Preserving Hope Page 19

  They team exchanged glances. Finally, Gerald shrugged. “Nothing much waiting for me back home, outside a bunch of ungrateful louts who think they’re special. Let’s stay for a while.” The others nodded in grim agreement, resigned to their likely fate upon their return to a place they might never again call home.

  The roads dried out, and they were able to make good time over the next two days, reaching the outskirts of Richland just before sundown. They pitched their camp again, with the expectation that they’d make their way into Richland in the morning.

  Will found Elizabeth sitting with her back to one of the wagon wheels, facing the town from her distant vantage point, her knees pulled up to her chest and her arms around her legs. Her facial expression was difficult to read. Will sat down next to her. “Nervous?”

  Elizabeth was quiet for a moment before responding. “Confused.”

  “What about?”

  “About what I’ll see there. I’ve never left our village before, other than the baths and that short time I hid after Mother’s death. I don’t know what other people look like, or what type of clothes they wear, or how they talk. I don’t know if they’re friendly or if they’re more like Father. And I don’t know how to Trade.”

  “I’ve met a lot of people,” Will said. “And I’ve found that with very rare exceptions, people are good unless they are consumed by some type of fear. Some fear losing their loved ones, or their possessions, or their money. Others, like Arthur, fear a loss of power and control. Others fear the unknown. Whatever it might be, it’s that fear that makes them behave poorly. If you show people how to overcome their fears, then the motivation for unfriendliness goes away.”

  “I don’t know anything about him,” Elizabeth said, her voice barely above a whisper. “Isn’t that strange? I’m almost nineteen years old, and yet I know almost nothing about my father. If you’re right, though, something in his life made him fear power held by others, and being controlled by others, and so he strives to gain it for himself and hold it, so that he never need feel that lack of power or control again. I wish I knew what that was, what that experience was, because maybe, if I can help him get over that…”

  Will turned his head, and looked at her. “You are a truly good person, Elizabeth. No matter what happens in the future, never forget that. It doesn’t matter who your parents are or what they’re like. Despite everything, you are still here trying to find good in this man rather than taking the easy and safe route of running away, and for what it’s worth, I’m proud to call you a friend.”

  Tears formed in her eyes. “Likewise, Will.”

  Will smiled.

  They entered the town of Richland the next morning, greeting many of the guards and vendors by name. Elizabeth, the newest Trader, was an anomaly, and her flaming red hair made her stand out. Unaccustomed to the attention of others not intending her harm, Elizabeth folded her arms across her chest and kept her head down, fearful that someone would harm her in some fashion. “Keep your head up and smile,” Will told her. “Be confident. Arthur is nowhere near us. No one here will hurt you. In fact, you’ll find yourself happily accepted and welcomed here.:

  Your doing? Her projection was loaded with the implication that any friendliness she’d experience would be due to him using his push-Empathy skills to instill such feelings in those they’d encounter.

  Not necessary. One day you’ll understand that are worthy of love and friendship, Elizabeth. I’m hopeful you’ll start to see that during our stay here.

  He could sense her disbelief that this could be true, but her doubt mingled with the hope that maybe, just maybe, Will was right.

  They entered the market area, as was their custom, and greeted many of the merchants who had become familiar friends in the many visits over the past three years. The sense of familiarity emboldened Elizabeth, who gradually emerged from her shell and became invaluable in the purchases for made for the villagers. She’d spent a great deal of one-on-one time with the neighbors over the preceding thirteen years, and in that time she’d become quite familiar with all of them in the Schola, learning their tastes, and fears, and interests. She’d familiarized herself with the list Eva built, and found herself a skilled shopper, able to pick out just the right coloring of clothing for the men, just the right style of jewelry for the women, or just the right types of supplies for the various master craftsmen. The Traders had always done well with their shopping, but Elizabeth knew exactly what those general lists meant. Her warmth came out, and between the intrigue of trading with a young woman with flaming red hair, the passion with which she fought for deals, or her impressive Energy development and corresponding empathic and telepathic skills, she engineered perhaps the most thoroughly successful purchasing mission in the history of the Traders. Elizabeth’s purchases were not only personalized, they had been procured at dramatically below the required cost. More incredibly, those she’d traded with felt that they had profited from the experience as well, and not just in financial terms. They’d become familiar with the general sweetness of Matilda, the firmness of Eleanor, and the savvy of Eva over the past few years; in Elizabeth, they found all of that and more.

  The innkeeper, Nicholas, greeted them with his standard warmth and showed them to their usual rooms. When they returned to the inn’s common room for their evening meal, the Traders introduced him to Elizabeth. He shook her hand and smiled. “I do not know where my friends come from, but I’ve learned that the women there are clever as well as beautiful. You are perhaps the best example of both of these qualities.” Elizabeth’s face quickly matched the color of her hair. His compliment drew a look of annoyance from Eleanor, one of offense from Matilda, and one of pride from Eva. Will chuckled.

