Chapter 23: The Seventh Day.

The seventh day came as all endings did. Dawn had barely touched the sky when we left the village. Ash carried a shovel she had borrowed from Tom the night before. I carried the Darkness Binding folded across my arms, the way I had seen others carry the dead.

We did not go far. A clearing past the treeline, close enough to find again, far enough that no idle wanderer would stumble upon it. Ash chose the spot -beneath a broad oak with a split trunk, the kind of landmark one could find twice.

“This will do,” Ash said. She drove the shovel into the earth. The ground was soft from the week’s rain, and it gave easily. She dug in silence, and I stood and watched the hole deepen.

This was a tactical consideration. That was the reason for this. Our backgrounds and our marks were already suspicious, the Inker’s unease had been plain last time. My Darkness Binding was a marvel amongst marvels. Ash’s green armor was also fine, I could admit. Arriving in armor as extraordinary as ours would only invite questions that had no safe answers. We would retrieve these when the time was right. Someday.

That was the reason. It was a sound one.

Eventually, the hole was deep enough. Ash set the shovel aside and reached for her own armor first. She placed the pieces inside the hole one by one -the green plate, the greaves, the pauldron. Each piece she set into the earth with great care. The Hero’s Sword she kept. That much I expected. A Hero without a sword was simply a woman, and even stripped of her Class, I did not think Ash was ready to be simply that. Besides, the sword no longer had its power or its glow. Without them, it was just fine steel.

She stepped back and looked at me. I knelt at the edge of the hole. The Darkness Binding lay across my arms. I had worn it for many years. It had turned aside the blows of Heroes and the wrath of Gods. It had been the last thing many had seen before the end.

It was just armor now. Its special functions were all but gone. The power that had once made it indestructible had faded with the System that had named it. What remained was just a very durable garment of black and red. I suspected that if I wore it, it would settle over me as uncomfortably as Martha’s garish clothes once had. I set it into the hole, beside Ash’s armor. The black lay against the green.

Ash picked up the shovel. She paused. “Are you alright?”

“I am fine. Most of the ache is gone. I can draw in ambient mana-”

“That is not what I asked,” Ash said softly.

I did not look at her. “Fill it,” I said.

Ash did not press further. Instead, she did as I’d asked. The dirt covered the green first, then the black. When the last of the Darkness Binding disappeared beneath the earth, something inside my chest shifted. Was this grief? No. I did not feel such a thing, and certainly not for a mere object. I was lighter. That was all. As if a weight I had been carrying for a very long time had finally been set down. Ash patted the earth flat. We stood over the unmarked packed earth and said nothing, because there was nothing to say.

I was dressed in the clothes Martha had set out for me today. A brown dress, simple and worn. Ash wore a similar thing in a faded blue. They were not bad garments. Certainly not garish. We walked back to the village in silence.

Hamel was awake when we returned. Doors were open and people moved through the paths with an urgency that I had not seen before. They knew what day it was then. I saw him from across the square.

Marin sat on a low wall near the well, his legs dangling. Sara was beside him, talking. Saying something I could not hear. Her hands moved as she spoke, shaping something in the air that I could not make out from this distance. The boy was listening. His head was tilted toward her, and he was nodding. His eyes were open, and they could see. I watched for three seconds. Perhaps four. I turned away before either of them could notice my gaze.

Martha caught me before I entered her hut. She was holding a small satchel, packed tight. The golden egg was already inside, nestled in a layer of white cloth. Beside it, folded neatly, were several changes of clothing.

“I did not ask for this,” I said. I had only come to retrieve the egg.

“No, you didn’t.” Martha pressed the satchel into my hands. Her grip was firm for a woman her age. “There’s a dress for warmer weather at the bottom and one for when it’s cold. You’ll want both, where you’re going…and where you might go after that.”

“You do not know where I am going.”

“I know you’ll be cold eventually lass.” She smoothed the strap of the satchel against my shoulder. “You just eat when hungry…don’t skip meals. Think I taught ya a little, at least enough to make something that’ll pass for food. Ya eat properly, you hear me?”

I heard her. “That is…noted,” I managed.

Martha looked at me. It was the same look she had given me every day since I had first sat at her table and eaten four bowls of stew. I still did not have a name for it, but now I was starting to recognize its shape, somewhat. “You’re a kind girl, Lily,” she said. Her gaze went past me, finding Marin and Sara where I had left them. It returned to me again.

I had returned to the hut last night in…an unfortunate state. Ash had carried me to our room. I had assumed that Martha and Tom would both have been asleep. I had assumed wrong. Martha had been waiting for us. I opened my mouth. There were many things I could have said -many corrections, many objections. The words that came were not any of them. “Your stew was adequate,” I said. “I will remember it.” I will not miss it.

Martha smiled, and her eyes were wet. She touched my shoulder one last time. Then she turned and went inside, and the door closed behind her. I stood there for a moment longer than I should have.

The sound of boots reached us before I saw them. Then the creak of armor. Then the Inker appeared at the northern edge of the village, his soldiers arrayed behind him in the same formation as before. He had brought almost twice as many men as he had before, that much I could tell from a distance. This was no escort. Or at least, this was an escort that could become something very different, given the chance.

Many of those men and women in silver stood at the village’s gate. The others formed another line, a twenty paces behind the first group. I stood at the center of the square. Ash stood beside me. The satchel hung from my shoulder. The Inker looked at us as he approached, stopping halfway between us and the men he had brought. He gazed at the scorched earth that had not yet fully healed. Something flickered across his face. He smothered it. If he had any questions, he did not ask.

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“You said one week,” I said. “It has been seven days.”

The Inker composed himself and straightened his robes. “So it has, and here you both are. You are both ready, I trust?”

“We are,” Ash said. She stepped forward. “We gave our word and we mean to keep it. We’ll come willingly.”

The Inker stared at us and he nodded slowly. Something drained from his soldiers, and there was that greed in his eyes again. He smiled widely, turned to his soldiers and raised a hand.

That was when Tom stepped between them. The old merchant planted himself in the dirt path with his arms folded across his chest, his round belly jutting forward. He was shaking. “Now hold on,” Tom said.

The Inker’s hand stopped. His eyes moved to the merchant, and there was a sneer across his face.

“T-these two saved this village,” Tom said. His voice wavered on the first word, found its footing on the second, and by the third it was louder than I had ever heard it. “Some beast came down on us from the sky, and your soldiers weren’t here. They were, and they saved us folk.”

“Tom.” Martha’s voice was sharp behind him. When had she approached?