Troubled Waters (19 page)

“You’ll be back,” he said. “They’ll hardly notice you’re gone.”

Ilene had made up her mind. “It’s a wonderful idea,” she said. “It will be good for you to see some of the world, Zoe. A pretty girl like you wasting her life away on the river flats! Go with Barlow. Visit the northern lands. Then when you get back—well—we’ll see, won’t we? Maybe a lot of things will have changed by then.”

Maybe my son will have fallen in love with you,
Zoe knew she was thinking. The possibility seemed more remote all the time, but Zoe wasn’t about to say so. “If you’re sure,” she said uncertainly. “I would hate to feel like I’ve abandoned you.”

Ilene smiled and put her hand on Zoe’s arm. “You’re hardly abandoning me when I’m pushing you out the door.”

Zoe turned back to Barlow, trying not to seem too brisk about it, as if she had successfully completed a first, inconsequential task and was now getting to important matters. But that was how she felt. “Then—what would my responsibilities be while I traveled with you?” She paused, trying to imagine the journey itself. “Do you camp out along the way? Stay at inns? Stay with clients?”

“We camp out or sleep in the second wagon,” he said. “Quarters are tight, but you could sleep in the merchandise wagon, where Jaker’s nephew used to put his mat. We all take turns cooking. If you know how to drive a vehicle, you could take your turn at that, too. But mostly we just need you to stay behind and watch the merchandise when we’re off trading.”

One part of this speech had caught her attention in a wholly unexpected way. “Drive an
elaymotive
?” she repeated. “A smoker car?”

Barlow grinned. “It takes some getting used to,” he admitted. “But I like it.”

“I’d
love
to learn,” Zoe said, wholly sincere for the first time tonight. “I can’t wait! I’m ready to leave tomorrow!”

T
here were goodbyes to say, loose ends to tie up, but all in all Zoe estimated that she could have packed her belongings and been ready to depart the city within twelve minutes of receiving Barlow’s invitation to join him on the road. The whole conversation had gone more smoothly than she’d anticipated; she’d thought she might have to convince Barlow to take her and overcome Ilene’s disapproval. But everyone, for radically different reasons, had been pleased by the plan.

Annova and Calvin also were wholly in favor of Zoe’s trip. “Good for you. You need some fresh excitement,” Annova said. “And traveling with an eligible young man! Nothing could be better. Don’t just concentrate on being beautiful. Show him how indispensable you can be. A workingman looks for a partner, not just a lovely face.”

“I will be traveling with
two
eligible men, though I don’t know anything about this Jaker,” Zoe said. “So my chances are doubled.”

“I don’t know this Jaker, either,” Annova said. “But stick with Barlow. His parents are good folks. He can be trusted.”

Impulsively, Zoe gave Annova a fierce hug. “If I don’t come back before the end of Quinnatorz,” she said, “assume I have found somewhere better to stay.”

Annova returned the embrace with fervor, but pulled back to give Zoe a long look of appraisal. “You’ll be back, I think,” she said, “but you’ll be changed.”

“
Coru
girl,” Zoe said. “Always looking for change.”

“
Sweela
girl,” Annova said. “Too smart to let it destroy you.”

TWELVE

J
ourneying across the kingdom with Barlow and Jaker was nothing like traveling with Darien Serlast. The only thing their vehicles had in common was that they were powered by compressed gas and they ran on wheels. All similarities stopped there.

For one thing, there was no team of Dochenza drivers on hand to make sure the motor assembly functioned smoothly, and at least once a day the wagons came to an abrupt halt as the supply lines fouled or the ignition system failed or some other problem surfaced. Jaker, the more mechanically minded of the partners, would climb into the small, odorous compartment and curse loudly and make a lot of mysterious banging sounds, and soon they would be on their way again.

