The High Road (On Hold)

Chapter Ten

Chapter Ten

The city seemed to rise up around them in the wink of an eye, the gruelling and arduous work seemingly taking no time at all, until it was nearly finished. There were houses for nearly all the residents, churches for all the gods, and a newly improved and enlarged barracks to house all the fresh recruits for the army. There were workshops that lined the newly paved streets, a clothier and cobbler, a bowyer and blacksmith, a tanner and a locksmith.

Wood was brought in to Learo’el from the forests of the north, stone from the mountains across the river. Along with the resources came people, folks from all over looking for safety and security in the new city. Hundreds of peasants had come there, along with many slaves seeking to escape their masters’ whips.

Jevar and Ellie were expected to work, of course, though with so many hands available to do what needed to be done, they did not have much to do. They helped in the building of a house for themselves, though, a small stone hovel with a shingled roof.

“Isn’t this wonderful, Jevar?” Ellie asked, standing in the middle of a room and looking around herself. It was the house’s main room, and sparsely furnished since it had only been completed that day. There was a table there, surrounded by chairs, and an open hearth for cooking. In the bedroom were two thin mattresses for them to sleep on, along with a wardrobe filled with whatever clothing that they had with them.

Jevar nodded contentedly. “Of course it is,” he said, taking a seat at the table. Resting on the hard oaken surface was a Castles and Conquerors board, which he studied as they talked.

“It’s not near as nice as the priest’s manor,” she continued, “but it’s ours. I don’t have to serve anyone, nor do I have to submit to a cruel mistress.” She laughed. “I could sing for joy right now, Jevar!” And she did, for a longer time than Jevar would have liked. She’s a pretty girl and a wonderful person, he thought, but her singing is worse than that of a dying animal!  He picked up a token, examining the brass figurine of a horseman, his lance thrust out in front of him.

“Does this mean that we should marry, Jevar?”

He dropped the piece. “What?”

Her cheeks flushed from embarrassment at his reaction, and she barely met his eyes with her own as she spoke. “I don’t know,” she mumbled. “I suppose that I thought, since we’re going to be living together, that we might as well be…well…married.”

A laugh threatened to escape his lips, but Jevar forced his face free of any expression, good and bad, and talked to her again. “You’re only fourteen, Ellie,” he told her, “and, as you said a while back, when we’d first arrived here, we hardly know each other.”

“That was months ago, Jevar! It has been half a year since we met the first time in Cross, and now we’re closer friends than I’ve been with anyone else in my life.” She frowned. “I’m fifteen, for your information, and what matter does that make? You are only seventeen.”

“How long have you been thinking about this?” he asked, an eyebrow lifted in suspicion.

“Just for the past week,” she admitted. “Opelain Sathir, the wife of the man who primarily built this house, was talking to me a few days ago as you were working. She asked if you were my brother, and when I told her no, she thought that there was something more than that.” She looked at her feet. “That’s all it is.”

He had never thought of Elicia as anything less than entirely mature, even womanly, before now. Over the course of their journey to the new city, she had had to be strong and cautious, tougher than any girl he’d ever met. She had not whined, nor even complained about the wound on her arm when that had been inflicted on her.