She slung the cloak off her shoulders and slid it over the other woman to conceal her clothing.
“Make ready!” called a guard as the sixth wagon shifted and rolled. He hurried over to them, gaze sharp and lips pursed with disapproval. “You should already have made your preparations. Leave-taking is not allowed at the gate.”
“It was just one last kiss for my sister and the daughters I’m leaving with her.” Asvi spoke so brusquely the poor young man took a step back, surprised at her vehemence. The lie fell easily from her mouth. She’d never had a sister, nor any daughters who had lived past three summers. She nodded at them and walked away without looking back.
As the last wagon began to move, another priest-guard came running up with his spear and net to scold the walking women. “Hurry! We must make Eldaal Temple before dusk, and we’re getting a late start. If you get tired you may sit in the wagon. But there isn’t enough room for all. You’ll have to switch out.”
He did not glance at Asvi nor did he notice anything strange about her presence there. She was just another valueless old woman, exactly like the others.
She walked briskly through the double-walled palisade gate and past its guard towers, its chimes and lanterns that would be lit when night fell. Beyond the barrier lay fields and orchards tended by farmers who lived within the walls after sunset. The sky was blue, striped with high, thin clouds. It was warm but not hot, a pleasant day to walk if you liked walking.
She had grown up walking along the hills, so the steady rise of the road did not trouble her. Avoiding the last wagon with its passengers and their inevitable questions was easy. She did not fear the harnessed ghouls, who had no interest in living flesh and wouldn’t even go after lambs. The wind breathed a slow song across fields of barley and dry-soil rice. In the distance, she spotted the threads of dragons curling around the peaks. A woman began to cry.
Her fear had fallen away when she’d taken off the bracelet and given away the cape. Posyon had gone to the edge of the world. Why not her? She would see the mountains up close, as she’d always yearned to. She’d finally follow the dragons into the clouds.
Midday passed, accompanied only by the tinkling of the chimes hanging from the guards’ hats and the spokes of the wheels. Alerted by the chimes, people working in the fields did not look their way, since it brought ill fortune to stare at the long walk. The corpses were too freshly dead to speak. The guards ignored their charges. The women were too much strangers to one another to speak of their own lives. Perhaps some had even loved the husband or brother or son whose death left them vulnerable. Their silence felt charged with despair.
In the early afternoon the wagons took a short rest in the shade of a row of mulberry trees. One of the guards handed out faring bread. She could not abide bad food caused by carelessness or cheapness.
“This is sour and undercooked,” she said to the priest-commander, showing him how spongy and dense the bread was. “Surely we are not expected to eat inedible food for the entire journey.”
Her bold comment startled the man.
“We cook as we go,” he said in a stern tone, mouth pursed with disdain. “We haven’t the leisure to please our palates. Unless you think you can do better.”
“Of course I can do better.”
He snorted, turning away as he called for the drovers to get the wagons moving. “We must make Eldaal Temple before sunset.”
They walked.
The temple was set away from the road behind a screen of thorn-gast trees. No one lived here. Countryside temples were built as refuges since demons might attack day or night. The corpse wagons and the oxen were sheltered in a shed protected by chimes, and the ghouls corralled in a stockade surrounded by ground glass. She ignored the open door that led to a dim barracks where the women sank exhausted onto hard pallets. Instead of resting she took her spice case to the kitchen.
Two guards assigned kitchen duty had started a fire in the hearth. She ignored their surprise when she walked in and began looking through the bags and baskets of provisions.
“Simple fare can be well made,” she instructed them, setting them to work as she had done with her sons when they were boys. Barley flour mixed with nuts and a pinch of alsberry was soon baking for the next day’s faring bread. She chopped up cabbages and onions to cook with oil, garlic, ginger, and star anise. The priest-mage came in to set out lamps lit by the magic slowly bleeding out of the corpses. He lingered, inhaling the scent as she whipped up a savory batter for pancakes fried in oil to go with the cabbage for the evening’s meal.
Everything was eaten, down to the last bite. The two guards, now smiling and genial, cleaned up while she set beans to soak for a hearty morning pottage. The commander came in wearing a frown.
“People need strength,” she said to him, thinking he was about to complain about the beans or the pancakes or the cooling bread.
He said, grimly, “The food tasted well, mistress.”
Then he remembered she was dead, no longer deserving a living woman’s title of respect, and he flushed.
She said, “I’ll cook every night, with your permission. I am sure you priests are powerful enough that you’ll take no harm in eating food cooked by a ghost. By the amount of provisions, I am guessing it will be about seventeen days’ journey.”
“That’s right,” he said, startled again. “It usually takes seventeen days to the bridge into dragon country past which no man can follow.”
Seventeen days. She took it as a challenge instead of fretting. Each night she concocted a different style of meal from the staples. Even the women grew more animated. Several who clearly had never had enough to eat began to gain strength instead of wasting away.
The third night she heard a guard complaining to the commander outside the way temple’s kitchen door. “Your Honor, the ghouls are growing weak. Usually one or two of the women have died by now.”
“They’re not women, boy. They’re ghosts.”
“Yes, Your Honor. Should we forbid one of the ghosts from eating? The eldest, perhaps? She can’t even walk on her own.”
The commander sighed. “I don’t want to risk it.”
“Risk what?”
“I don’t know about you, but this is the best food I’ve had on the long walk in all my years supervising it. Feed one of the corpses to the ghouls.”
“But the dead are meant for—”
“Do as I command. Don’t mention the ghouls again.”
With shaking hands, she finished preparing a stew of tubers sweetened with pears. The priests ate with gusto, and the women gratefully, but although the meal was as tasty as the ones that had come before, this night it tasted of ashes in her mouth. All that night she barely slept thinking she heard the ghouls slurping on decaying flesh and crunching on bones. But at least all the women woke up the next morning and set out with the wagons. She counted them five times, to make sure.
The fields gave way to uninhabited scrubland that turned into pine and spruce forest in which they walked in a rare sort of peace, unable to see the mountains. The women exchanged names and began to speak of commonplace things.
After days in the forest, the landscape opened up again as they emerged past the tree line onto a high plateau of short grass and frail summer flowers. The mountains rose in fierce majesty, gleaming in the crisp air beneath the sharp sun. This close, she could see a rippling halo of shining dragons winding around the peaks like elongated clouds painted in a rainbow of colors. Sometimes the dragons would dive steeply, then pull up, rising laboriously with a blurred object clutched in their gleaming claws.