Chapter 6: Three Years
751 Words
(Wren's POV)
Three years is long enough to turn a vow into a discipline.
I did not leave for Ashgrove territory the week my father died, or even the season after. I told myself patience was strategy, not fear, though there were nights I lay awake unable to tell the two apart. I spent that first year learning to fight properly, not the scattered self taught skills of a girl who had grown up more comfortable with books and herbs than blades, but real training, the kind that left bruises in the shape of lessons. I spent the second year learning to track, to read a territory the way a hunter reads weather, to move through unfamiliar land without announcing myself to it.
I spent the third year, mostly, trying to talk my brother out of coming with me.
Roran had taken our father's death harder than I had, if that was possible, though he wore it differently. Where my grief had turned inward and quiet, his had turned outward and sharp, a blade looking for something to cut. He was younger than me by two years and had never once, in three years, stopped calling Kaelan Ashgrove a murderer in exactly those words, flat and absolute, as though repeating it enough times could make the ground beneath it more solid than it actually was.
"Let me come," he said, the night before I finally left, standing in the doorway of the small room I had spent three years turning into a war room in miniature, maps and notes and a single silver locket at the center of it all. "You shouldn't do this alone."
"I need you here," I told him, which was not entirely a lie. "If something happens to me, someone needs to carry this forward. And someone needs to keep an eye on the elders here who'd rather forget Father's claim ever mattered."
"That's not the real reason."
It was not. The real reason was that I did not trust what my brother might become, standing across from the man he blamed for everything, if given a blade and an opening. My own hatred, whatever shape it had taken over three years, still had room in it for questions. I was no longer certain Roran's did.
"Promise me you'll wait," I said instead. "Whatever I find out there, let me be the one who finds it first."
He promised. I did not fully believe him, but I took the promise anyway, because a fragile agreement was still better than none.
I left before dawn the next morning, my pack light, my blades sharpened, the locket tucked beneath my collar where it had lived every day since the night I made my vow to it. I did not look back at the den that had raised me. I had spent three years preparing for this. Looking back now would only slow me down.
The journey to Ashgrove territory took the better part of two weeks, crossing land I had studied on maps a hundred times but never walked. I stayed off the main trade routes, avoided border patrols I had no permission to cross, slept in places that offered cover rather than comfort. Every mile put more distance between myself and the girl who had once believed the world was simpler than this, and I did not mourn her passing nearly as much as I once thought I would.
I told myself, somewhere on that long walk, that I was ready for whatever I found. I had spent three years building myself into a weapon precise enough to finally collect what was owed.
I was not ready. Nothing in three years of training had prepared me for the particular unbalancing of watching a man I had trained myself to hate kneel alone in the dark and speak like someone still carrying a grief he had never been allowed to put down.
But that discovery, and everything it would come to cost me, was still a few days ahead of me yet.
For now there was only the road, and the weight of a promise I had made to a locket that could not answer back, and the low, steady certainty that had carried me across two territories.
I was close now. Close enough to finally see, with my own eyes, the man responsible for the empty space where my father used to be.
I did not yet know how wrong I was about what that space actually contained.
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