Mara split the shift with Eli that first night in Ashfall, and every night thereafter. It wasn’t an even split–she only kept watch for a couple of hours at the beginning of the night, but Mara was capable of discernment. She knew a fight she could win from one she couldn’t. So, she split the shift unevenly and resigned herself to gratitude that at least a small portion of the weight was now hers to carry.

There were no more incidents after the unexpected band of outlaws–just day after day of walking up hills and then down them, setting up camp and then breaking it, watching the sun rise watery over the gray landscape and then watching it set, blinding and red, beyond the distant black ridges on the horizon.

Mara’s body held up well enough, after that first humiliating day. Perhaps because she’d become suddenly much tougher and more rugged overnight. Perhaps because she no longer resisted Eli’s efforts to send a push of healing magic at her during every break. It was tough to say.

Either way, the rest of their journey to Cinder was quiet enough that Mara found herself slipping inexorably from bored suffering into dense, heavy sadness. The part of her mind that remained detached recognized that this was to be expected. She’d found out her husband had died and immediately gone on the run, the loss supplanted by fear and uncertainty. And then they’d been in Loftland, and Davy had joined her in her dreams. In Loftland, her days had been enchanted, her nights a miracle. She’d wrangled her heart over Davy’s loss in those early days, but never single-handedly. She’d had the magic. The dreams.

But here, in Ashfall, where the landscape was as gray as her grief, hope and comfort faded more with each passing day. Whatever the dreams meant, she wasn’t naive enough to believe they were a promise of Davy’s return to her arms. When she went to him at night, she did so knowing that it wouldn’t, couldn’t last. No more than their life here together could have lasted. She began to count the nightly visitations, not by how many she had been blessed with, but by how many might remain before she lost those too.

So, Mara found herself sliding down the arc of her moods into a pit from which little energy could emerge beyond the necessary.

She woke up in the morning.

She wore her pack.

She walked.

She engaged with Nick when he engaged with her.

She gathered firewood.

She ate.

She sat for three hours in the evening, staring at the lumpy darkness of the forest, listening to distant wolves howl and less-distant coyotes yammer and shriek. When Eli woke from his heavy, corpselike sleep–always on time, of course–she crawled into her blankets and held her son and fell into her own deep slumber.

And then she woke up in the morning once again.

Beyond the cycle of necessity, Mara did little except drag her leaden feet over the ground and drag her aching mind from one of her son’s needs to the next. She did not request further lessons in resistance technique, nor did she practice the one exercise Eli had given her. She did not make up stories for her son, unless he asked. She did not attempt to engage Eli in conversation. She did not forage, except for food.

Each night, after Nick had gone to sleep but before Mara’s shift started, Eli would take a knee before her, interrupting her view of the fire, and force her to meet his eyes. He asked the same question, every night.

“Is there anything I can do?”

Every night, she shook her head. All he could do was what he already did–notice. If he noticed, if he asked, at least that meant she wasn’t as alone as she felt.

After the first few anxious nights, she didn’t count the days to Cinder. It could have been a week, it could have been a month. The terrain never really changed–just hill after steep, unforgiving hill, carpeted with thin, sickly-looking trees. The day they finally arrived, she was so lost in herself she wasn’t even excited.

“We’ll stick to the woodline,” Eli was saying, after announcing that they were within a league of the city. “Loop around to the west entrance. The east gate is closer, but I’d rather we not have to travel through that part of the city.”

Though they reached the ring road just after breakfast, they gave it such a wide berth it took them until well past lunch to circle around to the north entrance. Before emerging onto the road, they stopped to rest, and Mara sat in a fugue with Nick in her lap, trying to focus on what Eli was saying. She no longer felt as if she inhabited her body. Rather, she floated somewhere behind it, directing her own actions like an inexperienced puppeteer working the strings of a cheap marionette.

She gathered from Eli’s voice–which came to her from the far end of a long tunnel–that they were near to the road. That they would join the main route just west of where it intersected with the ring road. If they passed anyone on the road, Mara was to make eye contact with as many members of the passing party as she could. Odd instructions–back at the Capital, the policy was to keep one’s eyes downcast. She supposed it was some outlaw custom, but she didn’t ask. Even her curiosity had gone dim.

“We’ll have to bribe the gate guards,” Eli said as he rose to his feet and slung his pack over his shoulder. “I’ll handle the negotiations. Otherwise, it should be straightforward. Any questions?”

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Mara shook her head. She didn’t speak. She felt Eli’s eyes on her–worried, insightful, aggravating–as she donned her own pack. She didn’t look at him.

The road–packed earth and heavily rutted from recent rainfall–felt like glass beneath her feet, after so many days of walking on soft, even earth. Mara walked close to Eli, who carried Nick, and forced herself to follow his instructions every time they passed other travelers.

The first group was a troop of six armed individuals–four men and two women. They wore similar clothing–worn brown with green trim–and similar menacing expressions. Mara made eye contact with both women and two of the men, and exhaled in relief when they passed by.

“Who were they?” she asked, once they’d passed out of earshot.

“Kilgan’s,” Eli answered, glancing over his shoulder. “Officially, it’s a transport company–Cinder to Clearwater. Functions more like a protection racket.”

