Night Spinner (Night Spinner #1) - Addie Thorley Page 0,40

when a gong sounds from the Gesper Temple.

A hush washes through the encampment, and I turn slowly to look at the old obsidian structure. It hasn’t been in operation for nearly fifty years; the gongs should have been removed decades ago. Yet they clang with wild fervor—vibrating through the pit in my stomach.

The woman nearest me drops her bucket of water and runs in the direction of the temple. Tattered blankets are tossed aside and streams of people emerge from their tents like rabbits darting from burrows at the first sign of spring. In a breath, I’m caught in a flash flood of bodies and washed along the teeming current toward the Gesper Temple, the gongs still crying.

“Another delivery!” someone shouts as they shove past.

“Twice as much as before,” another voice says.

The excited murmurs build to a roar as we press closer to the Gesper Temple. “What’s happening?” I look to the man beside me, but his elbow slams into my ribs as he jostles past. I tug on the vest of the woman to my right, but she doesn’t notice. There are too many people, knocking and sifting like flour through a sieve. They heave toward the temple with outstretched hands, and I haven’t a choice but to shuffle along with them—a tiny snowball in the avalanche.

When I reach the front of the line, I find a dwindling pile of small burlap sacks. I haven’t a clue what they contain, but I grab one, tuck it into my tunic, and dash away from the swarm. Once I’m free from the worst of it, I double over gasping. This is ten times worse than the Qusbegi Festival. Maybe even a hundred.

After easing down on a rock, I remove the parcel from my tunic and turn it over in my hands. It’s about the size of my fist with crude stitching and a shoddy drawstring. My fingers recognize the rough weave and slight weight at once.

Military rations.

As a member of the Kalima, we were allotted better foodstuffs than the magic-barren warriors sent to the front, but I survived on a sack of food like this during my first training camp, when I was eleven.

A satisfied breath rushes from my nostrils and hovers around my face like steam. Finally a glimpse of the relief effort.

I rip open the sack with my teeth, and a handful of nuts and a few strips of dried beef tumble into my palm—just as I remember. But when I turn the bag over, the king’s seal—a golden sun rising between twin mountain peaks—is barely visible beneath another image. A ram, dark and charred, has been branded over the top. A ram that looks exactly like the one stitched into the corner of my blanket.

Chills tiptoe down my neck.

Didn’t Ghoa say Temujin and his Shoniin raided imperial supply wagons?

But why would a criminal feed starving refugees? Or give me a blanket?

We need you. Find us.

A few nuts spill to the ground, and Orbai swoops in immediately. I laugh as I empty the rest of the sack for her. “You are the hungriest bird in the empire. I’ll starve to death, thanks to you. What do you make of all this?” I ask as she pecks around for crumbs.

If the rations are from Temujin, I should report them to Ghoa immediately. But as I glance across the square, at a group of children devouring their meager portions like jackals gnawing bones, an ache clogs my throat. Ghoa and the king could punish the shepherds for accepting stolen imperial goods. And they will cut off any future deliveries and send the rations back to the war front.

Where they belong, I remind myself. But a tiny, niggling part of me wonders if the food truly belongs to the army. Of course it’s important to keep our warriors well-fed, but what about our people?

I nearly reach for my quill and parchment to ask Ghoa, but decide to do some investigating first. The food is too sorely needed to report it on a mere hunch. I need proof that the ram is connected to Temujin.

Slinging my satchel over my shoulder, I roam from campsite to campsite, watching and listening, inserting myself into conversations. I follow a group of old Verdenese men as they amble between sheep pens with feeding buckets. “Five pleas to the Sky King ignored outright,” one of them mutters. “It’s as if he thinks we’ll simply vanish.”

“We will vanish,” another says darkly. “Like King Minoak. According to the newest arrivals,