Anji had been this far north only once, when her family had been selected for passage on a caravan to sell pottery in Conifor. Her father had still been an apprentice fisherman, still struggling to bring money home, when he’d burst through the door to tell Anji and her mother. He’d called it the Pottery Lottery, seeing as well-paid work came infrequently to low-born citizens. Anji remembered her mother’s stern face folding into a frown at the news, but she’d simply nodded and started packing their things without a word.

The journey had been cold and dull, bumping along in a caravan led by a group of Repulo from the Southwest Shelf. The Repulo rode giant, flightless birds with cruel, curved beaks and chewed strips of stained wood as they chorused the long, sorrowful laments brought from their homeland. She could still see her parents bundled up against the latticed sides of the cart, heads jostling, one sleeping while the other watched over her. They’d done their business on arrival, but that night Anji had also accompanied her parents to a dismal warehouse on Conifor’s outskirts. Scores of people had gathered there, their conversations hushed, their faces drawn and tired. Anji’s parents had left her in a filthy office, given her a book, and told her to mind herself while a heated debate had commenced in the adjacent room. Anji had only caught a few words of the exchange, but her parents had come out looking frustrated and hadn’t spoken to each other till they’d returned to Linura.

This trip was proving much more exciting.

“How much farther do you think?” she asked, her voice light, airy as the plains sweeping out to either side. “I don’t have a compass to hand, but I’d say we’re headed east, not south.”

“Again, your observational prowess knows no bounds,” the Hawk said. She cleared her throat and Anji heard what might have been a wheeze, or the wind. The woman had certainly come down with something on her way north. Anji hoped it wasn’t catching.

“So…” said Anji, “we’re not headed for Linura?”

“We’re headed where I point us.”

Heat rose in Anji’s cheeks. She pictured the map of Yem tacked to the wall in her aunt’s tiny apartment. The barren trail the Hawk was forcing her down now would eventually connect to the Queen’s Road, which ran east from Yem’s border with Dorodad across the entire country until it ended in Tideron, Yem’s largest city apart from Linura. There had to be other villages and even towns dotted along that route. Towns meant more people. People she could bribe for information or protection or both.