Finding Savini: Adini's Quest, #2

By Ann Stratton

That strange little foreign nun had started all this, started Adini Smith Bronze and Savini Housekeeper Bronze on this trip, telling Adini she was meant for greater things. Adini didn't give her too much mind, except to worry about the Churchmen finding out she had been consorting with an unbeliever, because she had her own greater things to worry about: her Journeyman exams, finding a job and somewhere to live. Then she took on the Examination Board on Savini's behalf when her own mistress wouldn't, bending them to her will somehow, when the Examination Board bent to no one except maybe the Church.

 

Without any other prospects, the two women left the town they'd been born and raised in, leaving behind everything and everyone they ever knew. 

 

And then... Savini disappeared.

 

Adini needed Savini. Savini had said that Adini couldn't take care of herself any more than a man could, and it was true. Adini couldn't even light a fire, despite her life at the forge, and cooking was not a skill she had mastered either. Savini was her last link to home, where the two of them had grown up in the same orphanage, the only other familiar face in this strange world of strangers who looked funny and spoke in gibberish.

 

The story of Adini's search for the one last person in the world who knew her.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ann Stratton
• Release date: Jul 29, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393655756

Ann Stratton

Ann Stratton started writing at age thirteen with the usual results. After a long stint in fan fiction, honing her skills, she hopes she has gotten better since then. She lives in Southeastern Arizona, trying to juggle all her varied interests. 

Book preview

Adini’s Quest, Book Two:

Finding Savini

Ann Stratton

A Blind Woman Production publication

Copyright © 2020 Ann Stratton

To give the reader more of a sample, the front matter appears at the end.

* * *

That strange little foreign nun had started all this, started Adini Smith Bronze and Savini Housekeeper Bronze on this trip, telling Adini she was meant for greater things. Adini didn’t give her too much mind, except to worry about the Churchmen finding out she had been consorting with an unbeliever, because she had her own greater things to worry about: her Journeyman exams, finding a job and somewhere to live.

Then she took on the Examination Board on Savini’s behalf when her own mistress wouldn’t, bending them to her will somehow, when the Examination Board bent to no one except maybe the Church. Of course after that, Savini didn’t have any more jobs or homes than she did, and the Industrial Towns don’t have any patience with indigents. Without any other prospects, the two women left the town they’d been born and raised in, leaving behind everything and everyone they ever knew. Savini didn’t mind so much because she was done with the whole culture of the Industrial Towns, but Adini was quite literally and figuratively lost.

Far from their home and anything familiar, leaving Irontown on the shore of the inland ocean, they learned their life on the road the hard way. They traveled according to Adini’s vaguely defined ideas, leaving the Industrial Towns and their associated farmlands. The people became stranger and stranger, speaking languages neither Adini nor Savini knew, living lives that made no sense at all. Some of them lived in little settlements, growing food and animals. Many of them roamed the countryside hunting or raiding the settled people, terrifying the two women. Neither of them had any idea of how to defend themselves, though they had successfully managed to fight off several attackers, mostly by surprise.

They stayed close to the main road as best they could, joining the roadside encampments for the company and mutual defense. Usually they could find a Rover there, who had a few words of Townish, so they could ask for help or shelter or trade for food or supplies. They were the only people who spoke the only language Adini and Savini knew and so Adini bit her tongue and held her hammer, doing her best to look fierce while Savini bargained for what they needed.

Adini needed Savini. Savini had said that Adini couldn’t take care of herself any more than a man could, and it was true. Adini couldn’t even light a fire, despite her life at the forge, and cooking was not a skill she had mastered either. Savini was her last link to home, where the two of them had grown up in the same orphanage, the only other familiar face in this strange world of strangers who looked funny and spoke in gibberish.

