Chương 15: Is This Farewell

[SYSTEM] Warning: leaving registered territory range. Territory-linked functions will be disabled until back in range. She was still curled tight against the floor of the cage, muscles locked long after the fighting had left them, ears pinned flat. Her eyes had gone wide in the dark, pupils blown out to nothing, the cloth still covering her with no light getting through to shrink them back down. Still didn't mean calm. It meant she'd run out of anything else to do. The pale square hadn't left her.

She could still feel it sitting there, same as before. The words came, and she understood them, plain the moment they touched her. She was leaving something behind. That much was clear. The carriage kept moving under her, steady now, the sway settled into something almost gentle compared to before. Cold air found its way in through some gap she couldn't place. Beyond that, nothing reached her at all, not a voice, another set of wheels, or any sound beyond the cold itself.

A hand found the edge of the cloth above her. It didn't pull it away all at once. It peeled back one slow inch at a time, the fabric dragging against the bars, light creeping in narrow and gray before it ever reached her properly. He leaned down close once the cloth was gone, delighted by whatever he saw. His mask filled the gap above the bars, painted eyes and that same painted smile, fixed and wide, watching her without ever once looking away.

He tilted his head at her, slow and deliberate, then straightened and moved back to the far side of the seat, settling in like he'd gotten what he came for. She looked away from him rather than keep watching that fixed smile, and that was when she saw it. A window, wide open, moonlight pouring through it and washing the world outside in pale, colorless light. She'd never seen this much of anything at once.

Land rolled out flat and pale in every direction, farther than any wall had ever let her look, frost catching what moonlight there was along fields that had no end she could find. The stars sat thick overhead, more of them than the roof back home had ever shown her, nothing dulling them out here the way the city always had. Something moved through her looking at it, something that made her feel smaller than she ever had, staring at all that space with no wall anywhere in sight.

The carriage rolled on beneath her the whole time, wheels finding every rut in the road, the world outside sliding past the window without ever once slowing down for her to catch up to it. Time passed the way it always did when there was nothing to mark it by.

The moon crossed further than she'd ever tracked it crossing before, and the cold outside the window bit harder for a while before it eased again, and somewhere in the middle of all that she must have dozed, because the next thing she knew the black outside had gone gray instead, the sun coming up slow and pale at the edge of all that flat land. A voice reached back from somewhere up front, muffled through the wall between them.

"Sire, we're nearing the city." The man's hand dipped into his ring again and came back holding something flat, paper by the look of it, lines drawn across it in ink. He held it up close to his mask, tilting it one way and then another, unhurried about the whole thing. Satisfied with whatever he saw, he tucked it away and leaned back into his seat, one leg crossed easy over the other, arms spread out along the top of it like he had nowhere left to be in any hurry.

The humming started again, low and pleased with itself, and his head tipped toward her, watching her the same way he'd been watching her the whole ride. A line of other carriages and carts stretched long ahead of them at the gate, waiting their turn one after another. Their own carriage didn't join it, rolling straight past the whole line toward the front. A guard stepped into their path anyway, hand raised.

The masked, smiling man leaned toward the window and reached into his coat, drawing something small and metal out with a flourish, like he'd been waiting all night for the chance to show it off. This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author's work. The guard's whole posture changed the moment he saw it. He bowed, low and quick, then straightened up stiff, chest out, and started into something that sounded rehearsed.

"Welcome to the free state city of Cara—" The man's whole demeanor went cold all at once, the easy slouch gone out of him in an instant. One hand flicked up, quick and precise, and whatever had swallowed her own voice back in that alley closed around the guard's throat the same way, cutting him off mid-word. Whatever warmth had been behind that painted smile a moment ago wasn't there anymore. The guard's mouth kept moving, straining around words that never made it out, his throat working hard at nothing.

He waved them through anyway, silent, the line of waiting carriages left exactly where they stood. He was still trying as the carriage rolled past him, jaw working, no sound coming out of it at all. They rolled through slow after that, giving her time to take in what came next. Towers rose up on either side of the gate, taller than anything she'd ever seen, taller than the guild hall by more than she had numbers for.

