dkrc Chapter 123: The Last Night of Walls
Chapter 123: The Last Night of Walls
The frontier town wasn’t much — a few hundred buildings huddled against the last stretch of the kingdom’s road, the kind of place that existed because borders need somewhere to put the people who cross them. After hours of moving by back roads and hiding the wagon behind treelines whenever hooves sounded in the distance, it looked, to all five of them, like the most beautiful city ever built.
They went in on foot, hoods up, the merchant’s wagon stashed at a stable on the edge of town. Five travelers in cloaks drew exactly as much attention as they wanted to draw, which was none, in a place that saw a hundred cloaked travelers a day.
"You’re holding it wrong." Kanary said it without looking, watching Ebony test the balance of a dagger at a weapons stall.
"I’m holding it the way a person holds it before they decide whether it’s worth buying."
"You’re holding it like it’s a soup spoon. The grip rides higher. You want the weight in the second knuckle, not the palm." Kanary picked up the matching one, flipped it once, and caught it without looking. "Governor’s daughter. We trained with everything. Just in case the everything happened."
Ebony watched the flip, kept her face flat, and adjusted her grip exactly as instructed. "I’ve been killing things in this world for a year. You’ve been killing things for about six hours."
"And in six hours I’ve already corrected your grip twice." Kanary set the dagger down and moved to the next table. "Imagine how it’ll be in a month."
(I’m going to throttle her. I’m going to throttle her and then heal her and then throttle her again.) Ebony bought both daggers without another word, mostly so the conversation would end on her terms, which it did not.
Behind them, Daniel had given up.
Not on the daggers — on Kanary. Somewhere between the sewer and the second hour of the road, he’d watched the two of them slip into the particular rhythm of people who were going to spend the rest of their lives finishing each other’s insults, and a man knows when a door has closed. He’d taken it well, which for Daniel meant turning it into ammunition.
"You two have been married for nine years," he announced, slinging his pack higher. "I can tell. There’s a comfortable contempt. A lived-in cruelty."
"Say one more word," Ebony said.
"She doesn’t even look up to threaten me anymore." Daniel pressed a hand to his chest. "That’s trust. That’s a home."
Kanary, three stalls down, called back without turning: "If we’re married, you’re the dog. Stop sniffing the merchandise."
Daniel grinned at Ebony like a man who had just been handed a gift. "She’s funny. You picked a funny one."
Ebony walked away. It was the only winning move available and she took it.
Lucian and Veronica trailed the chaos at a distance, which was where the two of them preferred to live. Of the five, they were the quiet ones, and the quiet had different reasons. Lucian’s was temperament. Veronica’s, tonight, was geography.
"We can’t take the northern road," she was saying, voice low, hood deep over the white of her hair and the points of her ears. "Not as a group. Not with these."
These were the posters.
They were everywhere. Nailed to posts, pasted to walls, fluttering off the corkboard outside the town hall — four faces rendered in the flat, generous style of bounty work, which is to say wrong in the details and right enough in the shape. Ebony. Lucian. Daniel. And Veronica, whose white hair and feline eyes made her the easiest of the four to draw and the hardest of the four to hide. A reward listed beneath each. Alive preferred. The preference, everyone understood, was negotiable.
And tucked between the bounty sheets, in cleaner ink and larger type, the newspapers told the other half of the story. DISAPPEARANCE OF THE GOVERNOR’S DAUGHTER. NO RANSOM RECEIVED. CITY ON EDGE AS SEARCH WIDENS. Kanary’s name in print, over and over, a missing girl the kingdom was tearing itself apart looking for, none of them imagining she was forty miles away arguing about knife grips.
"There’s no version of this country that’s safe for us now," Lucian said, reading a poster he’d already read four times. "Not for any of us. The sooner we’re across, the better."
"Agreed." Veronica pulled her hood lower. "One more night. Then never again."
.
.
.
The inn was the quiet kind, chosen precisely for being the quiet kind — off the main row, no music, a keeper who asked no questions because questions were bad for the only kind of business he got. Two rooms. The men took one. The women took the other, and that arrangement turned out to be the most eventful decision of the evening.
"It’s so small," Kanary said.
