Wind Blown Ashes: Episode 9, Outside the Walls of Kematree

With no caravan heading her way and being barred from the town, Ashes has to make other arrangements.

Turning right on exiting the gate with the late morning sun beating down on her, Ashes meandered through the tables and a handful of interspersed small tent-stalls lining the road that circled the walls. As the shadows got shorter, she came to the midpoint between this and the next gate, where the caravans were required to park. Tables, and the few tents, lined the whole way from the gate and continued on past the campground around the city.

“Any of these heading into the desert to O’freindwel?” she asked the half elf standing guard at its entrance in his worn and tattered tabard.

He sneered, his singsong voice dripping with contempt as he replied. “No. One left for Old Friends Well, the first of the human cities to the south two days agone. I expect none to start forming for a ten-night, or more.”

Ashes read manuscripts written by humans four thousand years old calling it O’friendwel or a version of that. Only some of the elves, and the half-elves, still called it Old Friends Well. It was his tone, and using Old Friends Well, that convinced her that her choice of destination was right. They would look down on her in any place that had the longer-lived races like elves, gnomes or dwarfs. The human run desert city of O’friendwel or the Land of the Eighteen Kings beyond the desert was her best bet.

Looking at the three caravans there, Ashes knew he was correct, and she had been a fool for asking. All three contained a lot of nonhumans of one type or another, so wouldn’t be heading to O’friendwel.

So much for Plan A, she sigh, and continued down the road to put Plan B into action, glad to have taken time to develop Plans A, B, C and D while still in the library.

Not one of the tents she had already passed was suitable, so she pushed on, hoping it was Plan B and not Plan C. Nearing the next gate into the city, she approached a herb woman offering cures in front of a tent. The condition of her tent, and clothes which covered her to the same level Ashes own covered her, suggested that she knew what she was about.

“What can I do for you, deary?” the woman said, noticing Ashes’ interest.

If you missed book one and need to read it, read it for free here.

A Fall of Ashes: Chapter I, Mistakes