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  Johanna shuddered at the thought of what had happened to the inhabitants of the house. All signs of human habitation they had seen since being captured told a story of death and destruction. The burnt-out shell of the water mill, the burial mounds, and now this.

  This land was so badly cursed that it sowed dissonance even in those who crossed it. Just look at how the bandits argued all the time.

  Not much later, they crested the top of a hill, and the view forward as far as they could see consisted only of white sand.

  Sigvald held up his hand. Horses stopped, with much blowing and snorting. Sigvald spoke to the bandit next to him, but they were too far away for Johanna to hear what was said.

  They waited. Not a word was exchanged. Horses tossed heads and shook manes. They sniffed the air.

  On the horizon to the left and behind, a bank of sharp-edged clouds towered into the sky, topped by a great wedge-shaped protrusion. The sky above was still blue, but the air had taken on that oppressive quality that preceded bad weather.

  Sylvan and his group came up from behind. Johanna was glad to see Roald, and glad that he didn’t seem to have thrown a screaming fit, although he kept moving his head from side to side.

  The bandits went into a discussion which Johanna thought was about which direction to travel. Several men didn’t like the sand. Sylvan said to keep going. Sigvald didn’t like that either. Johanna suspected that Sigvald didn’t like anything that Sylvan suggested, but they seemed to reach some sort of agreement.

  Sylvan slid from his horse and took it by the reins. He led the animal onto the sand, straight past Sigvald, who said nothing and stood with his hands crossed over his chest.

  Sylvan stopped at the crest of the nearest dune, looked at the sky and waved his free hand. A gust of wind whipped up sand around him. He stood with his eyes closed and his hands spread, palms out.

  Wind magic.

  The men in his group were also getting off their horses. The old bandit had already lifted Loesie down. She stood with her arms clamped around herself as if she were cold. She also feels the magic.

  Johanna refused Ludo’s help in getting down, and so did Nellie. Johanna managed to get down from the horse safely, but Nellie half-fell and landed clumsily. Fortunately the sand was soft and nothing was hurt except Nellie’s pride.

  Still brushing the sand off her clothes, Nellie joined Johanna and Roald. “What are we doing? Why did we get off here?”

  Sylvan turned around. “Too hard for the horses to carry us. We walk them.”

  “Are we near the sea?” Nellie asked.

  This was like the sand dunes near the ocean in Saarland, only at the ocean there was one row of dunes and then the beach, but here there seemed to be no end to the expanse of sand. Johanna didn’t think there was an ocean on the other side, because Gelre was a land-locked country and the northern ocean was to the north of Estland. But to be honest, she didn’t understand why this sand was here either.

  It’s a cursed country. That was all she knew.

  The group started across the sand in single file. Sylvan went first with his horse, the two bears and the dogs, then Sigvald and a couple of his men leading their horses, then Roald, Johanna, Nellie and Loesie, and finally the rest of the group and remaining horses.

  The air became more pressing, while thunder growled in the distance. The horses were skittering, lifting heads and tossing manes. Father always said it was a bad thing to be caught in a field during a storm.

  The wind blew in squalls.

  Sand whipped around them, biting into exposed skin. But it was more than sand that caused Johanna’s skin to tingle. There was magic in the air.

  Even the hounds stayed close to the group. They whined and squeaked with tails tucked between their legs and preferred to walk between the horses. The bears stopped every so often to sniff the air.

  Sand got in Johanna’s shoes, in her eyes and in her hair. It bit in the exposed parts of skin. The wind swelled until it took Johanna’s breath away and carried sand over the surface in streaks

  Sigvald hurried the group along. The horses plodded through the biting sand with their heads held low.

  Johanna had to force herself to put one foot in front of the other. Every time she thought they were at the end of this horrible sand, there was another hill. They would sink deep into the sand on the lee side, ploughing through it almost up to her knees.

  Nellie collapsed several times, and cried that she didn’t want to keep going, but each time a bandit hauled her to her feet, increasingly roughly.

  Johanna wanted to shout, Stop the theatrics. It’s not helping. But she said nothing for fear of getting a mouth full of sand.

  Loesie plodded on, her eyes closed. Her mouth moved, as if she was praying.

  Roald seemed the only one unaffected. His hair whipped across his face, but his expression was blank as usual.

  On and on they went.

  Thunder was now close enough to make the air shake. The dogs yowled, and Sylvan yelled at them while trying to keep his horse quiet.

  The muscles in Johanna’s legs screamed from exhaustion. The wind picked up and blew lashes of sand against her that bit even through her clothes. Sand got under her dress. It got in her eyes and her mouth. She could barely open her eyes to see.

  What sort of terrible evil country was this?

  ‎

  Chapter 5

  * * *

  THE STORM broke with a few claps of thunder that made the ground shake. A sharp burst of rain halted the drifting sand. The wind stopped as suddenly as it had come. The sky cleared with crisp clouds and even a few patches of blue. The rain had made the sand wet and easier to walk on. The magic had vanished from the air.

