The Cursed Heir

Chapter Twenty

Cassie tilted her head curiously, not following.

"It rests, but it rises, it...changes. It can be something else, hidden away but...but forming."

Bread became itself, but it did not always do it in the way the baker might have expected. It could get too many air holes, or too few, and you could end up pulling out a loaf that looked very different from what you had baked last time. "Like possibility."

Sarita nodded. "Precisely."

What a challenge, to move through this world and experience it separately. It perhaps accounted for some of Sarita's oddness.

A villager rounded the stable and raised a hand in greeting. Cassie waved back. As he got closer she recognized Victor, whom she had met through one of Aldine's useless errands but had little reason to speak to since that first meeting.

"James not out here, then?" Victor asked when he was within earshot. Cassie shook her head. She had not seen him that day. "Shame," Victor said with a disappointed frown. "He's got another letter, and these days he's in such a rush to read them." He ran a hand through his thinning hair, the grey nearly indistinguishable from the pale yellow strands.

"I could help you look?" Cassie offered. Sarita had made no signal one way or the other if she would rather have her company or rather be alone. But as Cassie was the one who had trespassed on her contemplation, Cassie would restore it.

"I'd appreciate it," Victor said with obvious relief.

His back was beginning to stoop, which left his height nearly even with Cassie's. It also made it easier for him to fill her ear with a continuous stream of information about his latest struggles with his bad back. At first she tried to commiserate, making sympathetic noises, but as he talked over even that, Cassie fell silent and tuned him out. It made it easier for her to focus on looking for James.

If he wasn't at home, the next place to look would be the town center.

"By the second day I couldn't even lift my legs..."

"Seen James anywhere?" she asked the cheesemaker.

He pointed in the direction of the nut groves. "I think he and a few others went that way."

"Eleanor is always using me for these little experiments; if we had enough to pay a healer out here it would be different, but..."

"Thanks!" Cassie lifted a hand in farewell to the cheesemaker and headed for the nut groves, Victor trailing behind, words still pouring out.

"You ever been so bored you're stuck watching flowers wilt? I thought there was nothing..."

Slowly, a faintly raucous noise began to interrupt Victor's riveting explanation of what he did while he waited for his back to recover. It was not unusual to hear singing in Telyre, but it was not often followed by cheers.

Cassie veered off course to investigate. It was just a few streets off from the groves; Victor wouldn't mind if they took a detour.

It sounded like a group of men singing, and every time a verse ended there went up a cheer. But the tune...it was a song of welcome, Cassie had heard it a few times. She had never heard it in quite that tempo, like an energetic, whirling dance.

She was not surprised to find James present in the group, along with several of his friends. Cassie and Victor found them as they finished another verse.

"Another! Another!" George was already shouting, as they clapped loudly for themselves. "I'm leading, and Robert, you take it another octave higher!"