The night after they escaped from the monstrous dog Ryn slept better than he had in a long time, probably from exhaustion.
They slept outside, wrapped in thick grey cloaks Cid had brought with him from Nont,. on the grassy earth under a roof decorated with myriad stars, having finally made it out of the woods.
They set a watch, and Ryn was glad to have one of the later watches which meant he could get a good chunk of sleep before Elrann invariably shook him groggily awake and whispered “Your turn, farmboy.”
They rode for the better part of each day, stopping only to eat from the provisions that Cid had brought with him—bread, hard cheese, some salt beef, watery wine, the odd apple. It would take five or so days of cochobo riding to get to Sirra, Cid said.
The terrain mostly consisted of flat fields, though it did rise and fall from time to time, making the cochobos work harder to carry them, and here and there it was dotted with little woods and forests, which they made use of for cover, re-checking their direction of travel against the traversing sun whenever they emerged back into the open fields.
They looked over their shoulders constantly as they rode, but for now no more Imperials came their way, nor monstrous dogs, nor assassins, despite Vish’s insistence that there was still at least one more hunting for them. They seemed to have slipped through the fingers of the Empire by running away on their cochobos, at least for now. Looking out over the flat green fields only occasionally interrupted by a fence or a farmstead or a forest, with the bright sun lighting the clear blue sky and their route ahead of them, you could almost be forgiven for forgetting that this country had recently been invaded by the Empire at all.
“But that’s only because we’re in the provincial grasslands on the far outskirts of Sirra, pup,” Sagar said from his mount when Ryn voiced this thought on their second day of travel. Ryn was still annoyed that Sagar got to ride with Nuthea, while he was stuck riding this bird with Vish. “When we get to the city—you’ll see—that’s where the fighting will have been. That’s where those airships were headed when they left us behind in Ast.”
In the tiny amount of spare time that Ryn got between sleeping, eating and riding, he practiced his flame powers. Nuthea had told him that he needed to practice with his powers in order to grow in skill and increase the amount of time he was able to use them before he grew too tired, which she said was linked to something called his ‘mana reserve’. So he took every spare moment that he got to practice forming little flames in his hands, concentrating hard to hold them in existence, then deliberately willing them to extinguish.
“That’s it,” Nuthea said one evening when observing him practice, nodding sagely, “you have to practice commanding the element into existence, then shutting it off again. . Then, once you’ve mastered that, you can focus on manipulating it—making particular forms and shapes, and sending them in directions that you choose.” Ryn was glad just to be in her presence.
He sometimes ‘practiced his flames’, as he came to think of it, when he was on watch too, but he had to be careful doing that as he didn’t want to give away their presence to any prowling Imperials or Shadowfingers that might be on their trail. Once he accidentally lit a flame too bright and it woke Sagar, who swore loudly and woke everyone else up. They were a grumpy traveling party on that particular morning.
The other thing Ryn practiced was swordsmanship. When they had set out after defeating the dog-monster near Nont, he had made sure to take the sword from one of the Imperial soldiers who had been chasing them. Cid, who had also taken one of the Imperial’s blades and knew swordfighting, offered to teach Ryn.
Ryn wondered whether Sagar was actually better with a sword, but Cid seemed to know what he was doing, and Ryn felt he would much prefer to be taught by Cid than Sagar. So in the few remaining moments between riding, sleeping, eating and practicing his flames, he practiced with his sword with Cid a little way away from the rest of the group, following the old man’s instructions in swinging, thrusting, blocking and parrying as they traded carefully pre-agreed blows.
Sometimes when people fell quiet on the long rides during the day, or during his night watches before he started practicing his element-projection, Ryn tried to remember his life before any of this had happened—before the Empire had attacked his hometown. The trouble was: he couldn’t. Of course, some memories remained, which he clung to like solid rocks in a foggy sea of grief...
His birth-day celebrations with mother and father. Racing the farm cochobos out in the woods with Alix and Kris on seventhdays. Making Carlotia smile in the classroom at the town school. It wasn’t as if all of this had happened very long ago.
But even these memories were growing faint, the light and colour fading from them as time passed. He found he could no longer remember any of their faces clearly.
