Land of the Burning Sands by Rachel Neumeier Page A

families resettling from Melentser, and the carriages of the wealthy, and swift-horsed couriers.
    “There won’t be trouble with brigands from here,” Sicheir commented to Gereint. He was standing on the tiny balcony of their room at the inn, looking out over the crowded city streets. It was not a good inn, but the only one they had found with rooms still to let: Many of the refugees from Melentser still lingered in Dachsichten while they decided where to go. Some would stay, probably. Especially the less well-to-do. Dachsichten was not a pretty town, but it was prosperous; folk looking for work might well find it here.
    But it left the inns crowded. With Sicheir on the balcony, there wasn’t room for Gereint to even set a foot on it. That was well enough; it was, no doubt, extremely unlikely that anyone from Melentser would happen to glance up and recognize him, but why take the chance?
    “The men can all go back north in the morning, and we’ll part company,” Sicheir added. The young man looked over his shoulder at Gereint. “I’ll be sorry for that. You’ve a good memory for the odd tale out of the histories. I see why my father thought you might work well with Tehre.”
    Gereint murmured something appropriate. He was distracted by a sudden desperate temptation to declare that he’d changed his mind, that Breidechboden was no longer his destination. He could head west to the pass at Ehre with Sicheir, test once and for all the notion that crossing the border would break the
geas
magic, avoid any possible encounter with any previous master or cousin or anyone else in Breidechboden who might recognize him.
    Of course, if he did that, he would never find Reichteier Andlauban, never have the opportunity to ask the surgeon mage to remove the
geas
rings. Even if the
geas
itself broke crossing the border, Gereint knew that the physical presence of the rings would fret him for the rest of his life. He could endure that. There were far worse things than carrying merely the
symbol
of bondage. Even so… Gereint wanted the rings gone with an intensity that ached through all his bones.
    And he had promised Amnachudran he would go to his daughter’s house.
    Gereint had spent years learning to disbelieve in the existence of true kindness. And then Eben Amnachudran and his family had effortlessly demonstrated that all the painful lessons he’d worked so hard to learn had been wrong. It had been as though the world had suddenly expanded before him, reclaiming all the generous width he remembered from his distant childhood. And Gereint had realized, gradually—was still realizing—that he’d spent all those years wanting nothing more than a reason to believe in that generosity. And Amnachudran had given him that reason.
    So in the morning Gereint said nothing, but swung up on his borrowed horse and rode with Sicheir only so far as the western gate of Dachsichten. Then he left the younger man with a handclasp and a nod and rode south without looking back, through a pearly morning mist that drifted across the city and glittered on the slate roofs of the houses and cobblestones of the streets.
    The mist turned into a cold rain before he even reached Dachsichten’s southern gate, and then the rain stayed with him as he rode south. The road was too well made to go to sloppy mud; water simply beaded on its surface and ran away down its sloping edges. But the persistent rain got down the collar of his shirt and made the reins slippery in his hands, and he rode with his shoulders hunched and his head bowed. He tried not to take the rain as a sign of things to come.
    The character of the countryside changed south of Dachsichten, becoming flatter and richer. Gereint rode now through a tight and tidy patchwork of fields and pastures and orchards, with woodlots few and much prized. The river rolled along on his left, the color of muddy slate, rain dimpling its surface. Boats with brightly painted trim slid past him, running downstream