10. Ash
Ash
Please consider all my previous statements regarding Claire Briarwood legally, morally, and spiritually null and void. In fact, if you could just omit them from your memory entirely, that would be fantastic.
The village had barely slipped out of view when she called out from the carriage behind me.
“What is it?” I muttered, glancing back over my shoulder.
Caspian was already moving. Ever the chivalrous fool, he vaulted down from his saddle and marched toward the carriage like he was arriving at a royal gala instead of a muddy ditch in the middle of the Wilds.
He opened the door and offered his hand with a sweeping bow.
She took it with enough grace to sicken a saint, as if descending two feet onto solid earth required a formal procession.
I turned fully in my saddle now, watching as her shoes touched the dirt, her skirts gathered delicately in her hands to keep them from brushing the ground too much.
Gods forbid.
“There’s no privy?” she asked, looking around the forest.
I shifted in my saddle, the leather groaning as I hit her with the flattest look I possessed.
“We are in the Wilds,” I said slowly, in case the concept of nature was new to her.
Her gaze snapped to mine, horrified.
“What were you expecting, Princess? A porcelain throne and a bard to play ambient music?” She opened her mouth, then closed it.
“Something—anything!” she insisted, her voice hitting a pitch that probably alerted every danger within a three-mile radius. “How am I supposed to—to—”
She cut herself off, her cheeks blooming into a deep crimson.
Ah. The realization had landed.
Enter Caspian, ever the diplomat. “You can use leaves,” he offered cheerfully. “Just avoid the ones with jagged edges. Or the red ones. Actually, don’t touch anything fuzzy.”
Claire’s jaw dropped. “You cannot be serious.” She drew herself up to her full, ridiculous height, lifting her chin with the sheer, unyielding dignity of a queen issuing a royal decree. How tall could she be? Five feet, exactly? “I shall hold it until we reach a town.”
I snorted. “The next town is twenty-four hours away, assuming we don’t run into any trouble. If you want to fight your own bladder to the death out of spite, be my guest. But save your breath, Briarwood. I am not interested in your whining.”
Claire’s jaw worked as she scrambled for a retort that wouldn’t require her to take a deep breath. Failing to find one, she settled for a venomous glare.
“Your horse has a better personality than you do,” she snapped, before spinning on her heel and stomping back toward the carriage, her grand exit severely hindered by how carefully she had to walk.
“The next town we won’t reach until tomorrow evening. If we’re lucky,” Caspian added gently to Claire’s retreating figure.
The Wilds stretched beyond the settlements, untamed land where the rules of humans no longer held.
Bandits prowled these stretches as readily as the creatures that stalked the dark, things with too many teeth and not enough mercy.
Humans kept to their towns, while far to the north the fae remained in their mountain courts.
Everything else—witches, orcs, shifters, druids—made their homes beneath.
Silence, mercifully, fell. Well, as silent as it could be with the reek of Claire’s furious, high-born resentment bouncing off the carriage walls.
This was going to be a long three weeks. I’d known it within the first hour of meeting her. By the end of the first day, I was ready to eat a handful of Caspian’s mystery leaves just to see if the hallucinations would be more pleasant than this reality.
We couldn’t even manage a steady mile before the carriage lurched to another grinding halt.
It was a logistical nightmare. In my line of work, a stop meant a possible ambush, or some kind of trouble.
With Claire, a stop meant a rogue pebble had invaded her shoe, or the air was “too damp for her lungs”, or she needed Caspian to explain the concept of a pinecone to her again.
At this rate, the dark forces chasing us wouldn’t even need to attack. They’d just find our sorry hides by the side of the road, three miles from where we started, with me clutching a handful of those damn leaves and battling temptation.
“I’ve been sitting too long,” she announced, already rattling the carriage door before the wheels had even stopped rolling.
“You’ve been sitting for two miles, Briarwood,” I snapped down from my saddle. “Soldiers march thirty miles in full plate armor without a break.”
“Yes, and they smell like wet dogs and dysentery,” she shot back, stepping down onto the grass. “If my legs fall asleep, how am I to run from the dangers you keep muttering threats about?”
The second stop, an hour later, was for “fresh air”.
“It’s stifling in there,” she insisted, fanning herself with a silk handkerchief as though the carriage were a torturous, airless dungeon rather than a cushioned velvet box moving through a breezy trail through a shadowed forest.
“Open a window,” I grunted, pinching the bridge of my nose.
“The draft ruins my hair, and the dirt from the road makes me sneeze,” she replied with terrifying logic. “Therefore, I must breathe fresh air. Surely even a brute as yourself can understand that.”
Each time, Caspian would vault down from his horse like a well-trained hound, offering his hand with a smile that made me want to chew on gravel. Each time, she’d accept it.
And each time, my soul left my body just a little bit more.
My mare, Esther, grew restless beneath me, her muscles twitching with pent-up energy that perfectly matched my own. Even she was casting judgmental looks back at the carriage.
The road stretched ahead, long and winding, disappearing into the Wilds where the actual monsters lived, and we hadn’t even made it past the part of the map with decent taverns. I dragged both hands down my face, staring out over the horizon and trying to calculate our average speed.
I’d lost track of the timeline somewhere around stop number seven.
Seven stops over eight miles—for nothing more than cramped calves, a rogue dandelion seed floating too close to her face, and “stale air”.
My patience wasn’t just fraying; it had snapped, caught fire, and dissolved into whatever remained.
Garrick hadn’t given us a strict deadline, which was the only reason I hadn’t uncoupled the horses and left the carriage stranded in a ditch.
It was glaringly obvious this was Briarwood’s first time stepping foot outside her small town of Thistlebrook.
She had no concept of adapting. What struck me was the sheer irony of it—the woman had been practically vibrating with eagerness to leave Thistlebrook, yet she was actively sabotaging her own journey.
If she wanted to reach her beloved wealthy Duke so badly, you’d think she would buckle down and take on the elements of traveling more—every time she demanded a recess, she was just trapping herself out here in the dirt with me, the so-called “brute” she called me, for that much longer.
The carriage began to slow again. The wheels groaned. Caspian’s horse sighed. Claire’s voice drifted out, crisp and demanding.
At this rate, we wouldn’t reach Norwich in a month. We’d be celebrating our next birthdays on this exact stretch of dirt.