The streets past them were already full despite the hour, more people crowded into the little she could see than she'd ever counted in one place before. None of them looked like the guild's adventurers. Different clothes, different colors, voices layered over each other in ways that didn't sound like the same language twice.

Further back, past a stall already steaming in the cold morning air, something moved through the crowd that wasn't human at all, tall and strange-shaped in a way her eyes kept sliding off without ever quite settling on it. She'd never seen anything like this. Whatever this city was, it wasn't anything like home. The carriage slowed some time later. A voice reached back through the wall again, muffled the same way it had been before.

"Sire, we've reached the cathedral." It came to rest in front of a building that put even the towers at the gate to shame. It rose up huge and pale against the morning sky, carved stone climbing higher than she could tip her head back far enough to follow, shaped the way the guild hall's little shrine was shaped, only grown enormous, every line of it built to make something small out of whoever stood beneath it.

The man went quiet a moment, the humming dropping to something softer, a few low notes strung together like the beginning of a prayer nobody had taught her the shape of. His hand went to his collar and drew out a necklace hidden under the fabric, a small locket swinging free on the end of it. He opened it just enough to look inside, cupped in his palm where she couldn't see what it held.

Whatever it was, it pulled the fixed painted smile behind his mask into something that looked, for just a moment, like it might have been real. Then he closed it again, tucked it back against his chest, and the humming picked back up right where it had left off. The voice reached back through the wall once more.

"Should we rest here, sire?" Before the man in the mask could answer, another voice cut in from somewhere above them.

"This mister won't be able to answer you." It took Amber a moment to find where it had come from. A woman sat at the very top of the carriage. She was dressed head to foot in black, dark as midnight, and her eyes stayed shut the whole time she spoke, like she had no need of them at all. Amber went stiff all over. She should have heard her coming, the creak of weight settling onto old wood, a footstep, even just the drift of scent on the cold morning air. She'd caught none of it.

One breath the roof sat empty, and the next this woman was already perched there. And yet the masked man hadn't so much as flinched at the sound of her voice, no surprise in him anywhere, like he'd been expecting her to appear out of nothing exactly like that. Her voice carried easily down through the wood and glass between them. Then, brightening like the thought had only just caught up to her, "Oh, you must have known that already. Pardon me." The woman's head tilted down toward the cage, eyes still closed.

"I have never expected your visit," she said, something teasing in it, the way a person greets an old friend they hadn't seen in far too long.

"What are you here for?" She said it like the driver and his question had never happened at all, like it had already slipped clean out of her. Her head tilted a fraction further, something hopeful creeping into her voice.

"Are you here to drop me off a present?" The man moved for the first time since she'd appeared, his whole body swinging into motion, arms thrown wide in some exaggerated show of friendliness. He reached the cage in two quick steps and dragged the cloth back down over it, blotting the light out all over again before Amber could so much as tell whether those closed eyes had ever turned toward her at all. Dark closed in around her once more. Above the cloth, the woman made a small, dry sound.

"Tsk. So it wasn't for me." She didn't sound satisfied with that either. One moment the man stood between her and the cage, cloth held fast under his own hand. The next, he wasn't there at all, and the woman crouched right where he'd just been instead, the cloth already peeled back in her grip, like the two of them had traded places faster than either the eye or the mask could follow.

"Where did you even get such a cute thing, brother?" Every instinct in her screamed to hiss and fold in on herself, a fear deeper than anything she'd felt all night, deeper than she had a reason for. The man scratched at the side of his mask, the same slow, thinking gesture from before, then launched into something else entirely. Both hands came together, cradling nothing at all like it was something small and starving. His head bowed low and sorrowful. One hand mimed feeding.

The other pressed flat against where a heart would be, like the memory of it still pained him. It was a good performance. It was also, as far as Amber could tell sitting right there inside the middle of it, nothing at all like what had actually happened.