To Forget and Be Forgotten

The capital was four days away.

Seren knew this because Cassian's soldiers moved at a measured pace - not slow enough to suggest indifference, not fast enough to suggest urgency. The pace of people transporting something they had been told to deliver intact.

She didn't speak for the first day.

Neither did anyone else.

The road north was quiet this time of year - bare trees on either side, cold sky above, the occasional village visible in the distance that they never stopped at. The soldiers rotated positions with the efficiency of people who had done this before. Two at the front. Two behind. One on each side.

Cassian rode slightly ahead.

Always slightly ahead.

Watching the road the way he watched everything - not for threats exactly, just watching, the way some people breathed.

Seren walked.

They hadn't offered her a horse. She hadn't asked for one. Walking felt correct somehow. Like a penance she wasn't sure she deserved but couldn't bring herself to refuse.

Her wrists were bound in front of her. Loosely - loose enough that they clearly weren't worried about her running. That said something she didn't know what to do with yet.

The first night they stopped at a roadside inn.

A private room. A guard outside the door. Food brought in without ceremony - bread, something warm, water. Seren sat on the edge of the bed and ate without tasting any of it because eating was something bodies required and her body was apparently still operating even though the rest of her had gone somewhere quiet and distant.

She slept.

Dreamlessly, which surprised her.

She had expected Liora. She had expected Clara. She had expected the fragments - broken and hazy and wrong - assembling themselves into something she couldn't look away from.

Instead nothing.

Just dark and then morning.

She didn't know if that was mercy or something worse.

The second day passed the same as the first.

Road. Trees. Cold sky. The measured pace of people with a destination.

Sometime in the afternoon Cassian fell back from his position ahead and rode alongside her without explanation.

He didn't speak immediately.

Seren looked straight ahead.

"You could have run," he said eventually.

"I know."

"Before we arrived. You had time."

"I know."

He was quiet for a moment.

"Why didn't you."

She considered not answering. Then considered that not answering was a kind of answer and she was tired of things meaning things she hadn't chosen.

"I buried someone this morning," she said. "Running afterward felt wrong."

Cassian absorbed this.

"And before that," he said carefully. "You had days. You knew something was coming."

"Yes."

"And you stayed."

"Yes."

He didn't ask why. She appreciated that more than she expected to.

They rode and walked in silence for a while.

The trees on either side of the road had lost most of their leaves. What remained caught the pale afternoon light in a way that was almost pretty if you were in a condition to notice pretty things. Seren noticed it the way she noticed most things now — from a distance, through glass, present but not quite touching.

"The Underground activation," Cassian said.

She glanced at him.

"You don't have to answer," he said. "But I'm going to ask anyway."

"Ask."

"Did you understand what you were doing?"

She thought about this honestly.

"No," she said. "Not entirely."

"But you understood some of it."

"Fragments." She paused. "Things that felt familiar without a reason to be familiar."

Cassian looked at the road ahead.

"The language," he said. "The phrase you spoke."

"I didn't choose it. It surfaced."

"From where."

"I don't know."

He nodded once - not skeptically, not credulously. Just filing it. The gesture of someone collecting information rather than judging it.

"The Church believes you're dangerous," he said.

"The Church is probably right."

"The king believes you're a murderer."

"The king is also right."

Cassian looked at her then. Actually looked - the first time since they had left Norvale that he had turned his full attention toward her rather than the road.

She met it without flinching.

"You're not what I expected," he said.

"What did you expect."

He seemed to consider this genuinely.

"Someone who knew what they were," he said finally.

Seren looked back at the road.

"That makes two of us," she said quietly.

The afternoon light moved through the bare trees.

The soldiers maintained their measured pace.

And somewhere behind them - further with every step, smaller with every mile - a village sat at the edge of a forest where a grave had been dug that morning by someone who hadn't been given enough time and had taken it anyway.

The capital was still three days away.

Seren walked.