Chương 32: Running Away

POV: Evelisse Ardentia I sat on the chair in sis' living room. The attack hadn't reached past the plaza, so her house and everything around it had been spared. But sis had been near the plaza when it started, so she'd seen most of the attack. I sat with my elbows on the table, my forehead pressed into my hands, turning everything over and over while sis watched me from across the table, her face drawn and unreadable in a way it almost never was. I hadn't told her what Milo was.

But she'd been standing in the crowd after the fight. She'd seen him vanish into thin air with his minions in tow, so she must have known at this point. The aftermath was a mess. Eremiah was gutted near the entrance; the fires were out now, smothered by the last of the patrol mages and a handful of adventurers who'd pitched in, but part of cobblestones on the plaza was cratered, some from my own blows. No one had died, at least.

Milo must have ordered his minions to spare lives, but it changed nothing about the fact that he had ordered for the chaos in the first place. Had he meant to hit Eremiah? If I hadn't dragged him out on that quest, would he have lured me somewhere else instead? Was the whole thing a setup, wait until the Hero's out of the way, then burn the town? I didn't believe it.

As unkind as the thought was, Milo simply wasn't capable of that kind of scheming; I had watched him fumble too often; pretending to be a menacing Dark Lord, trying to impress on the night market, and getting struck unconscious by a troll. However, coincidence or not, he had set an attack in motion, and somehow, the attack landed in Eremiah. That was the thing. He could swear up and down that he hadn't known, that he hadn't wanted Eremiah, and I would half believe him, yet the destruction still had happened.

"Eve." I looked up. Sis had her hands folded in her lap, and she was studying me with a care that told me she'd been working herself up to whatever came next.

"Did you know?" There it was. I had known it was coming from the second I saw her in that crowd. I could have lied. It would have been easy, and she'd have let me. I didn't.

"... Yes," I said.

"I knew. I mean, I had fought him a few days ago and failed." My voice came out rougher than I meant.

"He's the one the whole kingdom is bracing for." Sis sat very still. Something moved behind her eyes, fast. My fingers curled against the tabletop.

"I'd planned to tell you. Before. And for some reason I just... didn't. I don't know why. I just—""Eve, it's…okay. I'm not blaming you." She reached across and caught my hand. She was quiet a moment, her thumb moving once over my knuckles before she spoke.

"I won't pretend I'm not frightened. I am. I had him under my roof, Eve, I sent you off into the dark with him." Her hand tightened on mine.

"And I won't pretend the town isn't broken. People I've known for years are sleeping in the temple hall tonight because their homes are gone. That's real. That doesn't wash out because the boy had nice manners."

"I know," I whispered.

"I know it doesn't." For a moment she wasn't looking at me at all, she was looking somewhere past the window, toward the part of town that was gone, and something worked behind her eyes that she didn't try to hide.

"Because I keep going back and forth on it. One minute I think of the sweet boy who had saved me and Mr. Aldric. Then I would think of the burning inn, the wrecked plaza, and I can't make the two of them be the same person. It frightens me that I trusted the first one so completely."

"In fact, I have many things I want to say to him, if we ever meet again." She drew a breath, and looked at me with that infuriating, clear-eyed way she had, the one that always saw straight to the thing I was hiding from myself.

"But you're not sitting there hating him, are you?" I opened my mouth. Nothing came. I was angry at him, frustrated at him. But do I hate him?

"I've watched you angry," she went on, gently.

"I know what my sister looks like when she despises something. That's not this. This is you furious at something you can't make yourself stop caring about, and that's a far worse place to be." My eyes stung. I looked down at our joined hands so she wouldn't see.

"He gave the order, sis," I managed.

"Whatever he is to me, he did this. I can't just—" This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

"No. You can't." She squeezed once and let go.

"And I'm not telling you to forgive it. I'm telling you I see you tangled up in something that's too big for me to understand the half of, and you've been carrying it alone, and you don't have to." She tilted her head, watching me.

"Did you know? Why he had to do this?"

"I... not exactly." I turned the words over before I trusted them.

"But somewhat. Yes."

"And I take it he doesn't enjoy any of it?" I did not answer for a while, then I nodded. A pause.

"I don't have to understand what he is to know that you're in pain over him. All the things you are feeling can be true. The anger is true, the fondness is true, so stop trying to sort it into something simple. It isn't, and pretending it is will only break you faster." I didn't answer. I couldn't. Because she'd reached right past everything; the Church, the cycle, the Hero I used to be, and named the only thing that actually mattered, the thing I'd been refusing to say even inside my own head. I was angry at him.