  Her confidence buoyed by her Trading success and the compliments she received, Elizabeth took care with her appearance for the first time since Will had known her. As one accustomed to doing work each day which literally made her sick, she never bothered with brushing her hair or ensuring that her clothing was clean and well-maintained. At Will’s suggestion, she had brought with her some of the money she had earned creating the daily zirple concoctions as well as some of those taken back from Arthur. With Eva’s assistance, she purchased a hairbrush and a new dress, and the two women spent the next morning working the tangles out of her hair and brushing it until it looked like flowing fire. With her new dress on, she looked like a different person. And when she entered the common room for the midday meal, Will wasn’t the only one staring at her. Will remembered her from the future, and today was the first time she’d had truly looked like Hope.

  Elizabeth glanced around, acutely aware of the attention paid her, and, aware of the thoughts of jealousy in many of the women and the amorous thoughts of the men, she once again flushed crimson. Why are they staring at me like that, Will? That’s how people stare at beautiful women. I’m not beautiful. Eva is beautiful. Matilda is beautiful. I’m just the freak with the red hair.

  Will managed to project a smile at her. It seems to be the unanimous vote of this room that you’re wrong on at least one of those points, Elizabeth. You are a beautiful woman, inside and out.

  He saw her smile faintly from across the room. Thank you, Will. I can always count on you to keep my spirits up.

  The Traders assembled at a table over their morning meal. “We previously decided to stay here for a few weeks,” Eva said. “We’ve completed our sales and purchases for others, and thus we can spend our remaining time here working for ourselves and earning our own money. Now that we’ve had time to think about this, are there any suggestions on what we can do to accomplish such a goal?”

  Silence greeted her. Each of the Traders looked at the others, hoping that someone else would speak up. Will finally looked at Elizabeth. “Before we entered this town, you told me that this team has talents. Do you remember that?”

  Elizabeth nodded. “We’re Traders. Why can’t we do that?”

  Aldus looked confused. “We’ve already done that
, though. We already finished all of the buying and selling.”

  Elizabeth faced him. “Yes, we did. For our community. What about doing the same thing for the people in this community?”

  Six sets of eyes stared at her, and Elizabeth became nervous, wrapping her arms around herself and looking at the floor, preparing herself for a verbal or physical assault like those she was accustomed to receiving. “Relax, Elizabeth,” Eva said, grasping her shoulder with a gentle touch. “We’re not angry, just confused. We don’t understand what you mean.”

  “Right,” Matilda said. “Can you explain this idea?”

  Elizabeth nodded. “We’re good at taking goods and going to a new community and selling them for a big profit. Why can’t we take goods from Richland and go to another town and sell for them, just as we always do? Same type of deal, where we split the profit?”

  The confused faces became thoughtful, and slowly each of the Traders nodded. “I like this idea,” Gerald said. “I’m not a person who likes to stay long in one place, at least one that’s not my home. Let’s ask the merchants if they have extra goods to sell, and we’ll take them to the next town over and split the profits with them.”

  Will nodded, then frowned. “We can’t simply leave with their goods. They like us, but they probably won’t trust us enough not to run off with their goods and never return. We don’t have enough money to buy their goods ahead of time, either. So we’d need to leave them something that would guarantee we’d come back.”

  “Why not all of the goods we bought for the community?” Elizabeth asked. “That’s a lot of coins worth of material; we’d not spend the effort to buy them and then run off.” The Traders nodded, and then raised their mugs of wine – created by their own neighbors – in a toast to their newest member and her brilliance. Elizabeth blushed anew.

  The next morning, the Traders left with two wagons full of goods from Richland. Two days later, they returned, each pocketing 20 gold coins in profits. They repeated the process with different merchants and traveled to other cities circling Richland.

  Three weeks later, they left Richland, driving back three of the six wagons they’d started with, piled high with the goods they’d purchased for their neighbors. Their joy wasn’t lessened as they thought about the people who would likely try to rob them of their rightful Trading profit of 40 gold coins per Trader, who would likely continue to deny them access to the zirple that would grant them the supernatural abilities they’d all long sought, and who would possibly even banish all of them to the outside world.

  The Traders knew they’d be fine if that happened. They’d be hiding 150 gold coins each in a hidden space outside the community before returning home to the village. With the profits earned on this extended Trading mission, they could almost buy their own hidden city in the forest to live in, a place where none of them would need to worry about a tyrannical leader looking to deprive them of their freedom.

  XVIII

  Shunning

  The return to the community made the Traders wish they’d stayed in Richland.

  There were no shouts of welcome, no warm greetings, no stories of happenings while they’d been gone. Instead, their neighbors gave them only cold stares, and the only words offered related to demanding their money and purchases.

  Will realized that they’d misjudged what might happen in their extended absence. The Energy skills had improved in the weeks they’d been away, but none of the villagers had sufficient Energy yet to do much damage. They’d have minor successes in performing telepathy with each other, but would only get fleeting impressions of emotions or thoughts in anyone not trying to communicate in that fashion. Nevertheless, even those small successes had emboldened them all, and Arthur had been sure to stoke those thoughts to their illogical but emotional extreme.

  The Traders were the enemy.

