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A man coughed, not six feet away. “Damned rain.”
Ilse froze. That was Niko’s voice.
“Go back to your tent then,” said Otto, one of the drivers.
“Not yet. Gimme another swallow.”
She heard a gurgling, then Niko smacked his lips. “Ah. That’s better. One more, and I’ll go.”
“You must want a headache.”
“Already got one ’cause of the damned rain.”
“You been sick a while. Did you catch something from the girl?”
“Nah. Gave her something else, though.”
Otto wheezed with laughter. “Well, if you didn’t give to her, then I did. If Brandt doesn’t get her back to Papa soon—”
“Doesn’t matter. Brandt’s got it all worked out. Gods, she’s a sweet fuck. I told Brandt to keep her. He says no, we can always get another one.”
They both took another swig from the bottle. She was lucky about that—all the guards were drinking hard these past few days—either from boredom or bone-deep weariness, or just because they could not bear the endless damp and cold. Alarik Brandt’s bitterest threats made no difference, except to force the guards to keep their liquor hidden.
Niko took one last drink, then shuffled away toward his tent. Otto remained by the horses. He was one of the rougher men. He’d pinch Ilse hard enough to leave bruises, and sometimes took her during rest stops, when Brandt wasn’t looking. If he caught her …
Her heart beating fast and hard, Ilse edged around the pickets, toward a ridge of boulders that lay just beyond the camp circle. The going was difficult. The rain had stopped, but the ground was soggy, and she feared the squelching mud would give her away. Twice, she paused, thinking she heard footsteps or voices from the perimeter guards, but once she passed the latrines and the trash pit, Ilse breathed more easily. The land ahead was covered in mist, with trees appearing as vague dark lines that reached upward to the darker sky, veiled by clouds.
She glanced back to the camp. The campfire sent up a dull gleam from its coals, throwing one of the wagons into relief. She thought she could pick out Otto’s figure, standing somewhat apart from the horses with his legs planted wide apart and his head thrown back, a misshapen shadow against the drifting fog.
She rose to her feet and started walking.
* * *
SHE WALKED UNTIL dawn, then dug a pit beneath a stand of oaks and buried herself. For just a moment, she breathed in the scent of dust and decay, a rich aroma like that of magic, before sleep overtook her. Nothing broke her rest until the midmorning sunlight filtered through the dirt and leaves. She jerked awake with a cry, half-forgetting what had happened.
No Brandt. No bonds or guards. She was free.
And alone.
Once she might have feared the solitude, but now …
I laugh and hear its echo in my heart.
Ilse set off with Tanja Duhr’s poem running through her thoughts. She did not stop until she encountered a running stream, where she drank until her stomach was swollen. The scholar’s advice remained vividly clear, but she had no idea how to find pine nuts or groundnuts, or where carrots and thistles grew. She told herself stories as she walked to distract herself from the ache in her stomach.
Her stubbornness lasted until late afternoon, when her legs collapsed beneath her. Ilse propped herself against a stump, staring blankly at the trees around her. Pine nuts, she thought. She swept the ground. Her trembling hands met needles and pinecones and the typical detritus of a forest floor. Wherever pine nuts were to be found, they weren’t here.
Later, she wasn’t sure how, she stood up and walked on. The forest gave way to a meadow—she had climbed up a ridge without knowing it—and from here she could see the land falling away to the north and west. Somewhere out there, Brandt and his caravan were climbing through the hills toward the Gallenz River and its highway.
It was cranberries she found first, a tangle of bushes half-hidden under a boulder. They were dried and bitter to the point of making her ill. She ate them anyway. In the same field, she discovered rosebushes from which she plucked the hips to eat raw. Gradually, she learned to see more provender in the fields and underbrush. Wintergreen grew in the pine forests, wild onions on the open slopes. Pine nuts and grapes, raspberries and thistles. There were days she went hungry, but she always gathered enough to survive.
For ten days, she marched through the empty wilderness. The only voice she heard was her own, when she sang or wondered aloud. At first she reveled in her isolation, but when the nights turned cold, and her throat ached fiercely, she wondered if she would ever reach a village, or if she had accidentally wandered off the map of the known world. She could die of hunger or sickness or accident, she realized with a sudden pang, and no one would know.
On the morning of the eleventh day, she stopped. Ahead, a dull gray stone tower poked through the blue-green expanse of pines. A village at last?
“Hello?” she called.
