Chapter Thirty-One: On the Road Again Leaving
Chapter Thirty-One: On the Road Again
Leaving Thornwick hurt more than Kael expected, and it was Wren, of all people, who nearly made him change his mind at the gate.
"You could just say you're taking an extended contract elsewhere," Wren said, arms crossed, doing a poor job of hiding how much the goodbye actually cost them. "Come back in a season. Nobody has to know you're not coming back at all."
"I'll know," Kael said. "And you'd know, eventually. Better to just say it properly." He managed a smile that felt more honest than he expected it to. "Besides. You're mid-stage now. You don't need me slowing down your training anymore."
Petren's farewell was quieter, a firm clasp of forearms and a promise — genuine, Kael thought, for all that Petren's Ashenmoor blood still sat as a small unresolved caution in the back of his mind — to send word if anything about Kael's situation ever reached his distant cousins' ears before Kael heard it himself. Coale simply pressed a small folded letter into his hand, addressed to "whatever Guild office serves you next," a professional reference that Kael suspected, reading her face, carried considerably more warmth than its formal wording would show anyone else.
You have built more here than you realize, Starlight said, quiet, as Thornwick's walls finally shrank behind them on the northern road. That is worth grieving properly, novice, the way you grieved Corren, though thankfully with far less cause for sorrow this time. Endings that come from growth rather than loss deserve their own kind of mourning too.
The road to Mournhall ran wider and busier than the track to Thornwick had been, well-traveled enough that Bren judged it safe for the two of them to walk it without waiting for a large caravan this time — though not, he was careful to add, without caution.
"Four days, maybe five," he said, studying the map Coale had given them. "Two proper towns along the way where we can restock and sleep somewhere with an actual roof. After the Hollow and everything since, I'd wager you could handle worse than an ordinary road alone, but I'd rather not test that wager unless we have to."
They fell in, within the first hour, alongside a modest merchant caravan of six wagons — a spice and dye trader named Master Corlin Ashe, his small hired guard, and, Kael noticed within the first mile, a girl about his own age perched on the lead wagon's bench, sharp-eyed and quick with a laugh, who introduced herself as Corlin's daughter Sable before he'd even finished offering his own name.
"You're the border boy from Ashvale," she said, matter-of-fact, studying him with open curiosity that had nothing to do with flirtation and everything to do with genuine interest. "Father's heard the name from two other traders already this season. Something about a beast pack and a crater nobody wants to properly explain." She grinned, unbothered by his obvious discomfort. "Don't worry, I won't pry. I just think it's more interesting than most of what passes for gossip on this road."
Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.
She means no harm, Starlight observed, mild and faintly amused despite everything. And I note, for whatever it's worth, that she has managed within five minutes to hold your attention more completely than Councilman Vell managed across an entire board session.
Kael, embarrassed and entirely too preoccupied with the road ahead to properly register the observation, simply nodded and let the conversation move on to safer ground — Sable's own stories of trade routes and difficult customers, easy and undemanding in a way that made the miles pass more pleasantly than he'd expected.
The attack came on the second evening, while the caravan was making camp in a shallow roadside clearing, and it announced itself the way most dangers had, by now, learned to announce themselves to Kael first.
Four signatures, approaching from the tree line. Human. Poorly disciplined — I'd guess desperate rather than professional. Starlight's assessment arrived clipped and fast. Bandits, novice, cruder than the ones on the Thornwick road. This should be well within what you can handle now, though I'd still rather you not grow careless simply because the threat feels smaller than what you've survived recently.
Kael was on his feet before the first shout came from the tree line, already moving toward the caravan's exposed flank where Corlin's modest hired guard — two aging men better suited to deterring petty theft than a real assault — stood no real chance of holding a coordinated rush alone.
The bandits who broke from the trees were exactly what Starlight had promised: four men, ragged and thin, wielding stolen or scavenged blades with more desperation than skill, no Spark discipline between them beyond the barest first-tier flicker one carried like a threat rather than a genuine weapon. Kael read the nearest one's overcommitted lunge a half-second before it arrived, sidestepping with the same clean economy Ostrada's sparring circle had drilled into him months before, and disarmed the man with a single controlled strike that left him staring at his empty hand rather than bleeding from it.
"Yield," Kael said, blade leveled, "or the next one won't be so careful."
They yielded — all four, faster than Kael expected, the fight draining out of men who'd clearly gambled on an easy caravan and found, instead, something considerably sharper waiting for them than tired traders and two elderly guards. Bren arrived a moment later, breathing hard from his own sprint across camp, and took in the scene — four disarmed bandits kneeling in the firelight, his son standing calm and unharmed at the center of it — with an expression that mixed relief and quiet, unmistakable pride.
"Efficient," he said, once the bandits had been bound and Corlin's shaken guards had regained enough composure to take charge of them properly. "You didn't need me at all."
"I'm glad you came anyway," Kael said, and meant it.
Sable found him afterward, sitting a little apart from the fire's main gathering, and settled beside him without asking permission, the way she seemed to approach most things.
"That was either the bravest thing I've seen all season, or the most reckless," she said. "Possibly both. Four men, you standing there with a blade you only half-drew like you already knew exactly how the whole thing would end before it started."
"I sensed them coming," Kael said, simply. "Made it easier than it looked."
"Easier for you, maybe." She studied him a moment, something curious and a little more careful than her earlier easy chatter. "You're a strange one, Kael Ashford. Fifteen years old, calm as a man twice that age in a fight, and yet you go quiet and awkward the second a conversation turns toward anything that isn't danger or duty." She smiled, not unkindly, more amused than wounded by whatever she'd concluded from that observation. "Don't worry. I don't think you even notice you're doing it."
Kael, who genuinely hadn't noticed anything of the sort, mumbled something noncommittal and turned the conversation back toward the road ahead, and Sable, with the easy grace of someone used to reading a room correctly, let him.
She is quite right, for what it's worth, Starlight observed, dryly, once she'd returned to her father's wagon for the night. You are, at present, considerably better equipped to read an enemy's next strike than a friend's next feeling. That is not a flaw I intend to correct for you, novice — simply an observation. Some lessons, I think, this road will have to teach you on its own.
End of Chapter Thirty-One