The High Road (On Hold)

Chapter Six

Chapter Six

When they woke the next morning, they broke their fast on fruit and cheese, a decision that Jevar did not appreciate. He was carnivorous, or so he liked to think, and a meal in which there was no meat was hardly a meal at all in his mind. They spent the first half hour after waking rationing the food, with Jevar making certain that he got most of the meat in his portions, which Elicia did not argue over. In fact, Elicia hardly said a word that morning.

As they rationed, Jevar sometimes stole glances at her when he thought that she wasn’t looking, and her face was as pale as that of a ghost. There were dark circles around her shimmering blue eyes, which were oddly pale that morning. It looked to him that she had had no sleep last night, when he had fallen into unconsciousness the moment he’d closed his eyes. She was troubled, obviously, so Jevar asked her what the issue was.

She simply shrugged, however. “Nothing is the matter,” she said, forgetting the question after that, though she looked strangely pale all that morning.

Aching from sleeping on the ground, after Jevar and Elicia had finished rationing he stood up and stretched, ready for another long day of walking. They would go north, for now at least, as it was the only way away from Cross where there was the least traffic. Where they would go later, he did not know.

It was warm that morning, and Elicia put her cloak into the bag that Jevar held over his shoulders before they got moving. They were in the sparsely wooded grasslands to the north of Cross, and it was the same scenery all throughout the lands between the River Erivol and the River Inaveh, without much differentiation. Past River’s End, though, were the mountains, beyond which were the great sands from which Reman Adaro hailed originally.

They started walking north soon after dawn, and as they went Jevar worked out the logistics of the trip. To the north, which was the only safe direction they could travel, there were hundreds of leagues of prairies between Cross and Craerock, about six hundred, if his tutoring at the hands of his parents had been accurate. He guessed that they could walk about three leagues a day, if they walked almost constantly the whole time, which would mean two hundred days of walking to get to Craerock. A daunting figure, but it would be two hundred days of the search for him cooling off. From Craerock, he could go on to Bealar, where he vaguely recalled having some distant relatives through his parents.

They were his foster parents, technically. The fisher family that had taken him in when he was but a boy had been the only family he’d ever known, and they had been taken away from him after six seemingly blissful years of normality. During that time, he thought he recalled being visited by relatives of his parents, and that the visitors had come from Bealar. He’d have to find them, though, and that could take a long time. Time, though, was the one thing he had that he would not run out of soon.

Ellie was being abnormally quiet. After about an hour, he realized that she had not spoken a word in all that time. This was unusual for her, he gathered from the two days he’d spent in her company. She’d hardly said a thing since going to sleep the previous night, and he found himself almost missing the clear sound of her voice. Once, in a particularly boring stretch of lush green grass without a tree in sight, he tried to make conversation.

“What happened on the Serpent’s Tail, anyway?”

This, as he would soon realize, was a terrible mistake. His one, poorly misguided question opened the floodgates, and Ellie cried more tears then than he’d ever seen someone cry all at one time. Seven words was all that it took for an entire three hour stretch, throughout which the silence surrounding them was broken only by the quiet sobbing of his travelling companion. Needless to say, he did not attempt conversation again for a long, long time.