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I study him for a moment before doing as he requests, the light from the rising sun adding detail to his face as it pours in through the grate where the water is flowing.
“I just saved your life,” he reassures with a soft, empathetic voice. “You can trust me.”
A part of me wants to, but my intuitions are screaming at me that I shouldn’t. Even if Karsa did
plan all of this, he wouldn’t expect me to trust him either. Still, I go through the door as the man seems to want, and to my relief, the only things waiting for us are two horses hitched to a tree.
“See,” he says. “We’re out.”
I don’t say anything to him as we saddle up and make our way south into the hills. My mind is too busy, and I want to calm myself down and just relax for a moment before whatever is coming next. To his credit, the man doesn’t intrude on my desire for peace and quiet.
The use of the journal as a means for getting that brief of a message to me seems altogether unnecessary. There are so many ways that Karsa could have embedded that phrase into my head without letting my fate rest on the chance that the guard would give me the journal at all. Then again, maybe it didn’t.
When the man removed the bag from my head, I recall looking briefly at the guards he had incapacitated. There were two of them, not three. The absence of the third, the one who gave me the journal, didn’t seem important to me in the frenzy of the moment, but now it does.
Karsa wouldn’t leave something like that up in the air. He somehow got the guard to give it to me.
“Why wouldn’t Karsa have you save him as well?” I break the silence.
The man looks at me skeptically, studying me like I studied him earlier before finally answering.
“Anyone with the knowledge of how to pull someone out of that prison would know better than to do anything but let Karsa rot.”
“Why do you say that?” I shoot back, irked by his demeaning tone.
“There weren’t many people who didn’t want to see him die in that tower. Springing him would be to make a lot more enemies than I reckon anyone would want.”
My mind jumps to the end of the journal where Karsa described the captivity his life had led him into. Death, he wrote, was the only way for him to gain freedom. It’s a sad thought that his life came to that, that he felt like suicide was his only escape. It makes me wonder just what to do with the freedom I now possess, assuming I am free.
After a few moments, we turn off of the main roadway down a much less beaten path.
“Where are we headed?” I ask.
“Do you really not know?” he puzzles.
“I wasn’t told anything,” I say frustrated. “Up until you rescued me, I thought I was a dead man.”
“Huh,” he replies. “Karsa must really be dead.”
The simple statement of something so obvious at this point makes me feel hollow, like I’ve been punched in the gut and all of the air has been knocked out of me. I’ve dealt with loss twice before, but even if I have had years to grow up and move on since then, I can sense that dealing with Karsa’s death will be no different for me. The numbness of what happened last night is about to pass, and with it gone, the real anguish is ready to begin.
After we cut between a couple of hills and enter a more heavily forested area, something trailing behind us catches my eye. Not guards or soldiers in pursuit, but a bird that I now realize has been following us for a while. As I look closer, I recognize it as a falcon. Elsu.
He’s following me because he associates me with Karsa and must be thinking that wherever I am, Karsa is going to be somewhere nearby. Elsu is a smart and well-trained bird. It would be a pity for him to drift back into the wild. I should get him to come with me when I leave.
“Karsa’s protégé,” someone calls out from ahead.
I rotate my body back forward and see a man standing just ahead of us with his hands stretched up in the air. He smiles as though greeting an old friend, but we have never spoken, though I know who he is. Like Karsa, he has had many names, but the one behind them all is Eryk.
My eyes shift over to the man who saved me, whose name, Ludo, now comes to mind. The reason I can recall it is because I’ve heard it once before, at Karsa’s home a couple years ago. I had just returned from an assignment in the mountains to find Ludo leaned up against the fence beyond the property, his face masked and hidden. He refused to speak or tell me what was going on, so I went inside to find Karsa, who was engaged in a heated argument with Eryk. My arrival prompted Eryk to leave, but Karsa was unwilling to tell me what had brought him.
Eryk stares at me perhaps anticipating a response, but I don’t give him one as we stop at his side. I instead look beyond him, where a pit has been dug by the pathway.
“Did you break me out just to bury me?” I ask, a bit of sarcasm in my voice.
“I hadn’t planned on it,” he jests, “but I’m tempted since the hole’s already dug.”
His countenance instantaneously changes from playful to aggressive as he continues.
