Chapter 61: The Notice Board

Kael stared at the ring in the dark.

“When did that shift happen for you,” he said. “From being carried to carrying it.”

She was quiet for a moment.

“Somewhere around the five hundredth year,” she said. “When I decided to remain myself. I told you about that.”

“You did,” he said.

“The shift for you,” she said, “will be faster. You have considerably less time to fill.”

He almost smiled. “That’s almost reassuring.”

“It was not intended to be,” she said. “It was intended to be accurate.”

“I know,” he said. “That’s what made it reassuring.”

The arm was better than yesterday. Not good. But better. The trajectory holding.

He closed the salve jar. Counted what he had.

Nine silver and twenty-seven copper. Same as last night. No spend, no earn. He noted it and picked up the notebook.

“Write something,” Seradhiel said.

“I just got it out,” he said.

“You have been sitting there for twenty minutes,” she said. “You are going to keep sitting there until you write something or until dawn arrives, whichever comes first. Write something.”

He wrote: She asked some rather unethical questions at four in the morning. I didn’t have a good answer. Some things don’t translate.

“What did you write,” she said.

“Something true,” he said.

She made a sound that wasn’t quite a response and wasn’t quite not one.

He sat with the notebook until the light changed outside the window. Then he got up and went to find Mira.

She was already downstairs.

Not at the table. A the door, pack on her back, spear in hand, looking at the road outside with the expression of someone who had woken up with a direction and was impatient to move in it.

She looked at him when he came down.

“You’re slow,” she said.

“I was writing,” he said.

She looked at the notebook in his hand. At the ring. The look she’d been giving both of them since Chapter One of whatever this was. The one that had a question in it she hadn’t decided to ask yet.

“There’s a proper town two hours north,” she said. “Harwick. I know it. Good market, decent guild outpost, an inn that charges fair rates and doesn’t water the soup.” She pushed the door open. “Come on let’s go.”

He followed her out into the morning.

Harwick was the first place since Crestfall that felt like a real town.

Wide main road, properly maintained. Market stalls that ran the full length of it on the three days a week the market operated and today was one of them. A guild outpost on the north end that was three stories and had a queue outside it at this hour which meant it was busy enough to have a queue and organized enough that the queue moved.

Mira navigated it like she’d grown up in it.

Which she hadn’t. She’d grown up in Valdris but she’d passed through it enough times on the southern escort circuit that she knew which stalls were worth stopping at and which ones had better-looking goods than they had quality goods and which inn on the east side of the main road had the best room to copper ratio of the three available options.

She stopped at a food stall near the market’s center and bought two of something wrapped in paper without asking Kael what he wanted. Handed one to him. It turned out to be a filled pastry. Meat and vegetables, the pastry itself done properly rather than as an afterthought around the filling.

Six copper for both.

He had just Nine silver and twenty-one copper remaining.

“Good,” Kael said.

“I know,” Mira said. She was already eating hers and looking at the market with the ease of someone on familiar ground for the first time in a while. Not happy exactly. Something adjacent to it. The particular quality of a person whose body remembered a place as safe before their mind caught up.

He let her have it without comment.

The guild outpost queue moved efficiently.

Kael registered as a visiting cultivator. Bronze Realm, no affiliation, the clerk noting it with the same mild interest every clerk had shown since Valdris and went to the notice board.

It was three layers deep in some places.

He read from the top. Escort jobs — several, various distances, various pay grades. Gate clearances — two Class D postings that required Silver Realm minimum, one Class E that didn’t. Investigation requests. Bounties. The usual architecture of cultivator work in a functioning regional outpost.

He was looking for the Class E posting when he found it.

Not a job posting. A royal notice. The crown’s seal in the top corner, the particular weight of official language that was trying to convey information while simultaneously conveying that it didn’t have all the information it would prefer to have.

By order of His Majesty’s regional governance, the Crestfall Pass relay station and surrounding area has been designated a surveyed zone following reports of unidentified conflict. Witnesses report significant structural damage to the relay station building and perimeter. Unknown combatants. No confirmed survivors or casualties on record. Citizens are advised to avoid the Crestfall Pass road until survey is complete. Any individuals with knowledge of the incident are requested to report to the nearest guild outpost.

He read it.

Read it again.

Stood in front of the notice board for longer than reading it required.

No confirmed survivors or casualties on record.

Which meant nobody knew. Which meant the guards who’d gone to survey had found damage and no bodies and no people and no explanation. Which meant Fen and Aldren and whatever remained of the Order’s people at Crestfall had either survived and cleared out or hadn’t survived and the Remnants had cleared out for them and the result looked identical from the outside.

He was still looking at the notice when Mira appeared beside him.

She read it over his shoulder. He knew when she’d finished because she went still the way she went still when she was processing something she hadn’t expected.

Neither of them said anything for a moment.

“Crestfall,” she said finally.

“Yes,” he said.

Your gift is the motivation for my creation. Give me more motivation!