personally and handed me quite the bag of gold to finance this trip.” Sylvie tapped the leather bag strapped to her waist meaningfully. “He said to make sure to send reports daily to keep him updated.”
“Don’t blame him,” Beirly grunted from atop the cart.
“He also said,” Sylvie added, “that we’re not the only ones he’s sending out. Apparently he has friends near Sateren that he’s also sent word to and they’re searching for her even now. So this might turn out to be a wasted trip.”
“Let’s hope it is,” Wolf said quietly.
“Regardless, we act like we’re their only hope,” Siobhan said firmly. “Darrens trusts us to save his daughter and we’ll do exactly that. Unless someone else beats us to it.” She looked through the iron and stone east gate, looking past it and to the open stone highway that led west. Only a few carts and pedestrians traveled out of the city at this hour of the morning and absolutely no one traveled toward Goldschmidt. They had plenty of room to use Grae’s pathways without any danger of being jostled.
She studied the ground with a keen and discerning eye. She didn’t have an ounce of talent where pathfinding was concerned, but after working with Grae for ten solid years, she knew how to judge the ground and sky and predict whether they could use the paths or not. “Grae? I’m seeing a lot of frost.”
“It won’t hinder us,” he assured her, interrupted mid-sentence from his conversation with Hammon. “We’re going to need another hour or so of daylight anyway before the sun is strong enough, and the frost will melt by then.”
He could very well be right. It would take them an hour to reach his pathways too. But she’d timed their departure with that in mind. Satisfied, she waved them back to their conversation before turning to Sylvie. “Did Darrens say whether or not he could confirm that they made it through Quigg?”
“He said he’d sent word asking but hadn’t gotten a response yet.”
Quigg was an insane hub of traffic coming and going. Never mind people, large circuses could be lost in there without trouble. Even her plan of going into the city and asking for information was flawed and depended more on luck than anything.
She let out a low breath and wished, not for the first time, that the guilds that controlled all of the cities had better working relationships with each other. Or were at least on better speaking terms. Ever since the fall of the great four nations that had once ruled over these continents seven hundred years ago, the world had changed drastically. Now, each city had a guild that ruled over it like it was a miniature country. The economy, politics, and livelihood of a city survived on the trade and governing ability of the major guilds. Small guilds like hers always owed allegiance to a large guild because of that. On a day-to-day basis, the governing of independent guilds worked—more or less. It was just in times like these, when emergencies popped up, that she saw how flawed the system had become. The areas between cities might as well be a no man’s land as far as the guilds were concerned. If you got lost traveling between one city and the next, well, you’d best hope you had strong allies that would come looking for you.
No one else would.
“Alright, everyone into the cart!” Siobhan commanded.
They’d reached the pathway exactly on schedule. To the novice eye, it didn’t look like anything more than some elaborate stonework set into the earth, forming a straight line of stepping stones. In all actuality, there were two lines, one of which sat a hundred marks farther to the right, both of them well away from the main highway. It sat near a running brook—which had a thin layer of ice on it still—and so provided an excellent source for Grae’s necessary water element. He preferred the far path above the one they stood poised to walk on for that reason. Well, that and the fact that this path was built to carry a smaller load. The other path was made to handle large groups, like caravans. (Hence his habitual arguments with her about weight.)
Grae left the paths in place without worry because so few Pathmakers existed in the world. Anyone without a Pathmaker’s ability couldn’t use them, after all. But leaving a bunch of stones buried in the earth didn’t mean that they would stay obediently in