Nathan came down the slope with his good hand raised.
"Excuse me."
The argument stopped.
Both men turned. The one standing straightened up off his hip and the one crouched at the wheel looked over his shoulder, and for a moment the only sound was one of the horses shifting its weight in the traces.
Nathan was aware of exactly what they were looking at.
He kept his hand up.
"Sorry. I’m not going to bother you." His voice came out rougher than he expected. He hadn’t used it much. "I just need to know where I am."
Neither of them answered.
The standing one had a broad, sunburnt face and a beard going grey at the corners. The crouched one was thinner, younger, with his sleeves rolled past the elbow and grease to the wrist. They both looked at the blood down his front, and the strips his tunic had come apart into, and the bandage, and the bare foot.
Nathan waited for one of them to reach for something.
Then the bearded one’s face opened up into a smile.
"Gods, lad."
He came around the back of the carriage at a good clip.
"Look at the state of you. Hask, look at him."
"I’m looking."
"Are you hurt? No, that’s a stupid question, of course you’re hurt." He stopped a few feet short, which Nathan appreciated, and put his hands on his hips. "Where’ve you come out of, the deep wood? On your own?"
"Something like that."
"On your own." The man shook his head slowly. "Right. Right. Sit down before you fall down, we’ll sort you out."
Nathan didn’t sit down.
"I only need directions," he said. "That’s all. I need to know which way the capital is."
"Which way the capital is," the bearded one repeated, and laughed, not unkindly. "Perrin," he added, and tapped his own chest. "That’s Hask under the cart. You’re a long way off the road you want, lad, but you’ve had a piece of luck for once today."
He jerked his chin down the road, west, where it curved away around the shoulder of the hill.
"We’re going that way."
Nathan’s chest did something complicated.
"You’re going to the capital?"
"Near enough to it. We run the low district route, we’re down there four times a season." Perrin was already turning back toward the wheel, waving a hand. "You can ride in the back. Won’t cost you anything, before you start on about it. I’m not leaving a boy your age out here to be somebody’s supper."
’The low district.’
Nathan stood on the road with the sun on his back and had to make himself breathe out slowly.
He hadn’t said which village.
Nathan opened his mouth to ask about it.
Then Hask swore at the axle and called for a hand, and Perrin turned away to roll his sleeves, and by the time either of them was looking at him again Nathan had lost the thread of what had bothered him.
’They run the low road. Where else would they be going.’
He was so tired.
’Where else would they be going.’
They fixed the wheel in about six minutes.
Hask got under the bed and set his shoulder to the axle and Perrin dropped the wheel back onto its pin and drove the collar home with two flat strikes of a mallet, and the whole thing was done and dusted and both of them were wiping their hands while Nathan was still standing there.
"Told you," Hask said.
"You told me nothing. You’ve been telling me nothing since morning."
"I’ve been telling you it’s a two man job."
"And how many of us were there this morning, Hask? Go on. Count."
Nathan looked at the wheel.
’That took six minutes.’
’They’ve been stuck here since morning.’
The thought sat in him for a second and found nothing to hold on to. Perrin clapped him on the shoulder, on the side that wasn’t torn open, and pointed him around to the back of the carriage.
"Up you get."
The bed of the carriage was dim under its canvas and it smelled of old straw and grain sacks and horse.
There were crates lashed along one side. A roll of oiled cloth. Two barrels wedged against the front board.
And a girl sitting in the far corner.
Nathan stopped with one knee up on the boards.
She was small. Not a child exactly, but not far off it, eleven or twelve at a guess, and so thin that her wrists looked wrong coming out of her sleeves. Her tunic had been a colour once. Her hair had been cut short and badly, in handfuls, the way you cut hair when you’re not being gentle about it.
She had her knees pulled up against her chest and her back flat to the boards.
She was looking at him.
The moment he met her eyes she looked away, fast, down at her own feet.
"Hello," Nathan said.
She didn’t answer.
He climbed the rest of the way in and settled himself against the opposite side, as far from her as the bed allowed, because he was covered in blood and he had a rock in his belt and he knew what he looked like.
"I’m not going to bother you," he said. "I’m just riding."
Nothing.
’Alright.’
He let it go.
The carriage rocked as the two men climbed up front, and then the whole thing lurched and started rolling, and Nathan felt the road start moving underneath him and closed his eyes for a second.
’Moving.’
’Toward home.’
They’d been going maybe half an hour when the canvas at the front lifted.
"Here."
Perrin was leaning back through the gap with a cloth bundle in his hand.
"When did you last eat?"
Nathan looked at the bundle.
"Two days."
"Two days." Perrin’s eyebrows went up into his hairline. "Right, that settles it. Take it. Don’t argue with me, I’m not in the mood for it."
He tossed it over.
Nathan caught it against his chest with his good arm and unwrapped it, and the smell came up at him and his mouth flooded so fast it hurt.
Bread. Half a loaf, dense and brown, and a wedge of hard yellow cheese beside it.
"I don’t have anything to pay you with," he said.
"No," Perrin agreed. "You’ve got a rock and half a shirt. Eat the bread."
Nathan swallowed.
"Thank you."
"It’s nothing."
"It’s not nothing." He heard his own voice do something and steadied it. "You didn’t have to stop. You didn’t have to any of it. I know what I look like, and you didn’t even ask, you just, you helped."
Perrin’s face creased up warmly.
"Lad."
