The Toll the Desert Takes

The caravan lost two mules and one very unpleasant merchant named Hobbs to the crossing between the second and third waystations — the mules to heat, Hobbs to his own decision to strike out alone rather than accept a freedman's advice about which wells still held water, a decision the desert corrected within two days.

Josiah didn't mourn Hobbs. He mourned the water Hobbs had wasted proving a point nobody asked him to make.

Eleanor had proven, over eleven days of shared road, to be steadier than her fine hands and finer horse had suggested she'd be. She could read a map faster than the caravan's actual guide, a skill she credited — with a bitterness Josiah understood without needing it explained — to a childhood spent memorizing shipping routes for a father who'd wanted a son and gotten, in his words, "a girl who thinks like one, which is nearly as good."

"He'll have men looking for me," she admitted, the night after Hobbs's absence was quietly noted and quietly forgotten by a caravan that had learned not to ask too many questions about anyone's reasons for the road. "Not because he misses me. Because the shipping contracts need my signature at twenty-one, and he'd rather drag me back than lose the money."

"How long till twenty-one?"

"Four months."

Josiah did the arithmetic of distance and time the way he did every calculation now, with the particular carefulness of a man who'd learned that freedom was a thing you had to keep proving, mile by mile, to a world that kept looking for reasons to take it back.

"Four months gets you further west than Charleston's reach, if we keep this pace," he said. "Further than most men's reach, out past the territories."

"And you?" Eleanor asked. "What does four months get you?"

Josiah looked west, toward a horizon that had, for six months now, represented the only direction he trusted completely.

"Same as you," he said. "Far enough that nobody gets to ask me for my papers ever again — because there won't be anyone left out there who thinks they're owed the asking."