Chapter 195 — What People Ask About the Road
The next morning, Nia made it halfway down the middle terrace before Ayari found her.
She had only meant to walk after breakfast. The stone was drying after the recent rain, and the air moving through the reopened passages smelled of wet earth, smoke, and whatever someone was roasting farther below. Shen walked beside her, close enough that his arm brushed hers whenever the path narrowed.
Ayari came out of a side passage, spotted them, and changed direction at once.
“You are home.”
Nia smiled. “I have been home for a few days.”
“I know. I wanted to come sooner, but I decided you should have time to sleep and put your things away first.” Ayari touched Nia’s forearm in greeting, then fell into step beside her. “Now I want the part nobody gives me when they say the trip went well.”
“What part?”
“What it was actually like. The road, the shelter, the market. Did you like going?”
Nia slowed at that question. Before she answered, a man working outside one of the pottery spaces looked up from a low table.
“Lady Nia.”
A shallow clay bowl rested beneath his hands. His fingers were wet with slip, and several unfinished pieces sat on a board beside him. Nia stopped beside the table.
“I heard you brought back a clay vessel with holes through the bottom,” he said. “Did it survive the road?”
“Yes. We used it over one of our wider pots.”
“For broth?”
“For steam. The water stays below it, and the food sits above.”
The potter paused with his hands over the clay while Nia explained that they had tried pale frost-root first and that the shape worked well enough for the steam to pass through without putting the food in the water. When he asked whether the vessel itself had cracked or softened, she told him it had not.
“I do not know whether their clay is better than yours,” she added. “I only know that one held.”
The potter nodded and looked toward the shelves behind him. “That is what I wanted to know.” Then he bent over his bowl again.
Ayari waited until they were moving before she said, “You have been home a few days, and people are already asking whether your market clay survived.”
“He wanted to know whether the shape was useful,” Nia said.
Shen looked ahead. “It is unusual enough to draw questions.”
Nia smiled as they continued down the passage.
The passage widened at the next turn. A pair of men carried a bundle of split wood uphill between them while a woman near the wall told one of them that the lower binding was slipping. They stopped, set the load down, and retied it before continuing.
Ayari stepped closer to the wall to give them room. Once the path cleared, she touched Nia’s elbow.
“You still have not answered me.”
“I liked going.”
Ayari studied her face. “Even the road?”
“The road was long. I still liked it.”
Nia thought about it while they walked. The outward trip had been different from anything she could have imagined when she first woke in this world. Hearthfang had once been large enough to overwhelm her. Then winter had closed even that world down to stone passages, fires, storage rooms, and whatever danger reached them through snow.
Now that Nia had seen the road continue past Hearthfang’s eastern marker, the territory no longer felt like the whole world around her. Coming back had still felt like coming home.
“I liked seeing what was past our roads,” she said. “At the meeting ground, people named roads and territories I had never heard of, and everyone around them seemed to know where they meant.”
Ayari nodded. “You stopped feeling lost?”
“Not completely. The first day I kept looking everywhere because there were too many rows and too many people moving through them. By the last day, I knew where some things were, and I did not have to stop every time the path split.”
“And the sellers?”
“Some were easy to deal with. Some wanted to keep talking after I had already decided I was not buying.”
Ayari smiled. “That part sounds familiar.”
A man carrying a stack of folded hides approached from the opposite direction. Shen put one hand lightly at Nia’s back until the load cleared, then dropped it again.
Ayari watched the hides pass. “What surprised you most?”
Nia took a few steps before answering. “How little anyone cared that I was surprised.”
Ayari looked at her.
“Not in a bad way,” Nia said. “Things that were new to me were ordinary to everyone else. People from different roads handled some things differently, but nobody stopped the whole market because I did not know what they were doing. I had to watch.”
“That is better than being taught by five people at once.”
“I agree.”
They reached a broad section where sunlight came through an outer opening and warmed one strip of stone. Ayari moved into it, and Nia followed. Shen remained nearest the open side.
“Did you sleep at the road shelter both ways?” Ayari asked.
“Yes. The same one going and coming back.”
“What was it like the second time?”
“Easier.”
The shelter itself had not changed. It still had the same rough roof, the same sleeping space, the same road sounds beyond it. What changed was that Nia knew where she was. On the return trip, she could look at the branch beyond the shelter and know which direction led toward Hearthfang.
“I did not spend as much time wondering what came next,” she said.
