post 3

Honey growled an affirmation. With shaking hands, Cassia wrapped up the remainder of the meat and fruit and packed it away. A quick glance at the main road showed that it was no more busy than it had when she first arrived. With a shaking hand, she traced the route. There were only five miles to Millea, and a few more miles to the crossroads.

“Wanna walk, Honey?” Honey was restless, scratching and woofing at the ground. But when Cassia began to walk, Honey stopped, shaking her head vigorously. Despite the tension that she felt, Cassia laughed at Honey’s antics. She picked Honey up and put her in the sling. She continued walking, staying in the safety of the trees, skirting the road and the river with equal caution.

As she walked, her thoughts kept straying to the mermaid in the river. “Perhaps the blood hasn’t been spilt just yet,” she had said. Cassia shuddered. The mermaids were masters of deception and fear. Perhaps the mermaid was merely hungry and hoped for Cassia to become terrified enough as to stray too near the river. Then it could feast on her blood. It was just a trick, a ploy. Yet her mind turned towards the words of her tutor and nurse, Thya. “When the mermaid makes a prediction, my child, you would do well to heed them, for though they are deceptive and manipulative, the mermaid has a strange propensity towards prophecy.” Cassia shook her mind free. Stop it, she told herself. She was just goading you, and you need to remain vigilant.

For a while she forced herself to focus on her journey, taking in the silent river and the shivering, crisp needles that threw striped shadows over the moist, untreaded earth. After a mile the river turned away from the road, narrowing towards the east, closer to the spring where it formed. As Cassia turned away from it in farewell, she thought she saw a glimmer of a scale, but she told herself it was just a wink from the crest of the small waves that flowed down the river.

Cassia sighed, annoyed with her paranoia. She knew that she was acting like a coward. Real heroes, her father often said, reasoned with their fears, and won. They were strong, both from will and necessity. The fearful had minds that were constantly clouded by fear and doubt, which grayed their reasoning and dulled their senses; the valiant knew their worth and their message, and utilized their wit and their resources. The brave sharpened their senses in the face of danger; the timid hid their faces when confronted with excitement. Never be a coward, he’d use to say to his children. The world is littered such people, who are manipulated by the powerful. Heroes are free to shape their world as they’d like. Cassia glanced down at Honey. “You think I could be a hero?”

Honey just met her eyes with her own liquid brown. Then she stiffened, a throaty growl emanating from her muzzle. Cassia instinctively shrank behind a trees. The bark was crumbling and gritty to the touch; the moist smell was laced with something metallic. The brisk clopping of horses and the crack of a whip cut through the eerie silence of the road. Cassia huddled in the shadows. A squad of six to eight horsemen leaned against their horses, urging the lathered mounts to greater speeds. Each man wore a calf length, nondescript coat, but the speed and the rise and fall of their motion revealed the black, white buttoned uniform – the uniform of Arche’s national army. Buckled at their side were stained and naked broadswords. Honey’s ears went back. Cassia stroked her head with trembling hands. Mentally she urged Honey to remain silent. The men passed by within a few armlengths.

“How are you holding up, Gartos?” one of the men yelled to his companion.

With a start, Cassia recognized the dark stain the darkened the dun coat of one of the army men.

“Think you can hold up until the town, Gartos?” Another man called.

“Or will we have to leave you at the edge to nurse your hurt while we do the real work?”

The wounded man, with thick, dark hair that curled over his suntanned head raised a hand and made a rude gesture at the speaker. The rest of the men roared with laughter.

Cassia felt the cool clench of dread fill her again. The town? Which town? She darted through the trees, reckless assurance telling her that the men would not notice her darting through the trees.

“Mer-whores rot you,” Gartos cursed at his companions, his voice gruff with pain. Cassia ran quickly and easily, having been trained by a retired hand-combat specialist since she was twelve. “I’ll hold up well enough.” She knew that she could not keep up with galloping horses for long, but she needed to find out where they were going, and where they came from.

“That’s my man!” A blond-bearded man galloped up to Gartos and slapped his back as he passed. Gartos roared in pain and spat at the rider. Cassia felt a stitch flare up her side. Where are you going? She wondered desperately. A wayward branch flicked her in the side of the face, and she stumbled to a stop. The riders, still whooping and rowdy, quickly thundered out of sight.

Despite her wish to collapse in the dirt at the foot of a tree, Cassia forced herself to keep moving to keep her leg muscles from cramping up. Honey, who had clung to the sling and Cassia’s tunic with her claws during the sprint, barked reproachfully. “Sorry,” Cassia puffed, jogging now. She figured that she had about a mile left until she would reach her sister’s village.

She forced her trembling legs into a steady rhythm. The sturdy beat felt good after that chaotic sprint. It was like the pounding of a drum, much like the one back home, which the head manservant at her house used to announce visitors whenever her father was receiving important guests. Theo, still fairly young and strongly built, would seize the large batons that he beat against the leather casing, once, twice, and thrice. Then he would announce the name of the visitor in a deep booming voice that could almost be mistaken for a fourth drum beat. The doors would be thrown open, and the visitor would strut in to the great dining room table, formally acknowledging her father. A slight silence would prevail for a few moments, the last procedures dictated by Archean tradition. Then father and the guest would guffaw together, the lucky fifth beat, and sit down to a hearty meal.

Cassia smiled grimly as she crested a small hill and began the downward trek that branched from the main road, where the ocean cut into the earth to create the narrow harbor peopled by the fisher folk of Millea. Cassia slowed, then reduced her pace to a walk as she neared the edge of the trees. She paused at the last of them, scanning the village carefully. Still on an elevated area, the entire gathering of huts and buildings were laid out like a map.

The road that trailed to Millea was empty, but perhaps that was to be expected, given the lack of traffic on the main road. Millea contained no defensive walls, so the road merely paused at the sign that read WELCOME TO MILLEA, and then continued past the post office and three story inn the Prongfish. Then it wound past shops and houses , bundled around the healer’s cabin, before thinning out into a dusty trail that looped around the fishermen’s huts until it reached the sturdy dock. Arche, being mostly landlocked, housed few navy vessels in the harbor, so only a handful of dawdling wooden, net-laden sea crafts populated the dock.

Cassia could make out the tiny movements of the few fishermen that remained on the beach. It seemed that the horsemen had not been headed for Millea, at least not for long. “Think it’s safe?” she asked Honey. Honey made no reply at all, but fastened her eyes on the serene town.

Cassia licked her lips, and felt her water flask at her side. Its meager contents sloshed weakly. She needed water, in any case, and she wanted to meet with her sister. Archia, though in many ways Cassia’s opposite, had nonetheless completed many successful missions before eloping, and had always helped Cassia. And Cassia needed this, as tendrils of foreboding continued to needle at her resolve. The abnormalities: the empty main road, the early Witching migration, the mermaid’s prediction, and the army horse riders. She could not help feeling that there was something more serious stirring beneath the simplicity of her errand.