Chapter 2: Seven Across the Thorngate Bridge

We left Caelveth before the city had properly decided to wake up.

The convoy assembled in the grey hour before dawn — four wagons loaded with grain sacks that smelled of damp and of whatever had been stored in the same warehouse before the grain arrived, something medicinal and slightly sour. The merchant, a heavyset man named Forren who had been paid sufficiently to ask nothing and remember less, directed his drivers with a minimum of language and a maximum of gesture. Our fellowship was distributed across the wagons and the spaces between them in the manner of labourers catching a ride, which was the point, and which some of us managed more convincingly than others.

Seraphine, for instance, did not look like a labourer under any lighting condition I could conceive of. She sat in the rear of the second wagon with a composed straightness that had nothing to do with pride and everything to do with a spine that had apparently never learned the option of slumping. She had her satchel on her lap. She had not opened it.