Ayari rubbed one palm over the sun-warmed stone beside her. “Were there many other households on the road?”
“A few. One passed us with a shoulder pole that squeaked every time the load shifted.”
Shen looked toward her. “It kept squeaking until they were well past us.”
“The carrier never stopped to adjust it,” Nia said. “After a while I started wondering whether he had heard the sound for so many days that he no longer noticed.”
Ayari smiled. “That is the sort of thing route reports leave out.”
A familiar voice came from behind them.
“What do route reports leave out?”
Mari approached from the lower turn. She carried no basket and had no count cloth in sight.
“The things Nia remembers,” Ayari said. “I asked about the road. She told me about a squeaking carrying pole.”
Mari stopped beside them and looked at Nia. “Did any of the fragile goods break?”
Ayari exhaled through her nose but did not interrupt.
“No. The clay vessel, grinding bowl, and hand stone all came back intact.”
“And after using them?”
“The pierced vessel was worth carrying. We have already steamed frost-root with it. The finer grinding bowl gives us a better texture than the older one, and the hand stone fits it properly.”
Mari nodded. “Then the packing and the space were worth it.” She leaned one shoulder against the wall and looked down toward the lower work paths.
Nia smiled. “Ayari has been trying to get me away from packing since she found us.”
Mari’s attention shifted briefly toward Ayari before returning to the work paths. “I still want to know if something cracks the first time you use it.”
Below them, two workers had begun arguing over a stack of drying boards. One insisted the boards had been counted for the upper smoking rooms. The other claimed two belonged at the fish racks.
Mari turned her head. “They marked the ends yesterday.”
Neither worker heard her, so she raised her voice. “Look at the ends.”
Both men stopped. One tipped the stack sideways. A dark mark showed on the lower board, and after a moment they pulled two pieces free and carried the rest in opposite directions.
Ayari laughed under her breath. Mari ignored her and started walking again, and Nia pushed away from the wall to follow.
“I saw much larger trade loads outside than we usually see in Hearthfang, including grain,” Nia said as they continued uphill. “Wetland sellers had enough that people from several roads were buying from the same area.”
Mari glanced at her. “That makes sense.”
“It felt different seeing it there. Here, some goods reach us in little measures and feel rare from the moment I see them. At the meeting ground, I could see that the same thing had already traveled through other hands before it ever reached Hearthfang.”
“Everyone between the source and the buyer has to eat,” Mari said. “Carriers, sellers, anyone storing it between roads. Some of the price is the food itself. Some of it is getting the food here without losing it.”
Nia nodded. After seeing the larger loads, she could picture more of the distance and handling hidden inside Hearthfang’s small measures.
Ayari let them talk about transport for a little while before she caught Nia’s arm again.
“You have told Mari what survived. Tell me who you met.”
“Too many people to name.”
“Then name the ones you remember.”
When Ayari asked, Ren was the first person Nia thought of.
“There was a merchant named Ren. He works with the red-fox buying house.”
Mari looked over. “A buying house?”
“Yes. They purchase across several sellers instead of working from one small stall. Ren knew which lots were better, where goods had already been promised, and which sellers were likely to have what we wanted. He also knew when not to pretend a bad lot was worth our time.”
Mari considered that. “Useful.”
Ayari watched Nia for a moment. “Do you expect to see him again?”
“Probably, if we go back to that market.”
Ayari did not press. Instead she asked what the market sounded like when all the rows were active.
Nia remembered sellers calling across the paths, cart wheels at the wider edges, and conversations continuing while buyers moved around one another. She told Ayari about turning down one seller path and finding another beyond it, and about seeing women bargain in ways that would have made no sense to her a few months earlier. Some customs she understood by the end of the trip. Other customs still made too little sense for her to do more than remember what she had seen.
They were almost at the branch toward Ayari’s household when Ayari stopped again.
“If Kael said the road was safe again next market, would you go?”
Nia looked down the terrace.
People crossed the lower passages beneath them. Someone was calling for a missing cord knife. A seller farther down answered a question Nia could not hear. Beyond the outer opening, the eastern side of Hearthfang showed between wet green branches and gray stone.
“Yes. I would pack the return load lighter next time.”
Ayari started toward her household path, asking what Nia meant by lighter. Mari went with her and immediately began talking about how much awkward space the fragile pieces had taken.
Nia continued uphill with Shen. Ayari and Mari were still arguing over what should count as too much to carry when their voices faded around the turn.