Chapter 133 - Expectations
Scarlett listened to the sounds of the winds and rustling leaves outside as her carriage rocked along the narrow forest path. It was a long ride, and it was far from comfortable.
The carriage’s seats were just solid wood, the air was stale, and the cabin was cramped. With no windows, the only light in here was from the glimmers of moonlight that sneaked through the cracks in the plank walls, so without her enchanted glasses she wouldn’t even have been able to see her own hand.
This mode of transport was far removed from what she had gotten used to up till now in this world, but that’s what you get when you’re trying to travel inconspicuously. Spending money extravagantly on a carriage that stood out was the opposite of what you wanted.
They would get rid of the vehicle later anyway, so it didn’t matter too much.
Even though her body might object to that fact. Having spent the last two days traveling around in this thing—as well as sleeping in cheap inns with beds that weren’t much better than a board of wood—she was feeling a lot sorer than she thought she would. It was a minor annoyance in the grand scheme of things, but it didn’t help to soothe her nerves much.
Today was the day.
This night was when they carried out the heist on the Sanctuary of Ittar.
The closer it got, the clearer the differences between this and her plan to deal with the Cabal became. Both were a necessity, from her perspective, and were a gamble in a way. But she didn’t feel as self-assured about everything this time. Apprehensions about what tonight would bring had filled her mind the entire day. She had also been more in control of the situation back with the Cabal. This time, though, there were more unknowns, and most of the actual work was left up to others. She liked to think that was the primary reason she was more nervous now, but it probably wasn’t the only one.
It wasn’t something she liked to admit, but it was also a simple fact that she didn’t have a grudge against the Followers as she did against the Cabal. Her anger at them attacking her home and injuring her people served to motivate her a lot more than she had originally thought. Without that, she found herself spending far too much time thinking about the things that could go wrong.
Which there were a lot of.
She’d made preparations, of course. She felt decently secure in that she could deal with the worst-case scenarios that might pop up. It would cost her, but it was manageable. If the Followers did find out about her involvement in this, for example, there were dozens of places across the empire where she could hide away and grow her power base in other ways to complete necessary quests. The Followers weren’t evil, so it wasn’t as if they would kill everyone connected to her. She had also left a few letters and papers behind that might even allow Evelyne and the Hartford barony to escape without too much harm if she were to be declared a criminal.
These last few weeks had given her plenty of time to read through legal documents and the like to ensure that was possible, too. There were precedents where other noble houses had members commit heinous crimes and the house itself still survived, after all. Abelard and the Withersworths were just one example.