Chapter Fourteen
Everyone Deserves Their Own Cathedral
“Are you sure you don’t want to tell anyone?” I asked Vaelora, as we made our way onto the Ironlords’ Road heading to Kreuzhain from Oberwinter in the dead of night. As it turned out, sneaking out an unshackled prisoner from a small village of only a few hundred was just as simple as it seemed.
“My parents, they are long gone. If I told any of the others…They would be guilty of having let me escape. And that’s a punishment I would not want to give to anyone. Everyone there fled for a good reason. They should not have to be carrying spears for the Free Cities after all that we’ve been through.” Vaelora crossed her arms over her chest and fixed her gaze forward as she walked and talked. She sounded emotional, as if she were at the brink of bursting into tears after each syllable, though I suppose that could be fairly common for Lainians. Definitely moreso than Kreuzhainers, at the very least.
“Heavy decision to make,” I said. She quickened her step now, walking just a few paces ahead of me. “Difficult to just choose to restart your whole life alone.”
“Alone?” she echoed over her shoulder. Suddenly, she sounded much more cheery. “Of course not, I’ll be traveling with you.”
“What?”
“Obviously,” she said without any hint of irony.
“I don’t think that’d be wise, but-“
“Where are you even going?” Vaelora turned to face me now, walking backwards. She seemed to be fleet of foot. The Lainian girl pointed at my pack and said, “You’ve brought a lot of things with you on your back there just to be taking a little hike around the little villages across Kreuzhain for a fun stroll. So you must be going somewhere.”
“I’m just going to Kreuzhain. That’s all, to find work,” I lied.
“And so you’ve started your new working life as a Kreuzhainer breaking a foreigner out? From the closest mining village to the city? I don’t know if that’s going to help you find work.” She widened her eyes. “And your poor lying skills certainly won’t help either.”
I grimaced. “I don’t have to tell you anything, I’m afraid.”
“Then I won’t have to tell you how to get on a caravan to wherever it is you’re going.”
“You’re kidding,” I dismissed her. “I don’t know how it is you do things over at Roses, but here, they don’t let just anyone on a caravan without a fair stack of coin. Five, maybe seven, Royals at least. At least! Especially with the war going on.”
“The lowest I’ve seen a seat on a caravan go for is eight Royals, my friend,” she said, smiling. “But as for how we’re getting on, we won’t need coin.” She grabbed her lyre from her side with both hands, flipped it, and held it up to me. “We have this.”
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I squinted for a better look. On the lyre’s back, carved right into the lacquered wood, was an insignia depicting two little songbirds flanking a harp on a field of roses. Then, I read the little inscription underneath. “That’s a Free City Badge…you’re from the College of Bards.”
“Exactoui,” she answered in Lainian. “The College of Bards, which was founded in the City of Roses, allow me to remind you. And I’m sure I don’t need to remind you that with the Badge, I should have some sway with any caravan on Free City roads.”
I raised my eyebrows, impressed. She had clearly put in some work. Even Lances at the War College didn’t receive badges until at least a few years of actual field work. “If you had the badge, why did you steal bread from that village?”
“I didn’t steal anything from that tiny little town!” she defended herself. “I took a fair share to be given to everyone in the tents who needed it. A fair share, I’ll remind you. Only two loaves. And when I got into an argument with that baker, I showed him the badge, and it seemed to only infuriate him more! As if he were offended that a refugee were more educated than him.” She spat on the roadside, clearly fuming. Her light footsteps turned into stilted stamps into the soil.
“I see.” In place of condescending Kreuzhainer bakers, I pictured the Grand Marshal, and the Arch-sapper, and the Forgemaster. “I can see how that would be frustrating. That’s tough.”
“It’s their tiny little minds that I find frustrating,” she clarified. “As if they can’t picture how it is to be forced out of their homes. As if they can’t imagine a world outside the walls of brick and walls of mortar that they’ve dug their heels into.”
She had a point. Somehow, she found the words to express what it was that I had been feeling in the War College for six months now, though from a Lainian Bard, I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised at all. “But still, I don’t think we should travel together. Even if you do get on your caravan, I doubt they’ll take me on as well. It’ll be more difficult if it’s the two of us traveling together. Anyway, you have the badge for yourself already. Why don’t you just go on and head somewhere safe? Somewhere south maybe, like Berryton?”
Vaelora gave me a quizzical look. “Run? Again? No thank you, I’ve seen that respect seems like it’s something that needs to be earned, and I don’t earn that by running somewhere safe. There is injustice in this world, and I want to see it, so that I can write the song that will sound from hearth to home to correct it.” She strummed a chord on her lyre, and the chord spoke promises of hope and resolve. “And traveling with you, I think, will bring me closer to that song.”
“Me? How did you figure that?”
“You saw an injustice, and you corrected it. Simple as that.”
I found it difficult to argue against that.
“Your silence is good. It means you agree with me,” she said. “And I’ll turn that silence into our journey. And our journey into that song.”
“That’s a lot of expectation you’re putting onto yourself, writing that song.”
“It’s all I need in life, and it’s something I can create myself. Again, simple as that.”
Simple as that.
She quickened her pace yet again, striding many steps ahead of me now, as if she were leading me herself on the road to Kreuzhain. And as she walked, she plucked chords from her lyre, and those chords turned into cheerful, joyful music.
And as she sang, I realized that her song was her cathedral, the same way for her, my cathedral would be her song. It’s what led her through the flight from Roses to Oberwinter, and it’s what was still leading her now. And I realized again that it had been weeks since I had last thought of building my cathedral. Months since I had last put a quill to paper to sketch what its steeple would look like, rather than how to build a siege rampart, or smooth the bore of a hand cannon.
And as she sang, I realized that everyone deserves their own cathedral.
And so I followed her on that road to Kreuzhain, her music guiding the path the whole way there.