The rain kept through to the evening. The tavern was without an inn, and Beryll guessed what lodging it clung to would not giddily house us. Many watched whilst we scampered to the early hills. Same fashion with which I’d guard my hands, as the mine’s ash was in the river carried away. Waiting to see a purity again. Hail came and blurred our nightfall. I had never left a settlement so confident its thieves did not follow. Good Barb claimed a queer thing. She said, as we left, that she had seen an old fellow in our tracks. She said he stood in our wake with a long scythe, or a rake, carving the proof of our cart’s passing. Smudging the mud flat. This unnerves me, and hearing the piddle of the storm I am yet to sleep, in no good hour. Earnestly, did he work, healing the road so as if certain we would not pass through again. Garl remains about, with Sphia and Beryll. I hear them outside, giggling here and there, keeping a low flame. Their shadows writhe in the folds of the tent. When they laugh, their jaws go long like snouts. And in the hiss of rainfall, every laugh is a discordant chime, fought not to be smothered. Whimpers, almost. Whimpers and hail and long sleepless nights. Eleven days and one morning. I pray we do better, swifter. How could she not?

  Damned rain won’t lessen. Can’t sleep during storms, so I write. No sage folk blinds an eye when the reckoning sings. Sphia loves rain and the thunder. I say it is a knife, pressed to the shallow gut, always with power enough to pierce on to the belly. Power, reserved and whole. I cannot sleep beside such a thing. There is no wagering as to a cloud’s clemency. The noise is its ceaseless drum, and nothing that follows the beat of drums accommodates our good sleep. Always do I remember the dig, raveling down as a throat to the acids of our own mortal digestion. How deep we delved and how the sun shut away behind us. We counted the minutes between thunders and made trenches to delay our own drowning. I believed in my heart that glistening rock was the last thing I’d witness. I thought pleading would be the final thing I’d hear. Up the water ran, till our waists were lost to us. I remember how I prayed the stone might collapse first. Now I only listen, to what is a faroff footfall of an enemy moved on. Outside, they jest. Of course it is good company. That bleak otherwise gives thought too much space.

  I hear dribbles of their speech. Sphia tells them the ways to read the weather after a downpour’s begun. Garl Drudgefoot moans of the poor birds who must in all haste scamper. She does remind him that other life relishes the hail, and such is a sage thought. Much time they have spent below ground. They more than most should know the blind and wriggling few who come for air when the flush clots their homes. At times I feel like a worm, most often as I write; a helpless groaning, of punctuated but impotent desire. A worm waiting ever under the world, etching forth, measly so and in sloth, for the world to wedge me up in my right time for my right glory. How often I find the worms surfaced only to be gored at the boot. Now I feel my tent come grim.

  “It is his bastard urge,” said Beryll. “Irmiter has it in his head that good gold’s sat unplundered for fear’s had it tucked away. Or that there is a bastion to be unearthed, relics claimed again. Perhaps some outpost to flag for good progress. He is a story-teller, but this tale he spins of Porvhuud I say is too far a fantasy.”

  “And?” began Sphia, grinning. “We have gone further for less than tales. Suspicions, guesswork. Stielbert once dragged us a country away 'cause he heard a well had a crack at its bottom, what water dripped through.”

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  “And right he was.”

  “Do you fear the ravings of Rabdour, Beryll?” she taunted. “Is your courage shriveled too in the cold?”

  At that he scowled and leaned away, covering an ire in the flap of his coat. “If a hundred in a town of ten all say the road’s gone sour, my word is ‘let the road be damned’. There is the peasant’s dread of things unruly, and there is tradition of good fear.”

  “You saw them,” said Garl. “What are the people of Rabdour to be trusted? Hacking, trembling men, cock-low in hay. I caught a boy, playing through a toad’s intestines with scissors. Thrashed him over his bug-eyed head, I did, and up he looks to me like he couldn’t make sense of a sound and sight both. An ill, ill little hamlet, best left to the land’s backend as we found it, to cough and starve or whatnot they wish. I say now, they will not see a stud of silver from my purse, even if every dullard finds their knees by our return. They fear the woods west, the men from the east, no doubt the winds north too.”

  “So only hearsay?” asked Beryll to them both. “Orolm says they saw a crone, him and Stielbert, one that warned of headless rabbits and scared wolves in the old wood. What is that but fell omen? And these scores of mildew in our packs, as if a dirty hand’s gone through… It is colder here than the season owes.”

  “An early winter, perhaps,” shrugged Sphia. “All the more cause to hurry to our work, and be past Rabdour again before the snows seal us in.”

  “And this storm? We will lose days already to the mud.”

  “So it’ll be a profit well earned, no?”

  On they bicker, to in time come to gigglings again. Then there is a sudden stifling of the every tongue, a bald silence. I creep through the tent, thinking they have mocked the wrong fellow and in turn has that fellow emerged upon their kniving. I arose in that downpour as if to arrest a skirmish, but the silence took me too. All three were turned outward, enticed toward the wagon. Closer, I heard a kneading, blunt, wet, bashings in mud. There was a hunched cloud so low in the dark, aside the wheel. Shadow, broad and folded ill over its belly. Molt sat cross-legged with his back to us, in the midnight freeze. We did not see on what he worked in his late privacy. But my coming was new authority and the right to make clamour given away, so I walked through the lounge of the three, near enough to glimpse his great fists over his shoulder. I squinted and made myself still, then saw.

  Aloud, I ordered all in the space to bed. They began quite abruptly to summon themselves upright, to then shun to their tents. Passing, I shook my head plainly, answered the plea of their quiet suspicions, banished unease with a calmness like treats happenstance—meagre and uninviting. They accepted that, and I returned to my own quiet. Soon enough I could discern Beryll’s snoring, but sleep did not come for me. There was a coldness like trapped air in my gut. I could not close my tapping of graphite and its string to temple. I could not fall into blind dreams.

  In his lay, Molt had been barefoot in the filth of brown, spoiled ferns. I found him wrangling about his toes, squirming ever so slightly, winging from a sting, and in my own eye I caught when from his biggest toe, he snapped the nail away, plate and root. Without so much as a grunt. Plucking burrs from the sleeve. The storm saw me restless.

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