Maxine stared up at it. Hidden behind the castellated tops of the walls were weapons, she knew. A mix of old and new, so the stories had it, that had seen off the most recent rounds of attackers. One of the town folk was studying Maxine, a young mother with one child in her arms and another, picking his nose and staring up at the stranger. "Outsiders do not get into the castle." The woman said. Maxine had to run the sentence through a couple of times to understand it. They had gone several weeks without speaking Spanish. "I know, everybody tells me. So I stand down here and stare up at it and try to imagine what it is like inside." Maxine looked down at the table before her, arrayed with objects they had picked out in the bad lands. "I'm supposed to sell you things instead. What do you want?" The woman only gave the products a cursory glance. "Which direction are you heading when you leave here?" she asked. "East. To Zaragoza and then into the mountains." Their final destination was, obviously, a secret, but there was no point in denying which direction they would set out in.
