The Believer

Chapter Two: Destin's Promise

The night was chilly, and Wilky found herself shivering in her thin nightdress. As they walked, now on the main road, others joined them, other families and their households, friends to the Geodonnas. There were other armed men, and after awhile, all the prisoners become one big mass, and Wilky no longer knew where her family was, though Winnie had stuck close to her side. The little girl knew better than to cry, but was trying hard not to break down. Everything was happening all at once, and no one knew exactly what was going on.

They reached a bridge and crossed over the Tawno River. It was about here that Wilky caught sight of Destin, trudging along with everyone else, eyes shifting about, searching for a way to escape. Wilky watched him, not wanting to move through the crowd for fear of losing Winnie, but desperately hoping to make eye contact with her fiance.

"Wilky," Winnie whispered. "Where are we going?"

"I don't know," Wilky replied, keeping her voice low. "We'll just have to wait and see."

"They wouldn't tie us up if it was somewhere nice, right?" Winnie asked.

"Right." Wilky agreed, without thinking. Winnie's eyes widened.

Wilky herself had an idea of where they were headed, though she didn't want to accept the possibility. She'd been hearing vague rumors of the Cordians crossing the Tawnian border, and attacking any villages or cities they came to, stealing the occupants away in the dead of night, never to be seen again. Wilky had thought these attacks were too far away to be a threat to her family, and this was the thought that kept her hopeful.

They kept travelling through the night, without being allowed to stop, though Wilky's feet were becoming sore. She wanted to stop and sleep and rest, but their captors kept urging them to go faster. At this point, they weren't picking up any more prisoners. Wilky had lost track of Destin's location, and hardly had the strength to care anymore. They were following a main road, but Wilky was too tired to know where they were going.

Finally, as the sun rose and shed its dusky light over the world, they reached the border between Cordia and Tawnin, which was guarded by towers placed at intervals. As they crossed, Wilky was surprised that no one stopped their passage. Their captors must have sabotaged the guard towers to allow themselves to pass freely back and forth.

Wilky had never been to Cordia. It was a country at war with what should've been its sister nation, Horitzor. The war between the two had been going on for about fifty years now, constantly on and off, but never resolving to peaceful terms. Sometimes, it seemed they had come to an agreement, or perhaps they just needed time to fix themselves up again, but they always came back to the battlefield. The border between the two countries was constantly shifting, like the ocean tide on the shore.

The language spoken in both countries was Kownian, originating, logically enough, in Kown, the parent country to both Horitzor and Cordia. Wilky realized now that the strange language the men had been speaking to one another must have been Kownian. Wilky had never studied Kownian, because her parents forbid her to, due to the bad relations between Tawnin and the Kownian nations. They said she should never need to talk to anyone from either of these countries, and learning the language would only allow her to understand their barbaric ways and possibly sympathize with them, which was out of the question. Cordia and Horitzor were inherently evil places, Cordia because of its wealth gained by slave labor, and Horitzor because of its persecution of any living thing that breathed- or so it seemed.

Now, Wilky was confused. Her parents had both told her she would never need to learn Kownian, but here she was now, in Cordia, soon to be surrounded by people who spoke primarily Kownian. She found this extremely inconvenient. If she could speak to them, maybe she could figure out what was happening and negotiate something.