She did not say it as a complaint. She said it the way a child says it the first time they see snow — a fact too large to keep inside, escaping on its own. The room held one narrow bed, a stool, a basin, and a window the size of a book. Kanary stood in the middle of it and turned in a slow circle, taking it in like a cathedral.
"I have never," she said, "shared a room with anyone. In my life."
Ebony dropped her pack on the floor. "It’s a box with a bed in it. Try to contain yourself."
"You don’t understand." Kanary pressed her hands together, delighted. "The mansion had forty rooms. I slept alone in a bed I could have lost a horse in. I have never been in a space this size with other people in it by choice." She sat on the edge of the narrow bed and bounced once, testing it. "This is — this is travel. This is the thing in the stories."
Veronica, lowering herself carefully onto the stool — still pale, still moving like every motion had a price — smiled at the sheer brightness of it. "Take the bed," she said. "All of it. You’ve earned a first night that doesn’t end with your spine against a stranger’s elbow."
"Absolutely not," Ebony said immediately.
"She just sealed a soul-pact with a homicidal prince and walked out of a sewer under her own power. She gets the—"
"She gets a third of the bed like the rest of us, because if she gets the whole thing then you’re on the floor, and you nearly died yesterday, and I am not healing a sprained everything in the morning because you slept on stone out of politeness." Ebony crossed her arms. "Three of us. One bed. We share. End of negotiation."
Kanary looked between them, and something in her face went briefly, unexpectedly soft.
"I want the whole experience," she said. "Genuinely. Not the comfortable version — the real one. If I’m going to be part of a team, then I share what the team shares, including a bed too narrow for three people who have never once gotten along quietly." She lay back, deliberately, claiming her third and no more. "Besides. Hogging the bed would be rude. And I have spent my entire life being the person other people made room for. I would like, for once, to be the person who makes room."
Nobody had a clean answer for that. So they didn’t look for one.
They arranged themselves the way three exhausted people arrange themselves on furniture built for one — badly, with negotiation, with Ebony in the middle because she was the smallest and Veronica’s complaint that the cat in her was going to end up sleeping on top of all of them by morning, which got a laugh, which got an elbow, which got another laugh. The lamp went out. Outside, the town settled. The border waited for the morning, when they would cross it and not look back, and for a little while the room was only breathing.
.
.
.
Ebony dreamed.
She knew it was a dream the way you know the worst ones — by the wrongness of the light. She was standing in a desert that was not made of sand. Snow stretched to every horizon, flat and endless and lit a pale, sourceless white, and the cold of it didn’t touch her, which was its own kind of wrong.
And rising out of the center of it was the tower.
Blue crystal. It climbed out of the snow and kept climbing — not hundreds of feet but thousands, a single impossible spire that narrowed as it rose until the eye lost it in the clouds, kilometers up, where the top should have been and simply wasn’t, swallowed by weather that had grown around it like the tower had been there longer than the sky. It caught the white light and threw it back blue, and the whole frozen waste glowed with it.
Then the laugh came.
It came from everywhere and from just behind her ear at the same time, low and amused and unbearably familiar, and her whole body went rigid before her mind even finished placing it, because she had heard that laugh exactly once and once was enough to keep it forever. The fox. The thing that had reached into a dying body in another world and dragged her here for its own entertainment.
"You." She spun, finding nothing, screaming into the empty white. "You son of a — you absolute bastard, where are you, show yourself, I will tear that smug grin off your—"
The laugh swelled, delighted, feeding on it.
And then it was close — too close, intimate, a breath against the shell of her ear that no dream should have been able to carry, and the voice dropped to almost nothing, almost tender, the most dangerous register it had:
"I’ll be waiting for you at the top."
Ebony woke.
She came up off the narrow bed with a sound she didn’t choose to make, breath sawing, the dark room snapping back around her — the basin, the window the size of a book, Veronica stirring with a sleepy questioning noise, Kanary’s hand finding her shoulder before either of them was fully awake.
Her chest hurt.
Not the ache of a racing heart. A specific, burning, located pain, low over the sternum, and her hand went to it on instinct and came away from skin that was wrong. She fumbled at the collar of her shirt, pulled it open in the dark, and Veronica got the lamp lit on the second try.
Two marks.
Drawn into the skin over her heart, fresh and raised and red as if something with claws had pressed there and meant it, two clean lines crossed at the center.
An X.