- 1 -

Adini and Savini had gotten onto a more heavily traveled section of the main road, somewhere in the dark. They had risen before the sun to resume their journey, but even then, traffic was heavy. In addition to the usual mail riders, who neither slowed nor swerved in the swift completion of their rounds, two more coaches thundered past showering them in dust. A wagon train of at least fifty wagons long, another two parties of hrsenli riders spectacularly dressed with their pale hair in elaborate arrangements, and an absolutely interminable line of people who marched single file down the middle of the road chanting some kind of walking song to the beat of their feet. This didn’t count the other usual travelers who filled the remaining empty spaces on the road.

They’d had to separate or get run over by the first coach. The next mail rider cut it too close to Adini, showering her with clumps of dirt and gravel from his long legged strider’s sharp hooves. By the time she got the dirt out of her eyes, she couldn’t see Savini anywhere.

Savini! she called, but there was no response. Adini ran to the other side of the road, cutting through a line of heavily laden porters, and looked up and down. No Savini. She called again, with no results.

Adini tried to look everywhere at once and almost fell, overbalanced by her heavy pack. The first of the marchers arrived, chanting his song, with his fellows close behind, and Adini couldn’t get back to the first side of the road. They didn’t stop or slow any more than the mail riders did, moving just fast enough that she couldn’t duck between them. With no language in common, she couldn’t ask them to let her through either.

She walked back the way she and Savini had come, trying to look between the marchers and be heard above their song. She walked as far as the wide spot where they had had to move aside for the mail rider—at least, she thought it was; they all looked alike to her—but she couldn’t see Savini there, or in the distance, or close by. She climbed up the nearest hill, but only saw rolling grass lands as far as the edge of the world. More travelers had trampled whatever tracks there might be, not that Adini knew how to track, so she couldn’t find Savini that way. She walked back along the road as far as she dared, looking and calling.

Adini had to jump aside for another mail rider. Behind her, another line of porters. Traffic was just heavy enough that getting from one side of the road to the other was taking her life in her hands. No one spoke any language she recognized, and certainly not Townish, if they did stop to listen to her. Several wagon drivers tried to convince her to climb aboard their wagons and ride along with them, but Adini refused their offers as politely as she could, given the lack of a common language. They were foreigners and usually men, and she didn’t trust them anyway.

The longer Adini couldn’t find Savini, the more afraid she became. She walked until her feet hurt, but nothing looked familiar. She couldn’t find the spot where they had spent the night. She turned around and walked the way she had come along the wide, nearly straight road that rose and fell and curved gently through the hills and realized it all looked the same. Desperate and footsore, she bit her lip and looked into the faces of her fellow travelers for any sign of familiarity.

By sundown, she was exhausted, terrified, and famished. She carried the tent, but Savini had the fire makings and cooking equipment and most of the food. Around the overnight camps, the grass had been grazed down to bare dirt, leaving nothing that Adini could identify as edible. A little stream ran under the road through a stone work culvert, but the water there didn’t look very clean.

Adini found a bare spot away from the road but close enough to see and hear. She sat with her hammer and tongs in her hands, watching the gathering gloom and listening to the noises that came out of it. Road noise diminished as the light went away, but strange rustles and calls from the grasslands around her rose up to fill the night, noises she had no idea of or how to interpret.

She thought she’d gotten used to the dark in the wilderness, with nothing but the moon and stars to light the sky, but without Savini, she was more alone than she had ever been in her life. No one spoke her language, everyone looked funny, she was sure somebody was following her, she had no way to make a fire and nothing to cook in it, even if she had some way to cook it. She was completely out of her element here in the open country, where every hill or clump of grass hid some predator or attacker, where every noise was something ready to attack or hurt her. She was hungry with no way to get more food. Her body hurt with the exertion and lack of food, and she was lost.

She only slept when her eyes went shut, until her head hit her knees, waking at every little noise. If she dreamed, she didn’t remember.

The dawning light woke her at last, not in the least rested. She clutched her hammer and tongs and stared around herself, not knowing where she was. The early mail rider flew past, frightening her with his sudden noise and appearance, and Adini panted, heart pounding, watching him to make sure he didn’t turn his strider off the road and attack her.

