Under better conditions, the journey to Cait Forest would have taken a month—a steamship to Murland, an upriver journey to Lake Va’ala and its network of canals, followed south to Archer’s Junction; from there, trains covered all but the last fifty miles. Alas, the Global Company owned the railways, the steamships, and most of the roads, so they had to go indirectly, moving as conditions allowed.

They worked their way west, hitchhiking on crabbing vessels across the Bay of Umyr. They passed Medvesziget on February 23, but Farisa could not find her old home, even with Claes’s field glasses, on the island that was both smaller and much larger than she remembered.

By March, they were out on the open ocean, facing forty-knot winds, stinging snow, and white-capped waves. Often, as they skipped from one hidden harbor to the next, they took boats so small they wobbled if anyone stood. Seasickness had become constant; even on land, Farisa could not close her eyes without the world seeming to sway.

The twenty-second of the month was especially bad. They had paid a high fare for passage on a forty-foot cutter, not wanting to take anything less seaworthy as conditions worsened, but even still the swells caused vessel to roll and jerk in all directions. Farisa leaned over the hull and paid, to the gunmetal sea, tribute of a recent meal.

“Feeding the fish?” the captain said.

“Aye,” Farisa said. She spat out the last bit of puke. “I don’t think I’ll ever eat from the ocean again.”

“You will,” he said. “There’s nothing else in these parts.”

Claes pulled at his shirt. Beads of perspiration clung to his face. “I haven’t felt this bad in years.”

“Hold that thought.” Farisa held her abdomen so the swells wouldn’t move her organs too much, then ejected into the ocean what little her sore stomach had left.

The captain said, “It’s not the weather I would have chosen.”

Claes waited for the other man to leave, and was careful not to be overheard when he asked, “Is this what your, you know”—the Blue Marquessa—“feels like?”

“No, graza-yovah. It’s worse, much worse than this.”

Claes said, “I can’t imagine what’s worse than twenty-foot seas. Other than, I suppose, twenty-five-foot seas. It must be awful.”

“To give you an idea….” Farisa stretched her arms to evict tension. “Your heart rate doubles and you can’t catch your breath. Your whole head feels like an engine running so fast, it can’t hold itself together, but will blow at any time. Colors and edges become sharper, but not in a good way, and since you can’t fix your gaze at one point, you’re almost blind. You feel like you’re about to watch something terrible happen to someone who is simultaneously you and not you. You’re dead sure that if you don’t consciously pull every breath, if you don’t manage every motion of your now-unschooled body, you will die the most embarrassing death and it will be all your fault. The worst thing you can do during the M—you know—is react, to fight it, but if even to breathe is a fight, you can see how....” She shuddered. “The worst ones are the ones where it feels like she’s real and can actually hurt you. You start to believe it.”

Claes’s eyes lowered. “It must feel like you’re going mad.”

“Exactly.” As the boat’s top and bottom went separate ways, Farisa grabbed a rail behind herself. “I’d prefer not to talk about this right now, if you don’t mind.”

“The captain said we’ll be through the worst of it soon.”

The day after that, the seas calmer, if not by much, and she did not have an appetite until they docked at Norwind, where a gentle wind blew and sun filtered through the pines of the western hills. They had, at this point, sailed five hundred and fifty miles—Claes had been keeping track—to land less than two hundred from Black Harbor, but they had arrived safely.

“We are finished with the sea, and it with us,” said Claes as he stepped off the boat.

A seagull was using a dock post as his throne, and it locked eyes with Farisa, a keeper of this frontier that seemed glad she was gone. She nodded in agreement. The Cait Forest experience would be all the adventure she needed—she wanted nothing but to be a normal girl.

Norwind was close enough to a real town that porters could be hired at the price of one silver grot. Still, as the captain of a prior boat had forecast, they found no sustenance on offer but local fish that had possibly consumed her regurgitations or those of others, but her hunger had returned.

“The worm the fish the man ate ate ate,” Farisa said.

“What?”

“It’s a grammatical sentence. Clunky, but grammatical. Center embeddings.”

“If you say so,” Claes said as he drank a beer—he hadn’t ordered it, but it was served to him by default—to go with his dinner. “The Polar Ocean can be unholy when the seasons change, but no one spotted us and we’ll be on land the rest of the way.”

“When do you think we’ll arrive?”

“We’ll be in Cait Forest in a month if luck finds us.”

Find them, it did not. This conversation happened on March 23, and they would not get there until September. The main roads were thick with Globbos and robbers, working together to terrorize residents and travelers alike, so Claes and Farisa had to make their way on the advice of locals, and it was hard to know who could be trusted. The back roads and detours they used were often no more than rocky trails. April threw snow and wind and rain and cold and heat and stinging sunburn. May, as mountain snowpack melted, saw them through flooded river valleys, the mud so deep it turned Farisa’s trousers black up to the knees. Not until June, on flat terrain where one could find a town every ten miles or so, had they been able to buy horses—a tall black steed for Claes, and a dark-maned brown pony for Farisa. They rode through swamps where coal-colored gnats swatted their faces; food in the roadside towns, usually priced four times what it would cost for locals, was barely edible.

They reached the Rhyoan Plains in July. Central Ettaso’s flat landscape gave no obstacle to armies, and high summer was the Company’s favorite time to pick at war, so they had to be circumspect. Farisa wore a full-length veil, like an Igna woman, despite the five-flag heat. Each morning, Claes would spend hours asking townsfolk about recent events, tracking the prices of goods to judge how many people had been or were going through places, and watching the horizon for smoke to judge the Company’s positions from a safe distance. When a region proved unsafe, he penciled it out on his map; by August, the chart had doubled its weight in graphite.

The petty discomforts of travel had been tolerable while they were moving; even the sickness at sea seemed not as bad to be stalled. One sweltering afternoon, though, they found themselves in a barren hamlet surrounded by gravel, because even weeds didn’t grow here, and even though they were less than a hundred miles north of Cait Forest, word of a roadblock—they couldn’t safely take the risk of going to see for themselves—made Farisa want to scream. She felt they might never arrive.

