Chapter 140: Jocelynn’s Journey
This year, Jocelynn had come to truly despise carriages. Originally, she’d protested when her father and Bors Lothian arranged for Ashlynn’s wedding to take place very early in the spring. Nothing was in bloom during her sister’s wedding and the nights were cold and chilly when they arrived in Lothian March. It almost never snowed in Blackwell County but there had still been snow on the ground in some places during the long carriage ride from her home to Lothian City.
Now that she was making the trip in late spring during the height of the rainy season, Jocelynn understood all too well why her father had insisted that they either travel before the rains started or well into summer.
The carriage rocked and swayed with every rut in the road, and her bones ached from days of being tossed about like she was in the belly of a ship in a storm. Even the cushions had become her enemies, turning lumpy and misshapen after the first few days of travel. The whole carriage needed a good wash inside and out after a few days, and no amount of potpourri could cover up the musty smell that had invaded the perpetually damp carpet on the floor of the carriage.
The trip that had only taken ten days at the beginning of spring took fifteen now. Twice they’d been forced to wait in tiny villages while rainstorms pelted the land and once they’d been forced to backtrack to take a different road because a bridge had washed out on the route they were using and wouldn’t be repaired for over a week.
The landscape had changed dramatically since they left Blackwell County behind. Jocelynn found herself missing the cool salty breeze that always seemed to blow in from the sea. It had been replaced by fresher, chillier air that carried the scent of fresh cut timber and wet earth that in her mind she’d come to associate with the untamed and uncivilized wilderness at the far edges of the Kingdom of Gaal.
The gentle rolling hills of home had given way to steep, rocky slopes covered in ancient forests that the common folk were still working to pacify. She’d lost count of how many logging camps and hunting lookouts they’d passed in the days since leaving Blackwell County behind and she’d long grown tired of playing the game where she tried to guess how many of the great trees that had been felled it would take to produce just one of the sailing ships in Blackwell Harbor.
Even the villages they stopped in felt different. Back home, every settlement had boats pulled up on the shore and nets hanging out to dry. Here, the tiny hamlets they sheltered in were surrounded by wooden palisades, and Eleanor had noticed more than one village where their wooden walls bore deep gouges from attacks by demons.
If not for the company of so many Templars traveling with them, she didn’t know how she would have slept at night, especially with the strange noises that seemed to echo off the rocky hills after the sun went down.