Free Froi of the Exiles by Melina Marchetta Page B

refused to yield. Her beloved daughter Vestie sat on the verandah waiting for Trevanion, who had kept away these past days. In the distance, she saw two more of her villagers take leave with all their possessions for the more fertile land of their neighbours and a loneliness and dread gripped Beatriss more fiercely than in those wretched years when the kingdom was torn apart.
    In the valley between Lumatere and Alonso, the wife Lucian of the Monts had sent back camped in a cave between her father’s province and her husband’s mountain. She recorded the names of her people, and learnt the ways of the Lumateran healers. Most nights her shame burnt bright and she longed to return home. But she pledged to herself and the goddess she had chosen to be her guide, that one day Phaedra of Alonso would be something more than the object of the Monts’ ridicule and Alonso’s failure.
    In the mountains, Lucian stumbled to his empty cottage, his body weighed by the weariness of leading a people who had little respect for him. He wondered what his father would do, if he lived. A fair man, Saro was, who had tried to teach Lucian to see the worth in every man and woman, regardless of whether they were the enemy. But Lucian was not his father and deep inside of him a desire burnt bright each night. A desire to steal away down the mountain and cut the throats of every Charynite who slept in the valley. Including that of the wife he sent back.

Part Two
The Reginita

Chapter 6
    L umatere had always been a feast for Froi’s eyes. Even during the years of little rain, it was a contrast of lush green grass and thick rich silt, carpeting the Flatlands and the river villages. But Charyn was a kingdom of rock and very little beauty. Here, the terrain was a rough path of dirt, pocketed with caves and hills of stone. Sometimes the dry landscape was peppered with wild flowers or the mountains of rock were shaped like the ghouls and spirits painted in the
Book of the Ancients
Froi had seen in the Priestking’s cottage. Wind holes had been carved out of the caves and from afar they resembled the dug-out sockets of eyes.
    Rafuel and the Priestking had instructed Froi that most of the Charynites had migrated to the kingdom from all corners of Skuldenore. The only original inhabitants had been the Serkers, who had now disappeared, although stories existed of underground cities where Serkers and other nomads were in hiding from the King and plotting their revenge.
    Stone, stone, rock, stone and more stone.
    Froi met his guide outside the province walls of Alonso, the birthplace of the wife Lucian had sent back. It was a province bursting with unwanted newcomers, a place on the brink of war within its walls. These days it accommodated its desperate neighbours from the smaller provinces all but wiped out by plague and drought. Froi suspected that the Provincaro’s marriage of his daughter to Lucian had little to do with a promise between two men and more to do with a need to make use of the Lumateran valley.
    Apart from the capital, which was known as the Citavita, there were six provinces left in Charyn, each one of them large, powerful and containing the most fertile land in the kingdom. There were also a handful of mountain tribes or nomads who kept very much to themselves. Rafuel had explained that if a clan chose to stay outside the major walls of a larger province, there was always the threat of the palace riders collecting their young men to be part of the King’s army or taking their lastborn girls. At least in the provinces, people were protected by the Provincari who still had power against the King. The palace’s greatest fear was that the Provincari would unite their armies against the King, but after the annihilation of Serker, no Provincaro was willing to take that chance.
    The guide’s name was Zabat from the province of Nebia, east of the capital. He spent much of his time not looking Froi in the eye, which was never a good