Chapter 64 — The Long Ride Home

The journey back passed slower than the ride east had, Elsbeth and Wren setting a pace neither Maren nor I pushed them past, both of us understanding, without needing to say it aloud, that whatever haste had driven us to Thornmere no longer applied to the return. The danger, for now, had been met and answered. What remained was simply the long, patient work of getting four tired travelers home safely.

I used the slower pace to know Wren better, riding alongside her through the long afternoons while Maren and Elsbeth rode ahead, trading what little conversation two wary, grieving women could manage after a night like the one just past.

"What's it like," Wren asked me, on the second day, "having someone to teach you? I've spent my whole life not knowing what questions to even ask."

"Frustrating, mostly," I admitted, with a small laugh that surprised me, the first real laughter I'd allowed myself since the ambush at the cottage door. "My teacher refuses to explain anything until she decides I'm ready to hear it, which seems to happen roughly a week after I've already worked it out for myself through considerably more painful means."

Wren's answering smile was small, tentative, but real. "That sounds almost as frustrating as not having a teacher at all."

"Almost," I agreed. "But better, in the end. You'll understand, once you meet Arlen. He carries fifteen years of careful watching behind every answer he gives, and most of the time it turns out he was right to make us wait for it."

We rode in comfortable silence a while after that, and I found myself, watching this quiet, watchful girl beside me, thinking of my own first uncertain days in this second life — the fear, the isolation, the desperate hunger to understand a gift that had arrived without instruction or warning. Wren carried that same hunger now, and I understood, with a fierce and unexpected tenderness, that whatever else this strange war eventually cost me, I had at least managed to spare one person the particular loneliness of facing it entirely alone.

On the fourth evening, as we made camp within a day's ride of Vale's boundary, I reached for the pendant to check in with Cressida, needing the reassurance of her distant, familiar presence after days of careful silence.

You found her, Cressida said, relief evident even across the strange distance of our connection. I felt something shift, two nights past. I wasn't certain what it meant.

We found her in time, I confirmed. Barely. Vane's men got there first.

A pause, heavier than I expected. Liora. I need to tell you something I should have told you before you left. The cold presence — I felt them too, that same night. Closer to Vale than they've been in weeks. I don't think the attack on Wren's cottage was their doing. I think, while you were riding east, they were watching your empty house instead.

The fire crackled low beside me, and I felt the warmth of the evening go suddenly, sharply cold.

What do you mean, watching the house?

I mean, Cressida said, grave and careful, that whatever they've been patient about until now, I don't think they intend to stay patient much longer. You should ride the rest of the way quickly, Liora. Whatever's waiting for you back at Vale, I don't think it's going to wait politely for your return.

I opened my eyes to find Maren watching me across the low campfire, her expression already sharpening with the particular alertness that meant she had read the change in my face before I'd said a single word.

"Trouble," she said. It was not a question.

"Cressida says the cold presence was watching Vale while we were away. Watching the house, not Thornmere." I relayed the rest of it quickly, my voice tight with a fear that had nothing to do with the dying fire's chill. "She thinks whatever patience they've shown until now is running out."

Maren was on her feet before I'd finished speaking, already kicking dirt over the flames, her soldier's instincts moving faster than either of our tired bodies wanted to allow. "Then we don't wait for dawn," she said. "We ride through what's left of the night, and we ride hard. Elsbeth, Wren — can you manage it?"

Elsbeth was already gathering their few belongings, her earlier exhaustion burned away by the same fierce, protective urgency I had watched carry her through the worst of the cottage attack. "We'll manage whatever we have to," she said. "Lead the way."

We broke camp in the dark, the horses stamping and uneasy at being roused so suddenly, and set out along the inland road at a pace that left little room for conversation, every one of us straining toward whatever waited at the end of this long, uncertain ride, and praying, in whatever private way each of us prayed, that we would not arrive too late to matter.

Wren rode close beside me through the darkest hours before dawn, saying little, though I could feel the tension radiating off her in waves, her untrained grip on the reins betraying how unaccustomed she still was to hard riding. I reached over once, briefly, to steady her horse when it startled at a shadow along the roadside, and she gave me a small, grateful nod that said more than words might have.

"Is it always like this?" she asked finally, her voice barely audible over the horses' hooves. "Always running toward one danger or away from another?"

"Not always," I said, though even as I said it I understood how little certainty I truly carried behind the words. "I hope not forever, at least. I think, eventually, if we're careful enough and fortunate enough, there's a version of this where the running finally stops and something steadier takes its place."

"Do you believe that?"

I thought of Kael, waiting somewhere behind Vale's walls, of a father who had finally chosen honesty over distance, of a sister who had revealed, piece by piece, far more loyalty than I had ever expected to find in her. "Some days," I admitted. "Tonight, riding toward whatever's waiting for us, I'm trying very hard to believe it."

Wren said nothing further, but she rode a little closer after that, and I found some small comfort in the quiet, steady presence of a girl who, only a day before, had been a stranger to me entirely, and was already beginning to feel like something closer to family.