When Ishtal awoke, she was stiff and sore and her mouth was dry and foul-tasting, and she didn’t remember at first where she was.
She sat up blearily, and realized that she was pushing herself up on dusty earth layered with evergreen needles, rather than on pillows, and instead of a roof over her head, there were branches with the early morning sun shining through them.She was out in the middle of the forest, with only trees and scanty undergrowth as far as the eye could see.
It all came rushing back to her: the ill-fated mail run, the banishment, her horrified flight from the village. At the time, she’d been mostly numb with shock and hadn’t been able to fully process it all, but now she felt it like a knife carving into her chest, making her curl in on herself. All in a moment, she’d lost everyone and everything she’d ever known. She was completely alone in the world, and could never go home. And Oroitz had had the nerve to say that this was for the best, that this would help her. The thought made her shake with a tangle of fury and despair and terror.
She almost broke down weeping again, but she was dehydrated already, and although a perfunctory fumbling at her belt pouch confirmed that she did still have the rations she’d neglected the day before, she had no water with her. She would have to do something about that. It shouldn’t be an insurmountable problem; the Onena forests were crisscrossed by any number of streams.
Something pricked at her finger as she pulled her hand out of the pouch again, and Ishtal paused, before feeling about once more with a bit more attention. A moment later, she had the offending object in hand: the silver crescent-shaped ear studs Berezi had been wearing the day before. She must have made them part of her trap, and then they hadn’t been discovered with the rest. Berezi must not have noticed, since she hadn’t said anything about it.
Anger burned low in Ishtal’s gut as she stared at the two innocuous bits of metal. Berezi had never cared one way or another about the jewelry. She just hated Ishtal and couldn’t let it go, and her valuables had just been a tool she could use to bring on the banishment. It didn’t make sense. Out of all the race of Onena, why did Ishtal have to be the target of her ridiculous jealousy?
After a long moment, she tucked the studs back into the belt pouch. Maybe she could sell them, or maybe once she got a chance to do a clean piercing, she could wear them herself. She certainly wasn’t going to give them back; if Berezi would have wanted her to return them, she shouldn’t have had her banished.
Ishtal slowly got to her feet, trying to think of a plan. Unlike most Onena, she wasn’t completely unprepared for the prospect of interacting with the outside world; one of the main reasons guardians were so revered was because they had the task of venturing out of the forests and dealing with ilegabeak on behalf of everyone else. Usually what this meant was that every so often, they would slip away and travel to the nearest population hub to pick up news of any great wars or natural disasters that might have repercussions for the Onena people in general. Father had gone once, when Ishtal was quite young, and afterwards had carved her and Arancha little wooden figures to show them what the other Peoples looked like.
Because of this, part of their training had been in the customs of different kinds of outsiders, in their various languages and how their societies worked—at least so far as the spying of previous guardians could determine. Ishtal could recognize each of the other Peoples on sight, and was nearly fluent, albeit with a significant accent, in the trade language, with a little Elvish and Goblin on top of that. With that to go on, she reasoned, she ought to be able to at least get her feet under her.
She was strong and tough and reasonably bright, and could fight if she needed to. It shouldn’t be too difficult, she reasoned, to find honest work and support herself quietly somewhere. Yes, that was it. She would work hard and stay out of trouble and she would show them, she would, that she wasn’t the troublemaker they’d accused her of being. Maybe she would even do so well that they would be sorry for exiling her and want her to come back.
Yes, Ishtal thought, lifting her chin higher and starting to walk, that was just what would happen.
Father had had maps of the world beyond the forests, starting out reasonably detailed and getting vaguer and emptier the further away one got from Onena territory. Ishtal could remember them well, and once she’d made her way out of the trees, around mid-afternoon, she had a rough idea of where to go to find a main road. Once she reached that, all she had to do was follow it west for what she estimated to be a couple of days’ journey, and she would reach the city of Lozhapad.
There were a fair few cities within reasonable walking distance that she could try, and there were always smaller towns and farmsteads. But according to the most recently circulated guardian reports, Lozhapad had the widest variety of Peoples living there: it was ostensibly a human city, but there were sizable populations of dwarves and goblins and trolls, and in fact one guardian had claimed that he’d seen representatives from every People except the ezkatatsua living there. She would be a lot more likely to find work in a place like that than in a smaller, more homogeneous community. Ishtal didn’t necessarily have any evidence, but she had a tentative theory that a village of all humans, or all goblins or all halflings, for example, would be fairly similar to Bosgarren Herria in terms of their opinions on outsiders.
