them into the land beyond civilization, her steps sure and her head held high. Rocks peppered the landscape all around, gradually growing larger as they continued. Here and there an azazel tree or gorse bush pushed its way through the sandy soil, spare yellow-green leaves fluttering in the cool southerly breeze.
Nyasha remembered treading this path with her papa, beginning the journey to Thyrion for a festival. They had made the trip three, perhaps four, times that she remembered. The journey had taken almost two weeks of walking each way, but the time had been pleasant and carefree, and they had both always been strong and sure-footed, finding pleasure in the exertion.
In truth, she remembered little of the festival itself. It had been a harvest celebration, which was a common enough holiday, but Thyrion raised it to ridiculous heights. The people were required to take their taxes to the government during that period, standing in long lines to present their documents and goods to government bureaucrats in the “Tithing Tents” set up in every plaza and square. In Averieom, taxes were paid with much grumbling and resignation, but the hardy people of Thyrion had chosen to make it into a time of fun.
Everywhere the Tithing Tents were raised, other smaller tents followed soon after–and food carts and tumblers and bards and merchant booths and fireworks and a thousand other entertainments and delights Nyasha scarcely remembered. “People are always willing to spend their money on anything but what they have to,” Papa had told her at one of their campfires, grinning his big white grin in the darkness. “If you have to give ten gold to the taxman, why not spend a copper for a pie?”
It was how the Thyrians kept their defiance, in a way, standing up and finding their own pleasure despite a rule that was much harsher and more restrictive than those in the other great cities. And going to enjoy it as a non-citizen had been Papa’s way of showing his own defiance. He no longer had to pay the tithe, but he could take his little daughter to see the jugglers and fire-eaters, to eat the lemon cakes and partridge soup, to laugh at the government men with their gray clothes and grayer faces. They couldn’t go every year, but each trip had been a wonderful treat.
More wonderful to Nyasha than the festival itself, though, was the time in the desert with her papa. In Averieom he worked hard every day, doing all sorts of jobs for anyone who would hire him. He shingled roofs and painted walls, built sheds and laid brick paths, glazed windows and mucked stables. He could do anything, Nyasha was firmly convinced, and anything he didn’t know already, he quickly learned.
Nyasha loved her mama, too, but Asha Cormorin had always been content to stay at the house, doing all the warm, homely things that made it such a lovely place despite its shabbiness. She gardened and knitted and painted little decorative patterns on furniture–all sorts of things. But from the time Nyasha could carry a toolbox, she followed her papa whenever she could. Most of Papa’s customers were wary of a little girl working on their property, however, so eventually she started going to the clinic to look for tasks to keep herself busy.
In the desert, though, Papa wasn’t working. He was free to laugh and chat and sing and tell stories, and that he did every day from dawn till dusk, to Nyasha’s endless delight. She learned how her parents met: “Over a soup kettle in an inn where she was working as a cook,” he said, slapping his knee in merriment, “And when I tried the soup, I kissed and claimed her in the next instant.” All the mischief he had gotten into as a child: “Scuttled up a chimney and pretended to be a soot-puff that could talk, scolding my sister for her terrible cleaning skills. She was so scared she brought down the house with her screaming. I got a whipping, but it was worth it.”
And, on their most recent trip, she’d learned why he and his wife had decided to leave Thyrion. Papa had sobered when she asked that question. “Our emperor had ambitions too great for the world to hold,” he told her, without even a hint of laughter in his voice. “It began to frighten us. Heaven laughs at the vain practices of we children of dust and water.”
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