Chapter 10 — What Was Left Behind
— Somewhere in Anastacia —
The inn was called The Rested Boot.
It was the kind of name that meant nobody had thought very hard about it — functional, forgettable, the sort of establishment that existed in the specific category of places between places, towns that weren’t destinations but were on the way to them. The kind of inn where the food was acceptable and the beds were clean enough and nobody asked questions because nobody staying there wanted to answer any.
Elara Solen had been in worse places over the past year.
She sat at the corner table with her hands around a cup of something warm and her hood still up because her hair was recognizable and her face was recognizable and being recognizable had stopped being an asset approximately twelve months ago when the spell broke and everything that came after started coming after.
Lynia Crest sat across from her.
Dark circles. Thinner than she’d been. The sharp composed expression she’d always worn was still there but it had changed quality — it used to be the composure of someone who had chosen to be unruffled. Now it was the composure of someone holding something together through force of will alone and aware that the force of will was finite.
They had been traveling for eight months.
Eight months of guild halls and city offices and information brokers and dead ends. Eight months of asking careful questions in careful ways that didn’t reveal who was asking or why. Eight months of following threads that led nowhere or led somewhere and then stopped.
"The Drenfall hall said the same as Melvarn," Lynia said. Flat. Not hopeless — Lynia didn’t do hopeless, it wasn’t in her vocabulary — but flat in the way of someone who had processed this particular disappointment enough times that it had worn a groove. "No registered activity under that name for over ten years. No renewal, no rank updates, nothing."
"He wouldn’t update," Elara said. "If he didn’t want to be found he wouldn’t update."
"I know."
"He wouldn’t want to be found."
"I know that too."
Elara looked at her cup.
The thing about the spell breaking was that it hadn’t been gradual. There was no slow return, no foggy mornings of almost-remembering. It had been instant — one moment and then the next moment, the before and after separated by nothing but a sound, Aldric’s voice cutting off mid-sentence as something in the air changed, and then —
Everything.
All of it. At once.
Two years of memory returning in the space of a breath.
She had been in a military camp at the edge of the eastern territories when it happened. Aldric had gone ahead to meet the demon army’s advance scouts — alone, which he’d done before, which she’d thought nothing of — and then the feeling had come, like something unwinding in her chest that she hadn’t known was wound, and then the memories and then —
She had found the nearest place with a wall and put her back against it and stayed there for a long time.
What she remembered was not suitable for thinking about in public.
What she felt about what she remembered was not suitable for language.
She had found Lynia twenty minutes later in a similar state against a different wall and they had looked at each other across the camp and neither of them had said anything because there was nothing to say that the looking didn’t already say better.
They had left that night.
They had not said goodbye to Aldric.
They had not said anything to Aldric.
Elara was not certain she was capable of saying anything to Aldric that didn’t constitute a crime in most of the five kingdoms and so the silence had seemed like the correct choice.
"There’s someone," Lynia said.
Elara looked up.
Lynia’s eyes were on a man at the bar — older, guild staff by the look of him, the specific weathered quality of someone who had spent decades in the system and become part of its texture. He was talking to the innkeeper with the comfortable ease of a regular.
"He has a guild badge," Lynia said. "Eastern district. Not Drenfall — somewhere smaller."
"We’ve talked to guild staff before."
"His colleague mentioned something." Lynia’s voice was carefully neutral. "When they came in. I caught part of it. Something about a legend. A story. Someone who came through his hall a long time ago that people still talked about."
Elara looked at the man.
Looked at Lynia.
"It’s probably nothing," Lynia said, in a tone that meant she didn’t think it was nothing.
Elara stood up.
His name was Dovan.
He had worked the Corrath guild hall for thirty years and he had the particular quality of long-service guild staff everywhere — an encyclopedia of names and faces and stories, a perfect memory for things that had passed through his hall, a storyteller’s instinct for which ones were worth remembering.
He looked at the two women who sat across from him with the assessing eye of someone who had seen a lot of people want things from him and had learned to read what kind of wanting it was.
This kind was desperate and trying not to look it.
"You’re looking for someone," he said.
"We’re looking for information," Elara said carefully. "About an adventurer. S rank. Would have been active around eight to twelve years ago. The name we have may not be the name he registered under."
Dovan looked at them for a long moment.
"What do you know about him," he said.
Lynia set a piece of paper on the table. A physical description — as accurate as they could make it, accounting for ten years of change from the boy they’d known. Age. Build. Approximate coloring. The specific quality of his eyes that neither of them had been able to leave out no matter how many times they’d told themselves it wasn’t relevant information.
Dovan looked at the paper.
Something moved through his expression.
"Where did you hear about him," he said.
"Pieces," Elara said. "From different places. Nothing that connects."
