For days, Chast headed south, plodded along, sleeping little, eating and drinking even less, his body moving in rote, preordained motions. It was not until the fourth day after leaving Maisie and his wagon behind that anything out of the ordinary happened. It was an overcast afternoon foretelling of a coming summer shower, and the resulting darkness on the forest floor was near enough to midnight as to make no difference. Still plodding along unevenly, his shorter leg aching now as if each step multiplied the short distance further it had to travel than its companion. Needles worked their way up through the pads of his feet and through his calves. There was nothing for it; there was a reason he spent much of his time in his wagon letting Maisie pull him along. Men who are long in the tooth with one leg shorter than the other weren’t made to be traveling long distances on foot.

The first rumble of thunder sounded in the distance, and moments later a flash of lighting lit up the forest around him. Chast had slept many nights outside in his life and was more familiar than most with the sudden, searing clarity a burst of lightning could inflict upon a landscape in its split second of existence, and this lightning strike was different than any he had seen before. His senses were awakened from their drudgery of the past days as the flash struck home, and time froze, the whole of the forest visible before him in brilliant color. To his left, a deer pissed behind a holly bush, in the canopy leagues away, a bat flew in silhouette, the confusion of darkness drawing him from the hollow of his dead tree. But most important was what Chast saw a few leagues to his East.

To his East, the lightning did not simply illuminate, but was reflected. Chast did not waste any time; there was no telling how long the darkness of storm clouds would last, and would give cover to his movement if he was careful. He moved methodically East, the ache in his short leg and the accumulated dreariness of days on the road fading as he went, giving way to adrenaline and fear. Each step was carefully taken. There were twigs to be avoided, and branches to bend and sneak by without letting them snap back into position. When he felt as if he had closed within a league of his quarry, Chast dropped to a crouch and continued on at a slow pace, closing the gap until he could hear the rustle of cloaks, the clink of chains, and the gruff voices of men used to their power.

Over the years, Chast had become largely inured to the images of Island Guards abusing their power, brutalizing Mainlanders, and taking advantage of local tavern keepers for free ale and board in the name of their so-called duty. For reasons unknown to Chast, the notion of free and fair trade was evidently a bridge too far, and consequently guards were frequently his best customers in whatever town he visited. It made sense; most folks didn’t have hard coin to spend, but Island Guards were among the lucky few who nearly always did. They rarely offered him a trade, but purchased his goods without bartering, paying the price he first quoted most times. He tried not to think of this arrangement as a purchased silence. He tried to.

From behind the gauzy curtain of a sambucus shrub, Chast looked into the clearing where a group of prisoners were being led in a single file line through the forest. They were chained at the wrists with their legs left free, but the entire line of them were chained together in a dismal, clinking, caterpillar formation so that the thought of group escape was effectively null. The high, shined boots, green tunics with SIS stitched into the shoulder, and bullwhips in hand gave away the captors as Island Guards.

It was the bright links in the chains which bound the captives together that had caught the flash of lightning and glinted brightly in the old trader’s peripheral vision. As much as he sympathised with them, there was little he could do to help them. One old man with a blunt machete would not do much good against three Island Guards. The smart thing to do was to creep back West the way he had come. It wouldn’t do any good to add another prisoner to the line. He watched as the sad, clinking caterpillar of disheveled men shuffled out of the clearing and into the trees, disappearing into the quickly-developing mist that preceded the downpour of a summer shower. He crept back West in shame and all the faces came back to him vividly.

The girl in Umlea whose scream was muffled by the leather glove the guard shoved into her mouth as he dragged her behind the barn.

The old man shackled to a hitching post in Freiland’s square for unknowingly emptying his pipe ash on a guard’s boot.

The cripple whose shop failed an inspection and was put in chains to be taken away. His crutches were unusable with shackled hands and he was dragged through the mud, the other prisoners forced to pull his dead weight and listen to his pleadings for mercy, for one of them to put him out of his misery with a well aimed blow.

The clink of the guards’ coins into Chast’s coffers was the clink of well-greased chains.

As Chast slunk back Westward, the sky opened up and a hard rain began to fall.