The wagon was lighter.
Petra was gone. Garrett had found her a place on a cart at the last town — a merchant heading south who did not ask questions. She had taken her bag and left without looking back. Nobody tried to stop her.
Three of them now. Aldric, Soren, Kira. The wagon that had held five on the first day held three, and the empty space was louder than any of them.
Soren sat with his arms folded and his eyes closed. Kira sat across from Aldric with her hands in her lap, watching the canvas sway with the movement of the road.
Outside, Garrett drove. The woman with the bow rode beside the wagon. The road was quieter than it had been two days ago. Everything was quieter.
Aldric looked at the bench where Darin used to sit. Then at the spot where Petra had pulled her knees up and cried. Two empty spaces. Two days.
He looked at his bag between his knees. The honey was still in there. He had not opened it.
The wagon rocked. The wheels turned. The road went on.
* * *
Garrett stopped the wagon near a stream in the early afternoon. The horses needed water. So did they.
Soren climbed out, filled his waterskin, and walked to a tree at the edge of the road. He sat down with his back against it and closed his eyes. That was his way. Aldric had stopped expecting anything different.
Aldric sat on the bank of the stream. The water was shallow and clear and moved over flat stones with a sound that reminded him of Ashford. He drank from his waterskin and watched the current.
Kira sat down a few paces from him. She drank. She looked at the water. For a while neither of them spoke.
"Do you think she made it?" Aldric said.
"Petra?" Kira said. "She's fine. The merchant looked decent."
Aldric nodded. A pause.
"I don't blame her," Kira said. "She saw something terrible and she wanted to go home. That's not wrong."
"But you stayed," Aldric said.
Kira was quiet for a moment. She picked up a stone from the bank and turned it in her fingers.
"When the attack happened," she said, "I was behind the wagon. I couldn't do anything. I just sat there and listened to people fight and die and I couldn't do a single thing about it." She turned the stone again. "Darin was ten paces away. Ten. And none of us could help him."
Aldric said nothing. He knew.
"I never want to feel that helpless again," Kira said.
She dropped the stone into the stream. It sank without a sound.
"We were given something," she said. "Magic. Whatever it is, however it works — we have it. Most people don't. Most people are like the townspeople in Harrenfield who ran inside and shut their doors and hoped it would pass." She looked at Aldric. "I don't want to be someone who shuts the door."
Aldric looked at her. The water moved between them. She was not trying to convince him. She was not giving a speech. She was saying what she believed the way she said everything — plainly, without decoration, as though the truth of it was obvious and she was only putting it into words because someone happened to be listening.
"You know exactly what you want," Aldric said. "You've known since before the wagon."
Kira looked at him. Something shifted in her face — small, quick. Her eyes moved away from his. She looked at the stream. Her hand went to the back of her neck and stayed there.
"I don't know about that," she said. Her voice was the same but quieter.
He looked at the stream. The water moved the way water always moved — steady, patient, finding its way around whatever was in front of it.
Kira's words sat in him. Not all of them. One part. The part about being given something and choosing what to do with it. He thought about Darin standing in the square with his brown hair and his wide eyes and his ten paces that might as well have been a thousand. He thought about his own hands flat against the wagon. He thought about what it would mean to be someone who could have done something.
He did not say any of this out loud. He did not announce it or promise it or turn it into words that could be measured against what he actually did. He just sat by the stream and let it settle into him the way things always settled into him — quietly, without fuss.
But something was different. For the first time since Ashford, the road ahead felt like it was pulling him forward instead of just carrying him.
Garrett called from the wagon. They stood and walked back.
* * *
The road changed in the late afternoon. More carts. More riders. The dirt gave way to packed stone and the trees fell back and the land opened up.
Garrett pulled the canvas aside.
"Valmont," he said.
Aldric looked.
Walls. Stone walls, taller than anything he had seen — taller than the meeting hall in Ashford, taller than the tallest building in Cresthill. Towers rose behind them. Smoke from a thousand chimneys drifted against a pale sky. The road ahead was full of people and carts and horses, all moving toward the same gate.
The wagon rolled forward. The walls grew closer.