I was grieving the town. And underneath both, I didn't want him to be the villain. I wanted him to be the boy who tripped over nothing and kept my handkerchief in his pocket. And I had no idea how to hold all three of those at once without coming apart. To lighten the mood, sis made beef stew. We ate it in silence. I think we were both struggling to digest everything that had happened, the food included. She had only just met Milo.

For two days she'd had this image of him in her head, kind and helpful, almost heroic. Then this morning it had all come apart in front of her. I lifted the spoon and tasted the beef alongside the soup. It was good, the way her cooking always was. It just sat oddly in me, like I was eating it from somewhere far away. After the meal I insisted on helping with the dishes, and she split them between us with a quiet, considerate smile and let me.

Then I went to my room and lay down, staring up at the ceiling for I didn't know how long. My mind went back to the fight. I couldn't pretend I hadn't felt it then, that thing close to rage, cause by this… feeling of being betrayed. I had shoved him off me, and somehow that had been enough to let me hold my own against the demon girl, who by all rights should have overpowered me like she had in the previous fights. I had genuinely thought about striking Milo. About hurting him.

He wouldn't have been hurt anyway, I had told myself. Not without the Mooncleaver, not without holy power behind the blow. That was the strange part. The feeling of being betrayed by him had made me fight harder than I ever had with the Mooncleaver in my hands, which likely meant I cared more about him than I did about my duty when I was the Hero. Milo had surely teleported back to Aniaros Forest. I had told him about the attack, so the sensible thing for him to do was prepare for it. Ywain might bring Mel.

He might bring others. And I was meant to give Ywain my answer by today, whether I would stand with him or not. I still didn't have it. Milo's words from the inn surfaced in my mind.

"I'm not asking you to fight for me. I'm not asking you to stand against the Church, or to choose a side, or to be anything you're not. You don't have to do anything." Then the morning came back to me, when I had been too flustered to let him see me in plain clothes. Then the night market before that, the stall he had damaged, the handkerchief, the way he had tripped over nothing at all. The day he told me he only wanted to be a friend, which I still hadn't answered.

The very first day, when he threw himself between me and the Cerberus. It wasn't much. Barely a week, all of it. And yet it felt longer than that, somehow. Like he'd been around far longer than the days actually counted. Then Mistros pushed in. The deaths, Shauna, her kid. Then the wreck of Eremiah today. I felt the fury rise again, the memory of the demon girl hanging in the air over the plaza, the moment something in my chest had simply broken loose.

I tried to picture tomorrow and couldn't even settle on what the best outcome would be. For Milo, it would be surviving another day, or somehow beating Ywain. For the Church, it would be the Dark Lord finally dead. There was no version where everyone walked away. Milo might die tomorrow. The Mooncleaver was sitting in his place, but if the Church felt sure enough to send Ywain regardless, then either they had something else prepared, or they believed they could get the sword back one way or another.

Milo might die tomorrow. And we had parted on a fight, with me pushing him away, swinging at him. My eyes were wet before I noticed. I blinked, and felt the tears slide sideways. The last time I had cried was at the funeral of my previous party members. There was an ache low in my chest, dull and insistent, and I pressed my palm flat against it as though I could hold it still. It didn't help. The pain stayed exactly where it was, patient, refusing to be pressed out. Milo might die tomorrow.

How could I not do anything like he had said? I sat up and looked toward the window. The sun was still up, though not for much longer. Astra was at the stable nearby, and with a speed enhancement I could reach Aniaros Forest by evening, then Astrea before midnight, allowing for one short stop along the way. I climbed off the bed, stepped out of my room, and knocked on sis' door. It took a moment.

When it opened, her hair was mussed on one side; she'd lain down to nap, the way she always did when something heavy needed forgetting for an hour.

"Eve? What is it?"

"I…I'm leaving." The words came steady.

"I think I finally know what I want to do." She studied me, then gave a small smile.

"All right. Let me put something together for you to take." She didn't ask where I was going. She just went to the kitchen, wrapped a sandwich in a square of waxed cloth and knotted it, and pressed the little bundle into my hands.

"Come back soon," she said. I nodded. And as I headed out toward the stable, only one thought stayed with me, clear and quiet under everything else. I won't run away anymore.