I wake long before Evan does. Long before anyone does. The sun isn’t up and the predawn light is just bright enough to read by. I open the book of myths that Evan had fallen asleep with and start at the beginning. I must have gotten up very early, because I’m a third of the way through the book when I hear Mom start the fire and pour water into the kettle.

“Is it morning?” Evan says after a gigantic, loud yawn. I’ve often thought that Evan yawned like a dog, without any amount of restraint. It actually looks pretty fun.

“Yep. Morning and time to get up.” I throw my legs off the bed and pull on my boots before my feet touch the cold floor.

“Where were you last night?” Evan says, coming to sit next to me and pulling on his own boots. They’re my old ones. I can still see the patch we had to put in when I ripped the leather in a massive thorn bush.

“Come on,” I tell him, dodging the question. “Aren’t you hungry?” He’s always hungry.

Mom greets me with a caress of the shoulders and a tousle of the hair. When I sit down at the table, mom silently puts the food on the table. Evan can chat your ears off, dad and I will talk for hours if we’re passionate enough about the subject. My mom on the other hand is quiet. She told me that she prefers to listen rather than to speak. I try to be more like her, but there’s too much I want to ask.

Breakfast is eggs, baked sweet potato slices and some venison strips fried up in our big iron pan. Dad got that from one of the big cities, Verfall I think. While Evan and I fight over the last piece of venison, Dad opens the door and comes into the cabin. He looks tired, wan. The woolen scarf he unwraps is stiff and covered in a light dusting of snow. He sits down in the chair hard and the wooden legs squeak against the floor. Mom places a bowl of hot water and herbs in front of him. Dad leans his head over the steam that rises from the bowl and breathes in deeply.

“How did everything go last night?” I ask.

“No sign of him.”

“Of who?” Evan asks. When no one answers he repeats it louder. “Who? Who?”

“Javin saw a tracker in the woods yesterday,” Dad says, reaching for a slice of potato with his fingers. Mom tsks and places a fork and a full plate of food in front of him. “We set up a guard last night and I took a few men to search for any sign of the tracker. We didn’t find anything, not a single foot print. Whoever this tracker is he knows his stuff. And no Evan, I don’t want to hear any more about it.”

I glance over at Evan. His mouth is open and one finger is extended, probably about to launch into a never ending list of questions.

“I told Javin this last night,” Dad says, cutting a piece of egg with the side of his fork, “and the same goes for you, Evan. No going deep into the woods while these trackers are still out there. Stay in sight of the clearing at all times and I want you to both carry something to protect yourselves if you’re in the tree line.”

It’s easy to read Evan’s face now. I’m sure it’s exactly how I looked when Dad told me that last night. We spend hours each day exploring the woods. As soon as we turned seven we were allowed to wander and explore. I have no idea what we’re going to do now.

“Come on, Evan. We’ll be late. ” I stuff my last potato slice into my mouth before leaving the table. I grab Evan’s and my school books from our room and our coats as well. Mom hands us our lunches wrapped in red checked clothes. Dad looks like he’s already asleep at the table, with his head slumped down and his eyes closed. Only his fork is still moving.

“Bye, mom,” I say and give Evan a little push out the door. The grass in the clearing glitters with icy frost. The roses outside our cabin are still in full bloom, the tips hard with ice. They won’t stay like that for long. The frost will melt when the sun is high enough and the roses will fall. The trees are still blocking the sun from view, but the light in the clearing is bright and clean.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

Evan and I join the dozen or so other kids that are making their way to the school house. There’s no law in the Forsyth that says children have to be in school, but most every family sends their kids. There really aren’t any rules that govern our village. We say that we live free. It seems to me that we are still governed by rules, to help our neighbors, guard our village, be good, be kind, we just don’t call them laws.

