The Long Road to Saltmere

They said the wells of Saltmere still ran sweet, though no one in living memory had made the crossing to prove it. The desert between was called the Rust, and it ate travelers the way rot eats fruit—slowly, then all at once. Still, when the last spring in Dunhollow turned brackish, the choice was simple: cross the Rust or die at home. Old Bram led them, twelve souls and four scrawny oxen, out past the boundary stones at first light. There was the twins who never spoke, the disgraced physician, the girl who claimed she could smell water from a day's ride away. By the second night the horizon shimmered with things that were not there, and by the fourth their water was half gone. But the girl lifted her nose to the wind, pointed toward a gap in the far dunes, and smiled for the first time since they'd left. "That way," she said. "Something's alive that way." Bram had gambled everything on a child's nose. He tightened the ox harness and turned the caravan toward the gap.