He didn’t, though, and disappeared over the hill, the sound of his strider’s hoof beats disappearing in the distance. Adini gulped, trying to slow her heart. She put her hand over her mouth to muffle her panting and realized she was crying, sobs choking her throat. Tears streamed down her face, burning her cheeks with hot salt. What was she going to do?

She couldn’t go back to Irontown, even if she knew how to get there. Same for any other settlement or other place she and Savini had stopped at. The nun in Irontown had told her she was more than this, that she had a destiny to fulfill, but the strange little woman hadn’t given her any direction or, or, anything. Just pushed Adini out of the town she had been born and raised in, away from everything she knew and understood, and now Savini was gone too, her last tie with her old life.

She should never have left Irontown. She would have found a job somewhere, somehow, if she had to sign her life away to the Beggars’ Union, if she had to spend another seven years apprenticed to another trade. She could do it, she could. If she would work at the forge all day, then any other trade would be a simple feat in comparison.

She could have gotten married, if she could have found a man who was willing to overlook the trade she had been apprenticed to all her life, or maybe willing to take her because of it. Being a smith was not particularly womanly, but it was a valuable skill.

She’d still have Savini. Savini wouldn’t be lost here in the open plains. Savini would be safe and running her own business, or maybe properly married to a man who appreciated her abilities.

Adini managed a snort at herself. Not Savini. She had no use for men in any way whatsoever, not after her experience with her mistress and her family. Savini had no use for Irontown in general, and was the main impetus to getting Adini out of her own rut and out here.

Reminded why she was out here, Adini loosened her grip on her hammer and tongs enough to wipe her eyes and nose on her ragged and filthy sleeve. Sitting here crying dishonored Savini’s memory and sacrifice, even as it proved her right again. Adini couldn’t take care of herself without Savini there to tell her what to do.

Adini sobbed again. Her stomach grumbled, empty. Startled out of her self pity, she put her hand on her stomach for a moment, not realizing what the noise was.

Savvie, I’m hungry, she said to herself.

Then get up and get something to eat, she answered herself. You told Savini you could take care of yourself. Now prove it.

Adini staggered upright, using her hammer as leverage so her pack wouldn’t pull her over. She had to stand there for a few terrifying moments until the dizziness passed. She raised her head and looked around her.

The ground here in this roadside park had been pounded down so hard neither grass nor brush grew there, and the little stream nearby was trodden down to a muddy, filthy mess, littered with the body wastes of every animal in the world, two and four legged.

Here and there stood the remains of fires, ashes and charcoal piled high. The rank smell of wet ash reached her nostrils, along with discarded grease and food wastes. Between the dead fires lay scattered trash.

Maybe someone had left something she could use. Adini stumbled toward the nearest ash pile, fell on her knees beside it, and pawed through the cinders. Nothing there besides gravel and bits of charcoal, that left her hands covered in soot. She crawled on hands and knees to the nearest trash pile, which consisted of broken pottery and a piece of torn fabric. No food there either.

She crouched there, head on her hands for support. After a little while, she realized she didn’t have her hammer or tongs and raised up in panic, looking for them. Her pack pulled her over backwards and she lay there, crying again, too weak to do more than lie there helplessly.

The first coach of the day rumbled past, rousing her from her desperation. In the distance she could hear the marchers’ walking song and from that gathered the strength to roll over and get her hands and knees under her again. Getting up again was a struggle, with the pack on, but she managed it, panting.

The marchers didn’t even turn their heads as they walked down the road, singing. Adini watched them, head spinning, making sure they were gone before she looked for her hammer and tongs.

There they were, right where she had left them. She might have run, but sudden movement almost knocked her over again and she walked slowly to the tree, using it for support as she picked up her precious tools.

Her canteen still had a little stale water in it, so she drank it slowly. The water let her think a little more clearly, and she remembered her pack still had a little jerky and acorn flour hardtack.

Getting out of the pack was easy. Adini pulled her shoulders in and shrugged out of the straps and the heavy thing fell hard. She crouched down and dug through it, pushing her hands down past the tightly rolled tent, feeling for the packet of jerky and hardtack.