After five days in an unsightly, overpriced inn, she demanded Claes show her the map, blackened in all the places too infested by Globbos for them to safely go.

He flicked a splinter off the solitary meal table. “As you see, we are surrounded. Globbos fucking everywhere, unless you see something I don’t.”

Farisa shook her head. “I’m looking at the same map you are.”

“There is one possibility.”

“Is there?”

Claes pulled a loose thread from his canvas shirt and placed it on the darkened paper. “Then I propose this route.”

“That seems like—”

“Hear me out.” He flattened the map, blackening his hands. “As bad as the Globbos are, they’re not stupid. This region over here, they’ve been tearing it up for three weeks. They’ve probably left by now. They know there’s no sense in stealing something twice.”

“Unless to steal it back.”

“Palpablo,” Claes said as he ran double-barreled fingers down the map. “The Globbos have taken everything along this column, and the people who live here will be too busy rebuilding their lives, if there’s anything to be rebuilt, to notice a couple of strange travelers.”

“It seems like a good plan,” Farisa said.

“What do you think?”

“It’s my call?” She was glad Claes was beginning to see her as an adult, but knew nothing of the local geography, let alone the conditions of war. “The merits of your strategy are significant.”

“But?”

“I’m not sure I want to see the sights.”

“I understand.”

“We’ve come this far, though. Five months ago, I was so seasick I thought I was going to die on that boat. We’ve taken a quarter of a million bug bites between the two of us. I think I can handle a few miles of ashes.”

“The sights of war have sickened men stronger than I am. Are you sure?”

“I am. I’m almost eighteen.”

So they rode due south, through a cavalcade of Company works: ransacked villages, blackened pastures, and broken animals left on the road to die. They saw no dead bodies—the people had not been so soundly defeated as to stop taking corporate displays down—but smelled a few. Their hatred for the Company, like the Company itself, was prevented from doubling only by the lack of room for expansion. They bought rooms in inns for shelter, but rarely slept more than four hours per night. They bought food when they thought it would be unwise not to, but rarely ate. There had been no apparent logic to the where and where-not of Company violence. Still, they passed safely through the band of devastation, reaching in early September a field where vegetation rose as high as late-summer grass should.

A few days later, Farisa noticed an odd cloud that gleamed brighter than the others and, in defiance of the windblown herd, seemed not to move. She borrowed Claes’s binocular spyglass. Steadying her view, she asked, “What should be the snow line this time of year?”

“Ten thousand feet at minimum,” Claes said. “Twelve, more like.”

“So I thought.” She pointed. “You said last night there’s only one peak that high.” She handed the field glasses back to him. “That’s Shield Mountain.”

Claes, after his own look, smiled. “I suppose you’re right.”

They had made it. After months on a hard leather saddle, after snow and rain and heat and bug bites, and after false starts and fatiguing circumspection—after seeing stains left on dry grass by the Global Company that one could have used to calculate the blood volume of a human body, they were finally through it all. Cait Forest was no more than a day’s ride away. Farisa threw her arms up in the air and screamed in joy.

#

Two hours later at a crossroads, Claes pulled right. The trees were far apart here, but the grasses of this mixed forest, brushing against Farisa’s shoulders, were high, so after a few minutes they had lost sight of the main road.

“It is a bit of a detour,” said Claes. “But I know the innkeeper. She’s an old friend. Her name is Ros.”

Farisa brushed a wisp of hair from her brow. “Rhazyladne?”

“Rosalind, I would guess. You’ll like her.”

Their horses continued their relaxed walk. The afternoon sun was bright and the insects were loud here but never a nuisance. The hills, which had never been logged or mined, rivaled the sky for depth of color. Shade made their going cool and pleasant. They reached a two-story fieldstone inn in a crescent of sycamores, its lawn set apart by an uneven stone wall so antique, Farisa felt she had stepped into a painting of medieval country life.

The keeper, a woman about ten years older than Claes, emerged from an open wooden door wearing a white headdress. Farisa suspected she had lost her hair to the Company in the ‘70s. “How comes ya?”

“We comes in kind.” Claes handed her a blue ten-grot bill. “Will this cover one night?”

“Put that away.” Ros stilled Farisa’s horse, making it easier to get out of the saddle. “Never insult me again with that man’s face. You will stay here for free. Whatever you’re doing these days, I support.” She looked at Farisa. “Kyana’s daughter?”

Farisa nodded.

“I’d have known you in a thousand. I am honored to have you as our guest.”

A boy came to lead their horses to the stable.

Ros said, “Your rooms aren’t ready yet, but the veranda’s clear. Are ya hungry?”

“Ravenous,” Farisa admitted.

“You’ve come to the right place, then. We haven’t had many guests, with all the main roads blocked, but the rain’s been good for our garden.”

Farisa realized she had not had a decent meal for months. The Global Company had picked the countryside clean, leaving for commoners and travelers no more than flavorless starch cakes and a tin-canned cabbage that tasted like it had been pickled in horse sweat.

“I’ll heat up a pot pie.”

Farisa and Claes smiled at each other as they sat down on plush seats that, after so many long rides in the saddle, felt extravagant. The chairs had blackwood frames and burlap upholstery with heraldic symbols; for an outdoor dinner, they had found the ideal time and place. The air here was neither hot nor cold; the breeze came only when the sun cut through trees, making it wanted. Farisa stared into the deep wood and let the forest’s hundred layers of green soothe the backs of her eyes.

Claes laughed. “It has been one hell of a journey. I mean no offense, but I am glad it is over.”

“Almost over. And no offense is taken. I can’t believe we’re actually here. It’s almost too good to be true.”

The man’s face, as it rarely did, seemed forlorn. “I have been away from my family for far too long.”

“I do my best to be acceptable company,” Farisa said.

“Oh! About you I have no complaint, but I have spent far too much of my life on the road, as a result of decisions made before you were even born. It all gets tiring. My children still cry every time I leave, but my work is my work and—”

The innkeeper returned with a pie large enough to serve ten—in better times, there would have been such a number to serve. Under a buttery, flaky crust, orange and purple carrots had been mixed with blue potatoes, dark mushrooms, and caramelized onion. The meat had been spiced with cardamom, cinnamon, and garlic.

