Mist moved through the roads of Simanel, enveloping whatever corner was bare of shadow. Early spring was the most common time for such weather. Clouds traveled in from the cool plains and sank under winds pouring from the hard northern mountains. If Vera did not know a Kulshe dragon manufactured their cover from Bahamut's temple, Vera might have believed fortune smiled on them. Instead the mist was a reminder that everything they did now, they did of their own power. Vera liked that idea far more.

Her white glove pressed into a shelf of soil as Elden pulled her from the ground. The sorcerer pulled her into the street and she rested on her knees for a moment. They had spent the past half hour in complete darkness. Vera found herself squinting, despite the heavy grey that began to occupy the sky. Large clouds, she thought. The sort that herald great windstorms to the west...

"Seems like our friends are doing their jobs," the old sorcerer muttered. He yanked Eithne out next. "We're not far from the advancing line of Greys. Do we have a plan yet?"

Vera shook the dirt from her cloak and stood up to brush the rest from her knees. The buildings around them were hard to see beyond pieces of their charred outlines. Strange to be standing in her home and not recognize anything. To not feel the welcome relief Simanel often provided almost shattered her right there. Simanel always lacked Agethlea's grandeur and Eistocene's imposing face. Instead of building monuments, Simanel built gathering places. It was a city possessed of community. A community who built itself up with a hard sort honesty. Vera walked the streets to visit the people there, not the sights. Void of sound and color, she knew that Simanel was hidden by more than just mists now.

"The plan..." Vera drew her staff from the holster at her back. The corners of her eyes crinkled as she looked at Elden, her smile hidden by the silver of her mask. "Don't get killed?"

Elden was not squinting when he glared in her direction. "You've been solemn as a damned stone since the Castel and now you want to joke?" he whispered, accusingly. "I can't joke when you took my flask."

"You should be sober."

( And you should have a plan. )

It was strange leaving the Castel in a tunnel made by Elden, she wasn't even sure how such a thing was possible, but he had made it and came with her back out into Simanel. Despite the fact that Agrippa was disappointed with her, he'd still given her this task to complete. Eithne had no room to complain any longer, and wouldn't complain. She was in higher spirits than she'd been in quite awhile. She was less elated about sneaking around the city that used to serve as part of her home than Elden was. He seemed quite good at such a thing, and Eithne thought she was sneaky. The man moved carefully around corners, and while he was probably drunk, he was at least good at hiding it. they were sent to check up on plans, plans which, Eithne still wasn't quite clear on. but Elden knew them, and he wasn't as grumpy as Agrippa so he made a fine enough partner. Eithne didn't have enough time to think about the grim things that had happened in these past weeks while they were travelling carefully from place to place.

There were people stationed all around the city, laying in wait for whatever it was that the Captain had planned. Eithne was surprised to see the numbers of plain clothed citizens sitting with White Riders. Ready, it seemed, for the end. Or the beginning. Whatever came, they were ready to defend their home. Eithne might have applauded them if it didn't make her sick to think of what would happen to some or all of these people. Riders included. She'd lost enough friends in this, and didn't want to see another fall. But there was no telling how or when this would end. Even if they managed to stop The Grey Riders, and Eragos' brother, what of Gavrie and Seca? What of Gola?

( There seemed to be more enemies than they could ever hope of arresting or defeating. )

Cobbled stone clicked beneath his feet as he moved. The streets were not as narrow as they could have been, he supposed, but Montfort Tavern seemed smaller than it ever had. One of those iron fire pits had been moved from the watch towers to the street below. There were several civilians huddled around it. Their palms were open and extended, facing the flame, and a single Rider kept a watchful eye on them. "Spring" was a phrase that meant nothing at times, especially this early in the year, and the cold could still make every joint in a man's body ache with memories of sweltering heat. That was likely to start fights among men who thought they were going to die. Eragos had broken up four such fights himself, and he'd been here for only three baleful stares of the sun. His hood sat high on his head, and he stared at nothing and everything while he moved.

If these times were normal, he would have listened to Montfort's son sing a song about the sexual perversion of Sadon and tried to prevent any of the older Riders from breaking the young man's head. The fool had never even met Sadon, only heard tales of the man from his father. Eragos had caught a glimpse of the old and infirm Sadon, who'd joined Mearann and Agrippa for some sort of procession of Captains, but that had been long ago. Sadon's stories were racing into legend by that time. Hell, half of Mearann's wilder tales had been considered outrageous lies. Eragos had only realized the difference by watching Vargis carefully. The old Rider would nod soberly when Mearann remembered something incorrectly, and his face would freeze when Mearann accurately recalled an indiscretion. No one remembered why Sadon and Montfort had hated each other, though there were a thousand stories. In any case, breaking the head of Montfort's son was something of a cherished pastime. Like besting Cistal at horseshoes, if you could manage it. A story to laugh about later.

