Free Exile's Return by Raymond E. Feist Page B

lack of hope. For these workers, each day was an exercise in survival; tomorrow would take care of itself.
    Kaspar felt a mixture of impatience and resignation. He was anxious to make as much progress as possible every day and to return home as rapidly as he could to settle accounts, but he knew the journey would take time, and that time was also dependent on many factors outside of his control.
    His struggle across the harsh wilderness before he found Jorgen and his mother had been simple physical hardship, but the week he had spent laboring at the caravanserai had been as miserable a week as he had ever spent. It had exposed him to a level of human wretchedness which he’d never experienced before in his privileged life.
    He had learned that the War, as it was known locally, had taken place when Kaspar was just a boy. The Kingdom of the Isles had defeated the armies of the Emerald Queen at the battle of Nightmare Ridge, when Kaspar had been barely out of nappies. Yet the effects were still being felt decades later.
    Many of the laborers were the children of people driven from their homes by the advancing horde. The enemy had enlisted every able-bodied man they found, giving them the choice at sword-point: to fight for them, or die. Women were taken as whores, cooks, and menial laborers, and even some young boys were forced to serve with the luggage carts.
    Thousands of children had been orphaned, and there had been no one to care for them. The weak had died, and those who did survive grew up wild, without any sense of family outside their gang of thugs, or loyalty beyond a petty bandit chieftain.
    Bringing order to such a place would tax the wits of the most talented of rulers, Kaspar thought. He knew that if he was given the task, he would begin much the same way this Raj of Muboya had: by consolidating a core area, making sure it was stable and prosperous, and then expanding the sphere of influence, turning the influence into control. The young Raj might do this for most of his life before facing any organized opposition to the north.
    As Kaspar had lived with the porters and teamsters for a week, they answered his questions and he had learned a great deal about the local area. To the east lay the Serpent River and beyond that the wasteland controlled by the nomadic Jeshandi; it seemed they had no interest in what occurred on this side of the river. But across the Serpent they ruled supreme; even the Emerald Queen’s army had been sorely pressed on that flank by the Jeshandi. Kaspar had read reports of the war from his father’s archives when he was a boy and given the immense size of the Queen’s army, Kaspar assumed the Jeshandi had to be a formidable cavalry to have avoided obliteration.
    To the west rose the Sumanu Mountains and beyond them vast grasslands that rolled down to the River Vedra and a string of petty city-states. That natural barrier protected the Raj from conflict to the west. To the south, other minor nobles and self-styled rulers held territory, but from the rumors, the Raj was already halfway to winning a happy little war with one of his neighbors in that direction.
    But far to the south, on the coast of the Blue Sea, lay the City of the Serpent River, about which these locals knew little. Once, it had held sway from the sea all the way up to the Serpent Lake, and had been ruled by a council of clans indigenous to the area. More than that, Kaspar didn’t know. Still, that was where ships docked, some from as far away as the Sunset Isles, the southern Keshian cities, and sometimes even Queg and the Kingdom. Which meant a way home for Kaspar. So, that was where he was bound, war or no war.
    The wagons continued to bump along and Kaspar kept his eyes scanning the horizon in case trouble appeared unexpectedly. He thought it was unlikely, as the farther south they traveled from Muboya, the more peaceful the countryside seemed. At least, until they ran into the rumored war.
    Kaspar sat at the rear of