Forest Mage (The Soldier Son Trilogy #2)

Forest Mage (The Soldier Son Trilogy #2) Page 111

She sipped from her tea, then admitted, “My husband was a thief.” Her mouth twisted on the word. “He was a thief like his father and grandfather before him. He used to laugh and say that it was the good god’s will that he follow in his father’s footsteps. When our boy was born, he even talked about how he would teach him to cut purses when he was older. But then Rig was caught and the choice was put to him—lose his hand or come east to work on the King’s Road.”

She sighed. “It’s my fault we’re here. I talked him into coming east. They made it sound so good. Hard work for my husband for two years, but then our own home in the town that they’d build along the King’s Road. They made it sound so good. We’d have own little house and garden in town, and land of our own outside of town. They told us any man could learn to hunt and that made meat free, and with what we’d grow in our garden, we’d never be short of food again. And they said the King’s Road would flow golden with travelers and trade, right past our door. I imagined that we would have a wonderful new life.”

She pursed her lips and stared into the fire. For a moment, caught in that old dream, she looked much younger, and with a jolt I realized she probably wasn’t much older than I was. Her musing look changed to a scowl. “It’s getting late,” she warned me without looking at me.

It wasn’t just that I feared she would send me away from the fireside. I truly wanted to hear the rest of her tale. I steeled myself to the loss and then said, “I’ve a tiny bit of sugar left in my panniers. Shall we have one last cup of sweet tea to end the night?”

“Sugar!” the elder girl said in wonder. The other two children looked puzzled.

Thus I bought myself a longer stay by the fire. Amzil pulled her chair closer to the hearth and told out her sad tale: the long miserable journey east, camping each night by the road, the callousness of the guards who forced them on each day, the primitive conditions in the camps. I’d seen the shackled lines of prisoners moved past our home in Widevale. Summer after summer, the coffles of convict workers and their military guards had passed my home. I’d always suspected it was a miserable journey, but Amzil’s tale of hardship made it real. As she spoke, her elder daughter’s face grew grave, obviously reliving those memories with her mother.

“We traveled to the end of the road. There was just a work camp here, with other men working off their crimes. There was no town with little houses and gardens for us! Just canvas stretched over boards and rough huts and dirt and work. Tents to sleep in, ditches to piss in, and the river for hauling water. Some new life! But they told us we were ‘home’ now, that it was up to us to make it into a town. They gave each household some canvas and some basic food and tools, and my husband and I put up what shelter we could. And the next morning, they put the men to work on the King’s Road, and left the families to cope as best we could.”

By day, the men left their families to go to work on the road. By night, they returned, too tired to do anything more than sleep. “Or curse,” Amzil said wearily. “My husband often cursed the liars who’d brought us here. Toward the end, Rig cursed me, too, for believing their lies and wanting to come. It was all my fault, he said. He said that even with one hand, he could have provided better for us in Old Thares.

“While they were building this stretch of road, it wasn’t too bad. It was noisy and dusty, of course. Heavy wagons and big horses everywhere. They dug and scraped and leveled and measured the land over and over. It seemed silly to me, the way they dug down into the earth to set down big stones, and then filled up between them with smaller stuff. And the amount of time they spent tamping it down! Why the road couldn’t just be a wide path, I don’t know. But they built it up in what everyone started calling an agger, with a lot of gravel, and all sorts of men with measuring sticks, always worrying about leveling things and making drains. I never knew what all went into a road before then.” Amzil’s dark hair had pulled free of the string she used to tie it back. It was feathering around her face, blending her features with the shadows behind her.

“But at least there were lots of folks here then. There was a big kitchen set up to feed everyone, and we could all go there for a meal once a day. The food was plain and not very good, but as you said, any food is better than none. And there were more people here, families as well as the other workers and the guards. There were other women to talk to while I did the wash at the river, and other women to help me when my baby came. The women who were already here when we arrived had learned a bit of how to manage, and they taught us. But most of us didn’t know a thing about how to live outside a city. We tried. Most of the houses you see around here, women built. And some fell down faster than we put them up, but we had each other to help.” She shook her head and closed her eyes for a moment. “Then it all went bad at once.”