Tortall by Tamora Pierce Read Free Book Online Page A

for Qiom and a cheese if they would do his farm’s work for a day as he cared for his sick wife. Fadal did chores inside the house; Qiom tended the animals. As Fadal set about killing and plucking a chicken, a process Qiom didn’t want to learn, he went to chop up rounds cut from a dead hornbeam tree for firewood. The chore didn’t bother him—the hornbeam would feel nothing that was done to it. Qiom envied it as he picked up the ax and began to chop.
    He had only learned to use an ax recently. Soon his hands blistered. Qiom put the tool down and considered the heavy circles of wood. They were very dry; a split ran a third of the way across the topmost piece. Did he really need the ax?
    He picked up the top circle of wood, set his fingers in the crack in its side, and tightened his muscles. It split in two. Qiom then broke each half over his knee. This was far easier than chopping, he thought as he worked his way through the pile.
    He was nearly done when he heard steps in dirt. Fadal stopped nearby, silent. Was he doing something wrong? “It’s easier if the wood is quite dry,” he explained, facing her. “The ax hurts my hands. Am I forbidden to do it this way?”
    There was an odd look in Fadal’s eyes. Qiom had to search his knowledge to find the right word for it:
awe
. “You’re very strong,” Fadal said at last. “No, you aren’t forbidden.” She went back to her work. Was it important that he was strong? Qiom wondered as he finished the wood.
    The next day they walked on. The road, nearly empty for so long, filled with human traffic. It streamed through gates in a log wall. “It’s this town’s market day. Towns are risky,” Fadal explained as they approached the gates. “It’s easier to be private in the woods or on a farm. Still, towns have plenty of work, and people will pay in coin. Fall is coming, and you need a coat.”
    On they trudged, part of the market-day throngs. Just outside the gates, Qiom saw a tall mound topped with strange wooden structures. Curious, he left the road to investigate. Fadal argued, saying they had to be inside before the gates closed for the night. Then, grumbling, she followed Qiom up the mound.
    Qiom frowned. Why nail lengths of wood together tohang four dead humans in the air? Buzzards, feasting on the dead, hissed at him, then left.
    A board with marks on it stood halfway up the mound. “These were bandits, hanged yesterday,” Fadal said, reading the marks. “Murderers, too. I suppose they deserved hanging, but they look so sad.”
    Qiom shook his head over the idea of dead men, hung like fruit on dead trees. “Twice a waste,” he told Fadal as they returned to the road. “A waste of living trees for the wood, and a waste of fertilizer.”
    Fadal looked up at him. Her eyes were sad. “Lives are more than fertilizer, Qiom,” she said. “Sometimes I don’t think you even want to be human.”
    “I don’t,” he replied.
    They found work just inside the gates. In exchange for cleaning his stable top to bottom, an innkeeper fed them and let them sleep in his loft. Qiom woke before dawn the next day. Normally he would have roused Fadal, but not now. She had slept badly. Her nights were never as quiet as Qiom’s, who only dreamed his talks with Numair.
    She always finds work, thought Qiom. Today I will find it and wake her when I do.
    The town was stirring as he left the inn yard. Wagons lined up at the gates, waiting for them to open. Qiom drew a bucket of water from the well in the square between the gates and the temple, rinsing his face and cleaning his mouth. As he finger-combed straw from his hair, he looked around. He wouldn’t try the temple. Even if the priest had work,Qiom disliked the places, with those huge fires at their hearts. Fadal had said marketplaces usually had more workers than they needed. Qiom would have to look farther from the gates.
    A smith offered him coins to fetch baskets of charcoal from storage; the smith’s wife said they