Chương 16: A Sense of Freedom

She lost track of how long they were left there. The cathedral sat huge and silent around them, the kind of quiet that seemed to eat any sound before it could travel far. The masked man had gone somewhere without her, taking his humming with him, and the woman in black had stayed instead, the cage and Amber both left in her care for however long that turned out to mean. Amber's fur crept up along her spine, just remembering the rest of it.

The woman in black had opened the cage herself and pulled her straight out, both hands, holding her up close against her chest. She carried no scent at all, not the sweat and leather every adventurer had, not even the plain warmth Ren always gave off. Just empty air where a person should have been. She'd squeezed too tight in places. Cradled her upside down at one point, turning her this way and that behind those closed eyes like she could somehow still tell the difference.

Cooed something soft and delighted the whole time, like she was handling something breakable and adorable both at once. Every part of her wanted to run. That was the only thing she wanted, the moment those hands closed around her, the same bone-deep terror that had made her want to hiss and fold before she'd even been touched. There was nowhere to run to. Her paws found nothing but air, nowhere solid to push off from, no floor to launch herself away across.

With running gone, all that was left was her claws and her teeth. She sank them in, twisting hard, aiming for whatever skin she could reach. None of it landed the way it should have. The grip never loosened. It barely seemed to notice. That was when the fear caught up to her. Something this fast, this strong, with no scent at all to warn her the next time it got close, wasn't something claws and teeth were going to win against.

She went still instead, stiff as a plushie in those hands, letting herself be turned and held and cooed over without another fight left in her. One wrong move around something that unreadable, and she hadn't been willing to find out what it cost. Eventually she'd been set back down inside the cage, gentle about it despite everything before, the door pulled shut again behind her. Footsteps came back eventually, ordinary ones this time, the kind that actually announced themselves.

The masked man crossed to the cage and lifted it without a word, the painted smile fixed the same as it had been the whole visit.

"Brother, Severus—" The woman in black stopped there half a breath, mouth still open, closed eyes tipped toward the masked man like she wasn't sure the rest would come easy.

"Take care. Alright?" Something plain and warm in it, nothing like the biting teasing she'd carried the whole visit. He gave a single nod, and a small bow along with it, brief but real, the most he'd offered anyone all day.

"Can't I just have her?" Light enough to sound like a joke, right on the heels of it, not quite managing to land as one either. She reached out to touch the top of the cage once, and let her hand fall empty when he carried it past her without stopping. Amber let out a breath she hadn't noticed holding, long and slow, the tightness in her chest easing for the first time since the gate. Back in the carriage, he set the cage down and rapped twice against the wall behind him.

The driver's voice came back muffled through the wood.

"Sire?" He simply raised a hand, and the carriage lurched forward, wheels finding the road again, the cathedral's huge pale shape sliding past the window and falling behind them. Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more. She watched it go from inside the cage, the light through the bars shifting slow as the carriage turned, until stone gave way to street and street gave way to nothing she recognized at all.

The woman in black had already thinned to a small dark shape in the distance, fading with every turn of the wheels, when he looked back toward her.

"A-ter..." The sound of it stopped Amber cold. Rough at the edges, cracked halfway through, like something dragged out of a place that hadn't been used in longer than it should have. But under the roughness it came out clear, every syllable of it cut clean and exact, nothing blurred or soft about it at all. Nothing like the silence she'd known from him this whole time, and somehow nothing like a voice at all, more like the memory of one, worn thin from disuse but never dulled. He didn't say anything else.

He turned back to the window, and the quiet closed over him again, same as it always had. The sound of it stayed with her longer than the sight of the cathedral had. She didn't have a word for what to call it. She only knew she'd recognize it again, if she ever heard it a second time. She didn't know how long it had been after that. Days folded into each other somewhere along the road, towns rising up and falling away outside the window. None of them stayed long enough to leave a mark on her.

She'd stopped trying to count them. The cage was gone. She could have tried to escape. She hadn't noticed him take it apart, not really, only that one morning she woke up on the carriage seat itself instead of behind bars, the shadow-dark metal nowhere in sight. Nothing held her in place anymore. She didn't test it with him sitting there. Instead she stayed put.

She kept to the same seat and stared out at the world going by instead, and the longer she stared, the less any of it felt like something she could do anything about. Everything past that glass was unfamiliar. Strange trees, foreign dirt, an odd smell of woodsmoke drifting in through whatever gap let the cold reach her. She didn't know which direction her territory sat in anymore.

She didn't know how many days of road stood between her and it, or whether "days of road" even meant anything she could translate into paws and distance. The freedom sitting right in front of her might as well not have existed, because there was nowhere she knew how to run to. She missed the beam over the flue. It was like a low, constant hunger, worse for having nothing to do about it. A handful of shapes cut across the sky ahead, small and fast against the gray morning light.

She'd been staring blank and half-lost in her own head for so long that the sight alone was enough to answer the question before anything else caught up to it. Birds, she took them for, without a second thought behind it. Then the sky filled with more of them all at once, and none of it moved like a bird ever had. They came down in a wide, fast rain toward the road, straight toward the carriage itself, closing faster than any creature with wings ever should.

Every part of her screamed to dodge, the same instinct that had saved her a hundred times before, muscles bunching to throw herself somewhere, anywhere, out from under it. There was nowhere to throw herself to. Just the seat, and the walls, and the small closed box of the carriage holding her exactly where she was. The masked man's head snapped toward the sky the instant the shapes broke wrong, no hesitation in that part of him at all.

His hand shot up right behind it, fingers curling toward the shadow pooled beneath him. For one long moment nothing happened. His shadow lay flat against the carriage floor, refusing to lift, like the daylight itself had pinned it down and wouldn't let go. Most of the first volley missed by a hair, thudding into the road and the carriage's own wood, close enough that the whole frame shuddered with each hit. A second volley followed right behind it, before the sound of the last impact had even finished.

Even after the shadow finally came, thinner than she'd ever seen it, he held still half a beat longer than he should have, head turning toward the hill like he genuinely hadn't believed it until he saw it with his own eyes. The driver's voice cut off mid-word. Silence took its place, sudden and complete. The masked man moved then, snatching her straight off the seat and hauling her against his chest as he threw himself toward the door. Wood came apart behind them a half-second later.

Huge, crude arrows punched clean through the walls and the roof both, thick as her own foreleg, and the whole carriage burst apart around the impact, boards and joints blowing outward in every direction. Her ears rang from the impact, a high thin whine that swallowed everything else. Dust rose up thick around them, splinters and grit hanging in the air where solid wood had been a moment before.

His shadow rose up around the two of them right as the frame gave out completely, thinner than she'd ever seen it, wobbling at the edges like something struggling to hold its own shape. Everything past the edge of it came apart, wood and wheels and whatever the driver had left behind, all of it breaking into pieces scattered wide across the road. The two of them sat untouched in the middle of it, one small pocket of solid ground in a wreck that should have left nothing standing at all.

Shapes broke from the hill next, the arrows only the opening move. Big, hunched things, moving on legs too thick for how fast they covered ground, skin a mottled greenish gray, scarred over in places like it had never fully healed right. Some still carried bows nearly as tall as they were.

Most had already dropped them for something heavier, long swords notched and rust-eaten along the edge, axes with heads too big for the handles carrying them, metal scarred and patched together like it had been scavenged off a dozen different battles rather than made whole in the first place. They just ran, weapons raised high overhead, mouths open around one long ragged howl that climbed and dropped and climbed again, no two throats matching pitch, spit flying loose with every breath they took.