Chapter 665: Tracking the Traitor (Part One)
"I, I don’t know what to say," Ollie said honestly after another minute of uncomfortable silence, as he listened to her rough, irregular breathing and felt her body quake with occasional tremors. "I want to help, but I don’t know how."
"You are helping, Ollie," Ashlynn said as she gave him an affectionate hug before she pulled back from the young knight and turned her gaze away from the pit for the first time since he’d arrived to look directly into his pale eyes.
"You just being here helps," she said softly. "It reminds me that I’m not facing this alone anymore. If you’d been with me back then, you’d have fought off both of Owain’s knights and pulled me from the earth before I even had a chance to free myself, wouldn’t you?"
Ollie might have been intensely stubborn in his trial, but if there was one thing she had come to understand about the young man, it was that he embodied the cypress tree long before she’d chosen it for him. He’d watched out for her when she’d been nothing more to him than another servant in the kitchens of the summer villa, and he watched out for her now.
Even if he couldn’t face the ghosts that haunted her with a sword and shield to defend her, he still did the best he could, and the genuine care and concern in his voice meant much more to her than any polished words would have.
"Of course I would have rescued you!" Ollie said automatically when she posed the question. "I wouldn’t have let them bury you in the first place," he added quickly.
"See?" Ashlynn said with a gentle smile. "Just hearing you say that is helping," she said as she drew in the feeling of safety and security he radiated to shake off the feeling of weight and oppression that had clung to her ever since she approached the open grave. She couldn’t escape its grip entirely, but with Ollie’s help, she was able to calm herself enough to consider the problem that Ollie had brought to her when he came here in the first place.
"You said that Darragh fled," Ashlynn said as she worked to recenter herself and focus on immediate problems. Unconsciously, she turned her back to the empty grave, as if to deny it the opportunity to haunt her further while she set aside the feelings it provoked within her. Once she did, it was a little bit easier to approach the puzzle of why one of the men she’d been counting on to support them had suddenly run away.
"Did he have a family that he wasn’t willing to bring into the Vale?" Ashlynn asked as her mind grasped at straws in search of the slightest reason that might excuse his behavior. "Anything he might be trying to escape to? Or did something happen in the village that he may be running away from?"
"Not so far as I know," Ollie said. "Sir Marcel made the offer to everyone after we started planting crops in the village. He said that you had promised them an opportunity to be reunited with their families, but Darragh said he had no one and nothing and that he was just happy to have a place where he could hunt and live off the land."