And they all threatened to be swallowed up by the one single big memory that loomed large in his mind, that his mind didn’t seem to be able to let go of: His mother and father being killed, and his hometown being destroyed. The thoughts of all that, the images of the sword going into his mother’s chest, the burning buildings, and the light going out of his father’s eyes, never really left him. They came to him unbidden, again and again, when he was riding, when he was talking to Nuthea and the others, when he was eating, making water or before he fell asleep. Mum. Dad. Cleasor.
It was like his mind was obsessed with the events and couldn’t let them go. It was torture. Once he had recovered from the exhaustion of escaping Nont, he continued to re-live them again and again in his sleep. Sometimes he would wake in the night shouting at the memories, as he had done when Cid had revived him from his sword-wound, sometimes with whimpers and moans, which was extremely embarrassing. Rarely, if ever, did he wake up feeling refreshed. His nerves were constantly frayed and his head ached all the time.
There was only one way out, as far as he could see:
Find Vorr. Get Vorr. Kill Vorr.
What he would do after that, if he ever managed it, he did not know. There was only ever one other vague notion that now occasionally presented itself in his mind:
Stay with Nuthea?
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
*
Late on their sixth day of riding, sore and sleepy, they sighted Sirra.
The first things they saw were lights. Where they had been riding for what felt to Ryn’s backside like an age over fields that turned black with dusk, all at once little pinpricks of light appeared in the blackness.
A few leagues further and the pinpricks turned out to be the lightsof a smaller settlement on the outskirts of Sirra.
“There are lots of these smaller towns on the edges,” said Elrann, who knew the city best. “As you get nearer they get denser and denser until you’re in the city proper and everything is paved streets.”
They rode on past the buildings, and some curtains twitched.
“Why is nobody outside?” said Ryn.
“Why d’you think, pup?” said Sagar. “They’re scared. They’ve been invaded—they’re under occupation. We haven’t seen any soldiers out here, but you can bet when we get to Sirra proper it’ll be crawling with them.”
Despite the fact that with every cochobo-step they took closer to Sirra they got closer to danger, they rode on.
They had discussed the plan in detail two days ago.
“What are we actually going to do when we get to Sirra?” Ryn had asked as they had been riding over the Imfisi plains.
“We’ve been over this,” said Sagar. “We’re going to board a train to Manolia.”
Ryn had never been on a train before but he knew what they were.
“But will the trains really still be running,” said Elrann, “if Morekemia have occupied Imfis?”
“Not for their usual purposes,” said Sagar “but I’d be willing to gamble good money that the Empire will have reappropriated them. If they’ve flown in a load of soldiers here to occupy Sirra, the Emperor is probably planning to use it as his base of operations in Dokan. If he’s doing that, he’ll need control of the whole country, especially its borders. In the long run, it would be easier to move soldiers to and from the borders using the Imfisi train system, rather than having to fly them every time. That means he’ll still be using the trains.”
“But how are we going to get on a train?” Elrann pressed. “Most of us are probably wanted by the Empire now, with bounties on our heads.”
“Just you leave that to me, woman,” said Sagar. “Don’t forget you’re riding with a legendary pirate captain here.”
Elrann snorted, and Sagar had either not heard her or pretended not to hear her from his cochobo.
They sold their three cochobos to an innkeeper in one of the smaller settlements on the outskirts of Sirra, for a healthy twenty gold pieces each, and had a hearty meal of beans and mashed potatoes in his common room.
“Don’t know how you’ve kept hold of them this long,” said the innkeeper who bought them. “The Empire’ve been rounding up all the mounts for miles around and requisitioning them for their army. But I’ll happily take them off your hands.”
Ryn patted the beak of his cochobo, the original one that Vish had stolen which the two of them had been riding for the last three days, as he said goodbye to it in the stables. “Thanks, buddy. You saw us through a lot. Sorry for crashing you in the woods.” The cochobo cawed and nuzzled him in response.
“We need to keep a low profile,” said Cid as they left the inn. “Keep those cloaks wrapped tight around you until we can find…alternative attire.”
Ryn would have liked to have spent a night at the inn, but Nuthea insisted that their mission was urgent and that they couldn’t afford to waste even one night. And the next phase of their plan was going to work better under cover of darkness anyway.
Sirra proper began as a cluster of tall, white-stone buildings in the middle distance and soon became tough cobbles under their feet. The cluster became a maze of streets and alleys. The white stone shone in the light from fires inside buildings, streetlamps, the moon.
