Western Watch (3rd Draft)

Chapter 4

The heat hits her like a hammer. Watch Hall had been oppressively warm, yet cool compared to being outside. Even shaded by an awning, Merreth feels like she's inside a smithy.

She stands on the wooden boardwalk that runs down the eastern side of Ridge Way, Westhold's main street. The wide ribbon of worn cobblestones tops a long low hill paralleling the Saskanna River for several miles. Streets and alleys run west down to the riverside warehouse district and east out through a growing jumble of well-kept cottages towards old, established farmland. The smell of fresh timber, clay, dust, and horse dung fills the air. A cloudless azure sky crowns the bustling town that seems to be growing before Merreth's eyes. White plastered buildings, some three stories high, jostle each other shoulder to shoulder on either side of the street. Brightly coloured awnings festoon many doors and windows.

A cacophony of sounds come to her: fragments of passerby conversation, enthusiastic market place entreaties, the distant clanging of metal work, of saws ripping through wood and hammers banging. Labourers, clerks, tradesmen, and others Merreth cannot identify scurry along the boardwalk. Those on the street weave amongst sweating, cursing drivers steering horse-drawn carts and wagons. On outside verandas well-dressed women and the odd dandified man sit talking, gesturing, and eating. Members of the rising gentry class, thinks Merreth.

She searches up and down the street and sees no sign of Tiandraa and Lyadkell. Good, she thinks. She strips off her gloves and loosens her vest. Trickles of sweat sneak down her back. Sarrit joins her on the boardwalk. A slight breeze plucks his tunic and for a moment she envies him; he can bear the heat much more easily than she. She strides over to Winddancer, tethered to a hitching post.

"Back to the stables, Lady Merreth?" asks Sarrit.

Merreth checks her saddlebags and bedroll then places a foot in the stirrup and mounts in one fluid motion. "Why?"

"Your pack horses? Surely you have pack horses to carry your essentials?"

Merreth smiles, a sketchy crooked thing that vanishes immediately. "I don't have any." She watches Sarrit's eyebrows rise in surprise. Red Hand nobles would possess at least half a dozen each, those that didn't make use of carriages. Pack horses would have only slowed Merreth down. She has saddlebags and a bedroll. A bedroll! What must he think of that? She urges Winddancer out onto the street. "Quarters now, Sarrit," she calls over her shoulder.

He hurries after her. Even amid the riot of sounds filling the street she hears his sandals slap against the cobblestones. "What did you think of it? The hall?" he asks as he draws up beside her.

"Mmmmm?" Merreth isn't really listening, her mind still on Tiandraa and Lyadkell. Where are they? What will they do when they learn of Bayllos? What will Rehkhell say? She reviews the morning, the last day, the last week, her mind racing back to the horrifying images of Bayllos, back to her horror. The sun seems to go cold; she rubs her arms, shivering at the bloody red memory, and at the excited tingle she quickly suppresses. She feels nauseous, soiled. "Not like that," she mutters. "I'm not like that."

"You don't like the inn?"

Merreth wrenches her mind back to the present. "I said it looks like an inn."

"It is."

She glances down at Sarrit. "Hardly fitting."

"Well," says Sarrit, "until last year the High Mistress governed from her estate but then the clans grew bolder. She wants to be closer to the west bank."