The road was right where she expected to find it. It was far from clogged with traffic, but there was a steady stream of individuals and small groups moving along in either direction. As she watched, a large family of halflings drove past in a cart pulled by two sturdy ponies, followed shortly afterward by a figure on horseback in heavy armor who could have been human or elven. In the other direction, a trio of hornpates strode along, swathed in large hooded cloaks and furtively glancing around like they expected trouble at any moment.
Nobody seemed to be paying her any attention, all too focused on going about their own business. In a strange way, this was reassuring—at least they weren’t instantly turning on her. Ishtal took a deep breath, letting herself become accustomed to the myriad new and overwhelming scents, and then turned onto the road, heading west.
For all the tales that Onena children whispered to each other about the infinite perils of the outside world, the ensuing days of travel were surprisingly uneventful. No one bothered her, or spoke to her, or even seemed to notice her much at all, aside from the occasional double-take. She could simply walk, and take in the sights around her of hills or woods or farmland, and of the different kinds of people. She didn’t have currency to stay in a hostel overnight, the way she saw others do, but she knew how to survive in the wild, and could simply make camp a little ways from the road, hunting small wild creatures and tracking down fresh water and sleeping wherever was comfortable. It was just at the beginning of autumn, so the days were no longer unpleasantly hot for walking, and the nights weren’t yet too cold to sleep outside without a blanket.
On her third morning since leaving the forests behind her, Ishtal could see the Lozhapad city gates just ahead. The flow of traffic had been getting heavier, and a couple of times came to a complete standstill with so many people trying to come and go. Eventually, though, the slow progression carried her up to the heavy wooden gates, standing open with squat stone towers on either side, and then through, and she had arrived.
Her first impression of Lozhapad was that it was very tight and narrow. The closest buildings all seemed to be two or three stories, and packed in tightly together. The main thoroughfares had enough room for perhaps ten people to walk shoulder to shoulder, which was technically more space than the houses in Bosgarren Herria had between them, but there were a lot more people here, in what seemed like proportionally less space. The area immediately inside the gate appeared to be some kind of market, and every vendor in it was trying to drown out his neighbor’s sales pitch with such volume that Ishtal’s ears flattened of their own accord. And the smell—or smells, she wasn’t sure—there were so many, hundreds of kinds of food ranging from mouth-watering to foul, incense, herbs, mud, something tarry she couldn’t identify, and the unique unwashed odor of almost every known kind of creature, all congealing into one wall of sensation that felt like it would knock her over.
Ishtal ducked out of the stream of people she was caught in and behind a thick post that stood on a street corner, covered in papers. Leaning back, she pulled the collar of her tunic up over her nose and mouth and made herself breathe slowly and deeply. Her own scent, and that of the soap they used at home, mostly blocked out everything else, and that let her get used to the intensity of sound until she felt she could bear it.
Finally, with an effort, she slowly lifted her face again, acclimating herself to the smell as well as the sound. She would have to learn to deal with this if she was going to live here. Perhaps in time, she would cease to notice it at all, the way one got used to the scents of their own house until they went on a long trip and came back.
She turned, ready to face the world once again, and something caught her eye, writing on one of the papers nailed to the post she’d been leaning on.
MASTER WOODWORKER WANTED, it proclaimed in bold, black letters. INQUIRE WITH OBRAZETS ON STRAIGHT STREET.
Well, that wasn’t a great deal of help to her, Ishtal thought, but she scanned the flyers nailed up around it, curiosity piqued. Some of them seemed to be local news items, and others, advertisements for some product or service, but there were a fair number that said things like HELP WANTED or HIRING. A few of those even mentioned work that sounded like something she could do.
And, she realized, glancing around, this wasn’t the only such post. She could see two more in different corners of the market, and she was willing to bet that there would be more in other parts of the city.
Hope started to rise in her chest, and she smiled, hardly daring to believe the luck she’d stumbled on. Maybe this business of making her own way wouldn’t be so difficult after all.
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