Farisa had put a whole forkful in her mouth and swallowed before asking, “What is it?”

“Venison,” said Ros before walking back to the kitchen.

A brown tabby cat nuzzled Farisa’s legs, purring. When she pet his head, he hopped onto her lap, where she slipped him a nugget of meat.

Claes said, “That may be against a rule here.”

“He won’t tell.” Farisa chuckled. “I’ve got to say, cats have life figured out. They can be old, fat, and grumpy, and even still, they’re cute as hell.” She scratched her arm. “I think I want to be a cat when I grow up.”

“It’s a good life in peacetime.” Claes seemed to look at something in the distance. “It wouldn’t have been my choice in the Siege of Ostwind.”

Farisa, who had no interest in that line of conversation, said something about the weather.

Claes continued. “Families traded pets, not to eat their own.”

Farisa lowered her fork. “As if we didn’t have enough reason to hate the Company.”

“Eight hundred and forty-four days. People boiled shoes and belts for broth. Leather soup, it was called. Threw in rats and earwigs, as well as weeds so devoid of nutrition they looked the same coming out as going in.”

Farisa said, “If you wanted my portion, you could have just asked, you know.”

“Ho! The accusations fly.”

She smiled. “You know I’m kidding.”

The innkeeper came out. “Would either of you like something to drink?”

“I’d like a beer,” Claes said.

“I’d like a beer too.”

He held up a single finger. “One.”

“I’ll be good.” Farisa crossed her arms. “I always am.”

After Farisa was done eating, Ros returned to take her to her room. The afternoon sky had mellowed into twilight, and she could see the horizon’s orange fringe from her bed, which smelled of freshly washed coverings. Evening birdsong and a pleasant chill came from the open window. Oil lamps had been lit in the hallway, but cast no smoke; Farisa had almost forgotten how cleanly high-quality fuel burned.

Ros closed the door once they were both inside. “Tell me about Claes.”

“Oh.” Farisa laughed. “Very married.”

She laughed. “I know that. What I mean is: Has he been good to you?”

“Of course.” Farisa scratched her arm. “Wait, are you asking if he tried to…? Oh, hell no. Zero interest on either side of that one, buddy.”

“I find him handsome.”

“Very,” Farisa said. “It’s just that I’ve known him forever, and he’s almost as old as my—”

“You don’t need to explain.” The innkeeper smiled. “I’m glad, but not surprised, that he has been honorable. They were close, he and your father.”

“So I’ve been told.” Farisa paused. “Wait, did you know my parents?”

The innkeeper shook her head. “I wish. But I knew of your parents.”

“I have the same problem.” Farisa had meant it as a light remark, but the innkeeper’s eyes grew sad, so she put a hand on Ros’s sleeved arm and said, “Thank you for dinner. The pie was fantastic.”

#

“Good morning, sunshine,” Claes said as Farisa, still groggy, descended the inn’s wrought-iron staircase into its warmly-lit dining room.

Farisa responded with a rude hand gesture. He laughed. She rubbed her eyes and asked, “What time is it?”

“Quarter past four.”

Farisa groaned.

“I know, I know,” said Claes. “When I was your age, I felt like hours before eight o’clock didn’t exist—or shouldn’t, at least.”

“I’m up now. I slept well enough. You?”

“I got a few hours of sleep. Woke up around two. There was a cat yowling outside. Probably the one you fed.”

Farisa laughed. “Probably was.”

“Are you going to apologize?”

“No.” She looked around. “Hey, is there anything to eat down here?”

“I made some oatmeal, if you’re hungry.” Claes spun a tan checker on the table. “Care for a game of farmer draughts? Or is Farisa too ‘college’ to play a common man's game?”

“I’m not ‘college’ yet. Game on, old man.”

“Old? There’ll come a time when you don’t call forty-two old.”

“Oh, I sure hope so.” Farisa laid the dark red checkers on the table in their rightful places: five in the back row, four and three in the rows ahead. “You’ll be sixty-seven then. They start using scientific notation for numbers that high.”

“’Tis true. I’ll be as old as the dragons.”

To start the game, Farisa reached over the checkerboard to move her middle-front piece to the right, an aggressive play. Claes mirrored it, so she started a center feint. By the time he realized what she was really doing, he had exposed himself to a flank attack. They had played farmer draughts a hundred times before, when she was a child, on the way to Medvesziget; this was the first time she had ever beaten him instead of being let win. Claes continued to play with his full ability, and won the next two games. Farisa won the fourth, tying up the match.

She said, “Best three of five?”

“We should let the tie stand and get going. It’s light outside, and it’ll be five flags this afternoon.”

“No,” Farisa said. “I have to defeat you. You called me ‘college.’”

“I meant no insult. I’m ‘college,’ sort of.”

“Really?” Farisa realized, not for the first time, how little she knew about Claes’s past. He had always been the man who would come to sort out her troubles, a loyal friend of her father’s, but she had not figured out what she had done to earn such a figure in her life. How had Claes, a light-skinned Ettasi, met her dark-skinned father? What promise had been made, and what nobility or debt of soul existed that would keep Claes in honor of it after fifteen years? “I had no idea. What college?”

“Shockson. It’s about halfway between Exmore and Moyenne.”

“I know where it is.”

“It was one of the top five on the Continent. No clue if it still is. I didn’t finish. Drank myself out.” Claes put two fingers to his temple. “Be careful of that.”

“I will be.”

“Alcohol’s as sneaky as a spider in a, uh... well, it’s...”

“Cunt,” Farisa said. “Spider in a cunt. It’s not like I haven’t heard the phrase.”

“Have you heard the song?”

“Song?”

“Oh yeah. It’s an old tavern song. Goes back centuries.”

“No, I’ve never heard it.”

Claes laughed. “I guess your reading thus far hasn’t covered everything.”

“Oh, it hasn’t.”

“Alcohol, in moderation, won’t do much harm. On the other hand, if orc’s blood is real, you better stay a mile away from it.”

