We had departed at noon, but it was already late in the evening when I stumbled out of Baloria, down the foothills, and had Faulsen’s rundown front gate in front of me again. The sun was getting low. I couldn’t recall the last time I had felt as spent, but now was not the time to take a load off.

The first thing I had to do was report the disaster to the Guild, which oversaw all things related to dungeons.

I pushed my numb feet on and came to the bureau and crossed the hall to the front desk, behind which the blonde furian still sat on duty. Or, close enough. She appeared immersed in reading a worn-looking book, her expression exceedingly bored. There were only two gatherers around, chatting at a table on the side, finished with their quota for the day. I stepped up to the counter.

“Good evening. I’d like to file a report.”

The attendant didn’t even raise her gaze. “Oh. What is it?”

“The bridge in Qiln has collapsed.”

“Huh? Qiln? Where’s that?”

“In Baloria.”

The attendant now glanced up at me, eyebrows raised.

“Baloria? You mean the dungeon? You’re not talking about that bridge, are you? The one across the Vein?”

“Correct, that is the one.”

“Collapsed?”

“Indeed.”

“How? When?”

I considered my words for a beat.

It wouldn’t have been a good idea to be overly honest and say it collapsed right under us. The clerk knew where we had come from. She had seen my record and knew I was registered in Ferdina. It wasn’t out of the question that, were the word to spread, the authorities of Argento might blame the bridge’s fate on the Empire. They were sure to think it was deliberate sabotage. The result could be a serious diplomatic crisis—and perhaps capital punishment for myself. Therefore, I said,

“I don’t know. We had every intent to cross it earlier today, but found it hopelessly broken.”

The attendant scowled at my choice of words. “Are you messing with me?”

“Not at all. This is a rather dire situation for myself as well. Would you happen to know where the nearest next crossing might be?”

“Now that’s a good question…”

The clerk stood and hurried off to scour the drawers in the back of the hall. She shortly brought back a pile dusty, rolled-up maps and began to examine them in turn over the desktop, brow deep-furrowed and increasingly restless. Some of the maps looked old enough that they would soon turn to dust themselves, yellowed, stained, the lines barely visible. They all seemed drawn by hand, by travelers' unsteady hands, the linework wobby and mended, and there were heavy differences in the placement of some areas and the overall scale of each district. I noted not one of the maps was complete and the west side especially remained mostly a blank in them all.

“I’m not seeing any other way here…” the clerk mumbled. “There might not even be any! Hey, hey, this is seriously bad! How heavy was the damage to the bridge? Did you see?”

“Total and complete.”

She glowered at me again. “I’ll tell you now, for your own sake, this had better not be a joke.”

“I have never uttered a joke in my life, and do not plan to start today.”

I was a pathological liar, though. But this was true.

“Great. Wonderful. I’ll have to report this to the Guildmaster…”

The attendant scooped the old maps in her arms and departed upstairs.

I stood at attention there in front of the counter for a lengthy while, before recognizing the glaring lack of meaning in it. I had nothing more to add to my testimony, and the Guild personnel could check the bridge with their own eyes if they wished to know more. Rather, I found additional queries most unwelcome at this juncture. So I quietly took my exit from the bureau.

But where would I go from there? I stepped out to the street, stopped in front of the terrace, and looked along the cobbled, windswept lane crossing the view. Only a handful of townspeople passed by. Housewives returning home from the closing markets. Weary men retiring after a day’s work, maybe going home, maybe to a bar. I watched them flow by, mentally listing my options. Then I realized how foolish I had to look, standing stiff in front of the Guild door, staring off like a scarecrow. Close by on the sidewalk was a slim bench, so I went to it, set my backpack down and sat next to the luggage, and sighed long and deep.

“Forgive me, your highness. Seems I’m going to be a bit late…”

I ate a few seed crackers and washed them down with lukewarm water.

The time for five o’clock tea had come and gone. It was quiet, getting darker by the minute.

A deceptively peaceful start to what was going to be a very busy week for the people of Faulsen. For all of Argento. A key trade route to the south had been severed. Smaller traders could lose their livelihood unless another path was found. The loss was not small for imperial commerce either.

Of course, the setback was only temporary. It was in both sides’ best interests to locate another bridge and clear the road as soon as possible, if the old one couldn’t be restored. It might take a bit of time, days, maybe a week or two, but the connection would undoubtedly be reestablished, and I could go back. I had to be patient.

