The Bounty Hunter

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Eighteen

Safita awoke to the chorus of birdsong which began just before dawn as the birds began to warm up, trilling merrily up and down scales as they perched on branches high up in the trees, an invisible choir. It felt off, however, as if something fundamental was missing and the first reason which her mind settled upon for the slight shift in the air was that she was alone, that Finred had left her. She dismissed this thought though when she realised that, without meaning to, she had slept in later than she had meant to; normally she was up and moving before the sun had risen but now bright rays of light were shining cheerfully into her bleary eyes from between the tree trunks and blinding her.

This discovery cemented her foul mood and she swore vigorously, tugging her hood low over her face and setting out without even eating, her boots treading lightly through the wood. She had contemplated staying at the inn in which she and Finred had planned to rest for the night but, knowing that he would most likely be there and being completely against ever meeting him again – unless it was to gore him with her bluntest blade – she had instead camped out by the side of the road. Safita had thought that it would have been comforting to return to her old way of life but instead she merely found herself feeling oddly lonely and staring absentmindedly into the fire as tiny flecks flickered and danced around the flames, painfully bright against the darkness of the night.

She tried to make up for lost time by pushing her muscled legs as fast as they would go, tramping across the countryside by herself, a single solitary figure that marched across the undulating green hills. By the end of the day the road had widened although it was still as pockmarked and rough as it had been earlier – though its size had increased its quality stayed much the same, a rocky testimony to the lack of money in the Outlands and a constant reminder of their separation – and the occasional cart was seen to trundle along it, wheels creaking and squeaking as the dilapidated wagon rumbled across the land, tugged forwards by a straining horse and its own momentum; on upwards slopes the owners often dismounted to push them along from behind – the cause of many a death when the cart came free – and on downwards ones the horse risked being run over as the sheer weight and size of the cart sent it flying forwards, a slave to gravity.

The blanket of evening had just settled down and got comfortable when the shrubs and trees around Safita morphed, unnoticed, into houses which were in as bad a condition as the road; no house in Scaera stood fully upright, instead each one leaned into another or into the streets at a perilous angle, looming over the passersby before it like an angry parent giving their child the stinkeye; from the grimy windows thin faces peered out, never completely clean but never really caring. For all of the poverty which abounded in the outskirts of the city there was a good sense of community, Safita knew that from various jobs she had conducted here which had involved masquerading as different people here, and she knew that they all took care of each other.

Inky darkness wound through the streets by the time she reached her favourite inn and old lodgings – The Flying Dagger. She found it slightly ironic that her hunt for the prince had led her all around the Outlands before bringing her right back to where she started; with a rueful chuckle she thought that she could have just stayed here and saved all of the effort of travelling, if she had she would certainly be in better shape than she was now. As she thought this she stepped on a particular part of her foot which she had been avoiding for a couple of days and felt the pressure of a blister on her toe; cursing her rotten luck she headed inside, hoping that she could lance and clean it quickly. Whenever she got the odd blister – few and far between now that her feet were so calloused and tough from travelling – she tried to remind herself of the first few times that she had left and the excruciating pain she had been in back then. It never really worked.