( Nobody was laughing, now. )

They rode like wild horsemen of old, charging through brush and plain with equal verve, their eyes fixed always forward. Rand was not exhausted by the time they'd stopped for the first night. A day and a half, covered in a day's time. This was the pace they were meant to keep all the way to their destination. When you rode that hard, over that many miles, there was precious little time for conversation. In truth, Eragos did not know what they would have discussed in any case. He knew that the cold wind bit through everything he wore to shield himself. He knew that soon or late he was going to pay a price for what he'd chosen to do, and how he'd chosen to do it. It was his lot to lead the willing into danger. If they were unwilling - or unable - then it was his lot to keep them safe. Right now, the Lady Vera and Eithne were either unwilling or unable.

( He was not sure it mattered, in any case. )

Oak planks from a broken armoire were used for the campfire, which roared from the confines of a circle constructed of stone and metal pieces. Her brother, Gavrie, had taught her how to build a good fire when she was young. It was an odd, stray thought that came to her when she was tossing another piece of wood into the flames.

Gavrie had always been good at setting camp, at provisioning the right amount of supplies and looking ahead. She wondered if the coldness in his heart was as great as the man that he was named for. She wondered, as she had always wondered, what it was he believed. Would he agree with Faxril? Or would he agree with her father? Those questions never seemed important when she was younger.

( But back then, she thought she could stop this. )

The knife's blade dragged across his scalp. Every hiss, every snap of hair, was another reminder of what he did and did not do. Did and did not value. There was a mirror in his chamber to trouble his mind. There was a way to see the serpent's slit that ran down the front of his face. As much a battle standard as any banner had been, that scar, still livid and red despite the time that had passed. Talon swept the knife into the bowl, rinsing it free of hair, then returned it to its duty. All the while his eyes burned into his own reflection. How strange it must have been to see those tattoos for the first time. Eragos had always been a hard man, harder than their own father, but beneath that lay anger and pride - also in greater measure than Valos. His brother thought of himself as inferior to his parents, but he'd surpassed them in every way possible. Except, perhaps, for one. He took Vaili's idea of honor and applied it to the world around him. He proselytized about the virtues of defending the weak. Yet he did not see where that path ultimately led.

( Ruin. )

There was no other choice in Eithne's mind. Eragos would not be willing or ready to kill the last remaining member of his family. His brother was all that was left, and Eithne was inclined to think that this fact would keep Eragos from turning his blade on his brother. He might be able to start the fight, but he would not be able to finish it. Eithne didn't want to see what would happen if Eragos did find that nerve. Would the curse he thought followed him everywhere cover what was left of his soul and make it impossible for him to breath? Would killing his brother end him? She did not want to ask those questions or find the answers to them. Telling the others that she was going to smoke and check on her horse was an easy enough excuse. A believable lie. Eithne hadn't had a cigarette in hours, and her horse did need tending to just as theirs did. But they were still back in that tent talking.

( She'd heard enough to know where to go. )

Rain was driving hard against the burlap surface of the tent. Here, as in the other tent, one barely felt the wind that shook the poles. Eragos was surprised at the sudden difference - humid rain, cooler than summer but not quite comfortable, gave way to an almost frosty interior. How such a thing was accomplished Eragos did not know, and was not sure that he wanted to know. What concerned him was not the temperature of the place, but what lay beyond the immediate. Upon entering they were greeted by a rectangular foyer, composed entirely of silk screens surrounded by wooden frames. There were two torches - bronze bowls filled with wood which burned brightly in the dimness, casting light upon the screens that blocked shadows from the receiving area. And in this area a soldier waited, stripping his gloves from his hands with great impatience. He wore the uniform of Faxril's men, but his head was not shaved clean, and there was no helmet on his person. He bowed when Eragos entered, and Eragos returned the bow.

( This was a strange way to keep a prisoner. )

The rain started when they broke out across the edge of the Acierran Plains, heavy and violent as it was wont to do in the southern half of the Free Cities. Vera was glad for her cloak, which caused the water to roll off her back rather than weigh down her clothes. The skies had waited until the tall flags of the Southern Army were in sight. Navy blue, red, black and white blurred together as the rain ripped fiercely at the cloth. Rain threatened even the stakes that held the poles to the earth. Yet the flags were driven into the ground by hands used to worse winds, worse rains. Faxril's men were, at their core, men of the sea.