Farisa shuddered. “I wouldn’t touch it. It’d destroy me. But aren’t orcs...?”

“They’re extinct, outside of the Bezelian highlands, but they could always be ferried back here.”

The innkeeper arrived. “Your horses are ready to go, but I can make breakfast if you’d like.”

“We ate,” Claes said. “You’ve done more than enough.”

They said their farewells to Ros and were on horseback by seven thirty. In not much time at all, the keeper and her inn disappeared behind the tall grass. This, Farisa realized, was the nature of adult life: Claes had met a friend he had not seen for a decade, and still left the next morning. The world just hurried; those who did not rush along with it could not possibly hold on. She was not ready for that brand of adulthood; she was glad she would be going to Cait Forest instead. Perhaps she could teach there, after her studies, and would never have to leave.

Along their summery path, the trees were massive but, with their lowest branches forty feet overhead, never imposing. The herbal scents of the coming autumn were faint, but present. Farisa often felt she was riding through one of Raqel’s paintings—the clouds overhead were so white, it seemed they had been washed for her arrival.

Claes, noticing that the road had opened up, steered his horse to the middle. “You mentioned the name Rhazyladne. Tales of the Sixteen Winds, right?”

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

Farisa adjusted her straw hat. “Aye.”

“Your mother loved those books. She was working on her own translation.”

“From all I’ve heard, it seems she never found time to be bored.”

“No.” Claes led his horse around a puddle. There had evidently been, between yesterday’s clear evening and this temperate day, a spot of rain. “I can’t imagine she ever did. Nor do I think you will be.” He looked ahead. “You’ll love Cait Forest, I’m sure.” They turned a corner around a hedge and found themselves at the gatehouse. “We should dismount.”

Farisa hopped off her pony. “I’m going to miss you so much.”

Claes turned around and said, “It’s not goodbye yet.”

“I was talking to her.” She grabbed the mare’s mane. “Of course I’ll miss you, old man, but wait your damn turn.”

The full-bellied man behind the gatehouse’s chest-high wall spoke. “Not to interrupt your scintillating conversation, I’m going to need your names.”

“I’m Claes Bergryn, but I won’t be staying.”

She looked at Claes, who nodded to indicate that she could use her real name. “I’m Farisa La’ewind.”

The man leafed through papers bound to a clipboard. “Farisa La’ewind. Farisa... L would be on the third page...”

Farisa looked around. This place made it hard to imagine being less than thirty miles from Company territory. A dog sat in the shade, coat full and clean, and she could not see a one of its ribs. A barrel of apples, yellow and pink, sat in the sun. The guard did not seem to be wearing a gun, and she doubted he had ever used one in anger.

“I’m sorry, I don’t see a Farisa on my list. Would you like me to—?”

Claes handed him an envelope. As the guard read the letter inside, his eyes perked up.

“Welcome, Farisa.”

#

She slowed down as they crossed over Rooksnest Bridge, the stone arch overpass connecting Cait Forest to the rest of the world, because there might be more crossings but there could only be one first crossing. The other eight of Ettaso’s Nine Wonders had fallen; she felt the sturdiness of the surviving one in every sense. One could clearly see why people who graduated from Cait Forest went on to achieve so much in the arts and sciences. One who stood here felt supported not only from intricate ancient masonry but the whole world, down to its center. In the ravine below, a sunlit stream babbled in the language of perpetual peace.

Claes said, “I must admit, I envy you.”

Farisa scoffed. “Don’t be ridiculous. You’ve seen half the world, and I’m merely going to school. Flattery will get you nowhere.”

“Flattery gets you everywhere.” He lowered his voice. “Take it from a spy.”

“Should I, if he tells me so readily that he is one?”

Claes laughed. “You may have me there. I hope you make the most of this opportunity. Read deep and broad—not just that T. C. Yeller.”

Farisa insisted, “T. C. Teller.”

“Sure. The smut peddler.”

“Which he’s not. No, he really isn’t, and I don’t read him for the raunchy bits.”

This was all true. Teller’s sauciest scenes were tame compared to the amorous poetry in the uncensored Sixteen Winds. Besides, nothing in print rivaled her imagination. She enjoyed his writing for other reasons entirely. He used plain Ettasi, as opposed to the nine-grot words other authors utilized to adumbrate their indubitable erudition. He cast women as heroes as often as he did men. His stories, as coarse as they often were, carried in them a strong sense of morality and justice. People swore and drank and the heroes didn’t always win, but the author had created a moral world where virtue, even if not always given earthly reward, was recognized—that, in the Company’s world, was rare. As a teenage girl in a world where even those who tried to write for young women seemed unwilling to understand them, Farisa sometimes felt the author was addressing her directly—as if she were one of the lost daughters to whom the novels were dedicated.

She added, “There’s so much more to his work. I feel like he knows me. I’ll lend you one of his books.”

Claes said, “I suppose I could stand to improve the breadth of my reading.”

Farisa noticed a smoky odor as they reached the bridge’s other side. “What’s that smell?”

“Controlled burn,” said a short man, about sixty with long silver hair, in a black fedora. He walked toward them. “We do it every September and May.”

“I almost didn’t recognize you,” Claes laughed. “What shit stirs ya, old bastard?”

“This and that.”

“I hope you’re staying out of trouble.”

“I give as much as I get.” The man made a quarter turn. “You’re Farisa, I assume?”

Farisa attempted a curtsy but nearly lost her balance.

“You don’t have to do that here,” said the man. “Of course, you can if you want. I’m Bjorn.”

“Professor…?”

“I suppose I am one, but I’m too old for nonsense. Titles are wasted words, and wasted words are wasted time, and wasted time is a waste of life. Bjorn.”

“Just Bjorn?”

“Bjorn. Just like that. I teach geography. Study it, too. Unfortunately, our headmistress is busy today with a certain... absurdity... that has come upon us. I’ll have to introduce you to her tomorrow.” He turned to Claes. “It has been some time. Join us for coffee?”

“I would love that, but I’ve been away from my family for too long.”