  Coming over the crest of a particularly tall dune, Johanna spotted a dark row of forest on the horizon, a wonderful sight after all that loose sand and the dunes.

  A quick look over her shoulder revealed an untouched landscape of white sand dunes with a few gnarly pine trees. The wind had erased all their tracks.

  After crossing a few more dunes, they came to a small village, nested in an alcove between sand dunes that smothered a landscape of heather and small pine trees.

  The houses were low structures from rough wood, with no windows, half-sunken in the ground. Like the abandoned house they had seen previously, their slanting roofs were covered with sods of heather, the branches brown and dead, and now all quite sandy from the wind. Johanna counted twelve such houses, each of them surrounded by fields with the most miserable crops that Johanna had ever seen. The plants were pale green, almost yellow, their stems short and uneven, and very sparse. Not even the weeds had made much of an appearance.

  A couple of women were working in a field, scooping off encroaching sand and carting it out of the settlement in a wheelbarrow. A small sad-looking paddock with a rickety barn held an ox and a shaggy-haired pony. A man was filling the drinking trough that stood against the barn wall. Two children herded a group of sheep along the main “road”, a path pockmarked with puddles and rutted with tracks from nothing but wheelbarrows.

  Someone whistled and everyone in the village turned around to watch the newcomers. People stared at the horses. Even if they weren’t being ridden, the bandits’ horses looked magnificent compared to the village animals.

  A couple of scrawny children stood in the doorway of the closest house, dirty, dressed in rags, very skinny and small.

  In the centre of the village, a man with a shovel in his hand came out of a barn as the procession came to a stop on what looked like a village square. Sigvald handed the reins of his horse to the young bandit next to him and went to speak to this villager. Sigvald was much taller and broader than the man, and his tattooed head gave him an imposing appearance.r />
  They exchanged greetings, the villager appearing very timid. He didn’t look Sigvald in the eye.

  His hands were dirty, and when he wiped his face he spread a smudge over his forehead.

  A couple of small boys stared at the party from the barn door behind him. A young woman dragged them out of the way with a hissed, “Begone with you, or the magician will change you into a toad.”

  Sigvald said something about a bed and food.

  The man flinched. “The barn is available, as always. But, Lord, we have barely enough to feed ourselves. The winter has not been kind to us.”

  His speech sounded a bit odd and old-fashioned, but it was surprising how well Johanna understood him, better than she understood the bandits.

  Sigvald shouted at him about having an agreement. The man retreated further, muttering about poor harvests and fields being covered in sand. “It’s like a curse, my lord.”

  “You deserve it,” Sigvald said.

  “We bring our own food.” Sylvan came forward, holding up the rabbits. “If you can cook them.”

  The man’s eyes widened. “Yes, yes, certainly, lord. Lenie, put them over the fire and ready the barn.”

  The young woman scurried forward, took the rabbits and disappeared after the two boys. Sigvald gave Sylvan a dirty look. Sylvan said something in too low a voice for Johanna to hear and Sigvald replied with an obscenity.

  “We will tend to your horses,” the villager said.

  “Make sure they’re well-looked after.” Sigvald’s voice was a growl.

  “Certainly, my lord.” He called a few names.

  A couple of men came out from the other huts. All of them were skinny, with bony arms and hollow cheeks. They took the horses to the pen near the village’s well, which was occupied by the pony and the ox. The horses bunched together in the corner furthest away from those two animals. They held their heads low and showed little interest in their companions. The sand had exhausted them as well.

  One man dragged in a wooden trough, while a young woman came to the well.

  She lowered the bucket, keeping a wary eye on Sigvald. Johanna could hear the bucket hitting water, not very deep. The woman turned the wheel to bring the bucket up with a squeak, squeak, squeak that sounded ominous in the silence. She emptied the bucket in the trough. The water had a red-brown tinge.

  Sigvald snorted. “That’s not water, that’s piss.”

  She flinched away from him. “This is the only water we have, my lord.”

  Johanna cringed at how these people treated him as a highly-ranked person.

  The girl trembled visibly when she lowered and pulled up the bucket for the second time. Squeak, squeak, squeak went the wheel into that tense silence. She emptied it in the water trough. Splash. The horses gathered around.

  “Wait,” Sylvan said. He pushed himself between the horses’ bodies and stuck his hand in the water. He paused, with his eyes closed. To an outsider, it might have looked like he relished the coolness, but Johanna could read the signs.

  Water magic. She’d thought he had wind magic. Was it even possible to have two different kinds of magic in one person?

  He turned to Sigvald and nodded. He had judged the water safe. The horses drank and not much later, the dogs and the bears came to join them. The girl brought up a few more buckets of water, doing her best to ignore the gazes of Ludo and several other bandits. A young boy brought a wheelbarrow full of hay.

  “I wonder where they cut the hay in this miserable place.” Sigvald lifted his face to Sylvan, as if his question was a challenge.

  Sylvan snorted, but said nothing.

  Someone was spoiling for a fight, but Johanna had no idea what it was about.

