"Sorry brother, but today I cannot get caught."
Night swallowed Evan the moment he broke past the cursed orchard. Rain blurred all shapes into shifting ghosts, but the surest ghosts were those behind him—the enforcers of the Disavowed, dispatched by the Obsidian Concord the instant they were notified of Godred's failure.
It was a team of three: masked colleagues Evan might or might now know. One was specialized to track Evan's blood trail or any traces left behind by him during his escape. The other two were swift Blade wielders who pursued and quickly closed the distance.
Evan glimpsed them only as splinters of torch-amber through the branches, yet every thud of disciplined boots found an echo in his rib cage. He fled deeper into the orchard's outskirts, vaulting ditches, shearing through curtains of ivy, nursing the dull ache where his knuckles had split open on Godred's edge.
'An ambush and I can immobilize them. But it wouldn't be a prudent choice. Only reserved as the last choice.'
Evan wouldn't have been so confident before. But ever since he had stolen his family's signet, he was more than confident in his firepower. But the Drakos signet was anything but flashy. He couldn't risk attracting attention lest there were reinforcements on standby.
A flare-arrow hissed overhead, bursting in a red light. Shadows leaped in the air, with Evan among them. Quiet, noiseless movements followed. There was pin-drop silence in the surroundings other than the occasional weapon brushing against the sheath.
Evan dropped flat beneath a fallen elm, smothering his breath while the hounds traced the multiple footprints. However alas, all their efforts would come to result in vain. After all, Evan was in the dark, while the team was out in the open.
'As long as I move through obscure means, it won't be that easy to find me.'
After a moment's confusion on their part in tracking him down, Evan used it to the fullest. Leaping from platform to platform and crawling through roots till the hound was misdirected and the blade wielders pressed on in the wrong direction.
Evan ran by fragments: a sprint, a stagger, a duck beneath thorns. When a second patrol swept in from the north, he back-tracked through his footprints, kicked mud over every luminous droplet of blood, and doubled into a gully choked with alder saplings. Time stretched, tore, and re-knitted around him; thunder kept no rhythm he could trust.
At sunrise, Evan reached a wide, icy river. White banks rose on either side, and fog drifted from small dams downstream. He walked in up to his waist and let the swift water wash the glowing dust from his boots. Moving along the rocky bottom, he stayed in the current until his legs went numb. The Hound would find it harder to find him after this. The chill cold water had destroyed all traces while delivering excruciating pain to Evan himself. When he climbed out on the far bank, the only sound behind him was that of the wind and nothing more.
Evan lay under a tangle of willow roots, shaking, eyeing the signet that had saved his life.
He twisted and turned it in his fingers as if staring at an enigma.
"A symbol of authority, a symbol of nobility. It could have been mine, yet Godred was chosen, and yet fate brought it back to me"
Evan would have never dared to steel a signet of any household let alone the Drakos. But with his being already labelled a traitor how did it matter how many acts of blasphemy he conjured?
He tied the ring inside a strip of oilcloth, tucked it beneath the cuirass padding next to his skin, and whispered a promise to the ghosts of his colleagues that he'd carry the signet with him until truth found daylight.
Waterlogged solitude set its hooks. Memory replayed over and over: Mairm's last order, Sura's cut-short hymn, Godred's blade at his neck. He imagined futures that dwindled to narrow tunnels, years skulking on the margins like the kingdom's other failed assets, trading forged papers for bread, never again answering to his name. Evan tasted that imagined life and gagged.
Think, Evan. If there's nowhere to turn to people alive, turn to the dead who still keep secrets.
"His team had owned a safe house the Concord never logged: an estate cellarette far west of the capital, once the property of an extinct barony. The team had used it for cold-weather exercises, smuggling runs, and the occasional card game that ended in off-key songs. It sat in the notch of two hills, masked by elderberry thickets, its only entrance a half-height iron door caked in lichen. Commander Maim called it "the Hollow."
"Perhaps, having a base of operations would be nice."
The thought arrived unbidden, then tightened into purpose.
The Disavowed often worked outside the norms of feudalistic control. Accomplishing missions that the nobility don't want to get their hands dirty with. In doing so, they can go unburdened as long as they don't get caught. Often acquiring assets, channels, and connections that go undocumented in the annuls of the kingdom.
"The Hollows" too was one such asset. Known to no one, yet not owned by anyone.
Evan rose, wrung river water from his cloak, and aligned himself by the paling eastern glow. The Hollow lay perhaps forty miles on foot. With stolen horses and back-woods cunning, a Drakos could make that in two nights.
He moved under elder canopies all day, dozing in spurts no longer than a heartbeat. Sunset bruised the sky; stars groped through ragged clouds.
Scavenging for medicinal herbs whenever he stopped for a rest. Some used to tend to his wounds while others stocked and fermented to manufacture ointments.
Evan stole a shaggy moor pony from a sleepy miller's paddock, swapped his battered cuirass for a rough-spun coat in an unmortared shed, and rode west beneath the wheeling constellations.
"Though not a horse, this would do for now until I recover."