Creusus's Arc

Chapter 41 of 43

At first light Creusus walked inland to look for Thane. He left Kallista sleeping and told Malachai to keep watch. He crossed a low ridge and expected empty country. He found a road instead. The road ran between fenced fields. A boy drove goats along it. A woman with a basket nodded at Creusus as she passed. Beyond the fields he saw smoke from chimneys and heard a bell ring the hour. This world had people in it. It had work and roofs and morning noise. He walked into the town and asked after a mage with a scarred face. No one knew the name. No one had seen a man come out of the hills alone. A cooper told him the country stretched for weeks in every direction, past rivers he had never heard of. Creusus stood in the square and understood he could search for a year and find nothing. He did not turn back yet. He watched a smith beat a horseshoe flat. He watched two children fight over a crust and then share it. He smelled bread. He had forgotten bread smelled like that. Somewhere Thane was alive or he was not. Creusus could not force the answer today. He took the first work offered. A yard master needed lumber moved from a cart to a stack behind a mill. Creusus unwrapped his hands and set them on the wood. He carried beams two at a time. The yard master watched, then stopped watching, then paid him at dusk in coin he did not recognize but that the innkeeper took. He brought Kallista and the others in before dark. Malachai took a room. Deborah helped Kallista wash the salt out of her hair. They ate stew at a low table and Kallista told a story about a statue she had seen once as a girl. Creusus listened. He did not speak of the shore or the orb or the man he had come inland to find. Days turned. He hauled lumber. Malachai went to the capital and came back in the plain surcoat of an imperial knight, sworn to a lord Creusus would never meet. Deborah and Kallista walked to the market together and came back laughing about the price of onions. A year passed. Creusus stopped asking travelers about a scarred mage. He kept the question, but he stopped asking. One evening he stood outside the mill and looked at the two moons rising at their different speeds. He decided he would meet Thane again or he would not, and either way he would be here when it happened.