When the fords at Courdo became the bridge at Courdo, change spread like fingers along the South Road, creeping west toward the centre of Jadis and east into the wilds along the coast. Inns grew, and taverns, and all the trappings of transport: post houses and blacksmiths and wheelwrights. Frontier homesteaders cut down the forest and put it back up as cabins and barns. Goblins and bugbears and orcs stayed away and there was enough for all.

  Grains and grasses replaced trees, bringing haystacks and silos and grist mills. Those probing fingers of change splayed out into the side roads and rivers, forking and forking again until they began to turn back on upon themselves and made fists, erasing the old names and places.

  Blaise’s home village of Worthe, north up the River Flumarais from Courdo, was in one of those fists. Before she was born, there had been hunters and trappers and foresters here. Her grandparents and their parents had heaped their wares onto ox-drawn barges to feed them to markets in the hungry central kingdom. When the trees and game were thinned and gone, the people remained. As farmland, Worthe had nothing on the wetter river delta south of the new bridge, but it would grow wheat, and wheat would feed pigs and chickens, and the people found new ways to live.

  The goblins and their kin lost their hunting grounds and began to hunt among the farms. The people appealed to the lords and nobles for protection and the Scarlet Knights were sent. Mounted soldiers with bows and swords but very little armour, they rode light and fast. Pitting skill and craft against might and muscle, they won more than they lost. Blaise had never seen a Scarlet Knight. The frontier had passed Worthe before she was born. Life here was quiet and peaceful.

  And boring. Blaise stood on a haystack and regarded her little village critically. It was slowly baking in the unseasonable heat. Two oxen plodded on a well-worn path pulling a weathered barge up the river toward the jetty. Downie and another man waited to moor it.

  The jetty thrust into the river like a thumb. Beside it, the old warehouse sagged for want of care and the newer one wasn’t much better. The silo was completely bare because you don’t need a silo for hay, only grain, and ever since the mill had burned down, hay was what they sold. They had to buy back their own wheat as flour. That was it for tall buildings. Everything else huddled close to the ground. Like bugs hoping not to get stepped on.

  “Don’t fall!” said Downie. At fourteen, he still suffered from squeaking while speaking. He was the only boy her age in the Village of Worthe and she was positively, certainly not going to marry him. He giggles like a girl. Tall and skinny and spare, he was lost in the hand-me-down overalls that covered his shirtless chest.

  “Falling is something you would do!” she answered. She slid and jumped down, almost bowling him over on landing so he had to step back. She stalked away from him like a disdainful cat.

  “Hey! I didn’t mean…” Downie ran down and stopped, ears red and eyes wet. His hands would be balled into fists in his pockets, she knew it. It was always the same. He just has no idea.

  Safely away from him, Blaise turned and regarded her village as though she were a traveller on the overgrown cart track leading to it out of the forest. Many windows were empty. Buildings that had smoke in the chimneys were run-down and needed mending. Old bunting festooned the square and the stalls where people hoped to sell something to someone.

  The villagers, mostly her kin, wore bright colours over shabby clothing because today was a feast day. There were fewer people than when she was little and they were worn down, like tough trees. Worthe had its best foot forward, sellers hoping for travellers with full purses to buy their buns and pasties and eggs. The last of last year’s apples, salted meat and poultry, feed and beer could be had for a modest price.

  The villagers wore their bright headscarves and their uneasy smiles and stood by their wares. There were more sellers than buyers. Such customers as there were, mostly barge men and their families, looked much and bought little. Blaise knew the truth. The villagers were going hungry so as to sell their own food. The tattered flags and bunting strung from the central oak tree and the kerchiefs and the shawls hung so as to cover the worst of the vacancies spoke of a village gone to seed.

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  Blaise walked behind the stalls in order to show she was not a buyer. “Blaise! Come and mind the stall while I get cooking!” called Gramma Bickert. The girl made as if she had not heard and disappeared behind an empty house. “Oh that shiftless girl!” she heard as she snuck away. Blaise didn’t want to be tied to the stall all day. No one was going to buy anything anyway, and they would eat their own breads and pastries for the next few days.

  Blaise stopped short at the post-house, now horseless for months and empty. A traveller approached from the woods to the east, on the grassy track between the fallow fields. She had seen him first, before anyone else. she climbed onto a trough to see better. Kind of young. Not much older than her thirteen years. Was it a boy? It was a boy! She dropped to the ground and went to the trough to inspect herself. Patchy clothes and messy hair and freckles peered back at her from the water. She frisked her fingers in the water to dispel the reflection.

  Rushing to hide in the empty post house, she peeked out. The traveller reached the edge of the village, stopped, blinked and wiped his brow. He has enormous eyes. He blinked again and continued. Unarmed and dressed in pleasant clothes like hers, the boy was built a lot like Downie, tall and scrawny and pimply. A bindle stick balanced on his shoulder.

  He’s probably wondering about the bunting. The Feast of Feathering celebrated the sparrows leaving the nest and learning to fly. It was always on the seventh day of the fourth month. Pilgrims began their travels on the heels of the departing snow. This boy looked to have been sweltering on the road a while already. Unimpressed, Blaise sniffed, then ducked when he looked her way. Those huge eyes drank in everything. She knew he had seen her but he didn’t call her out.

  Blaise don’t know much, but she knew she wanted out of Worthe. The only people left were her extended family, cousins and uncles and aunts and nephews and nieces and Gramma and… The familiar hand grabbed her heart and squeezed. She tried not to think about her parents. She could hardly remember them, though she had sworn she would. But they were in her dreams sometimes, and whenever they were it was always sunny. Blaise hung onto that sunshine with all her being.

  They would want me to go. Blaise was certain of it. At thirteen, she was almost too old to be taken as an apprentice. There were no finishing craftsmen left here now, only farmers that made their own everything. If only she could get away, into the wider world, she was certain she could make a better life. Really, anything would be better than this.

  The traveller didn’t look like much but he was here now. She took a ready breath and stepped out of the gatehouse.

  “Well come to Worthe,” she said.

  “Well met,” said the traveller. He was looking behind her, not at her.

  “Happy Feast of Feathering.”

  “And to you.”

  His eyes were everywhere, darting about and landing only occasionally on Blaise. That was no good. She wanted him to see her. “Where do you hail from?”

  The question made him jump. He looks guilty. Blaise wondered if he was a thief or a bandit? Whatever he was, he was definitely looking suspicious.

  “Shrugg,” he said.

  “What?” asked Blaise.

  “That’s my name.”

  “Shrugg?”

  “Yes?”

  Blaise frowned. “Yes what?”

  “Did you want something?” asked Shrugg.

  Blaise’s lips pursed. He is mocking me. “No I didn’t,” she said, and spun on him. This boy was definitely not her passage out of Worthe.