On the walk back to the compound, I was thinking about Dorado again.
I had been thinking about it for years, but lately the idea had started to feel less like a story I told myself and more like something I might actually do. I was eighteen now. The compound would not keep a room open for me forever, and I had never apprenticed to a trade. Most of the other boys had chosen something by then. Carpentry. Metalwork. Carts. Whatever they were good at, or whatever their fathers were willing to teach them.
I had kept taking whatever work Brother Tomas found for me. A wall. A cart. A day in a smithy. It paid, and I was good enough at most things to be asked back, but none of it told me where to go next.
Dorado seemed like a reasonable place to start. Five days on foot if the weather held. There were roads beyond it, and towns I had never seen, and work I had not already done. I did not know what I would choose when I got there. That was part of why I wanted to go.
Jorin and Tavi had gone on ahead with the tools. I stayed behind to collect our pay. The woman who owned the yard needed a wall, not a mason, so Brother Tomas had sent the three of us. Jorin was seventeen, Tavi fifteen, and I was eighteen, which made me the experienced one.
Jorin took the heavy stones if he got to the pile first. Tavi sorted the rest and complained whenever Jorin took one with a good face. We had worked side by side for two weeks, fitting the faces, checking the line, and setting the capstones. The woman pressed one of them with her palm before she paid me the amount Brother Tomas had agreed. I counted it once and put it away.
Two weeks' work. Enough for food, a little oil, and another few coins toward a road I had walked a thousand times without leaving town.
Most jobs lasted a day or three. A cart wheel. A broken hinge. A piece of iron that needed holding while somebody better trained hit it. Brother Tomas found the work, and I went where he sent me. By morning there would be something else. If there was not, I would find it myself.
I wiped my hands on my trousers, touched my necklace once, and started back. Fifteen minutes from her yard to the compound gates. Eight years of that walk, and I still count it sometimes, mostly to see if I am slower than I was.
Smoke from the kitchen when I came through the gates. Boys from the school crossing the yard. Someone arguing in the infirmary door. Ordinary evening.
Then I saw Brother Cale.
He came in by the side door at a pace I had never seen on him. Cale is unhurried. Even. He stops at the kitchen on his way through, every time. Cale is always eating. He is also always moving, which is why he has never managed to look like a man who eats as much as he does. He did not stop. Coat loose, sash twisted, boots loud on the flagstones, straight for the corridor to his room.
My mother used to call it curiosity, back when she was still around to say anything. I should have gone to the meal. I followed him instead.
He was at his door, working the latch, when I came up behind him.
“You alright?”
He turned. Same look he used to give me in the bread line, when I was small and he was deciding whether I got a second piece.
“Fine.” He got the door open. His hands would not settle. “You finished that wall?”
“Today.”
“Good.” He wiped his face on his sleeve. “I have work, if you want it. Paid. Hold something for me and meet me at the old watchtower tomorrow at midday. We start from there. I have a few things to put in order before we leave.”
He drew a flat dark rectangle from his coat. Smooth, cool, one seam along the edge. Church work. I had seen the sealed boxes in the chapel. I could not read it. Church people could.
“If I am not there, take it to Master Dren in Dorado. He will know what to do with it. I am sure it is nothing.”
He said it too quickly.
He set it in my hands. Heavier than it looked.
“You were never much for the Church,” he said. “That is why I am asking you. You will not just hand it over because someone in a sash tells you to.”
Then he was through the door, and the door shut.
I stood in the corridor a while. Put the thing in my pocket, next to my knife, and walked to my room.
Cale had never lied to me. Not in eight years of bread and questions and quiet kindness.
Dorado. Five days walking. I had been saving toward that road for years. Now I was being paid to take it.