Soulwoven

Chapter Ten

~10~

After seven days, the long, green plateau of the Westplain finally yielded before Cole Jin’s tired feet. He stood on the white stripe of the high, clear Windroad, next to the shallow babble of a wide river. To his left, a line of hills marched into dark blue haze. The sweet scent of baking bread on a light breeze tickled his nose, and ahead at the bottom of a river valley beckoned the first real civilization he had seen in a week.

The brown-cloaked, moving back of Ryse Lethien soon blocked out the view.

The sun was close to its zenith. Already, Cole was farther from home than he had ever been in his life, and every step on the unforgiving highroad was an agony. His legs burned. Muscles in his butt and back he had never known existed groaned and ached. He was covered in sweat and grime and feeling more or less like leaving Eldan City had been the biggest mistake of his life.

He drew a ball of phlegm into his mouth and spat it, watching Quay balefully as the prince marched ahead of him, chin up, shoulders back, posture so rigid Cole could have broken a board on him.

He was saved further thought by bumping into something that reached about to his sternum. He looked down to find Len Heramsun glaring at him over his shoulder.

“Keep your eyes where you’re going, boy,” the Aleani said. “Don’t make me tell you again.”

The sun glinted off the sweat on Len’s smooth forehead, and Cole bit his tongue. There was something in the Aleani’s dark eyes that should have kept him from speaking. He knew the little thing was dangerous, knew he would lose to it in a fight unless he could outrun it. But still—

“Or what?” he asked.

The Aleani moved quick as a serpent. His fingers closed around Cole’s ear and yanked it down to the level of his dark, leathery face.

“One of these days, boy,” the Aleani whispered, “you’ll cross the line and find yourself wishing you’d learned to keep a civil tongue in your head.”

Len tugged down further, just an inch, and Cole had to take a step to keep his balance.

Then the Aleani let him go, and Cole stood rubbing his stinging ear while Len marched toward the city of Lurathen.

Cole Jin had been on the receiving end of plenty of threats before—from his father, from his brother, from innkeepers and guardsmen and friends. Few of them had ever come to much. He had learned not to respect them.

But this time—

Len’s axes swung from his waist as he walked. The Aleani’s bobbing shoulders looked powerful enough to sling them easily across the twenty yards that had spread between him and Cole.This time the younger Jin brother wasn’t so sure.

Cole fell into line and slouched toward the mishmash of whitewashed houses and brown streets that formed the city of Lurathen. It looked about half the size of Eldan City at the most, and it lay in a river valley between the hill Cole stood upon and a larger one to the north. From the top of the latter hill, a great forest stretched to one horizon. Opposite it, the river turned and ran south along the edge of the massive wall that marked the western border of Eldan.

A breeze whistled over Cole’s head, and he stopped and stared. The wall was sixty feet high and made of some stone that lent it an otherworldly, sea-green color. It was rumored to be even thicker than the walls around Eldan City, but from his perch atop the hill, Cole could still see over it into the country beyond. Into Nutharion.

It looked no different than the hill he stood upon.

He shook his head. Walls were for cowards—that was what his friends in Thieves’ Rise said. Cowards and rich men.