"Who are you?"
I asked, and I heard my own fear in it before I could do anything to smooth it over.
"Hans and Abi are in trouble," she said.
Then, the way a candle goes out between one blink and the next, she simply wasn't there. No footsteps retreating down the corridor, no door swinging shut on its hinges, nothing. Just the cold stone of Kaldrec's burial chamber, the dust still settling from the fight we'd only just finished, and one less person standing in the room than there had been a heartbeat before.
I didn't wait around to make sense of it. I was already moving, boots slapping stone, and I heard Namey call my name from somewhere behind me before his hand closed around my shoulder and spun me back around.
"Jon, wait!
Where are you going?"
he asked.
"Hallowmere," I said, trying to shrug him off without much success.
He might have looked like a man who spent most of his waking hours squinting at scrolls, but his grip turned out to be iron.
"Why?
Why now?"
"My friends are in trouble."
"How do you know that?"
"I saw someone.
A girl.
Blindfolded, white dress, right here where you're standing."
I gestured at the empty space beside him like it might still hold some proof of itself, but of course it didn't.
Namey's face did something complicated, worry and calculation crowding each other out on their way to his mouth.
"Jon, listen to me.
Even if that's true, even if something really is happening back home, they're..."
He stopped himself there, and I watched him actually catch it, the way you'd yank a horse back from a cliff it hadn't noticed yet.
"I was about to say they're just NPCs.
I know how that sounds now. I knew how it sounded the first time too, if I'm honest.
I just never had anyone in the room before who'd correct me on it."
"Then don't say it," I told him.
"I'm not going to."
He let go of my shoulder.
"But hear the rest of it first.
If something is happening in Hallowmere, you flying in alone, half-trained and running on adrenaline, isn't going to save anyone. You'll get there exhausted and out of mana against however many of whatever's doing this. That's not bravery.
That's just a slower way of losing."
"Then come with me."
"Luxy and Savage are still restocking in Vorn.
I can't leave them there without a word, and you can't wait around for us to catch up either, not if there's a real fire behind this."
He pressed two fingers against the bridge of his nose, under his glasses, the particular gesture he made when he was deciding something he didn't like the shape of.
"Go.
I'll bring the others after you as fast as horses and Vorn's gate guards allow. But Jon.
Whatever you find out there, don't do anything with that bow that you can't walk away from."
I didn't answer that one. I think we both already knew I wasn't going to make any promises I couldn't keep, and it would have been a crueler kind of lie to pretend otherwise just to make him feel better about letting me go.
Aki caught the tremor running down through my knees and into his flank before I'd even said a word, and he was airborne before I'd finished settling my weight, faster off the ground than I had ever once seen him move. Yoshi burrowed down into my shirt without being asked, small and warm and trembling, like he'd already understood something nobody had told him yet.
The flight back took both no time at all and several lifetimes at once, which I know doesn't make sense written down, but there it is. My wrists ached from gripping too hard at Aki's neck, hard enough to leave faint crescent marks in his hide, my stomach turning at the sight of them afterward, though he never once complained. Below us, the world unspooled backward through the same country I'd flown out over what had seemed to take a hundred years the first time and had actually only been a handful of weeks: the frost-crusted flats of the Pale giving way to the green rise of the midlands, the river Oryn a bright thread stitched through green fields catching the last of the moonlight, and finally the dark seam of the Livornian forest, and beyond it, home.
I kept telling myself the girl could have been wrong. Or lying. Or some kind of trap dressed up as a warning, the way that unnervingly forgettable armor merchant back in Vorn had been something dressed up as generosity.
I told myself all of it in a steady, useless loop, the way you tell yourself anything you desperately need to be true, and none of it slowed the sick, cold drop in my stomach when I finally saw the smoke.
Not one column. A dozen, easily, maybe more, black and greasy against a sky just barely starting to gray with morning, rising up from right where Hallowmere was supposed to be.
I had promised Abigail, leaving that farm weeks ago with her threat still warm against my forehead, that I was coming back. I had never once let myself picture what I might be coming back to.
Aki dropped altitude in a stomach-lurching spiral, and shapes resolved out of the smoke and half-light below us: riders on beasts twice the size of any horse I'd ever seen, low-slung and long-limbed, moving between the houses of Hallowmere with the calm, methodical patience of men doing chores rather than butchering a town. Their hair streamed long and wild behind them as they rode, and the weapons in their fists curved at angles that had no honest business existing, more grown than forged, the kind of shapes I'd have said belonged to some era and place I'd never once heard described in any of Gramps's stories.
I want to be honest about that moment. What rose up in me wasn't fear, not the kind that freezes a person solid. Something colder and more purposeful than fear.
I had spent my whole life being the boy who couldn't hunt with a blade because he couldn't stand to look anything in the eye while it died. That boy would not have survived what came next, and some distant, oddly detached part of me noticed that fact and simply set it aside, the way you'd set aside a thought that had stopped being useful to the problem directly in front of you.