‘Yes,’ he answered, then with a flick of the reins he started his team, deftly moving the horses to skirt around Sandreena.
As he rode past, she shouted, ‘Where is it?’
‘You said one question, and I answered it,’ was his reply and the boys burst out laughing.
Suddenly impatient, Sandreena turned and urged her horse on, quickly overtaking the wagon. With one swift motion she reached over, grabbed the man by the collar, hauled him off the seat and deposited him in the mud.
‘Try again,’ she said, her voice hissing with menace.
‘All right,’ said the man, rolling to his feet in one deft move. With three strides he was back alongside his wagon and then back on the seat. ‘Akrakon is down the road, maybe five miles. You’ll be there by supper.’
‘Thank you,’ she said, putting heels to her horse and urging it into a lazy canter. She wished to put as much distance between herself and the annoying man as quickly as possible.
Then she remembered what the Father-Bishop had said about the villagers being from one of the more annoying tribes of the region. She had thought he meant fractious and rebellious, but perhaps he simply meant they were rude.
*
As the man predicted, Sandreena rode into the village of Akrakon near suppertime. Two boys ran past her through the centre of the village, perhaps returning from overseeing a flock, or fieldwork, and now intent on reaching the day’s final meal. She overtook and pulled up her mount before them. ‘Has this place an inn?’
Neither boy answered her, but one pointed over his shoulder as he darted around one side of Sandreena’s mount, his companion dodging around the other. Shaking her head at the lack of civility so far demonstrated by these people, Sandreena wondered how much information she would be able to extract about the goings-on in the mountains above the village. She might have to club it out of them.
She had never seen a region like this one. Since leaving Krondor she had passed through miles of coastal lands, but none like this.
Both the Kingdom of the Isles and Roldem held claim to the long strip of coastal land running between the southern shores of the Sea of Kingdoms and the mountains called the Peaks of I ranquillity.
She assumed the tranquillity was reserved for those who lived south of that massive barrier, for the region between the Kingdom city of Timmons and Pointer’s Head was anything but tranquil. Two other cities rested between them, Deep Taunton and Mallow’s Haven, neither of which properly acknowledged either kingdom. The local nobles and merchants had enjoyed playing one kingdom off against another for decades, building their own alliances and keeping free of close supervision.
Only the mountains kept Great Kesh from also laying claim to the region; they tried in the past, but their attempt to annex the area had resulted in Roldem and the Kingdom putting aside their differences in order to drive Kesh south again.
Sandreena vaguely recalled from her history studies that the last battle had been fought over a century before, when a Kingdom duke from Bas-Tyra had driven Kesh out of Deep Taunton. That land was rich with forests and farms, this side of the Peaks of the Quar had little to covet. Since riding north from the port city of Ithra, she had seen nothing but rocky bluffs and stone-strewn beaches. It was a difficult road cut through in a dozen places by swiftly running streams hurling down from the peaks above. The woods towering above her looked dark and uninviting, and the only villages she encountered were small fishing enclaves, where the inhabitants scraped out a harsh existence.
Sandreena expected to find a few farming communities, else those fishing villages would have vanished ages before, yet she saw no gardens or fields. She deduced that they traded their catch for vegetables, fruits, and other necessities. If there were farming enclaves in the region, she didn’t encounter them; but there were occasional trails and pathways leading up into the hills, some with recent wagon tracks.
But what was strangest to Sandreena was there was no authority in the region. If Kesh claimed this part of the peninsula they invested nothing; gone were the usual outposts and patrols, governors or minor nobles, it was as if this rocky coastline had been forgotten by the Empire.