  Sigvald went inside the barn when the owner called him. The rest waited around uneasily. A couple of the children stared at the group from the door of another house. Johanna met the eyes of a little girl and found herself the subject of the stares of all the children. Most were scrawny, dirty. One had a funny eye that looked in the wrong direction; another’s foot was turned awkwardly inwards.

  She felt too embarrassed for words. She didn’t want to be part of this group that barged into this poor village and demanded favours that the villagers couldn’t afford.

  Never had Johanna seen poverty like this. There were beggars and refugees in Saardam. Some were sick or had lost limbs in wars, but even if they couldn’t find work, there was the church where the poor and destitute could always get food. Even in their plain farm clothes, dirty and tired as they were, the Saarlander travellers looked so much richer.

  The farmer called the group into the barn. Johanna, Roald, Nellie and Loesie followed the bandits through a rickety door into the hastily vacated room.

  A few lights burned on roughly-hewn pillars that supported the roof. The floor was covered in heather twigs in a layer so thick it was springy. Rough-hewn wooden planks held up the layer of soil on the roof, but some of the roots had worked their way between the planks and dangled from the ceiling like spider webs. It was surprisingly warm in here. The bandits put down their packs along the side wall. All the saddles and riding tack went near the door.

  “The food will be out shortly,” the farmer said to Sigvald.

  There was a rough door in the back wall that opened a sliver, and the two boys peeped through again.

  The farmer turned to them. “Hide yourselves. Don’t annoy our guests.”

  But now the door opened further, and two teenage boys entered carrying a table, which they placed in the middle of the barn. Then the little ones carried in a bench which they placed on one side of the table. They ran back to fetch another bench for the other side of the table. The older ones brought a couple of rough-made chairs that went on both ends of the table. Sigvald sat in one of them, Sylvan in another.

  There was not enough room for everyone, and a couple of younger bandits, as well as the prisoners, had to sit on the ground.

  Johanna, Nellie, Roald and Loesie ended up next to the saddles, which exuded the smell of horse.

  The bandits laughed and talked as if they owned this place and it was their right to be here.

  The farmer, whose name appeared to be Otto, called into the adjacent room, “Bring the soup now, Lenie.”

  Johanna revised her assessment of these people. While this was obviously a barn, the sheep were outside at this time of the year, and the family made money by offering travellers a simple place to stay. She guessed there hadn’t been any travellers for a long time. Who would willingly traverse that horrible sand?

  The farmer’s daughter brought in a large pan of soup that smelled wonderful, which she set on the table with the announcement, “The rabbits will be awhile cooking.”

  She first served the bandits, starting with Sigvald, and only came to Johanna, Roald, Nellie and Loesie when she had finished with all of the men.

  She handed Johanna a battered bowl, their eyes meeting. Lenie’s eyes were grey, and she wore her hair tied back in a severe bun that made her look much older than she was. “I didn’t know that women rode with Sigvald.”

  “We’re not part of his group,” Johanna said, well aware that that Sigvald had his head turned and was listening while pretending to talk to his fellows.

  “You’re travellers?”

  “Prisoners. We’re from Saardam.”

  The girl’s eyes widened. “Really? The home of the free church?”

  Free Church? “We have the Church of the Triune.”

  “That’s it.” She lowered her voice, “We’re Free Church members, too. That’s why we can’t live in Florisheim. You know how they allow magic over there?” She glanced at the bandits. Some had finished their soup.

  One of them yel
led, “Stop talking, serve us first!”

  The girl turned away. “I’m sorry, I’ve got to go. Will you pray with us later tonight? It would be an honour.”

  “Hurry up!” Sigvald yelled and another bandit hit the table with a thud.

  The girl went back inside and made her round past everyone at the table with a pan of mash.

  Johanna watched her sinewy arms as she lifted the heavy pan. She was really incredibly skinny. The Church of the Triune? Here? Really?

  When the girl got to Ludo, he squeezed her behind. She shied away from him.

  She finished her round and came back with bowls for Johanna, Nellie, Roald and Loesie.

  “Be careful of that one,” Johanna said in a low voice, glancing at Ludo. “He’s been harassing us the entire journey. Don’t give him ideas.”

  The girl gave her a strange look. She picked up her pan and walked out without a further word. No thanks, no questions.

  Oh well, at least she’d warned the girl.

  The soup was watery, the bread made without butter or salt and the plates were stained and chipped. The rabbit was a little undercooked and the mash very bland. But it was warm and filled her belly for at least a little while. She met Nellie’s eyes over the top of Nellie’s bowl. “You’re all right?”

  Nellie nodded. Her cheeks were red from being outside all day.

  Both Loesie and Roald had finished their meals. Loesie lay curled up with her head on her hands, not unlike a cat. Her eyes were closed. Roald leaned back against one of the saddles, also with his eyes closed. His mouth was slightly open.

  Exhausted. Johanna felt like joining them.

  “Isn’t it terrible how these people live?” Nellie said softly. “They go to church and are good and honest people.”