Cara heard them stirring in the pantry, the sound of cloth-muted steel and low murmered conversation. From the window of her room she watched the sun-eddied River Tesque warble through her hometown of Sitwesk. Children had set up small tents further along the bank and they were peering into nets between casting them out into the silt.
"Cara?" came a voice, muffled through the window. She broke her gaze and peered down to see none other than Ernest Botcher, the tillerman's son. "Cara!" he repeated, waving his hands up and down. She tutted before opening the window.
"What is it Ernest?" Cara said. Ernest rested his hands on his knees in relief. He appeared to be out of breath.
"I'm going away to the capital," Earnest began, raising one hand into a finger pointing north while the other remained on his knee. He regained his posture. "Father said I should see your dad before I leave. Is he free?"
Cara had gotten used to being the proxy for her father. Sitwesk was known primarily for being the last bastian of faith before the groaning outer wilds to the south. Cara's father was the Sitwesk's chief Shaman and many visitors stumbled in from those wilds with diseases and wounds that needed treament
"Yes, he's in. He has visitors though so you'll have to wait," Cara said, her gloved hands already placed against the window to close it.
"Wait!" Ernest said desperately. "I don't suppose you fancy waiting with me?" Cara sighed. She remembered long afternoons with Ernest walking by the river-rings that shivered in the early spring rain. They were younger then, and the world of Treeia had not been particularly kind to either of them since. Looking at him now from the second-floor window of her family home, there were traces of that boy who showed her how to skim stones against the river flow, who boosted her up on to the tree branches in the Grooms Wood and celebrated wildly upon her ascent of a tree.
"Okay," Cara said simply, trying to set his expectations to a reasonable level. Ernest seemed to be celebrating as she closed the window.
Her father was attending to a swordsman slumped over the floor of their hallway.
"Sorry dear," he said, raising a free hand in a gesture of good will. She recognised the back of Gertrude Knowles, an apothocary. Gertrude was preparing her instruments while her father sprinkled shavings of Mildflower over the body.
"Ernest is outside, I think he wants to see you," Cara said, walking straight past the whole affair as she had done many times before.
"Is he okay? It'll be Craig who sent him I suppose," her father said.
"Tarrick, please focus," Gertrude said. "We can deal with the common cold of a boater's boy another time, this man is dying."
Cara opened the back door and felt the heat of the midday sun on her shoulders. She looked up with closed eyes and took a deep breath. She closed the door and headed out to the side of the house, where she expected to find Ernest. He had been standing on a small patch of turf beside their house. When she approached the spot she looked first at her surroundings, then down on the ground. His boots were imprinted firmly on the grass. She looked around for further footprints but there were none. It was as if he had vanished completely.
A single bell tolled in Sitwesk chapel.