“I understand,” said Bjorn. “Send my best to Alice.”

Claes handed Farisa an envelope. “My address is on this. Shining Star only.”

“Smart call,” Bjorn said. “Company reads everything else.”

“Shining Star’s boxes are...?”

Farisa resented the question. She wasn’t a child. “Green.”

“If it’s not green…” Bjorn started.

Farisa looked at him. Well?

He shrugged. “Couldn’t find a good rhyme.”

“And you ran out of time,” Farisa said.

Bjorn covered his face.

Farisa looked inside the envelope to find three blank sheets of paper. “Only three?”

Claes said, “Brevity, Farisa.”

“Not my style, Claes. When I write, I write.”

He opened his arms. “I’ve always been bad at goodbyes…”

Farisa walked into his hug, and wrapped her arms around him. His leather jacket was hot from the sun. “As always, thank you.”

“Write me. Any time, any reason.”

She was too old for tears. “Bye, Claes.”

As he turned around and walked away, back over Rooksnest Bridge, then collected the horses to leave, he seemed at once satisfied by the mission’s safe conclusion and saddened that it was over. The color of his coat seemed to fade, as if ten years of sun had taken away its pigment.

“You’re lucky to know him,” Bjorn said as walked toward campus.

“I am.” Farisa slowed her pace to take everything in. “I’m thrilled to be here.”

Bjorn led her down a path of polished white stone, exposed to all elements but flatter than most house floors. Lush gardens lay in abundant sun as if land were free—for here, it was, because if no one could own land, everyone did. Ivy, cut into perfect banners, hung over grand buildings, some the size of castles, redolent of a more honorable past. So much beauty had accumulated here, and none of it had ever been destroyed, so she felt as if she had come into an alternate world where the Global Company had never existed. She could not wait to grow into this place and learn all its secrets.

“I wish you had come at a better time,” Bjorn said.

“I’m sure it’s beautiful in all seasons.”

“Oh, it is, but that’s not what I meant.”

“If I could have been here on time, I would have been. We had to take the long way.”

Bjorn laughed. “I’m sure you did. No one faults you for the time of your arrival, of course. Unfortunate is just what it is.”

“Ever sail a Polar Ocean trawler in March?”

“Thankfully, no.”

He seemed to want to hurry, but she walked slowly, because she had scene this place in bookplates, but none really captured the crisp blue sky and the warmth that seemed to come from everywhere. A handsome couple, the man and woman both tall and pale, lazily walked toward a marble fountain, in whose shade they sat. A girl lay reading, barefoot, on a cotton blanket under a tree twice the height of any building. In the front lawn of a sandstone castle, two teams of men played a sport whose rules she did not know but that she could tell they took seriously. Gardeners smiled at Bjorn as he walked by; he greeted them by name. All things done here were done freely; the pressured, servile speech of the Company’s world was absent. What could possibly be…

“Unfortunate, you said?”

“The timing isn’t what we expected, is all,” said Bjorn. “There’s one thing that is not in the right place, but the headmistress and I believe it will only be a problem for one day. I will need to put you up in my office.”

“In your office?”

“I’m dreadfully sorry. I have a sleeping bag, never used. You’ll have total privacy.”

Farisa laughed. A sleeping bag in a professor’s office, compared to ship bunks and swampside hotels with broken windows and torn mosquito nets, counted as a luxury. “I’m sure it’ll do just fine.”

Bjorn led her around a limestone building with arched doors and windows to its rear, a sore block of concrete that seemed out of place. An iron door, out of place here for it lacked ornament, had been painted to blend in with the back wall. “There’s one other thing.” The lock whined as he turned the key, and the door opened into a tunnel with a musty odor.

“What?”

“I can’t explain this to you, and it’s going to be a hassle, but it would be a terrible idea for you to leave this building today.”

Farisa crossed her arms. “Why?”

“I wish I could explain it to you, but the headmistress wants you to hear it from her. You’ll have two servants waiting on you, so you’ll be fed and they will show you to the bathroom if you need it. You are an important guest, in a way you could not possibly know.” He stooped to grab a lantern, then lit it. The door shut behind them. “Chance picked a bad day for you to arrive, and I’m sorry.”

#

Bjorn’s second-floor office was underwhelming, as she had imagined Cait Forest professors having beautiful workspaces, whereas this was a mere cramped room. Two windows admitted sunlight. More books on his desk were opened than closed.

As the professor unraveled a sleeping bag on the floor, he said, “Most of the buildings are connected underground by tunnels, but students aren’t supposed to know they exist, so don’t tell anyone.”

Farisa looked outside. There were at least sixty people, most of them her age—Cait Forest’s students ranged from fifteen to twenty—on the quadrangle, or on a dormitory balcony, or on a staircase. They were smiling; they were loud; they were having fun. She wanted to be there, and she wanted to get out now, because if she didn’t start the life she had been promised, fate would find a way to take it away from you.

He continued. “The tunnels are part of a massive—well, it’s a wine cellar—beneath us. Two flags, year round. It could be snowing, or it could be hotter than the fires of hell, but down there it’s light jacket weather in every season. I’ll take you down some day if I can trust you not to tell the world I did. You’ll see all of campus, soon enough. Today, though, we need you to stay inside.”

“You still haven’t told me why.”

“The headmistress will explain everything.”

Farisa crossed her arms. “I’d like to know now.”

Ignoring her insistence, he asked, “Shades up or down?”

“I think I can figure out how they work.”

“Very well. I’m sorry I’m not able to tell you all the things you want to know.” He closed the office door and left after saying, “The headmistress will receive you at eight in the morning tomorrow.”

“Right,” Farisa said to herself.

She opened the window. The air was warm but not stuffy. She could not be sure of tomorrow’s weather, but it was September; the day after this one would probably be as fair, but have two minutes less of light.

Out there, a golden-brown dog bred for aesthetics rather than work ran free through a hedge maze. She counted the buildings—twenty one—she could see from here. The light struck them a little bit differently every minute. Girls outside walked barefoot on grass and it was nothing at all to them; she wondered if, in two or three years, she would build up the durn to wear sandals outdoors, since no one would know her own culture’s restrictions. Boys were smoking, and the professors who walked by might have had disapproving thoughts regarding the practice, but nothing bad happened to anyone.

