I look at her face, which has formed a question mark out of her eyes, nose and mouth. “Don’t do anything to hurt that little girl,” she says, her eyes as iron grey as the clouds were earlier.
“I won’t, ma’am,” I say, unsure of what she’s getting at.
“Well, then you might want to turn around and go right back home,” she says, firmly but not unkindly.
“But my job,” I say, knowing how weak it sounds.
“Yah. Your job,” she says.
Easing the stew pouch from her grip, I say, “Thank you, ma’am. For the stew and…well, for everything.”
Chapter Three
I take the trail to the lower Brown District, where Buff lives. The further you go down the mountain, the less silver people have and the shivvier their jobs are—if they have work at all. Buff’s father’s a treejacker, earning a sickle a day from backbreaking work that supplies all the timber to the White District and the palace. There’s not much new construction in the Brown District, so little of the wood is sent our way. By the time Buff’s father gets home he’s so bone-weary that it’s all he can do to take dinner in bed and go right to sleep.
Buff’s younger sister, Darce, is a pretty little thing of all of twelve years old, like Joles. After their mother died of the Cold three years ago, she took over the motherly duties of raising all six of Buff’s other little brothers and sisters, as well as feeding Buff and his father. She’s a woman trapped in a girl’s body. The exact opposite of what my mother has become.
I pause on the edge of a large, snow-covered rock before I make the final descent, breathing in the crisp, pine-scented air and gazing down the mountainside. The first part is covered in a winter blanket of white, smooth and unmarked except for the handful of trails where the snowshoes of treejackers and miners have trod a deep path in the high crests of powdery snow. But eventually, beyond the snowy slopes, the mountain turns brown, dotted with heavy boulders and spindly, leafless trees. Further down still, heavy oaks rise tall and majestic, all the way to the edge of ice country, where it seems to collide with fire country. The desert, they call it, bare and lifeless. Even the sky seems to recognize the difference, as the moment the forest gives way to sand and dirt, the clouds stop, as if running up against an invisible barrier that ends their unceasing march across the night sky.
For a moment, as I have many times before, I wonder what’s out there, in fire country, beyond the borders. From what the men at Fro-Yo’s say, there are the Heaters, a peaceful tribe of desert-dwellers. Then there are the Glassies, who I like to call the Pasties, on account of how eerily white their skin is, even whiter than most of ours. No one really knows where they came from, but they’re our friends, too, apparently. According to King Goff’s shouters, who come down from the palace a few times a year to present us with news from the crown, we have trade agreements with both the Heaters and the Pasties. We give them wood, bear meat, and a few other odds and ends, and the Heaters give us what they call tug and ’zard meat, which have become something of a delicacy. I don’t know what either a tug or a ’zard is, but the few times I’ve been lucky enough to eat their meat, I’ve been impressed—it’s much better than bear or rabbit. The Heaters also help guard our borders, although I’m not sure who they’re guarding against. The Pasties, on the other hand, are something of an enigma. No one seems to know what we get from them in exchange for the provisions we provide them with.
I’ve never seen a Heater before, but the men at the pub say they have brown skin and are scared of being cold, whatever that means. That’s why they never come up the mountain. The Pasties, however, appear from time to time in the White District, on their way to the palace. They never stop at any of the local businesses, nor do they speak to anyone but each other. After disappearing through the palace gates, they reappear a few hours later and march right back down the mountain and toward fire country and their Glass City, which I’ve also never seen, other than in the paintings you can buy in Chiller’s Market. But as far as I’m concerned, the drawings are pure fiction—no one could build a glass structure big enough to enclose an entire town.
In fire country, there’s also the Fire, which we call the Cold, an airborne plague that kills many each year, both in fire and ice country. Only, down there, on the flatlands, it’s much worse, or so they say, killing many of them before their thirtieth year. I shudder as a burst of ice runs down my spine. If I lived in fire country, I’d be more than halfway through my life. At least up here where it snows almost every day of the year, the Cold is slowed, allowing us to live into our forties. It certainly puts things into perspective.