I looked around again, then quickly asked, “How far do you travel in your wagon these days? Do you go all the way to Aktau?”
“I do,” Horacio answered with a nod, his brow knitting in confusion.
Horacio might have been confused, but I was ready to sing for joy.
“How would you feel about taking six illegal passengers with you from the south side of the south hill the day after tomorrow?” I asked in a mumbled rush.
Horacio’s eyes went wide. “You’re not thinking of attempting to escape Royersford, are you?” he asked, also glancing around to make certain we weren’t being listened to.
“I’m planning to escape the Old Realm entirely,” I said. “With Appius, Mara, Lucius, Leander, and Darius. We’ve been planning an attempt to get to the frontier for months now, and you might be the last piece we need to put into place to make it.”
That seemed to both energize and terrify Horacio. “The mountain pass is gone,” he said. “You know that. You were there in the autumn, right after the new army was destroyed. The mountains are now impassable.”
I shook my head. “The mountains are impassable for wagons and armies and anyone wishing to do trade with the frontier,” I said. “But men crossed the mountains to the frontier before the pass was built, and we intend to do it now.”
“I…I suppose it would be possible,” Horacio said, shoving a hand through his hair. “The bridges have been destroyed and large swaths of the road have been covered in rubble, but no one knows how far that extends. Everything could be as it was last summer once you get far enough along the path.”
I hadn’t considered that, but now the idea excited me. Maybe it wouldn’t be as impossible to get back to Dushka as I’d worried it might be.
“But I don’t know anything about climbing mountains,” Horacio went on.
I shook my head and opened my mouth to explain, but the head cook stepped out of the kitchen to see what was holding up the delivery.
I snapped my mouth shut and lifted a barrel of fish into my arms. Horacio followed suit with a sack of grain.
After we’d made a few trips, I whispered, “All we would need is for you to pick us up at the bottom of the hill at dusk in a few days and drive us away from Royersford through the night. I figure one night of travel would be enough to get us far enough away that no one would suspect who we are or why we’re traveling to Aktau, so we might be able to travel in daylight for the rest of the way.”
Horacio made an uncertain sound. “That might be harder than you suspect,” he said.
I paused as I deposited another barrel just inside the kitchen. “Why?” I asked. “Is the countryside being watched by the king’s soldiers?”
“No,” Horacio said. He even laughed as he said it. “There aren’t enough soldiers to do more than watch the cities. Their sole purpose at the moment is to keep city people in the cities and country folk in the country without any communication between the two.”
I nearly dropped the barrel I was carrying. It reminded me so much of the way the cities in the frontier were with the forest and forest-dwellers. As we’d all learned on the frontier, no good at all came from isolation in the long term, but it was a fantastic way to turn people against each other.
Which was why I wasn’t surprised when Horacio went on with, “Country folk are suspicious of all city people now. You won’t be able to find food or shelter outside of the cities. They know their own kind, and they won’t help strangers anymore.”
Paradoxically, I smiled. “That tells me we’ll just need to bring along more supplies than I anticipated. We’ll bring enough with us so that we don’t have to stop before we reach the mountains.”
We’d carried a few loads into the kitchen, but in the process, we’d emptied the wagon, and there wasn’t really any further reason for the two of us to stand around talking. There was no time left to plan.
“It’s madness,” Horacio said, frowning in thought. “But then, everything is madness right now.”
“You’ve heard that General Reuben has started murdering students and staff at the college?” I asked, hoping he would take the question as motivation for all of us wanting to do something so dangerous.
“I have,” he said with a doleful look.
“The six of us go up to the south hill estates every Thursday,” I said quickly. “That’s two days from now. Is there any way you would be able to wait for us somewhere at the bottom of the hill and then take us as far as you can in the dark?”
“Horacio, come along,” one of the other deliverymen who had brought supplies called out, clearly impatient to leave the college.
Horacio let out a breath and scrubbed a hand over the bottom half of his face. I took that as a bad sign, and was surprised when he said, “Yes, I’ll do it.”
“You will?” A rush of giddy danger shot through me.
“I’ll meet you at the giant’s shoe,” he said, then turned and marched off to climb up to the seat of his wagon.
He was gone before I could ask him what he meant by a giant’s shoe. I assumed it was some sort of feature on the south side of the hills, someplace Mara might know about, since Royersford was her home.