Despite Barlow’s boasts, they did not cover ground very quickly. Zoe didn’t know much about such things, but the engine in the Serlast carriage seemed to have been more powerful than this one; at any rate, their own small caravan did not bowl along at the same brisk pace she’d enjoyed on her eastward journey. And the level of comfort between Darien’s car and Barlow’s wagons could not even be compared. The trade wagons jounced along, even on the smoothest roads, as if they wanted to eject all merchandise and passengers with the maximum amount of violence. When progress was slow enough—on highly pitted roads or in heavily trafficked areas—Zoe opted to climb out and walk. It was a far more pleasant way to travel; and she had worked for a cobbler, so she owned excellent shoes.

Despite the unending low-level wretchedness, Zoe enjoyed the trip immensely. Jaker proved to be a lean, long-limbed, and friendly fellow somewhere between forty and fifty years old. His blue eyes brightened a weathered face and bald scalp tanned dark by constant exposure. Everything interested him, from the way a fellow traveler hauled a water keg to news about the viceroy of Soeche-Tas. He seemed happy to talk to Zoe on any subject she introduced without once asking prying questions. He was one of the most comfortable people she’d ever met.

He was the one who taught her the basic mechanics of driving the
elaymotive
, explaining how to speed up, how to slow down, and how to cut power to the engine if she couldn’t figure out any other way to make the wagons stop. She was fascinated but tentative; she didn’t trust her newfound skills enough to be the driver if there was any other traffic on the road. But on clear days, when they were between towns, Zoe loved to take the wheel and feel the bunched power rumbling behind her in the engine box, loved to know that it was her will, her decisions, that would keep them going forward or tumble them into a ditch.

“You’ve got some aptitude for this,” Barlow said on their third night out as they made camp. Something else Zoe had not known was that campsites existed up and down the main roads of the kingdom, places where all sorts of travelers, not just peddlers and traders, could pull over for the night. These usually offered only the barest amenities—a well-cleared circle of land, a water pump, perhaps permanent privies, and a trash dump. However, a few of the more well-stocked ones sold oats for horses, meat and bread for humans, and canisters of gas for the new engines. “If you ever decide the city life isn’t for you, you could hire on with some merchant and travel for the rest of your life.”

She smiled at him. On the road, Barlow seemed like a different man altogether—happier, more relaxed, more expansive.
Torz
heritage or not, this was a man with a
coru
heart. He would never be able to sit still, adding up accounts and fawning over customers at his parents’ shop.

“Maybe I’ll hire on with you and Jaker,” she suggested.

“If you decide that’s what you want, we’d both be glad to have you.”

She was more relaxed with him as well because it had been clear from the very first day that he had absolutely no interest in her as a potential wife. He had no interest in any woman, and neither did Jaker. People who preferred to take lovers of their own sex were a largely ignored subset of Chialto society; she had seen a few such couples down on the river flats but none of them had been her particular friends. Zoe had to hide a laugh at the thought of how disappointed Annova would be that her
two
unmarried men both turned out to be wholly ineligible.

That first night, she had watched as Barlow set up a small tent, scarcely big enough for one, and Jaker had carried in a single sleeping bag. Her eyes were still wide with a question when Jaker crawled back out. He gave her a barely perceptible nod, his blue eyes considering her; she had replied with a slight shrug and a small smile. Everything had been easy between the three of them from that minute forward.

“Well, if I decide I want to go adventuring across the kingdom with the two of you, I’ll handle my own merchandise,” she said. “Jewelry, maybe, or—no! I’ll sell shoes! I’ll have Ilene and Melvin make up dozens of pairs in fashionable sizes, and I’ll sell them in all the small towns where girls dream of luxuries that their local cobblers can never provide.”

“Not sure you can make much profit on shoes,” Jaker commented.

“Oh, I’ll make a profit. You have no idea how much country girls long to be as fashionable as city girls. They’ll pay twice what the shoes would go for in the city.”

But she was just talking. Spinning dreams she had no intention of pursuing. She was a
coru
girl, true, who thrived on change and travel. But, strange and surreal as it seemed, she was the Lalindar prime. She would not be traveling the countryside selling footwear out of a wagon. She had no idea what the rest of her life might hold, but she was sure it would be far more complex than that.