I came here through a warzone. There is nothing dangerous out there.

Still, she did not want to cause offense. Claes had called in a major favor, and it could reflect badly on him if she disobeyed a direct order. She would find ways to entertain herself here. There were geodes on the professor’s shelves, and they were pleasing to look at, but they were just rocks. They didn’t interact; they didn’t smile. She looked through his books, but she couldn’t summon a copper’s worth of interest in five hundred pages about the various forms of malachite or ancient mining practices. There was a thin black book about the Wyovian glaciation, but she found the prose impenetrable. Perhaps least riveting, to a young woman trapped in a high tower, was the nondescript brown book with no page numbers or words, featuring only arrays of digis—sines and cosines, computed to seven places, at intervals of one-sixtieth of a degree. She wondered if these computations had been done by hand—it was laborious, which was why these books of tables cost seventy grot per copy—or by aid of one of those difference engines they had in Salinay.

Across the lawn, a bell tower clock struck three. “Seventeen hours,” she said to herself. A thousand and twenty minutes. Sixty-one thousand, two hundred seconds. Sixty-one thousand, one hundred and ninety-nine. Sixty-one thousand, one hundred and ninety-eight. Sixty-one thousand, one hundred ninety-seven...

“I did not come here to follow orders,” she said to herself as she left the professor’s office, closing the door quietly—she did like him, and she did want to be respectful in her disobedience—and walking down the marble stairs. She was going to start her Cait Forest life today. She would not have dinner served to her—she would eat in the common dining hall with boys and girls her own age. She crossed the atrium. The building’s double doors, ajar to let out heat, had already been opened for her. She walked toward the sunlight.

“Farisa!” A red-haired woman in a beige dress, who had been reading by the window, called her name. “You shouldn’t go outside.”

“Oh, shouldn’t I?”

“Please, go back to your room. If you have needs, I will send someone.”

“What happens if I do go outside?”

“This is Cait Forest. You are free to do as you will. Still, it is best if you stay inside today.”

One hand stopped the other from scratching her neck. “Really?”

“This is for your own protection.”

“I don’t need to be protected,” she said.

She was less than a month from turning eighteen. She had come here over frigid oceans on falling-apart crabbing boats. She had ridden on horseback through a hot swamp where a bite from the wrong insect could cause half a year of illness. She had been through a town less than five days after the Globbos had been there and seen firsthand the sad eyes of women, pregnant by Company men who were doing the same damn thing somewhere else. What did she need protection from? Stray hylus balls? Thrown slide rules? Fanged mimic books that would bite her wrists? Even the outlying forests had no predators larger than foxes and no venomous snakes. A slight asymmetry in a hedge here merited immediate attention. There was nothing unsafe here, nothing at all.

Her arms were warm from the September sunlight. Girls were cheering at the end of an impromptu ball game. Boys were in an outdoor coffeehouse debating something—surely, philosophy or high culture—she would not possibly be able to understand until she had taken a few classes here. A laughing young man ran after a girl wearing a conical hat.

No fucking danger at all.

She came to an awning. A bulletin board held announcements for various social events—music recitals, dinners hosted by student clubs, poetry readings—that would occur this month and in early October. Someone, in a bizarre prank, had posted a placard suggesting that Hampus Bell would be speaking on September 7—today.

“Good one,” Farisa said.

She found the joke offensive, though, having lived for a long time in Tevalon. The sins of Alcazar had been committed a lot closer to here, but Vehu still considered Globbo jokes, unless the context was right and they were very well-crafted, to be in poor taste. She had forgotten that, in much of the world, Globbos’ gray uniforms and constipated style of marching did not inspire dread or hatred, but amusement, as they really did look ridiculous. Still, she took the flier down.

A man in beige, a little older than the students but too young to be a professor, walked by.

Farisa asked, “Whose idea was this?”

He looked at the poster. “Hampus Bell, September 7. I suppose that is today.” He looked aside. “I don’t know, but I suppose Hampus Bell had something to do with it.”

“Be serious.”

“I am,” the man said. “Hampus Bell is speaking right now.”

“What an unfortunate coincidence. Surely you don’t mean—”

The man’s eyes drifted.

“The Hampus Bell? The Patriarch of the Global Company?” Farisa’s hands landed on her hips.

“Here, in Cait Forest?”

“I believe so.”

“Right now?” The man who killed my parents? “He’s here, now?”

He seemed to stop himself from rolling his eyes. “Is there anything else I can help you with?”

“Fucking unbelievable.” She tore the sign in half. The paper felt hot in her hand, as if sunlight had been focused there by a lens. Cait Forest, her new home, the only safe place in the world, had decided to let Hampus Bell come in and speak? She hurried to a stone path. A group of five male students were walking together. She smacked one of them on the arm. “Where the fuck is it?”

The boy seemed terrified, as if accosted by a madwoman rather than Farisa. “Where’s what?”

“The speech. The Hampus fucking Bell speech. Where?”

“Oh, that windbag.” He groaned, then pointed. “Where I boarded, he spoke all the time. You’re missing nothing, but he’s over there.”

Farisa ran. People were shouting at her to use the paved footpath, but she had seen enough of the world to know they would not stop her, and this impulse could not wait. She broke a sweat as she ran up a hill, and came down the other side to an outdoor amphitheater where the man, tall and thin-framed but with a visible stomach and gray hair—he looked ordinary, aside from his gold-fringed suit—was speaking. As if released from constraints of friction and coordination, Farisa sped like a flying bolt of hatred.

Hampus Bell, Chief Patriarch and Seraph of All Human Capital, fifty feet away. Anywhere else, he would have been protected by bodyguards and hidden marksmen, but here was speaking calmly and probably unarmed. At forty feet, she climbed a wooden fence on which four bored students sat... nearly but not falling... thirty feet... another horse fence, some chairs in the way... twenty. She cut between the pair of standing young boys. She would stop at ten feet; a bodyguard would see she held no gun—her weapon sat inside her skull—and see no threat, though she could do her work, with hands visibly open, without even climbing the stage.