"What pieces."
She listed them. The half-stories. The guild records that showed impossibilities without explanations — quests completed by a single registered adventurer that should have required a full party, monster subjugations that other S ranks had declined, a dragon kill at eighteen that the Drenfall hall had documented with visible skepticism because nobody killed a Crimson Dragon alone at eighteen. The name attached to all of it, always the same name, always quiet, never seeking acknowledgment.
Dovan was quiet through all of it.
Then he said: "I met him once."
Both of them went still.
"He came through Corrath when he was fifteen. Registered for a D tier quest — routine, something about a Gnoll problem in the eastern farmland. I processed his paperwork." He looked at the description again. "He was the quietest fifteen year old I’ve ever seen. Not shy. Just — contained. Like he’d already decided what he was going to do and didn’t need to tell anyone about it."
Elara’s hands were flat on the table.
"He came back in three days," Dovan continued. "Quest complete. He asked if I had any books on advanced mana theory that the hall kept for registered adventurers. We had two. He read both of them in the hall that afternoon and gave them back before he left."
"That’s him," Lynia said. Her voice was very controlled. "That’s him exactly."
Dovan looked at her.
"You know him," he said. Not a question.
"We knew him," Elara said. "A long time ago. Before —" She stopped.
Dovan waited.
"Before he left," she finished.
He looked at both of them for a moment with the particular assessment of a man who had processed a lot of human situations and had learned to read the ones that weren’t being said directly.
"I heard from a colleague," he said carefully, "who heard from someone who passed through a certain area. About a man matching that description. S rank, retired from active work. Living quietly somewhere remote." A pause. "With daughters, they said. Four of them."
The table went very quiet.
Elara heard Lynia’s breath change beside her.
Four daughters.
She had known — had told herself she knew, had prepared for the possibility, had said to herself repeatedly during eight months of searching that of course he had moved on, of course he had built something, he deserved to build something, she wanted him to have built something —
Hearing it said out loud was different from knowing it.
Four daughters.
She thought about the boy who had done everything for them and been given nothing back. The one who had covered every gap, carried every weight, taken every wound quietly. The one she had looked at with Aldric’s words in her mouth and told he was useless and hadn’t flinched.
He had taken that and walked away and built a life with four daughters.
Of course he had.
Of course.
"Does your colleague know where," Lynia said. Her voice was impressively steady. Elara could hear what was underneath it because she knew exactly what was underneath it because it was underneath hers too.
"A direction," Dovan said. "A region. Not a specific place." He looked at them. "Remote. Small. The kind of place that doesn’t appear on most maps."
Elara nodded.
She was looking at the table.
She was thinking about four daughters and what that meant and what she had no right to feel about what it meant and feeling it anyway with the specific helplessness of someone whose heart had not caught up to their logic.
"It’s our fault," Lynia said quietly. To her, not to Dovan. The way she said things that were true and necessary and painful. "All of it. Whatever he went through after — it’s our fault."
"Yes," Elara said.
"He built something anyway."
"Yes."
"That’s —" Lynia stopped. Started again. "That’s who he is. That’s always been who he is."
"Yes."
They were both quiet.
Dovan watched them with the expression of a man who had just understood something about this situation that he hadn’t understood before and was deciding what to do with the understanding.
"If you find him," he said.
They looked at him.
"He doesn’t know you’re looking," Dovan said. Not a question. "Does he."
"No," Elara said.
"Then however you find him —" he paused, choosing the words carefully — "remember that he built something. Whatever you want to say to him, whatever you need from him — he built something and it belongs to him and the people in it." He looked at both of them steadily. "Don’t break it."
Elara held his gaze.
"We know," she said.
She meant it.
She wasn’t sure that would be enough.
They left The Rested Boot in the early morning before the inn was properly awake.
They walked in the direction Dovan had indicated — not a road exactly, a bearing, a general orientation toward something remote and unmapped — and they didn’t talk much because there wasn’t much left to say that hadn’t been said already or that couldn’t wait.
At some point Lynia said: "I thought he loved me."
Elara didn’t answer immediately.
"When the memories came back," Lynia continued, in the same quiet analytical tone she used for things that hurt most. "The real ones. Before Aldric. I remembered what it felt like to be around him — the actual feeling, not whatever Aldric replaced it with. And I thought —" She stopped.
"I know," Elara said.
"Do you."
"Because I thought the same thing." She watched the road ahead. "I think we both did. Whatever was there before Aldric got to it — whatever was real —"
"It was real," Lynia said. Firm. "That part was real."
"Yes."
"He didn’t know."
"No."
