Chapter 5
Sky
“Poppy. Poppy, come here. Poppy, we need to go!”
Moerrven was on his knees behind the woodpile, his thickly muscled arm wedged into a gap between two logs, and I watched, because how could I not. With Moerrven positioned like this, his pants were stretched tight across his ass, and oh my. What an ass it was.
I was supposed to be angry with him. I had been diligently angry for three days. The anger took one look at those trousers and requested a personal day.
I could dine out on this story for years.
I was standing in his front garden holding a wicker basket lined with a blanket, watching a seven-foot troll novelist beg his cat to come out from behind the firewood.
He looked my way, and I noticed that the bruise under his eye had already faded to almost nothing, to my relief.
Trolls apparently healed fast. One less thing to feel guilty about.
“Can I help?” I asked.
“She does this every time. She knows we’re traveling. She disapproves.”
“Every time? How often do you travel?”
“We used to, before…” He trailed off, then shook himself.
“I mean, often enough that she has a system.” He withdrew his arm, sat back on his haunches, and regarded the woodpile like it had personally betrayed him.
“She hides until I offer a bribe, then she emerges, accepts the bribe, and allows herself to be carried to the wagon with great dignity.”
“Let’s go straight to the bribe, then. What’s the bribe?”
“Dried fish. Could you go get it? It’s on the top shelf of the pantry, in the blue tin.”
I fetched the dried fish. Moerrven held a piece near the gap in the woodpile and made a clicking sound with his tongue, and Poppy emerged with the slow, deliberate grace of a queen granting an audience.
She ate the fish from his palm, licked her whiskers, and climbed onto his shoulder and settled there like she’d been ready to go for hours.
“She’s incredible,” I said.
“She’s a tyrant.” But he was already scratching behind her ears, and she was already purring, and neither of them looked sorry about any of it.
Angry, I reminded myself. I was angry at this man and his lying mouth and his soft, stupid, cat-spoiling hands.
The wagon looked like one of those old-fashioned buckboards you see in cowboy movies.
It had a sprung bench at the front, wide enough for both of us, and a flat cargo box behind it for supplies and a big boxy thing that might have been a cage for Poppy.
Clover, Moerrven’s draft mare, was already hitched and waiting. She eyed the cat with disdain.
But I was more focused on the bench, which was hard, flat wood.
“How long is the journey to Highmark?” I asked, smoothing a hand over the wood. Had they not invented cushions in Qoksmere?
“The route I’m planning to take is ten days. Perhaps a fortnight, if the weather turns.”
“Ten days?” I twisted to stare at him. “On this bench? This actual plank of wood?”
Moerrven frowned. “We break at night, of course. Clover needs to rest.”
“Do you have another carriage? Perhaps one with a cushioned bench, and a nice luxurious backrest?”
He snorted. “That sounds extravagant and wasteful.” He opened a small door, and set Poppy inside what could only be termed a luxurious cat travel suite.
“Poppy gets three beds, but a butt cushion is extravagant?”
“Sometimes she likes being in the sun, sometimes she prefers shade,” he said as if that made it all make sense. Poppy settled on her sunny bed and shot me a disdainful look as she started licking her rear paw.
He looked at me, then at the cat. Then he blew out a breath and stomped back into the cottage. When he returned, he was holding a thick wool blanket, folded into a square, which he placed on my side of the bench.
“Does this suit Your Highness?”
“I have sensitive sit bones!” I said, grinning at him as I plopped down on the soft blanket with a happy sigh.
He stepped back, gave the whole setup an assessing once-over, then went back inside and came out with a second blanket, which he draped across my lap. “The mountain roads get cold in the afternoon,” he said, not meeting my eyes.
“Thank you,” I said, beaming at him. “And thank you for agreeing to help me on my quest.”
“Anyone would do it.”
Anyone who’d lied to his whole town about finding his soulmate, anyway. I laid a hand on his shoulder. “Moerrven, seriously. Thank you.”
He grunted and climbed up beside me and picked up the reins. As Clover plodded forward, the wagon swayed, and Poppy meowed. “Could you let Poppy out of her habitat?” Moerrven asked. “She might want to walk around.”
I reached around and unlatched the tiny door to Poppy’s sunroom, and she wandered out, jumped onto Moerrven’s shoulder, then hopped to the top of his head, perched between his horns like a furry crown.