This is for Kyana!

The spell that twists his guts will leave no trace. No one will know.

But that’s the problem. He won’t know why it is happening to him. He might not even remember Kyana. He wasn’t even in the prison at the time.

He will feel no regret and no shame.

Best case, it looks like he died of natural causes. He is not young.

Worst case, they notice a strange brown woman taking ill a minute after his collapse, and figure out that a spell was cast.

Either way, the Global Company goes on. They will replace Hampus Bell with someone else; nothing will change...

She was out of breath, eleven feet and call-it-six inches from the stage. Hampus Bell, who had stopped speaking, wore a bemused look on his face.

“The seating area is behind you,” said a man who used the most polite voice she had ever heard, but who had a baton holstered.

“Thank you,” she whispered. She let him walk her away from the stage. “I suppose I got a bit outside myself.”

“I understand. It’s very hot. You should drink water before you go out in the sun like this.”

She nodded. “I should.”

The shaking girl wanted to disappear forever. She had interrupted a speech of no importance. She would be remembered—what had the Igna said, that hell is being remembered?—as having wasted half a minute of everyone’s time. It didn’t take much, with her color and in this region, to draw attention. She had done a dumb thing—she was seventeen, and did not need to handle Hampus Bell today.

Farisa returned to the building she’d left ten minutes ago.

The red-headed woman said, “I already heard.”

“Am I in trouble?”

“Probably not. Few things that happen here are of consequence. This will be forgotten in a day or two.”

“I sure fucking hope so,” Farisa said under her breath as she walked back upstairs.

#

She slept that night fully clothed with the window open. The sun had already risen when Bjorn knocked.

She rubbed her eyes and sat up. “Come in. I’m awake.”

Bjorn opened the door. He was carrying a cork-handled metal pitcher. “Care for some coffee?”

“Sure.”

He poured the brown liquid into two cups. “You left the building.”

“I did.” Farisa sipped, finding the coffee still too hot. “Why didn't you tell me?”

Bjorn laughed. “I was afraid that if you knew Hampus Bell was here, you’d do something rash. Which you did.”

She stood up. “I thought Cait Forest was neutral. I thought the headmistress was on our side.”

“Oh, she is, but she doesn't decide everything around here. Our illustrious board made the decision to let the Patriarch speak. It’s a harder world for us, financially speaking, if our graduates can’t get jobs.”

“Money makes the world go round,” Farisa said.

“Alas,” Bjorn said. “The headmistress cannot so openly oppose such the full array of interests that our backers represent. I’ll tell you another Cait Forest secret: Hampus Bell spent a year here.”

“I thought he went to—”

“City Private. He did, after failing out here. Our headmistress graded his exams. She told me he was the worst student she’d had in ten years—a complete flunkard from the first day. The fact that even being a Bell couldn’t keep him in this place, it made it a sore spot. It is hoped that allowing him to speak here, after his seventh request for the honor, will leaving him feeling that he has been made whole, so he can forget we exist.”

Farisa wrapped a knuckle on Bjorn’s window. “He just had to speak here the day I arrived.”

“No one had any idea when you’d get here.”

“That’s true,” Farisa said.

“Also,” said the professor as he sat in his chair, “most people on our board do not know—and must not know—that you’re that Farisa. You’ll need to use a false surname, but that’s a topic for you and the headmistress.”

She laughed. “I can’t believe I went out and—well, I tried to—well, I didn’t try very hard, but—”

“It was perverse coincidence to have the world’s two most extreme people—two antipodes, if you will—arrive here the same day.”

“I’m extreme?”

“You may not know it yet, but you are.” Bjorn straightened some papers on his desk. “The greatest tension in the world is between the two forms of power.”

“You mean energy? Kinetic and potential?”

“No, not that.” Bjorn scratched his ear. “I do mean power. Property versus talent. Capital versus capability. Past versus future. Money versus people. The demands of the dead, versus the needs of the living. All of these are the exact same tension. Men like Hampus Bell represent the calcified detritus of avaricious and deficient past generations; they represent the deceased and the decrepit whose whims nevertheless govern present society, whereas you represent—”

“A seventeen-year-old girl who just made a fool of herself.”

Bjorn laughed. “The future.”

“If there is one.”

Bjorn emptied a pile of unwanted mail into his trash bin. “There always has been.”

“You’re not going to read those?”

“They’re Mountain Road letters.”

“Mountain Road letters?”

“Oh, I suppose I could read one. You see, one of the downsides of being a department chair is that you observe a unique flavor of human desperation. My counterpart in literature gets thirty manuscripts a week for ‘fiction novels’ that will become bestsellers if given ‘a quick edit.’ The chemists learn all about immortality elixirs that require only a few rare ingredients, which the letter-writers never offer to pay for. The physicists are invited to invest in perpetual motion machines. In geography, we learn all about the Mountain Road.”

“Which is?”

“To the Antipodes.”

“Oh, that.” Farisa looked out the window, then back at him. “It doesn’t exist, though.”

“Oh, the Road exists. It just doesn’t go anywhere, but there are plenty of towns along the way to that nowhere where people will gladly take your money.” He stood up. He drew five ovals on his blackboard, a polar projection by which each corresponded to the Known World’s five continents, on the blackboard. “None of this is to scale.”

“Clearly,” Farisa said.

“I’ve never been great at drawing. Got fired by every map company I ever worked for. Had to do this job instead.” He drew a circle around the continents. “Pole’s here at the center, and this outer circle is the thirtieth parallel.” He clicked his chalk stick against each of the oblong blobs. “Ettaso, Wyo, Terosha, Lorania, and this little one in the corner is—?”

“Bezelia,” Farisa said. “Bez means five. It’s Lyrian.”

“As you know, I see. No one has seen Terosha’s southern extent, but it’s flat and there isn’t much to see beyond forty. Bezelia, on the other hand, is mountainous, though I’m surprised anyone lives there at all. The diamond mines were depleted fifty years ago, and even the northern coast is unbearably hot.” He drew a squiggle running south. “So, this is the Mountain Road. People, for as long people have been people, are dumb enough to go see where it leads, believing vainly that it leads somewhere.”