“There were women,” she observed.

“There were.”

“With swords.”

It wasn’t that Mara thought women incapable of fighting. She knew that, beyond the Provinces, women held all sorts of positions–warriors, hunters, leaders, healers–with great success. The true leader of the rebellion was Davy’s mother, not his father.

But it struck her as fantastical that women would be seen carrying swords so openly in Provincial territory.

“The Order’s control is more lax, south of Clearwater,” Eli said, answering her unspoken question. “They crack down on smaller outfits, but companies like Kilgan’s are allowed to make their own rules. Regular contact with Ralin keeps them supplied with their own Shadowcasters, so they’ve got enough shielded minds to withstand persuasion. And they keep the Order happy by offering discounted transport contracts to between the port and the river. If they ever had a mind to rebel, or to extend their influence beyond the Cinder-Clearwater route, the Order would demolish them. As is, they coexist. Easier for both parties.”

More questions scrambled their way to the surface of Mara’s hazy gray mind, but she didn’t get a chance to ask them. They’d joined with the ring road and all the traffic that went with it. They passed horse drawn carts and covered wagons, some with escorts and some without. They passed more armed parties in a host of colors, many of which Eli identified for her after they passed. Brown and green–Kilgan’s. Sky blue and navy–Seasafe. Yellow trim on gray–Plarit’s.

Once, they passed an innocuous duo–two men in plain tan trousers and white shirts. As they approached, Eli reached down and closed his hand around hers–so alarmingly out of character she barely resisted the urge to yank her hand away. Perhaps she would have, had he not squeezed once, hard.

A warning.

“Eyes down.”

Mara obeyed without question, lowering her gaze to the tangled trail of ruts down the center of the road. She didn’t have to ask to know Eli was using persuasion. Though she hadn’t been practicing her resistance technique, sensing had become second nature. She knew the way his healing magic tingled in the air well enough to know this was something different--his persuasion had a smell to it. Rich and metallic like warm blood.

The duo passed, and Mara counted twenty more steps before Eli released her hand. “I’m sorry.”

“Order?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Are they here looking for us?”

“Probably not. The Order’s always got spies in Cinder. It’s not unusual.”

There was more to it. She sensed that as clearly as she sensed the persuasion. But before she could press him, they turned off the ring road onto a wide, straight path and Cinder finally came into view.

The city wall was a patchwork construction of hewn logs, braced upright and carved at the top to form jagged points. A narrow moat surrounded the wall, though it was little more than a culvert with a collection of brackish water at the bottom. It seemed some engineer had decided a moat was in order without putting much thought into how it might be filled, or what its purpose ought to be other than simply to exist.

Nonetheless, Mara was grateful for the rickety bridge that crossed the moat. The last thing she needed was wet feet. At the gate–an imposing construction of wrought iron, manned by six gruff, bearded guards in mismatched gray–Eli handed her Nick and they joined a queue of about a dozen other travelers. Mara, pathetic and downtrodden as she was, made eye contact with those who looked directly at her, but otherwise kept close to Eli. Behind her, a statuesque blond woman in Plarit’s uniform was arguing with a stout Seasafe employee, and Mara tensed until she realized they were merely comparing favorite taprooms.

When they reached the guards, Mara stood a little behind Eli, bouncing her son, and drew on her dreary mood to better play a woman for whom this chaos was commonplace and unremarkable. She hoped her expression was bored rather than horrified as she listened to Eli bargain the exorbitant bribe down to something merely absurd.

With the negotiations and the guards behind them, they strode onto the streets of Cinder’s western quarter.

“We’ll find a room first,” Eli said as she drew even with him. He walked much faster on these crowded streets than he had at any point during their journey thus far, and she found herself half-jogging to keep up with his long strides.

Cinder seemed unremarkable as towns went, not that she had much to compare it to. It wasn’t at all like the Capital, lacking the large city’s cobblestone streets and perfectly spaced lampposts. Nor did it call to mind Bedford’s colorful wooden storefronts or the low huts and roaming chickens of her mother’s village.

It was just… a city. The streets were paved with stones, albeit roughly, with large sections missing and given over to muddy puddles of unknown depth. Every building was constructed of the same timber that comprised the outer wall–the wood a grayish brown, undoubtedly the trademark black pines of Ashfall–and looked sturdy enough if a little rough. Painted signs identified the purpose of each establishment–taproom, tanner, smithy, general store, butcher, farrier, and so on, nothing out of the ordinary. And the people seemed ordinary as well, dressed not unlike Mara and Eli in well-traveled cotton and wool, moving here and there with a purpose but not in a hurry.

She was almost disappointed. She’d expected working women on every porch, slinging jugs of hard liquor. Brawls down every alleyway. Blood and vomit in the streets, leering criminals pawing at her as she passed.

The reality was less alarming, but also much more dull.

Eventually, Eli turned them left off the main drag and down a quieter side street. “I know the proprietor where we’re going,” he told her. “But she might not have any rooms available. Late spring is busy season in Cinder, with the Stormway reasonably calm and folks moving goods to and from the port.”

“What do we do if there’s no rooms?”

He shrugged. “Find another inn.”