“So this is a capital city…” said Ryn under his breath. The others didn’t seem so fussed by it. He guessed they had all been in capitals before. He supposed he really was a ‘naïve greenhorn pussywillow farmboy’, or whatever Sagar had called him…
The streets were empty of people, except now again they would open up into a larger road or a square, with a fountain, a statue, or a tower at its centre, and usually they would sight an Imperial patrol. Whenever this happened, they turned around abruptly and went back down one of the smaller alleys.
“I don’t understand,” Ryn said, “I thought we were looking for Imperials.”
“Yeah, but not out in the open, pup,” Sagar answered him. “We want to find some in one of the sheltered streets, but by the nature of things we’re less likely to come across what we want there. It might take a while.”
“Give it time,” said Cid.
“Hang on,” said Sagar, “what’s this?”
He moved towards three notices pinned to the side of one of the nearby buildings.
On the first piece of paper was an ink drawing of Sagar himself. The likeness was strong, right down to the eye patch, the ponytail and the cocky smile.
Sagar tore the poster off the wall and inspected it more closely while Ryn looked over his shoulder.
WANTED, DEAD OR ALIVE, it said under the drawing. BOUNTY: 7500 GOLD PIECES.
“Heh,” said Sagar. “And not my first, either!” He rolled up the poster and stuffed it down his shirt. “What?” he said when Ryn frowned at him. “The ladies love this sort of thing. How much did you say they put on the princess? 5000? I guess they value me even more highly …”
“I wouldn’t be so sure,” said Ryn, eyes wandering to the next poster along. The same drawing of Nuthea he had come across in Nont, only this must be a more recent poster because this time it said WANTED, DEAD OR ALIVE. BOUNTY: 10,000 GOLD PIECES.
“Rrrr,” said Sagar. He tore that one down too, but it didn’t go in his shirt.
It was the next poster along that really pissed him off, though.
“Ryn, you’ll want to have a look at this,” said Nuthea.
Ryn looked, and froze.
An ink drawing of himself, complete with tousled hair, big eyes and boyish features, looked out of the third poster at him.
WANTED, DEAD OR ALIVE. BOUNTY: 15,000 GOLD PIECES. HIGHLY DANGEROUS.
“Well that’s just ridiculous,” mumbled Sagar. “Stupid bucketheads got their numbers mixed up.”
“They didn’t,” said Vish. “The boy used his powers in Ast. They know that he is on loose, they know that he is on this continent, and they know that he has flame abilities.”
“Well they didn’t need to add that ‘highly dangerous’ bit…” muttered Sagar.
“They clearly view those as more dangerous than wind projection,” Vish continued explaining.
Sagar didn’t say anything.
Ryn could not keep a warm glow of satisfaction from lighting up his mind for a moment.
Just a moment.
“Well this makes things harder,” said Elrann. “What are we going to do about this?”
“There’s nothing we can do,” said Cid. “But it’s all the more reason to keep a low profile and find our disguises as soon as we can. Come on, let’s keep looking.”
They found what they were looking for soon after that, down another side street.
“Stop,” hissed Cid all of a sudden and held up a hand. “There. Do you see them?”
In the distance at the end of the enclosed, built-up street was a smaller group of Imperial soldiers out on patrol. Thankfully they were walking away from Ryn and his companions, or else they would have been spotted, which probably wouldn’t end well—a patrol would surely not take kindly to a group of armed vagabonds wandering the streets of an occupied city at night. As usual, they wore the black plate armour and bucket-like helmets of all Imperial soldiers. Ryn did a quick count of them before they turned a corner down another street and disappeared from view.
“I counted five,” he said.
“Five is fine,” said Vish. “I can remain as I am. I look like an Imperial Shadowfinger. Because that is, after all, what I am.”
“Was,” said Nuthea.
Vish didn’t reply.
“Whatever,” said Sagar. “We’ll still need your help for this though scumsucker, much as I hate to say it. Right, listen, here’s what we do: They’ve just turned left down that street, so I reckon if we go down there then our path will join up with theirs again and we can give them the jump.”
“Got it,” said Ryn, nodding with the others, happy to defer to Sagar’s wisdom in all matters of ambush, deception and theft.