Chapter 2
KAEDRIN
The tracks are three days old by the time I pick them up outside Aldwick.
Two horses, heavily loaded, cutting off the main trade road onto the older forest path that runs parallel before rejoining near Brindle Hollow.
Smugglers favor old paths. Less traffic, fewer eyes, and the tree cover makes it harder to spot weighted wagon beds from a distance.
I follow the line of broken brush and pressed earth at an easy pace, letting my horse set her own speed through the uneven terrain.
The commission is straightforward enough on paper. Two men, names unknown, connected to a network moving illegal magical artifacts through the borderland trade routes. The courts want the men and the contraband both. I've been on worse assignments for less clear direction.
The forest path spills back onto the main road two miles before the valley opens.
I smell the caravan fires before I see them — woodsmoke and boiling grain, the grease-and-leather scent of working horses standing in harness too long.
Four wagons pulled off the road's edge, drivers and hands eating their midday meal around a low fire while their animals rest.
I slow my horse to a walk as I approach. Several heads turn. A few hands drift toward belt knives before their owners get a proper look and think better of it.
"Passing through?" The man nearest the fire is broad through the shoulders, grey-stubbled, with the squint of someone who spends most of his life looking into weather.
"Looking for information." I dismount and keep my horse between myself and the group out of habit. "Have you seen an unusual merchant? Moves through the borderlands regularly with wares that don't match his listed trade."
The broad man turns a skewer over the fire. Two others exchange a glance.
"What kind of unusual?" one of them asks.
"The kind people don't ask too many questions about."
The fire pops. Someone pours a cup of something and doesn't offer me any.
"Fenwood," the broad man says finally. "Torbin Fenwood. Runs a mid-size caravan, calls himself a general goods trader." He pulls the skewer back and examines what's on it. "Passes through this stretch four, five times a year. Always has a few crates nobody's allowed near."
"Always has coin to make sure nobody gets near them either," the man across the fire adds. "Paid Oster's crew double to load and unload without looking. That's not normal rates."
"Cagey about his sources," the first man says. "Never names his suppliers. Claims he buys from private estates, old collections. But the pieces he moves—" He shrugs. "Not the kind of thing you find at estate sales."
"Where does he usually stop?"
"Brindle Hollow's a regular point. Good crossroads. Enough caravan traffic that one more wagon doesn't draw attention."
I ask two more questions, get two more useful answers, and remount without ceremony. The broad man watches me go without expression.
The valley road opens up past the next ridge, and Brindle Hollow appears below it as the afternoon light starts its long slant westward.
A proper small town — mill, market square, a river bend keeping one side of it honest. Smoke from a dozen chimneys.
The kind of place that keeps its head down and its doors locked after dark.
I've been here before.
Once, three years ago, chasing a different set of tracks through a different season.
An autumn storm had dropped out of the northern hills faster than any reasonable weather had a right to, and I'd made it to the edge of Brindle Hollow soaking wet and without a dry place to sleep.
Most doors I'd knocked on had gone quiet at the sight of me. One hadn't.
A small bakery near the market square. A woman with flour on her hands and no apparent fear of dark elves standing dripping on her doorstep.
She'd fed me and given me a place to dry out, and when the storm showed no sign of stopping by nightfall, she'd offered more than that without either of us making it into more than it was.
Or so I'd told myself riding out the next morning, recalled orders already waiting at the inn's message post.
Maris. Her name surfaces easily, after three years. Warm hazel eyes and a sharp, dry humor she deployed without warning. I'd thought about her more than once on the road back through the territories, then put it away the way you put things away when duty doesn't leave room for them.
I wonder, riding down into the valley now, whether she's still running the bakery. Whether she's still in Brindle Hollow at all. Three years is long enough for a person's life to move in any direction.
My horse's hooves find the cobblestones at the town's edge. The market square is louder than I expect — a caravan has set up along the fountain, and traders are still arranging their displays in the slanted afternoon light.
I file Fenwood's name alongside what the caravan drivers told me and start watching the wagons.
Maris can wait. She's probably long gone, or married, or both. I have work to do first.