Cody, the Centaur Courier

Cody will introduce himself before you've asked, and he'll do it as one long breathless clause — "Cody, dispatches and deliveries, mountain and river terrain, reasonable rates" — as though the words themselves are a satchel he's trying to get across a ford before they get wet. It comes out so fast it's genuinely hard to catch, which is a small mercy, because the alternative is that he'd say it twice. He is a centaur: a bare-armed young man from the waist up, an honest chestnut working horse from the waist down, and the two halves do not always agree on the wisdom of a given road. The human end leans hopefully forward at every gradient, as if that will help. The horse end does the work regardless.

What he sells is reach. A cart stops where the wheels stop; a man on foot stops where his wind gives out. Cody stops nowhere in particular, which is precisely the point — he takes letters up goat-paths and along flooded riverbanks and over passes that other couriers cross off their maps, and he takes them, by his own careful and slightly generous accounting, on time. The trouble is that "on time" for Cody is a category with a great deal of give in it. He does not plan a route so much as commit to a direction and trust the world to eventually cooperate. Often it does. When it doesn't, he simply keeps going until it does, on the reasoning that no pass yet has failed to connect to somewhere, and this one surely won't be the first.

You catch him at the low point of that philosophy. He has been circling a single contested pass between Tongue's Landing and Confluence Watch for the better part of a day, cheerful and increasingly baffled, and had just begun to entertain the radical hypothesis that the road doesn't go anywhere at all. He carries a letter for Duke Aldren that is four days late — which is not ideal — and there are men on the road ahead who take exception to travellers, which he reports in the same tone he'd use for weather. He does not notice the figure in the lichen-green cloak higher on the scree, still as a stone, counting his hooves rather than his person. Cody rarely notices the thing watching him. He is generally too busy being delighted that another person is alive on the road.

That delight is the whole of him, and it's disarming in the literal sense. Corvin's hard men, who have never in their lives seen a centaur, forget for a moment to be menacing and settle instead into a kind of unprofessional fascination. Point Cody at a ledge built for goats and he'll get his hindquarters over it through sheer refusal to be defeated, turn up two days later at The Crossed Keys with a bandaged rear hoof and a cider, allow that he went a bit sideways near the top but the view was worth it, and press a drink on you unasked before you can decline. He is easy to help and impossible to help efficiently, and somewhere in the difference is the reason people remember him.

There is a shadow at the edge of all that sunshine, though he doesn't cast it himself. Pinned to his satchel flap is the wax seal of the letter he carries — a quartered crest with four letters worked into the arms, except one of the letter-spaces has been smoothed perfectly flat. The wax is good; this wasn't damage. Someone pressed that seal deliberately short. Cody collected the thing from a nameless factor at Mudflat Market, paid in advance, and assumed the worn letter meant the matrix was giving out — a reasonable guess, from a courier who reads addresses and not intentions. Told otherwise, that a name can be a fence and someone has quietly pulled a rail out of it, he goes still in a way that doesn't suit him. Then he squares the satchel, thanks you, points himself down a safer path, and — because he is Cody, and the next delivery is always more real to him than the last mystery — whistles on into the hills. He'll deliver a great many letters in the kingdoms to come, and reach places no one else can, and if any of them are carrying more than ink he will be, blessedly and characteristically, the last to suspect it.