Blade of the Avatar/Blade of Midras/Chapter 18

=Innocents=

Excerpt
“Six days I’ve been here,” Aren frowned. “Six of the most miserable days of my life.”

The late afternoon sun had just dropped below the western horizon, casting beautiful, soft shadows among the buildings of Opalis under its afterglow. Laughter sparkled through the air as groups of shop owners and craftsmen, some with the lamps already lit in the windows of their homes above, went about the work of closing for the day. Vendors, whose business time was only just beginning, were wheeling their carts to and fro along the great curve of the Muse Way – that great circular avenue that carried the carts and citizens around the outer ring of the city – each looking for their favorite place from which to sell their prepared foods and art.

“The most miserable days of your life?” Syenna rolled her eyes as she popped another small, steamed dumpling in her mouth from the greenleaf basket in her hand. She managed to talk around it as they strolled past the Fields Gate in the direction of Elders Hall. “I’ve watched you march through the mud in the rain, try to set up your tent in the midst of a blizzard so strong that it might have blown your horse away, and even watched you make your way across parched land where the only standing water would kill you from the smell alone. Now you’re trying to tell me that you’re miserable here?”

Aren looked balefully about at the gentle evening settling over the streets of Opalis.

“Very well then, Captain Bennis,” Syenna said, turning angrily toward her charge. “What is so terrible about your life here in Opalis?”