Not much was left, just a couple of strips of jerky and a couple of hard tack crackers. Dry and unsavory as they were, she could have eaten everything and drunk all her water, but she forced herself to put all but one jerky strip and one cracker back in her pack under the tent again. She chewed slowly, reducing each hard won bite to a salty mush on her tongue before swallowing it, chasing it down with a cautious sip of water.

She looked at the filthy stream again and did not want to refill her water bottle from it. The little bit of food gave her enough strength to get the pack back up in her shoulders and stagger to her feet. A line of porters looked at her in curiosity as she stepped out onto the road. She didn’t bother hailing them because they wouldn’t have understood her to begin with, and they were foreigners anyway.

She stood there on the side of the road, looking one way and the other, seeing the porters disappearing into the forest. A faint rumble warned her of an oncoming coach and she turned away as the massive vehicle rumbled past, showering her with dirt and clods from the draft animals and wheels.

When the dust settled, she looked up and down the road again. None of it looked familiar. In the morning light, the grazed land looked completely different than it had in the evening light and she could not remember which way she had come.

She couldn’t stay here. Adini choked back a sob of loss and indecision.

Savini would know what to do. Where was Savini? Where could she look for Savini?

Something had pushed her out here into the wilderness. That little foreign nun, back in Irontown, who had told Adini that she had to discover what she was truly meant for, had not given her any directions at all. If the little foreign nun was right here, Adini would be very inclined to shake her hard for being so useless. Adini would demand real answers and directions back to Irontown.

There was no way back to Irontown. Irontown was lost to her forever. Even if she did go back, how would she be received? Townies didn’t like immigrants, even their own, and now that Adini had left town of her own free will, she was as much a foreigner as anyone from out of town. She might have her certification and the cuff that marked her as a free adult citizen, but that didn’t mean she had a home or a job or any other means of support. As an orphan, she had no family to fall back on. As a certified adult, she couldn’t go back to the orphanage. Her funds were nearly gone, so she couldn’t buy a room at a hostel or rooming house. Appealing to the Smiths’ Guild meant she would have to apprentice herself all over again and she was a free and certified Smith already. She shouldn’t have to go through that all over again, and who knew if her new master would accept that?

Going home to Irontown was out of the question. It wasn’t her home anymore, anyway.

Adini sobbed again and turned right, for lack of any other direction.

- 2 –

Adini walked along the side of the road, where it had been beaten down by many feet, mostly porters. She had to stumble down into the ditch to avoid them, or out into the rutted road, where the singing marchers walked single file down the middle, only splitting up to allow the passage of mail riders or coaches. None of them so much as glanced at Adini, standing on the side of the road.

None of the marchers looked like any people Adini had ever seen, at least not in Irontown or any of its visitors. They were shorter than she for the most part, with little padding to their bodies, but their legs were powerfully muscled, both sexes, and they tended to dress in little more than loincloths and long shirts. Most of them walked barefoot. They carried small packs, but she’d never seen a one of them in any of the pullouts or roadside camps she stopped at.

Lost in their own little world of marching and singing, she might as well be a clod of dirt they stepped over.

Even so, they had to give way before the freight wagons, long heavy things loaded with all manner of heavy goods, pulled by hrsen, shaggy long horned bison, or huge powerful horses. Everybody gave way to the freight wagons, even the mail riders and coaches. The drovers were a motley lot of little men and women, who tended to walk rather bow legged when they got down off their wagon seats, and who called and shouted at their animals with just as much emphasis as they talked among themselves and their crews. It was probably just as well Adini couldn’t understand what they said, as it was probably profane. They wore sturdy leather pants and loose shirts over sturdy shoes, and braided their hair with beads and covered their faces with cloth against the dust. They were a close and clannish bunch at camp, though they often asked others to join their trains.

The drovers, mail riders, and coach drivers tended to be look much the same. They were probably all members of the same tribe, Adini realized, not unlike