Moerrven left her there, and I tried my hardest not to think it was the cutest thing I’d ever seen.
Because I was supposed to be angry with him. Unfortunately, I wasn’t a person who held onto anger long, and after three days spent packing and preparing, I was mostly just charmed. I looked at the scenery for a while, then petted Poppy when she hopped down and demanded ear scratches.
Every time my brain went quiet, the worry about Pip crept in. My best friend could be anywhere in this world, hurt or scared or alone. Pip had gone through hours before me, with no one on the other side to cut his ropes or carry him to safety. No Moerrven with his grumpy muttering and orange cat.
Only we weren't moving with an urgency that reflected the danger Pip was in.
“The scenery moves very slowly,” I said. “Are those mountains even getting closer?”
“Of course they are. We are headed directly toward them.”
I stared at the mountains, which did not appear to be getting closer. “Are you sure? Where I’m from, vehicles move quite a bit faster.”
The joke made my chest tighten. Because if the wagon was this slow, everything was this slow.
Pip had come through hours ahead of me, and every one of those hours was a road I couldn’t see.
There were no phones here. No internet, no missing-persons hotline, no gas station counter where you slid a photo across and asked if anyone had seen this face.
There was me, a wagon traveling at the speed of a bored horse, and a country that seemed too vast to cross at such a pace.
“He could be days away,” I said, and the words came out small. “Wherever he is. He could be weeks away, and we’re walking. Oh god. I’m never going to find him, am I? One person, in all of this.” I waved at the beautiful, enormous, indifferent scenery.
Moerrven was quiet for a moment, and it was not his grumpy quiet. When he spoke, it was level and slow. “You will not find him by searching. A blind search would take months, or even years.”
“Wow. Okay. That’s so much worse than comfort.” I slumped against the low backrest.
“I was not finished. We need to first discover where it is that you landed. Because he is likely looking for you, too. And if we can get back to the start of things, we’ll find your answers.”
“You believe that?” I asked.
Moerrven flicked the reins, unhurried. “Answers will lead you to Pip, I am sure of it. Every mile of this slow road is a mile toward the Archive, and the Archive is where the answers live. Once we have all of the information, we can ask the right questions. And then we shall find him.”
“Okay,” I said. “That makes sense. But you don’t think we should be actively looking, too?”
“We can do both, can’t we? We can ask each person we pass if anyone has seen a man in improbably short trousers. Rumors spread like wildfire in Qoksmere. Have no fear, we'll attack from both angles, and it'll give us the best chance of locating Pip.”
I sat with that for a while. The mountains stayed where they were, and Clover kept her funeral pace, and the frantic thing in my chest, the one that had been running since the club, sat down for the first time and caught its breath.
It was the first thing anyone had said about finding Pip that sounded like a plan instead of a prayer.
My grandfather had a saying for this. Find the calm while you’re moving, and you can find it…
no. Find the moving inside the calm? That wasn’t quite right either.
He’d said it a thousand times while I stood in horse stance hating him, and now I couldn’t put the pieces back in the right order.
But sitting on a hard bench behind a slow horse, I was pretty sure I finally knew what he meant.
“Okay,” I said. “Answers will lead us to Pip.”
“Maybe you could read a book. Pass the time.” He shot me a pointed look. “Distract yourself from thinking too much about your worries.”
“Are you bored, too? I could read out loud.”
“We have been traveling for fifteen minutes, Sky. This is some of the most beautiful country in all of Qoksmere. There is much to enjoy.”
“I did enjoy the mountains! They’re gorgeous. But like…”
“Read a book, Sky. You packed the crate of them under the bench, didn’t you?”
I reached for the crate I’d packed, one that included ten books Moerrven had said he couldn’t do without, plus a pile of his own novels that I was desperate to read. I dug until I found one with his name on the spine. His eyes darted to the book.
“That one? There’s also a treatise on the fascinating science of mycology in there.”
I eyed him. “I don’t even know what that is.”
“The study of mushrooms, of course. The book covers exhaustive research on the origins of fungus. I found it quite engaging.”
“Yeah, no, I think I’m going to stick with The Stonewall Bride, a torrid affair between a beautiful troll and the prince she’s forbidden to touch.”
Moerrven harrumphed, eyes darting to the book, then back to me, then back to the book, with such intensity that he almost veered the wagon off of the road.