The school house is a single room with slatted walls. Outside a few kids are trying to toss handfuls of ice at each other. There’s not enough frost to clump together though. Evan runs ahead of me and joins in with the ice tossing. I watch for a moment and then go inside. Our teacher, Ms. Bell, is hanging a large map of Kostos, drawn on a sheet, to the front wall. It amazes me how small the Forsyth is in comparison to the west. It feels so massive to me. The Eastern border of Kostos is just a sliver in comparison to the west, dotted with several large cities and even more small towns. Large black lines run all over the east. Train tracks. The West almost looks blank compared to the busy East. It stretches from the Forsyth to the grassy flatlands and then into the desert where the Hillanger tribes live. Miles and miles of desert lead to the greatest mountain range in Kostos, the Iancatine Mountains. We call them the Impassable mountains though, because that is what they are. No one knows what’s beyond the range, although we suspect it is more mountains in ever increasing sizes. The mountains run all around the western tip of the coast, completely impenetrable.

“Can everyone sit down?’ Ms. Bell calls. There is a flurry of movement to the long bench desks. We are in rows according to age. Evan sits a few feet in front of me. Today we’ll be talking about the history of the west. We’ve been talking about it for weeks. I know it well, having gleaned as much knowledge as possible about the west from my dad’s books, and so mostly I watch the back of Evan’s head. He spends more time trying to choke back laughter and passing notes to his friends than he does paying attention to the teacher.

Just a few weeks ago I graduated to the very last row. There are only two other kids next to me, Eric, an incredibly talkative boy, and Mira, who I can barely talk to. It used to be different. When we were younger, Mira and I played together all the time, racing up trees and throwing pinecones at each other. We don’t really talk at all anymore. Or at least, I don’t really talk to her. My crush makes it impossible for me to string more than pleasantries together. I steal a glance at her out of the corner of my eye. Her long hair hangs down like a red sheet, hiding her entirely from view. I try to be subtle about my crush. If Evan ever found out I’d never hear the end of it. If only I knew who he liked, I could preemptively tease him about it.

I pull my attention away from Mira and back onto the map at the front of the room. Ms. Bell is rattling on about a great battle, a hundred years ago, between two Hillanger tribes in the west. Ms. Bell talks like it was so long ago, so uncivilized, but have we really changed at all? Aren’t we about to launch into the biggest war in the history of Kostos? Our country has always been a large nation with two polar opposite halves. At one time they were similar, but when the eastern half launched into progress, commerce, invention, the western half stayed to their traditions. The Forsyth is more similar to the west, I suppose. I’ve read that the capital city, the Delphast, has rows of buildings whose only purpose is to sell fabrics, foods, books. They have hospitals, teams of researchers dedicated to pushing Kostos forward. Our current Kai has been open with sharing anything and everything with the west, but apparently they’ve refused. I don’t know much about the reasoning behind the war. It seems like the west wants to be separate from the east and the east wants to keep Kostos whole. So who’s at fault? I have no idea. It seems wrong that the Kai is trying to get rid of us in the Forsyth though, even if it is for our own protection. It seems like an empty threat anyways. What would the tracker do if he did capture us? Take us to the capital and what? Would we be scolded? Fined? I can’t imagine that they’d actually make us move.

A wave of fatigue passes through me. I didn’t sleep very well last night. The dreams that kept me up are gone from me now, just hazy dark visions lost in that sleeping world. Ms. Bells’ lecture is easy to tune out and I close my eyes for a moment. The darkness is nice, quiet. Perhaps if I drift off to sleep no one will notice.

The braided-man flashes in the dark. He grins at me and reaches out, grasping for my neck with a giant hand.

“Javin? Are you paying attention?”

My eyes snap open to snickers. Ms. Bell is staring at me, one hand on the map of Kostos, near the Impassable mountains, and the other one on her hip. “Yes. Sorry,” I mutter.

Mira leans closer to me. “I should have woken you up, sorry,” she says.

“No. Fine. It’s fine,” I mutter and furtively glance at her. Mira smiles at me and then disappears behind the sheet of red hair again.