"I’m serious. I’ve had a bad few days." Nathan gave a short laugh that came out badly. "A really bad few days. And you two are the first people who’ve been decent to me in all of it."
"Well," Perrin said. "There you are, then. Not everyone’s rotten."
Hask said something from the driver’s bench that Nathan didn’t catch, and Perrin laughed at it, and turned back with the same broad smile still on his face.
"Eat up. You’ll feel human."
The canvas dropped.
Nathan looked down at the bread in his hands.
Then he looked across the bed of the carriage.
The girl had not been given anything.
She was sitting exactly where she’d been sitting, knees up, eyes on the boards, and there was no cloth bundle near her and no crumbs on her tunic and nothing in her hands at all. Her wrists came out of those sleeves like sticks.
Nathan tore the loaf.
"Here."
He held half of it out across the gap.
The girl didn’t move.
"Go on. I can’t eat all of it anyway, and you look like you need it more than I do." He pushed it a little further toward her. "It’s fine. They won’t mind."
She looked up.
She looked at the bread. Then at his face. And something happened behind her eyes that Nathan didn’t have a name for, something that moved fast and got shut down faster, and she pulled her legs in tighter and slid herself sideways along the boards until her shoulder was pressed hard into the wall of the carriage.
She put both arms over her head.
She stayed like that, face hidden, curled up small against the wood, and did not make a single sound.
Nathan sat there with his arm out.
"Alright," he said quietly.
He drew it back.
’She’s terrified.’
’Of me, probably. I’d be terrified of me.’
He looked at the shape of her in the corner for a moment longer, at the badly cut hair and the arms over the head, and he felt something scratch at the back of his mind, some small wrong-shaped thing trying to get his attention.
But his hands were shaking around the bread.
Two days. He hadn’t eaten in two days and there was food in his hands and his body had stopped being interested in anything else.
’Later.’
Nathan ate.
He ate too fast, the way you do, tearing off pieces and barely chewing them, and the bread was good and the cheese was sharp and salty and it was the best thing he had ever put in his mouth in his life. He finished all of it. He licked the crumbs off the cloth.
Then he sat back against the boards with his eyes closed and felt, for the first time since the temple, something that was almost fine.
The carriage rocked.
’Almost home.’
’Get to the district. Find Jerry. Then Nolan.’
’Then the man who sent him.’
He was working out how he’d get near a palace when he noticed his hands were heavy.
Not tired. Heavy, like something had been poured into them. He tried to lift one off his knee and it came up slowly and wrong, and his fingers didn’t close when he told them to.
Nathan opened his eyes.
The inside of the carriage had gone soft at the edges.
’What.’
He tried to sit forward and his body did not respond in any recognisable way. His shoulder slid down the boards. The light coming through the canvas seam had turned into a long white smear and the sound of the wheels was coming from somewhere much further away than the wheels were.
’The bread.’
The thought arrived with terrible slowness, from a long way off, and he could not do anything with it.
’The bread was—’
He went down onto the straw.
The last thing he saw was the girl in the corner, still curled up with her arms over her head, watching him through the gap under her elbow.
Then nothing.
The canvas lifted.
"He’s off."
Hask leaned through, looked at the boy sprawled face down in the straw, and let out a breath.
"Took long enough. He’s a big lad."
"He’s a starving lad. Went down fine." Perrin came around the back and hauled himself up into the bed, crouching over Nathan and turning his head with two fingers to look at his face. "Gods, what a mess he’s in. Somebody’s already had a go at him."
"Does that matter?"
"Not to us." Perrin took Nathan’s wrist, turned it, prodded at the forearm through the filthy bandage, and grunted. "Arm’s bad. That’ll come off him or it’ll go rotten. Either way it’s coming off the price."
He let the wrist drop.
"Still. Sixteen, seventeen. Strong through the shoulders under all that. Somebody’ll want him for the pits or the quarries."
He looked over.
The girl had not moved.
"And you," Perrin said.
She got smaller.
"Come here. Look at me."
She lowered her arms very slowly and looked at him, and her whole body was shaking hard enough to be visible from the front of the carriage.
Perrin crouched down in front of her and put his hands on his knees, and his face was the same warm, creased, open face he’d shown Nathan on the road.
"You kept your mouth shut," he said. "The whole way. He talked at you, he offered you food, and you didn’t say one word."
He nodded slowly.
"That’s good. You want to know how good?"
She didn’t answer.
"You’ve had luck today, girl, you just don’t know it yet." Perrin reached out and pushed a piece of her ragged hair back off her forehead, and she flinched so hard her head hit the boards. "If you’d opened your mouth. If you’d warned him, said one word, given him one look. Then you and me would be having a very different conversation right now, and it wouldn’t be a long one."
He straightened up.
"There’s two kinds of stock, see. There’s the kind that behaves, and that kind goes to a buyer, and a buyer feeds you, because you’re no good to him dead."
He brushed the straw off his knees.
"And then there’s the kind that makes trouble. And that kind doesn’t get sold whole."
Hask laughed from the front.
"You’ll do well," Perrin said, and smiled down at her, and it was a genuinely kind smile. "You keep being good and you’ll do very well. Sit tight."
He climbed down and the canvas fell shut.
In the dark, the girl stayed exactly where she was, with her back against the wall of the carriage and her arms locked around her knees.
Six feet away, Nathan Avenworth lay face down in the straw and did not move at all.