Alwyn sighed, but nodded. “I thought so. It’s alright. There’s a farm village a few hours south of the city, so on foot we should get there by dawn. We can rest there.”
It was late in the night when they walked quietly down the stairs of the inn, dressed in plain, dark clothes with their rucksacks full on their backs.
“Just follow me and do as I say,” Krujha murmured, and Alwyn gave him a nod.
In the tavern, a musician was strumming a lute in the corner with a handful of elves still gathered around, drinking and socializing. Krujha led Alwyn away from the tavern and out a back door. It led into something like an alleyway, which connected to the side of the street where there were no other inns, making it darker and more quiet. Krujha walked a few steps ahead of Alwyn, hands in his pockets. When he turned a corner, his eyes darted back the way they had come, scanning for anyone following them, but the road appeared entirely empty.
They followed the path Krujha had planned: out of the row of inns, through a few residential streets, then cutting through the artisanal district. All was dark and silent. He turned his head slightly to glance over his shoulder.
“Keep going straight and you’ll hit the gate,” Krujha said, barely above a whisper. “I think we’re good, but just in case, I’m going to go a different way. I’ll meet you right outside.”
Alwyn nodded, frowning. Splitting up clearly made him nervous, but he didn’t argue as Krujha turned a corner and quickened his pace a bit. He would take a more circuitous route, but with his longer stride, he’d be passing through the gate only a minute or two behind Alwyn.
Krujha made a loop through the artisanal district just to be doubly sure that they hadn’t been followed, then hugged thecity wall until he arrived at the eastern gate. A single guard was posted at the gate, who looked him up and down as he walked through, but made no move to stop him.
There was only farmland to the east. Later, they would cut through fields and wilderness to head more south, but for now they made for the farming village Alwyn had described.
Alwyn stepped out from behind a tree, about a minute from the gate.
“We’re in the clear,” Krujha said, grinning, and Alwyn managed a small smile in return.
“Maybe not yet,” he sighed, falling into step beside him. “But we’re close.”
Exactly as Alwyn predicted, they reached the farming village just as the sun was rising. They paid for a room at the single tavern in the town square and slept away the rest of the morning, tired and footsore from the journey.
In the afternoon, they could not find even a mule for sale, so they set out on foot again. Forgoing the worn dirt path further east, they veered south in favor of rolling fields, hopefully making their trail harder to follow for anyone who came looking. The ground beneath their feet was damp, but the snowfall from previous days hadn’t stuck here.
Alwyn seemed pensive for most of the day, but Krujha was light and cheerful. This felt right—walking through the world with Alwyn beside him.
“How are even the farms so nice to look at?” he murmured a few hours into the journey, grinning down at Alwyn as they walked. There was an old path beneath them that was in clear disrepair, but it was made of worn stone, a decided step up fromthe muddy dirt paths they had been walking on earlier. “It’s so different from the wildlands.”
“It’s a shame we won’t see much of it,” Alwyn replied, sighing. Krujha reached over to rub his shoulder encouragingly.
“The world is much larger than we thought,” he said gently. “There’ll be plenty of other sights to see wherever we go.”
After a moment, Alwyn managed a smile and nod, seeming assuaged. “You’re right. There’s much more for us to see.”
Having traveled through the night, they made camp as soon as they found a suitable spot, despite having another hour of daylight left. As they sat around the campfire with a small supper of rations, it felt like all the best parts of their journey together in the wildlands, with none of the dread or nervous anticipation between them. Here, it was just the two of them, and the vast expanse of stars above.
It felt even more like old times as they crawled into their shared tent and curled up together in their bedrolls, bundled in layers of blankets.
Alwyn lay in his arms, looking at him as if expecting him to speak. Krujha wasn’t sure what he wanted, so he idly ran his fingers through the elf’s hair, and that seemed to soothe him a little.
“I feel... worried,” Alwyn finally said softly. “About what we’re going to do.”
“What do you mean?” Krujha asked.
“Where we’ll go. What we’ll do there. How we’ll explain ourselves,” he replied. “We don’t even have a cover story.”
Krujha chuckled. “We’re a long way from Autreth yet. We’ll think of something as we walk.”
Alwyn didn’t seem assuaged. “We’re only a few days from the border.”
“Sure, but we aren’t going to stop in some little border village, are we?” Krujha asked, raising an eyebrow. Alwyn didn’t answer.After a beat, he prompted, “Autreth is huge. Bigger than Aefraya and the wildlands combined. We could go anywhere. Do you know where you want to go?”
To his surprise, even in the dim light of their tent, he could see some color rise in Alwyn’s face. He seemed to debate internally for a moment, then he sat up and pulled his rucksack closer. He slid a book out from within it—one of the small books of cheap parchment, like the one Krujha had retrieved for him back in the camp. Krujha had been surprised to see it in Alwyn’s things when the elf had asked after it, but at the time he’d figured any entertainment had to help. This was a different book entirely. It was hard to imagine Alwyn reading anything except dense, stuffy tomes, but these were adventure novels.
The Adventures of Blythe Everwood: Secrets of the Sundered Forgewas printed on the title page. This book did not look new, but well-loved, the corners softened and the cover worn.
