The Spirit Rebellion(52)

“Not much farther,” he said, tilting his head so the water would have a harder time going down his neck.

“So you keep saying,” Josef said. The swordsman paid no more attention to the rain than a bull does, and the water rolled off him with scarcely a notice. Nico kept in step with him, kicking her thin feet so the mud wouldn’t build up on her boots. Eli grumbled something about traveling with monsters and kept his own pace, moving his feet carefully so as not to lose a boot in the quagmire the road had become. It was a complicated process, which was why he didn’t notice that Josef and Nico had stopped until he ran face-first into Josef’s back.

“Powers!” he muttered, stumbling back. “What now?”

Josef just nodded at the road ahead of them. Eli squinted into the rain, confused; then he saw it too. About ten feet ahead of them, the rain stopped. The road went on, the hills went on, but the rain didn’t. Eli walked forward, sloshing through the mud until he was on the edge of where the weather suddenly cut off. There, in the middle of the road, was a line. On one side, it was a miserable, cold, wet rain; on the other, the weather was sunny and the road was dry.

Squinting through the rain, Eli leaned forward until his nose was almost touching the invisible barrier separating rain from sun. “Well,” he said softly, “that’s odd.”

“That’s one way to put it,” Josef said.

Eli tilted his head back and squinted at the sky. The disconnect seemed to go all the way up. Even the gray clouds stopped at the line, swirling and turning over on each other at the border as if they’d hit an invisible wall.

“Very odd,” Eli muttered.

Josef glared at the division. He didn’t like unexplainable things. “Any ideas on what could cause something like this?”

“Well,” Eli said, tapping his fingers against his wet chin. “It could be some kind of agreement between the local spirits. I doubt it, though. Spirits have their own politics, but something this precise smacks of human interference.”

Josef frowned. “A wizard who likes sunshine, then?”

“That’d be my guess,” Eli said, poking at the line between wet and dry with his boot. “Not a Spiritualist, though. They’d consider something like this, I don’t know, rude. Not their style at all.”

Josef nodded, and they stood there staring at the anomaly for a moment longer. Then Eli shook himself.

“Well,” he said, “no point in standing in the drink when we don’t have to. That’s our road, so we might as well stop worrying and enjoy the sunshine.”

He strode forward, crossing the border between rain and sun with only a tiny hesitation. He felt nothing as he crossed, just the welcome warmth of sunlight on his wet shoulders. Now that he was on the dry side, the air was cool and bright and the dry road was solid and even, a welcome change from the rutted mud slick they’d been shuffling through all day.

Once they were all in the dry they shook out their soaked clothes and sat in the thick grass on the roadside while they drained the water out of their boots. Now that they could see the sun, it was clear that the afternoon was quickly passing, so after a short rest, they pressed on, following the road down out of the hills into a green valley.

The land on this side of the rain was very different from the scrubby hills they’d been plowing through since abandoning the cart. The brown grass and rocky outcroppings had been replaced by orderly orchards and green pastures. The road was well maintained, with neat stone walls dividing it from the farmland and not a single rut in the hard-packed dirt. In the distance, picturesque farmhouses made of gray stone and whitewashed wood nestled between the hills like plump, roosting chickens. Sleek horses grazed in green fields while roosters with deep-blue tails strutted on white fences, crowing occasionally as the sun sank lower.

“It’s like we walked into a painting,” Josef said. “Cottages at Sundown or something.”

Eli brushed self-consciously at his dirty clothes. He hated being dirty in general, but being dirty here felt like an insult to the bucolic perfection. “Funny, I figured the richest province in the Council Kingdoms would be a little less pastoral.”

Josef shrugged. “Even rich people have to eat.”

“I just hope this place has something worth picking up besides the Fenzetti,” Eli said. “All I’m seeing is a lot of grass and livestock, and I’m not doing horses again. I swear, the more valuable their bloodline, the harder they bite.”

“I don’t think you have to worry about that,” Josef said. “There’s the town.”