Chapter 3: Mint

The war between Genna's hair and Genna's headband had been running since she was six, and the Corvale wind entered it on the hair's side. She stopped at the second switchback to retie the band, and stood a moment with her arms up and her eyes shut against the grit, and listened to the road. This was her father's trick, listening to a road, and he'd never once been able to explain what he meant by it, which at age eleven she had marked down as mysticism and at age twenty-three, standing on the ale road while it carried half a country the wrong direction, she finally understood. A road has a sound when it's working. Wheels, feet, the talk of people going somewhere they've chosen. The Corvale road had stopped making that sound. What came down the pass now was the sound of people going somewhere they'd been sent, which is a different sound, lower, and it does not stop at night. The refugees had begun a half day out of Marrowell, in ones and families, and thickened toward the hills until the road was a single conversation eleven miles long, and Genna, walking west against it, was the only person going up. She walked it in the sunglasses, which the grit and the low sun had promoted, inside a day, from invention to equipment, and which had a secondary property their maker had not advertised: she could hear about her father all day long with her eyes doing whatever they liked. There was a use for smoked glass the knight had not named. The Cracking had not finished. She'd assembled that much from the traffic. It had not been one morning of catastrophe but a settling-in, a new weather: the ground let go somewhere every day, near or…