Chasing the Valley Read Online Free PDF Page A

Has she returned home to find her house gone, her family lost amid the blood-streaked rubble? Maybe an alchemy bomb has replaced her home with wild flowers or a lake of rippling silver. There’s wailing now, a chorus of grief as her neighbours take up the call. I grit my teeth, grind each foot into the cobblestones and try to ignore them. There’s nothing I can do to help.
    I hesitate at the intersection. I don’t know which way to turn. It’s too late to find a bed in a hostel tonight; they all lock their doors at curfew. The thought of a night on the streets – now, when the world is a blur of death and flames and screams – is enough to turn my stomach. I can’t do it. I can’t stay here and listen to my family die over and over again.
    There’s another scream, this one from the opposite direction, and I make up my mind. My encounter with Radnor’s refugee crew has cemented something in the back of my skull. A feeling I never knew was brewing there . . . not until now, on the intersection of Rourton’s alchemy-bombed roads. I can’t do this any more.
    I refuse to do this any more.
    I refuse to spend my life in this grimy city, scaven­ging for food and sleeping in doorways. I refuse to reach my eighteenth birthday here, to be conscripted into King Morrigan’s army and shunted off to fight on behalf of the monarch who killed my family.
    I’m going to escape from Taladia. I’m going to find the Valley. And if Radnor’s refugee crew won’t take me, I’ll do it alone. Tonight. This is my chance. The city is in an uproar. People are battling fires, searching for their families, or – if they’re lucky – cowering in bunkers and waiting for dawn. Any obedience to the monarchy’s curfew has gone out the window and no one will notice a scrawny teenage girl. If there were ever a perfect night for escaping Rourton, this is it.
    I have no real possessions, beyond what I’m wearing. The clothes on my back and my mother’s silver bracelet, which is secured up high above my elbow. It’s a liberating thought. It means that I’ve got nothing to worry about or protect, nothing to retrieve in the jumble of a post-bombing frenzy. No possessions, no friends, no family. I can head straight for the city walls and make a good start on my journey before the night ends.
    I cross the intersection and start towards the edge of the city. There’s a thick plume of smoke and ash to my left, so I veer towards it. If anyone is looking out their window, hopefully they’ll assume I’m just a local girl running home to make sure her family survived. In all this haze, it would be hard to make out the ragged clothes and unwashed hair that mark me as a scruffer.
    Closer to the city outskirts, I see more signs of the bombs’ destruction. There’s a huge crater in the middle of a road, where white snowflakes fall upwards and melt into the dark sky. A few streets later, I stumble across what used to be Rourton’s library. The building is gone, but broken books and papers flock like seagulls in the night. Thorny vines unfurl across the rubble so fast that I can actually watch them grow. I stumble forward, searching for signs of survivors, but of course there’s nothing. No one ever survives an alchemy bomb.
    There’s nothing I can do.
    The night my family died, the bombings were caused by a woman from Gimstead, a smaller city west of Rourton. She managed to whip a few dozen scruffers into an attack on their city’s hunter headquarters, trying to steal some food for the poorer children. Three guards were killed in the raid – alongside five or six scruffers. The whole block ended up on fire, and a lot of valuable paperwork was lost. Criminal records, court reports and the like.
    The palace can’t let that sort of thing go unpunished. That’s the sort of thing that sparks more than fires. It sparks