Covenant's End - Ari Marmell Page 0,3

He'd shed no tears when he learned she'd left.

Still…if she's coming back, I do rather hope it's soon.

The days were oddly chilly, given that the calendar insisted mid-spring wasn't terribly far off. Not ludicrously so, not wrapped in snow as if winter had utterly missed its cue to depart, stage north. Just chilly. The breeze carried a subtle bite, the sort offered when the neighbor's dog was tired of your crap but hadn't yet reached the point of going for your throat. The rain, less frequent, fell in fat, cold drops when it came, liquid spiders scurrying down inside collars and boots.

The woodland creatures were confused, popping out of winter burrows one day and hunkering back down the next. Grasses grew, foliage sprouted, only to be uprooted or torn from branches by the wind and the rain. Along this particular length of highway, one of southern Galice's major thoroughfares, the road was more muck than dirt, and the leaves that had tried to grow on nearby trees lay scattered willy-nilly like a bunch of bleeding, groaning bandits.

A metaphor that would have made no sense whatsoever, had the road and surrounding woods not also been strewn with a bunch of bleeding, groaning bandits.

One solitary figure strode casually away from the human detritus, her boots crunching lightly in the cold muck. A dark hood, matching the rest of her traveling leathers, kept chestnut hair from roiling and coiling around her head in the breeze. For a time, other than those gusts and her own footsteps, the only sound to be heard was the faint jingling of the ratty pouch she weighed and juggled in one hand.

“I don't know, Olgun,” she lamented to, apparently, nobody in particular. “This is barely more than the last group had on them. We really need to get ourselves accosted by a better class of highwayman. What?” She cocked her head to one side, listening to a response nobody else could hear. “Oh, come on! I didn't hurt any of them that badly!”

Another pause. “Well, yeah,” she admitted, “that probably hurt pretty bad. But he has another one that should still work just fine.”

Widdershins—formerly Adrienne Satti, former tavern-keeper, former ex-thief, and soon-to-be-former exile from Davillon—continued along the path she hadn't, until recently, been sure she would ever tread again.

The way home.

“What?” she asked. Semi-violent imagery and an overwhelmed sensation ran through her mind; such was the “speech” of her unseen companion, a god foreign to Galice and who boasted, in all the world, precisely one adherent. “Well, how the happy, hopping horses am I supposed to know what's ‘normal’ here? We've only ever been on this road once before, and that was in summertime. Maybe this is the normal number of bandits along here. Or maybe, I don't know, maybe it's bandit season. That'd explain why we haven't seen many other travelers, yes? If the locals know when to stay off the highway.”

With a frisson of both bemused and amused reluctance, Olgun pointed out the logistical paradox regarding the notion of a “bandit season” in which travelers remained home.

“Oh. That's a good…well, maybe it's dumb bandit season!”

Widdershins chose to interpret Olgun's subsequent silence as meaning she'd won that particular exchange. Olgun chose to let her. They were both happier that way.

Still and all, as the day aged and the road unwound beneath her feet, Shins had to acknowledge that something was definitely off. This was a major thoroughfare; even allowing for the unseasonable cold, even if the threat of banditry was higher than usual, such a total dearth of travelers was odd. They should be fewer, but they should not have been absent.

It was…off. And after the previous, oh, bulk of her entire life, the young woman had developed a healthy distrust of “off.” Nothing about her posture visibly changed, but her steps grew softer and more deliberate, her attentions more focused on the world around her.

As she was so heavily alert for danger, however, it took a subtle nudge from her divine companion before she noticed the changing aroma in the air. The lingering breath of northerly climes and the first faint perfumes of buds and blooms gradually gave way to wood smoke spiced with roasting meats.

She was still a couple days from Davillon, so what…?

“Ah.”

A small cluster of buildings made itself visible as she crested a shallow rise. Nothing even remotely impressive, just a squat structure of wood with a couple of smoke-belching stone chimneys, and a few even squatter structures scattered around it.

Now that she