  The Traders took their profits in transactions, selling goods they had not and could not make. They did not contribute to the food production that fed the villagers. They merely consumed, and as such any small good they did in handling Trade and freeing the others to focus solely on production was overshadowed. With their newly enhanced mental abilities, the residents could handle their own trading, and keep all of their profits rather than just half. The Traders had also not participated in the zirple consumption with the others, which was only fitting, as one of their number had been testing products — including zirple — for a dozen years and had failed to identify in the simple root the secret to unlocking the abilities they were all now developing. They were known, in at least one case, to have participated in conversations relating to denying others the fruits of that testing, and it was only right that these leeches were now denied access to the zirple. They had held others back in the past, financially and otherwise, and would continue to do so by draining food and other resources that could be better used by productive members of the village.

  In the morning, the Traders arrived at the gate for the morning bath, only to discover that the others had already left. By the time the Traders reached the Halwende River, the others were already dressed and beginning the journey back.

  Elizabeth had allowed her usual bedraggled appearance to return as they’d traveled back to the village. She was, however, emboldened by her Trading successes, and felt compelled to speak out. “And here I thought you’d miss me, Father. Why do you run away from me?”

  Arthur ignored her, but Maynard did not. He drew his long sword, marched to Elizabeth, and pointed the sword directly at her throat. “Watch your tongue, you filthy mongrel. You’d do well to learn to show respect to your betters. You may otherwise find our community’s generosity towards parasites like you… slipping.” He feigned slipping forward, which would have plunged the sword through her neck, but he held the blade still.

  “Do it, you coward!” she snapped. “The lot of you have been trying to kill me for years. Slit my throat, and my father will love you like the son he wishes he’d had. Or are you too weak to decide anything on your own?”

  Maynard lunged at her, grabbed her arm, and spun her around so that she was pinned against him. He put the long edge of the blade against her throat, and the villagers stopped to watch, uncertain what to do. “Hey, Will!” Maynard shouted. “What do you think I should do here?” Nervous laughter flitted through the villagers. Their words were tough, their anger stoked, but they were uncomfortable with the idea of the cold-blooded murder of a young woman.

  Will dispatched his nanos, creating a shield that covered Elizabeth’s neck, and sent the rest to cover the surface of the sword. He directed the nanos to gradually pull the sword down toward the ground, and the sudden weight took Maynard by surprise. “Looks like you need to make yourself a lighter sword, Maynard,” Will said. “That one appears to be a bit too heavy for you to control, and I’m concerned someone might get hurt.” The weight of the sword increased to the point that Maynard could no longer hold it upright, and it swung down in an arc, gaining weight the entire time, and slipped from his grasp. The blade embedded in the ground only inches from Arthur, who looked startled and then glared at Maynard. The metal smith looked at the blade, baffled.

  “Be careful, Maynard,” Will said. “Whether it’s guilt over your bullying of an unarmed woman or weakness of your arm, you really need to get a new sword. One more move like that and you might find yourself…” He paused, leaned forward, glanced around as if to make sure nobody else could hear, and then looked back at Maynard. “You might find yourself forced to be a Trader. And we seem to be out of business.”

  Elizabeth, who had managed to remain calm while having a sharp sword pressed to her throat, gathered her composure. Thanks for taking care of me, Will.

  My pleasure, he responded.

  Elizabeth turned to face Maynard, and patted him on the shoulder. “Maybe the zirple weakens sword-wielding muscles, Maynard. Perhaps you should consider cutting back on one of them.” And she walked away, heading toward the river, leaving Maynard confused as to wha
t had happened.

  Elizabeth elected to stay behind after the morning bath, and the six remaining Traders walked back to the village without her. The temporary joy they’d felt at the conclusion of the encounter with Maynard was undermined when they walked through the gate. They moved around to each of the craft masters, looking for opportunities to work, but none would take them on. Arthur and Maynard stood on either side of the collection of Shops, watching, ensuring that no one provided an opportunity for the Traders. Annoyed and hungry, they made their way to the chefs and bakers for their morning meals.

  “Two coppers,” the chef told Will, his gaze icy.

  Will stared at him. The cost per meal had always been one copper, and he had a hunch the sudden change wasn’t by chance. “When did the cost go up?”

  The chef glared at him. “Just now.”

  “And if I only pay one copper? The same price it’s always been?”

  “Then you’ll get nothing.”

  Will paid the two coppers for a meager ladling of the beef and vegetable stew. The other Traders, seeing themselves with no other options, followed suit. As they finished, Joseph, the carpenter, walked up behind them, handed the chef a single copper coin and received a generous portion of the stew.

  Will looked at the chef and arched an eyebrow. “Another new price change?”

  “What have you ever done for me, or for any of us?” the chef snapped.

  In answer, Will reached up and grasped the rope controlling access to the overhead flowing water system. The chef’s eyes widened as Will gave a gentle tug, and the falling water saturated the chef’s clothing.

  “Hey, Arthur!” Will called. “This guy’s doing a great job of making me feel unwelcome in the village. You should give him extra zirple or something to reward him! Or, better yet, give him the portion of somebody who’s not trying quite so actively to starve me and the other Traders.”