“You suspect it doesn’t.”

“It might, but it isn’t worth what it takes to go there.”

Farisa touched her chin. “The mountains are important because it’s colder at high elevations, right?”

“That’s correct,” Bjorn said. “The lowlands are uninhabitable, and even the Road gets quite hot. The problem is that it drops off, after Switch Cave, into a flat featureless desert where it’s too hot to live—ten, eleven flags—that goes for at least four dozen miles.”

She said, considering the world’s massiveness, “There must be other ways to get near the equator.”

“People have tried everything. The deserts get so hot, even at night, you can barely make yourself move. The rainforests are so humid, you can’t sweat—you get steamed, instead of baked.”

Farisa tapped the outer rim of the circle. “What about the ocean?”

“You have the same problem as in the jungles, and since the water is hot...” His hand gesture suggested rotation.

“Hurricanes.”

“Right-o. Your ship’s a bag of splinters before you hit the twentieth parallel.” Bjorn spun a silver half-grot that lay on his desk.

“I wonder, then...” Farisa said.

“Go on.”

“I’ve heard of attempts to build flying machines. I wonder if one could go by air.”

“A splendid idea, Farisa.” Bjorn scratched his chin. “It really is, but if you can believe me on this, that has been tried too. The lift comes from a massive hydrogen balloon. I understand you plan to study chemistry, so you may know that hydrogen has a tendency toward—”

“Vigorous exothermic reaction.” Farisa gestured an explosion with her hands. “Also known as one big fucking shit-ball of fire.”

Bjorn slapped his leg and laughed heartily. “Correct. One lightning strike, the whole thing’s on fire.” He paused. “You seem a good lass. Can I trust you with one more thing you must tell nobody?”

“Who would I tell?”

The professor walked over to his closet, opened the door, then rummaged for a minute before producing a glass case twice the size of a house brick, which he handed to Farisa. “You can hold it, but be careful.”

Farisa shuddered, unsure she wanted to take the transparent object into her arms, but accepting it because dropping and breaking it would be worse. The tentacled creature, though no bigger than a cat, had such a snarl of hatred on its distended face, she felt like it personally hated her.

“What the hell’s this?”

“Rock calamar. Bastard doesn’t look like much, but a live one will bite your hand clean off.”

Farisa said, “You tried the Road.”

“A young, foolish man with my name and body did.”

“What was it like? How far south did you get?”

He looked around, as if the still morning air could hear him, before whispering, “Seventeen degrees and a half. We didn’t know it, but we were three miles from the world’s southern record.”

“Impressive.”

“No, not really.” Bjorn shook his head. “I shouldn’t be alive, to tell you the truth. There were eight of us, and the other seven died. That’s twelve and a half percent—a failing grade. I wasn't the best, nor the smartest, in our party, and to be honest, I had no business going, not that anyone does. Hell, I was barely older than you are now. When I got back to Portal, I was barely a hundred pounds and delirious with dehydration.”

“But you survived.”

“I did.”

“How’d the others die?” She realized she had asked a rude question, but had let curiosity get the better of her.

“One was a snakebite, just ten miles beyond Portal. One disappeared in the middle of the night. We never found out what happened to him. He just disappeared. One died of heatstroke in the Ashes, which was what convinced us to turn around. The world’s southern record means nothing when you watch a man bake to death and can’t do anything to save him because he spits up any water you try to give him. On the way back, four of us were killed in an orcish ambush.”

“Orcs? I thought orcs were—”

“They are not even rare, not in the Bezelian highlands. You can find a tribal outpost if you know where to look, and if you take the Mountain Road, they will know that you are there, just as sharks in the ocean do, but this does not mean they will attack. In fact, they must have some impulse to cooperate, to achieve as much as they have without language, but a thousand eyes are on you every mile out there, and the group we met were evidently not the civilized kind.”

Farisa handed the glass case back to the professor.

“Did you know there are probably five hundred orcs on Ettaso?”

“I thought they were extinct here.”

“In the wild.”

“Next you’re going to tell me that ‘orc’s blood’ is real.”

“That too,” the professor said. “It is. The stuff that sells for five grot per vial, that’s fake. They mix rotting meat and iron filings into tomato juice and vodka, then sell it on campuses like this one. We see it all the time, and it only works because the boys who drink it think it works. We do see the real stuff on occasion. It should not surprise you that some of our students come from connected families.”

“Where do they get it?” Farisa’s image of an orc—a fierce medieval creature, eight feet tall and furious, because it was said to possess intelligence but no capacity for language—did not square with the idea of them allowing others to draw their blood. And she did not think many people in the world would be inclined to go hunt them.

“There are breed-and-bleed operations in Moyenne.” He looked at the door to make sure it was still closed. “Where the Company can turn a grot, the Company turns a grot. Anyway, you don’t need to worry about that here. We find the real shit maybe—maybe—once every five years, and expel the student at once.”

Farisa, not sure what to say, looked again at the chalkboard.

“Right, the Road.” He pointed at a notch he’d drawn. “Switch Cave is dangerous enough, but after that you’re in the Ivory Ashes, and it earns its name. The air itself is trying to kill you. You’re walking through an oven every day. We dug for groundwater at every chance, but we never found any. We did uncover quite a few skeletons—some from medieval times wearing plate mail.”

“Problem diagnosed,” Farisa said. “Too hot for armor. Good thing no one wears it these days.”

The professor laughed. “My greatest failure is that journey. It was a sort of mystical experience, though, not with divinity but with denial. There is no way to the Antipodes, I’m afraid. I’ve studied all the maps. I’ve heard all the foolish schemes to get to the south. All there is around our planet is a line drawn in invisible fire, a wall of misdirection and opposition that attracts fools and digests their corpses as surely as a sundew collects flies. I don’t believe in gods, miracles, any of that, but on this particular topic, I have seen that intolerable barrier and shall make one prophecy about it: No man will break through.”