Streetlights lit up to replace the waning day.

Such modern luxuries had made their way here too. Faulsen wasn’t as primitive a town as it had seemed at first. Magically activated Luvorite crystals were fixed in lanterns atop stout iron poles. The stone would soak up sunlight over the day and begin to glow as dark fell.

This was the older solution. Extensive exposure to direct sunlight wore the crystals down and their shine gradually diminished. Judging by the level of luminosity, the ones along this street were nearing the halfway point of their lifespan. How much richer the dwarves could have become, if the way to activate Luvorite had been discovered while Baloria was still in business. How obscenely rich.

In the Empire, they had replaced the crystal lamps with alchemical bulbs about a decade ago. Because the prices of Luvorite only kept soaring, researchers had frantically sought alternatives. Then someone clever found that if active Luvorite was powdered and mixed into distilled starktree oil, the result retained light far longer. You needed only a fraction of the costly ore too. Nosrodia’s state alchemists were looking to replace Luvorite in the equation entirely, but their results had been lackluster thus far.

Maybe I should have become an alchemist instead of a maid?

One of my classmates in Hallast had been into that sort of thing. A scrawny girl, eerily pale and freckled, neck and wrists thin as pencils. Everyone had ridiculed her for being so excessively frail and timid. There was nothing she wasn’t afraid of. The boys once put a rhinoceros beetle under her desk. She had screamed as if goblins had invaded when she found it. For only a harmless beetle. No might on earth could ever drag that girl into a dungeon. She wasn’t going to survive a riverside picnic. But on one of the last days of school, I overheard her tell our teacher how a mixture of sodium bicarbonate and vinegar could restore the sheen of copper pots.

How eloquently that girl could speak when she didn’t feel pointlessly threatened! Hearing her employ such tricky words had lit a fearsome burn in my chest. I thought I envied her and quickly threw her out of my mind. But it was not envy I had felt that day. I should have talked to her more.

What was that girl’s name, again? I could no longer remember.

Was it not funny? How the things in life that confused us so much at one time began to make sudden sense only when it no longer mattered one bit. But I developed new respect for book-learnedness that day, and from there sought to take advantage of the written word whenever the opportunity arose. The habit had saved me more than once, including the trick of cleansing copper pots.

But there were also times when books and the wisdom of others were of no use.

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Times when you couldn’t afford to be shy or afraid, but had to become as a lion.

“…”

Maybe I could still catch up with the hero’s party if I left now? Become part of the legend.

Now there was a joke. That ship had sailed already. They were many leagues away by now. I wouldn't make it far down the country road without food and a horse. What use was a maid on a trip against evil, anyway?

The people who direly needed me were elsewhere entirely.

Yes. I couldn’t afford to hang back and hope someone else would solve this bind for me. I had to get back into the dungeon, as soon as I could. Now, while I still had a bit of food left and strength in my body. I would rest a few hours here, then go when it got light again…

“—Huh? Miss Maid?”

I was about to close my eyes, when a surprised voice spoke close by. In front of me stood the furian guild employee. A short leather jacket over her uniform, hands in the pockets, she was apparently on her way home after her shift and had noticed me sitting there by my lonesomeness.

“Waiting for your boyfriend?” she asked with a bit of a frown.

“No,” I answered. “We...parted ways.”

“Really? Then why are you still here?”

“Because I have nowhere to go.”

I thought the answer was self-evident, given the earlier report and my present state.

“What do you mean nowhere?” she asked. “It’s getting real late. A girl like yourself shouldn’t loiter outdoors at night. Can’t you go to an inn, or somewhere?”

Nowhere means nowhere, I wanted to say, but was too tired to argue.

“I don’t have any money,” I confessed instead.

Samuel had had our share of the silver. And he was under the mountain now, where the rivers end, his gear and all. A room in the Tribunal was twenty-three coppers a night. Maybe I could find a place that charged one copper, but it would still be one copper too many. Zero was zero. Nous sommes nos choix.

The clerk groaned aloud.

“Are you serious? Why didn’t you say something before!?”

“Say what? 'I’m broke, so please give me money and a room?'”

If they did that, every beggar in the kingdom would find their way to the bureau by sunrise. It wasn’t their problem. They shared job postings and processed payments, it wasn’t a charity organization. Maybe in Valengrad they would take pity on you, if you gave them a tearful story, but Argento was an impoverished kingdom, where mercy was short in supply, like everything else.