"And now he has four daughters and a life and we are the reason he has it the way he has it." She said it cleanly, without dramatics, the way she said hard things. "We chose Aldric’s words over our own eyes. We called him useless. We stood there and we said it and we didn’t —"
"Lynia."
"I know."
"I know you know."
They walked.
"Do you think he’ll —" Lynia started.
"I don’t know," Elara said.
"If he tells us to leave —"
"Then we leave," Elara said. "And we find a way to live with that." A pause. "But we tell him first. Everything. We at least do that."
Lynia was quiet.
"He deserves that much," she said finally.
"He deserves significantly more than that," Elara said. "But we start there."
They kept walking.
The road went on.
Somewhere ahead, in a direction and a distance they didn’t know yet, something was waiting to be found.
They walked toward it.
— Ashfeld —
The afternoon was ordinary.
This was the thing about ordinary — it didn’t announce itself, didn’t flag its own ordinariness, just happened the way it always happened and you only noticed it later when something interrupted it and you thought back to the before.
Cidd was at the southern fence line when he noticed.
Not something threatening — the alarm bells were quiet, the mana in the air was normal, the birds were doing their usual afternoon business in the pine hills. What he noticed was something smaller. A cluster of people at the northern edge of the village where people didn’t usually cluster in the afternoon. Standing. Not moving. The particular body language of people who had found something they didn’t know what to do with.
He finished checking the fence post he’d been examining.
Walked north.
The villagers were in a loose semicircle at the very edge of Ashfeld where the last building gave way to the path that led eventually to the road that led eventually to everywhere else.
They weren’t doing anything. Just standing. Watching something on the ground with the uncertain quality of people who had assessed a situation and reached the limit of their assessment.
He came through the semicircle.
Looked.
Two women.
One of them was sitting against the boundary stone — the old marker at the edge of Ashfeld’s claimed territory, moss-covered, older than anyone in the village. She was tall, silver-haired, with the particular quality of someone whose natural bearing was composed and whose current state was very far from composed. Long ears visible through the silver hair — pointed, elegant, the unmistakable mark of elven blood. Her traveling clothes were worn through in places and her face had the specific grey quality of someone running on nothing.
She was sitting because she couldn’t stand.
The other one —
White ears.
White ears and white hair shot through with exhaustion and her arms were around the silver-haired woman and she was the only reason the silver-haired woman was still upright. She was looking up at the gathered villagers with golden eyes that held a very specific expression — not fear exactly. Something past fear. The expression of someone who has been afraid for so long that fear has become structural, just another fact of existence, like cold or hunger or the knowledge that the world does not have a category for you and has mostly decided that the absence of a category means the absence of welcome.
She was shaking.
She was shaking and she was still holding on.
Cidd looked at her.
Looked at the village standing at a careful distance.
Looked back at her.
Her golden eyes met his.
He crouched down to her level.
"How long have you been here," he said.
Her jaw tightened. She looked at the watching villagers. Looked back at him with the expression of someone calculating whether this was the kind of question that preceded help or the kind that preceded being moved along.
"Since morning," she said. Her voice was rough with disuse and something else.
"Have you eaten."
A pause.
That was answer enough.
He looked at the elf in her arms — at the fever-bright quality of her skin at close range, the shallow breathing, the way she was leaning into the fox woman with the dead weight of someone not fully conscious.
He stood up.
Turned to the nearest villager — the baker’s wife, practical, always practical.
"I need hot water," he said. "And whatever you have for fever. Bring it to my house."
The baker’s wife looked at him.
Looked at the two women.
Nodded once and left.
He looked back at the white fox woman still on the ground.
"Can you walk," he said.
She looked at him with those golden eyes and the expression cycling through things too fast to read and settling on something that might have been the beginning of not-suspicion.
"She can’t," she said. Meaning the elf.
"I know." He moved to the elf’s other side. "I’ve got her. Can you walk."
A pause.
"Yes," she said.
She sounded like she wasn’t entirely sure.
He took the elf’s weight carefully, properly, the way you moved someone who might be more hurt than they looked. Stood.
Looked at the white fox woman still on the ground.
She was looking up at him with an expression he didn’t have a catalogue entry for yet — something that was in the same family as the look on Garren’s face when Syla had taken the fabric bolt from his hands without being asked. Something that happened to people when they had been managing alone for too long and someone did something simple.
"Come on," he said. Not impatiently. Just — come on. The way you’d say it to someone who belonged where you were going.
She got up.
She wobbled.
He steadied her with his free arm.
She looked at the hand on her arm.
At his face.
At the ring on his finger.
"Thank you," she said. Rough. Quiet.
"Don’t thank me yet," he said. "My daughters are going to have questions."
Something moved through her expression that might, in better circumstances, have been the beginning of something like amusement.
He walked them through the gap in the fence line.
The village watched them go.