Chapter 31 #3
“Don’t move,” she warned again. “If ye get caught, I’m pretendin’ I don’t know you.”
“I won’t get caught,” I said.
She disappeared through the door.
I waited.
I counted my breaths to keep from unraveling. Measured time in the drip of some distant pipe, the ache in my feet, the relentless coil of thoughts tightening around my ribs.
Elara in chains.
Elara starving.
Elara alone.
I pressed my nails into my palm until it hurt enough to anchor me, because pain was uncomplicated. Pain didn’t require interpretation. It didn’t ask me to make eye contact or choose the correct expression or decide whether this was the kind of moment where people hugged.
I didn’t make friends often.
Not because I didn’t understand the concept.
I understood it academically. Social bonding.
Mutual trust. Shared risk. Reciprocity. But in practice, friendship was a language I could read but rarely spoke without a stutter.
I missed cues. I overexplained. I corrected people when they were trying to be comforted.
I cataloged their grief like a specimen instead of holding it the way they wanted.
And I had always been told, gently or cruelly, that it made me wrong.
So I stopped trying.
I stopped reaching for people and started reaching for books, because ink never flinched when I got too intense. Paper never looked at me like I’d ruined something by being myself. Knowledge had rules. Patterns. Structures. You could follow them. You could trust them.
But Elara had not been a pattern.
She had been… noise. Heat. A variable I couldn’t control.
A girl who didn’t belong in any of the equations I’d built my life around, because she was all instinct and defiance, and somehow she still looked at me like I was useful instead of strange.
When Bertha came back, her arms were full and her face looked like she’d just bullied the entire castle into cooperation.
She dumped everything at my feet. “Alright. Food. Water. Bandages. The good knife. Not the kitchen rubbish.”
My gaze snapped up. “And the horse?”
Bertha opened her mouth, hesitated, then clicked her tongue like she was disgusted with herself.
“We’re not doin’ the horse,” she said.
My pulse spiked. “What?”
“We’re doin’ it faster,” she grumbled. “I know a guy.”
“A guy who can travel miles at a time?” I asked, already calculating. “That would require a spatial fold. Or a tethered path. Or an anchor point magic. Or?—”
Bertha held up a hand. “Don’t start.”
I stopped. Barely.
“What power?” I demanded.
She looked irritated just saying it, like the words tasted sour on her tongue.
“A Stridebinder,” Bertha muttered, already rummaging like her hands had opinions of their own, “and don’t get that hopeful look on yer face like this is some fairytale rescue, because it ain’t.
It’s a real person with real limits and a real price, an’ if ye start asking questions in that little voice o’ yours, they’ll either take twice the coin or shove us into a ditch for sport.
Stridebinder makes one step into a hundred, aye, but it don’t mean ye get there clean, it means yer legs feel like they’ve been beat with a mallet and yer lungs forget they’ve got a job.
It’s not travel, it’s theft, hear me? Stealin’ distance from the world like it won’t notice.
But it will. The land always notices. That’s why ye keep yer head down, ye keep yer mouth shut, and ye do exactly as I tell ye, because I am not draggin’ ye out into the wild just for ye to perish dramatic in a snowbank like some tragic poem.
We’ll get there by tomorrow,” she added, like it was nothing more than changing rooms in the castle, “and if the ancestors have any mercy left in ’em, we’ll do it without losin’ a toe or makin’ a sound loud enough to get us both killed. ”
My breath caught. She had said so much and I had so many questions, but we needed to get moving. “Stridebinding is rare.”
“Aye,” she said darkly. “That’s why it’ll cost us.”
I reached into my sack with shaking fingers and pulled out the bundled coin I’d stolen and hoarded like instinct. Too much. Heavy. Desperate.
I held it out to her. “Will this work?”
Bertha stared at it. Then at me. Then back at it, like she was seeing my naivety and my resolve in the same ugly pile.
“You scholars,” she muttered, snatching it. “Always actin’ surprised that money fixes things. Like you thought the world ran on good intentions and vocabulary.”
“It shouldn’t,” I snapped.
Bertha shoved the coins into her pocket. “No, it shouldn’t. But it does.”
Then she leaned close, voice dropping.
“And if we’re gettin’ out of here, you’re gonna learn the difference between how the world should work”—her eyes cut—“and how it does.”
I swallowed. “As long as we get out of here.”
Bertha turned toward the door again, already moving, already deciding for both of us.
“Come on then,” she said. “Before I change my mind and leave ye to freeze with the rest of these fools.”
I followed her into the hall.
Into the dark.
And into the first adventure I had ever had.