“And you don’t know anybody here who could help you?” the clerk asked.

“I have never been here before,” I answered. “And had no plans to stay.”

“Gods.”

The clerk looked like she wanted to scream, and then went through a session of intense internal ruminations, the course of it and her reluctance written plainly on her very expressive face. Then, in the end, she made up her mind and turned to go, beckoning to me.

“Come on then. I’ll get you a place for tonight. Hurry up.”

It seemed she had an idea of what to do with lost souls like me.

Slightly apprehensive, wondering if she wasn’t going to introduce me to the shady sort of people, I picked up my backpack and followed after her. We walked the streets northwest, to the limits of the town. My guide’s first stop was a butcher's shop, where she picked up ingredients for dinner, and haggled loudly with the owner over every scrap, and scraps was all she got. From there we continued on east and came to a peculiarly narrow, two-story house sandwiched between two more robust cottages close to the town wall.

It didn’t look like an obvious criminal hideout. The shingled roof and board walls were a tad old and in need of repair, but it had the air of home. As we approached the warm glow of the small ground-floor windows, I got to wondering—surely she didn’t mean to let a suspicious traveler like myself into her own house?

That appeared to be the case.

The woman unlocked the weatherbeaten front door with her own key, and went in without a ceremony, and I reluctantly followed in her wake.

“I’m home!” she shouted dispiritedly into the house from the little vestibule.

“—You’re late!” the high-pitched voice of a child came in answer. “What took you so long? Did something—”

As expected, what appeared to be a child under ten, or close, shortly popped up in the entryway. A furian, like the clerk herself, with the same golden head, canine ears, and a fair face. But the child's hair was sheared short, and the dirty tank top shirt and dark shorts were clearly male clothing. Upon seeing me, the boy quickly silenced himself and his look turned into that of profound caution, the ears deep-lowered.

“…Who’s that?”

“A guest,” the clerk said. And then, to me, “This is Norn, my—little brother. And I’m Vera, by the way.”

“A pleasure to meet you both,” I said and bowed my head to the young master. “My name is Lunaria. An adventurer.”

“Leave your shoes there,” Ms Vera told me and went in, displaying no interest towards my self-introduction. “There’s an empty room upstairs on the second floor, the one closest to the stairs. You can take your stuff there. Then come back down and we'll get you something to eat.”

The boy called Norn looked dismayed by the suggestion.

“You can’t be serious! She’s not staying here, is she?”

“Be quiet,” Ms Vera said.

The boy glared at me, and then left stomping after his sister.

Clearly, not all the residents wanted me here—if either of them.

I felt uneasy about leaving my footwear at the entrance. You couldn’t get better hiking boots anywhere. Such weren’t typically available in female sizes but had to be made to order. Good shoes were worth their weight in gold on the road. And judging by the overall state of the house, excess of wealth wasn’t one of my host’s faults. Opportunity makes the thief…But carrying my shoes with me would have declared my doubts with such volume, it was liable to get me evicted on the spot.

Well, if they vanished, then so be it.

I went along the narrow hallway and past a combined kitchen and dining room. It was a well-equipped, well-kept house, despite its obvious age and lack of luxuries. I couldn’t help but note the dining table was rather wide for only two people and had four chairs around it. So they lived with their parents?

I could sense no other presences in the house, though.

The hallway continued past the dining area, with a bathroom in the far right corner, and near there rose a precariously steep staircase. The boards groaning under my feet, I climbed to the second floor, where another hallway passed the other way, four doors along its length, two on the left and two on the right, respectively. The one closest to the stairs was free, then?

As promised, the door was unlocked.

I pushed into a barren room that smelled of dust and wood and forgetting. There was a desk on the right with a light chair; further back, the empty plank frame of a double bed. There weren’t bedclothes or anything on it. Guests weren’t so frequent, it seemed. But I had my camping mattress and sleeping bag, and required nothing more. I set down my backpack by the desk and went to peer through the small square window in the back. There was a narrow gap between this house and the next, with only plain board wall visible.

A room gone untouched. A double bed without sleepers. A dining table with room for four. A sister who works long days and a young kid suspicious of strangers. Though I hadn’t been looking for one, I was starting to see a story.