( ... )

Twilight was a peculiar time to be on the road. Diffused light softened the night's darkness into a sapphire blue but did not yet collect on the horizon. The moon was still preferred by the heavens and yet drooped, as if fatigued. Night was often cold in Agethlea, especially at the turn of the seasons, and a low lying fog settled in anticipation of the sun. As the White Riders made their way out of Agethlea, the fog spread into the trees surrounding the road. The heavy clouds clung to the bases of trees and occasionally reached up to tangle in branches and vines.

( Conditions of the road made for a somber exit... )

That was way too fucking crazy for anyone to be alright with it. The problem was, of course, that all of them had been too shocked not only by the fact that Gola had been wounded, actually wounded, but that his arm had got up and crawled off on it's own accord, at his fucking bidding. Eithne had stood beside Eragos and taken on a dragon but that took the fucking cake on crazy things she'd seen. Of course, that didn't mean Eithne felt wide eyed or horrified, actually, she felt more subdued than she normally would. The anger wasn't a storm on the sea anymore, it was all calm waters. It was because of all the death, all of that for.. for this to happen. Arand was dead. Grees was dead. She was sad about those deaths. Tirad was dead but Eithne wasn't sad about that. She wasn't particularly happy about it either but it was already accepted in her mind. She felt shame over the fact that she'd been the one to do it, to betray their trust just as he had by going behind their backs. But that was further from her mind. All she had on her mind was getting a drink, two, three, really more like as much as she could consume without passing out or forgetting everything.

( First she needed to see a healer. )

He didn't know where he was. He knew. Yes, he knew. The hard paved stone beneath the arches could not be mistaken for anything else. If Inalen had been here to see smoke pouring out behind them - what would she have said? And what would she have done? Something was happening down below. No one was getting out of there who was not already out. So it was relief which found him first when Eithne revealed herself to be sitting atop one of the medical wagons, sullen in her insistence on smoking even as they were trying to assess her wounds. The healers received more than one barking instruction from her. I can walk, she had shouted. Wordlessly she yelled in another man's face as the fellow tried to get at the wound in her side. Somehow she'd made it out. But there were two masks beside her, where there should have been one. Tirad was dead. That was what it must mean. Eragos realized with a sinking sort of sadness that Grees' mask had burned with him in that hellhole.

( If they could recover it, they would. )

Vera's face was slick with blood that was not her own. She wiped both the crimson and the sweat with a glove she'd ripped off her hand, before discarding the ruined thing in nearby flames. She was running now, trying to keep low in the smoke despite the way her ribs protested -- likely bruised, instead of broken. She remembered the words of the Grey Rider as he grabbed her wrist with his burnt hand. She stabbed him through the neck, careless of the spray. The bubbles of liquid that made him choke as he opened his mouth were what made his words stick farther in her mind. The knife that she'd used to take the light of his eyes was now in her belt. She never lost her knives.

( Look around you... )

Midnight.

When the message came, she should have been sleeping. Over Agethlea, muted lightning ran through low clouds that shifted restlessly against one another and before sprawling across the tops of buildings. Twisting, thrashing, the storm threw rain against the glass panes of the Lord's Manor and the water clung to the windows, almost pleading to be let inside. Vera was already awake when Agethlea shivered under the harsh hand of the wind -- a violent variation of what blew out the candles of mourners. She couldn't sleep here. She could only lay staring at a ceiling with perfect paint and a spider too lazy to catch much other than its own floating web. That was when Vera felt that terrible burn inside her skin, the one the High Lord told her not to ignore again. A guardsman came with a brief, unsigned note not long after:

It is happening now.

( There was no meeting this time... )

The cape pinned to Vera's shoulders was the proper color as dictated by the uniform code all Riders followed, but against her back the fabric felt too light and too smooth. Her cloak had been lost in the battle for the Lower Courts; while her uniform was saved, it was only so that another could be made. In truth, she only wore bits and pieces of the white that she'd ridden into Agethlea with. Vera's gloved fingers moved briefly over the emblem of the Free Cities that was stitched in black at her chest, before she fiddled with the foreign bit of silverwork that kept her cape in place. The same Dwarven hands that made this pin had made the knives now resting in the wide leather belt encircling her middle. How Elden managed to afford weapons from a Dwarf's forge was a mystery, but that fit in line with the sorcerer's nature. They had been gifts to help her, to cheer her up. And that was another mystery. Vera had not known Elden very long, but he'd managed to see how much she'd needed her uniform back.