W
eather was good for the entire length of their trip, though it was the opening nineday of Quinnatorz and the air simmered with the promise of heat. For the first three days, they passed through land that was broad and level, prairie and woodland taking over any stretch of soil that hadn’t been cleared and cultivated by human hands. Water was abundant, though this apparently came as a welcome surprise to many of the travelers they met on the way.

“Drought been along here for the past two years,” an old man observed to Zoe as they waited to fill containers at the water pump of a campsite. “The first year, they rationed how much water you could take at any campground. Last year, none of the camps had water at all. It makes me crazy to see water spilled on the ground—look at that, those boys don’t even stop pumping while they put down one bucket and pick up another one!”

She smiled at him. “I don’t think we’re going to run out. Not today.”

“You wouldn’t say that if you’d ever lived through a drought,” he grumbled.

“I suppose not,” she said. “But I never have.”

Coru
girl. Lalindar prime. Of course she’d never seen a time without water, but until now she had never realized why.

As they pushed farther north, the land began to change, growing hillier and rockier, sustaining hardier crops and more stubborn trees. Not long after that, mountains began taking a dusky shape on the northern horizon, curving up from the southeast to create a serrated spine from the city to the northwestern coast. The river, Zoe knew, ran alongside the mountains all the way to the southern sea.

“The air smells different here,” she said on that seventh morning. She was carefully piloting the wagons along the empty road that rose at a shallow but insistent angle all along the visible horizon. “It smells like snow. I’d forgotten that.”

“Forgotten?” Jaker said. “You’ve been to the northwest provinces before?”

“Not for years. We used to visit my grandmother there when she was alive.”

“It’s the prettiest land in the whole kingdom, I’ve always thought.”

“I loved it when I was a little girl.”

“Is any of your family still alive up here in the northern parts?” Jaker asked.

Zoe thought about it a moment. “Maybe.”

He gave her a shrewd look from his blue eyes. “Is that why you’re along on this trip? To find out?”

She smiled at him. “Maybe,” she said again.

He nodded and asked no more questions.

T
he day was blissfully sunny when they finally reached their destination, a small, picturesque town nestled against the mountain foothills like a kitten curled up against a rumpled pile of blankets. Smaller and more playful here at its headwaters, the Marisi chortled in its banks between the steep slope of the mountainside and the flat acres of the town. The place was barely a crossroads for travelers planning to journey on to the coast and for tradesmen swapping goods with local merchants who served the great manor houses nearby. The town boasted little more than one inn, a modest campground, and a couple dozen houses and storefronts.

“You might as well take a room for the night,” Barlow told Zoe. “We’ve got to haul the wagons to the three estates where I’ve promised deliveries—can’t transport the glass any other way. We’ll probably end up pitching a tent on one of the properties, depending on where we are by nightfall. We’ll be back sometime tomorrow to pick you up and start on home.”

Smiling, she shook her head. “I won’t be going back to Chialto with you.”

Barlow was surprised, but Jaker wasn’t. He said, “I thought you didn’t know yet if any of your folks were still here.”

“They’re here,” she said. “I just don’t know what they think of me.”

A little bewildered, Barlow looked between Zoe and Jaker. “If you’re not sure of a welcome,” he said slowly, “we could wait a day or two. You can still come back with us if things don’t go the way you hope.”

Impulsively, she kissed him on the cheek—and then, because it felt right, she kissed Jaker, too. “It’ll take me more than a day or two to sort it out,” she said. “I’ll find another way back to the city if I have to.”

“What do I tell my mother and father?” Barlow asked.

She laughed. “Well, first you have to tell your mother that you are
not
interested in marrying me.” He groaned and she went on. “And then you can tell them that I thank them very much for the trust they put in me and the opportunities they gave me. And that when I have a chance, I will pay them back eightfold.”

That raised Jaker’s eyebrows, but Barlow was still focused on more immediate explanations. “They’ll want to know why you didn’t come back.”

“Tell them the truth,” she said softly. “I have family here. And I’m going to see how much we like each other.”

“
Coru
family?” Jaker said.

“Yes,” she said. “Lalindar.”