Chapter Three - Day Two

The inn at the road's edge was the kind of place that had seen everything and developed strong feelings about none of it. The innkeeper looked at them, looked at their lack of luggage, and asked no questions. Edgar paid without discussion. One room.

Of course.

"I'm not —" she started.

"You'll be out the window before the door closes if I give you your own room," he said. "I know your third plan, Ysolde. You have a contact in Kelwick town. He'll be expecting you by tomorrow morning."

The air went out of her so fast it was almost audible.

"How," she said. Flat.

"The stable boy talked. Eventually." He pushed the room door open. One bed, one chair, one window. "I'll take the chair."

She walked into the room and stood in the middle of it and looked at the window and measured the drop and the distance to the tree line, and she was aware of him seeing her do all of this, and she did it anyway because she was not going to pretend.

"The contact," she said. "Did you —"

"He's been redirected."

"Meaning?"

"Meaning he's been informed that his involvement in this situation would be — inadvisable."

She turned to look at him. "You threatened him."

"I reasoned with him."

"Was there a knife involved in the reasoning?"

The faintest thing. That almost-smile.

"No," he said. "Money, mostly. And a very clear picture of what Lord Caen does to people who interfere with his arrangements."

She sat on the edge of the bed.

The anger was there, it was always there, a constant low burn she'd been living on for six months, but underneath it, pressing up through the floor of it, was exhaustion. Real exhaustion. The kind that came not from walking but from months of holding yourself in a state of constant readiness.

"You're very good at this," she said.

"At what?"

"Closing off exits." She looked at her hands. "I had three plans. You've blocked all three. Most people who've tried to retrieve me gave up after the first."

"I know." He sat in the chair. Pulled off his boots with the economical movements of someone who had done it a thousand times in a hundred different rooms. "You're not most situations."

She looked at him. He was looking at the floor.

"Is that a compliment?"

"It's an observation."

"Edgar."

"Mm."

"What happens to you if I don't arrive? Honestly."

He was quiet for a moment.

"I lose my position," he said. "And the people under my command lose theirs."

"People."

"Soldiers. Young ones, mostly. I've been— I've kept certain men under my command specifically because it gives them cover. Protection. They have nowhere else to go." He said it without sentiment, which somehow made it more real. "If I fail this assignment, I can't protect them anymore."

She studied him. The firelight from the hearth caught the side of his face.

"That's why you took this job," she said slowly. "Not the money. Not loyalty to Caen."

"I take every job," he said. "Because of them."

"That must be very convenient for Caen."

His jaw tightened. Just slightly.

"Yes," he said. "It is."

The honesty of it stopped her. No justification. No counter-argument. Just: yes. It is. And something in that admission that sounded like the most tired thing she'd ever heard.

She lay back on the bed. Looked at the ceiling. The plaster was water-stained, old rings spreading out like something had been trying to get in for years.

"I'm a physician," she said. "I'm the only physician in my district. People come to me in the middle of the night, in winter, on roads that would make you rethink the concept of roads, because there is no one else. A woman went into labor three months ago, and it was going badly, and her husband rode two hours in the dark to find me." A breath. "Her daughter's name is Mira. She wouldn't exist if I'd been in Velmoor playing political decor for a man who sees me as furniture." A pause.

"That's what I'm being taken from. Not a comfortable life. Not privilege. Work. Real work."

Silence.

Then: "I know," Edgar said. Very quietly.

"Then —"

"I know it isn't right." His voice had changed by some small degree that she noticed without being able to name. "I'm not telling you it is. I'm not asking you to understand it. I'm just —" He stopped. One of those edits.

"I'm telling you I'm sorry. For whatever it's worth."

She stared at the ceiling. The water stain looked like a hand, reaching.

"Goodnight, Edgar."

"Goodnight."

...****************...

She tried the window at two in the morning.

She'd timed his breathing. She'd spent twenty minutes mapping the exact rhythm of it — the long slow even cadence of a man who'd taught himself to rest efficiently. She'd counted to three hundred after it steadied. She'd eased off the bed one degree at a time.

She was four steps from the window when he said:

"Twelve feet to the ground. There's a drainage channel directly below— you'd hear it if you'd opened the window first to smell for standing water. You didn't, which means you were planning to open it and assess on the way out. There's also a patrol that comes through the yard every forty minutes. They came through eight minutes ago."

She stood with her hand raised, halfway to the latch, and breathed.

"You weren't asleep," she said.

"No."

"Are you ever?"

"Sometimes." A pause. "Come back to bed, Ysolde."

The familiarity of it — the way her name sat in his mouth, like it was a thing he'd already decided the shape of — made something in her chest do something she chose to ignore.

She went back to the bed. Sat on the edge.

"I will find a way out," she said. Not a threat. A statement of fact.

"I know," he said.

"That doesn't worry you?"

A long silence. And then he opened his eyes and looked at her across the dark room with an expression she couldn'tcategorizee — something that was not the steady blankness he wore in daylight, something older and less managed.

"Yes," he said. "It does."

She lay back. Pulled the blanket up. And she thought: he didn't mean the job. She was almost certain he didn't mean the job. And she had no idea what to do with that, so she filed it away with everything else and stared at the ceiling and waited for morning, which took a very long time to come.

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