( Sun warmed her hair through her hood... )

For the first time in his life, he felt as though - even if it was just for a moment - he put the concerns of the people above himself. Always it was revenge he wanted, or "justice", that word that could mean almost anything in the mind of the wronged - that word whose meaning was never wrong, even though no two people had an exactly similar idea of what justice was. There was no pride in such a decision. In fact, it was an uncomfortable sensation that was running through his limbs at that moment. Not just because he had been - up to that point - a selfish sort of fellow. Not just because he should have been putting their needs ahead of his own all of this time. But because it meant putting her in danger. When he could not resolve what she meant to him, when every glance in her direction was a tangled web of thoughts and emotions, he was willing to send her into harm's way and ... nothing about that seemed right.

( Perhaps it was not right. )

The memorial had been markedly brief. There were men working in the square at all hours. Priests and soldiers and White Riders alike, clearing away rubble. Searching for anyone who might have survived. And so the site itself had become a memorial. Estimates and rolls of the court's staff listed casualties at nearly three thousand. Perhaps as many as one thousand dead. Eragos could hardly credit such numbers - but the tower itself had collapsed into dozens of other structures, which had not been evacuated, and the tower itself had still been conducting day-to-day business. Some simply ran and hid with the start of the commotion. Those were the rolls he studied with a stone face. Emotions kept in check only because he did not know what would happen if he failed. Tanist and Thiele, missing. Presumed dead. Cols, dead. Birloch, dead. The Lower Court's judges, dead. Frozen Pond, dead. That poor girl, dead. Sarta, dead. Again. Every living soul who had witnessed anything - any living soul that could be trusted to be impartial - was dead. And their work was for nothing.

( This was what the Red House made of public announcements. )

Each patch of cobblestone in the square was covered by a pair of feet except the band of space that Grees emptied with six other men. They were large-muscled soldiers with intimidating swords on their hip and dark, distant eyes. Occasionally they stepped forward to gently press a common man back from the foot of the court steps. Yet the space in front of Grees remained untouched. He stood not far from the High Lord Arand with arms crossed and a sneering frown marred what Vera often considered to be a gentle face. He had left his mask hanging at the side of his hood, probably to express his no-nonsense attitude about his duty a little better to the general populace. None of the common folk interpreted gentleness in Grees. One woman clutched her young son's collar when Grees looked their way and grunted, scolding the boy for simply pointing his toe in the large Rider's direction.

Vera might have laughed, once. Instead she quietly moved between people towards the next point in the crowd she had to inspect. Nieve was following High Lord Arand as he emerged from the doors of the Lower Court, passing between the enormous bronzed lions that guarded the entry way. The ferocity those statues portrayed was echoed in the quickness of her own blood, the eagerness of her own fingers to stop whatever evil snaked through those gathered. She felt insecure, leaving the younger Rider at the High Lord's side, but knew that if she was in Nieve's place she would not see what needed to be seen. Nieve looked every part of the invisible bodyguard as the High Lord took his place at the front of the crowd, pushing back the long sleeves of his robes. Maybe she wouldn't be considered green for too long.

( If she survived... )

Hot, she felt hot. Like a fever. But if she remembered right, a fever felt more cold than hot. Still, it was hot. How had they gotten out of that place? That damned room that claimed Raed. Raed was dead and Eithne could only think about how they'd gotten out. How many assassins lay dead because of them. She'd killed one, she knew that. The other, the other Vera had killed. Vera had saved her from dying and yet she still couldn't trust the woman. Why? Because she'd hid all of this and that's why Martine was dead, why Raed was dead? Both died in the line of duty. Died doing things they loved to do. Was death so easy for them? She could have died, and she would not have been happy dying as a Rider. Dying because she demanded to be here, wanted to be here. Doing this for him and dying because of it? She could be dead.

( She couldn't see anything after all. She just felt hot. )

"A minor question of land rights circa the fourth hundred years of the Free Cities..."

With Throstle on his right, and Gawain on his left, Eragos felt as though any attack would have been a mercy. Bahn had been right. The two Riders were extremely green. One was fat enough to concern Eragos, while the other was nothing but bone. He could have been with the Lady Vera, speaking of... Eragos felt his ears burn before he finished the thought. It was not proper. There was little of his behavior that could be considered proper of late. He still wore the mask, despite the civilian clothing draped upon his person. A single candle illuminated the table in the common area of this large home. There was a certain feel of a dungeon to it, with imposing stone walls and iron-crossed windows meant to keep in as much as to keep out. All gray and black, with little enough red in the carpet that ran like a guide through each room and corridor to each thing of value. The sconces were all carvings of dragons, ornate clutching torches as though their very existence depended on it. Eragos forgot for a moment that the fellow was talking to him.

"...the third daughter has common blood on both sides, and is deemed owner, but in the event of her death..."

( It was unbearable. )