A b e l
I WILL OFFER UP A BRICK
TO THE BACK OF YOUR HEAD, BOY
The only time he is surprised is when the man blinks into existence beside him.
It went like this: first nothing but the ghost of a breeze, and a strange scent riding on it; then a a voice, a man. Abel starts, but only once; his eyes show their whites when he glances at him, and recognizes one of the faces from that first meeting in the Solterran courtyard.
To disappear is a useful trick, one he wishes he possessed.
“Yes,” Abel says, and is serves as answer to all the golden man has spoken.
He says nothing else as the others filter in, only watches with his eyes dark and impassive, a thing watching from the shadows beneath a stone. None of them do anything to settle his anxiety. The other boy is brusque, loud with his chains and rough of his grating voice. The mare - she looks like trouble, like danger, with her foolish words and her mad and recognizable face.
Of course, he does not say. Why else would we be standing in this cave at this hour with this look in our eyes.
Perhaps they will all be caught and killed. Perhaps that is a relief.
Or, he thinks (and as he thinks it, it becomes more than that - it becomes a thing he knows, down between the spaces of his bones, down in the darkness of his heart) it is a test that Raum has set them. They will pass and live or fail and die and the Ghost does not care which. It makes Abel think too much of the gods, who the people of Novus served and served and were smote by anyway, dying like mayflies with prayers still in their mouths.
Abel had thought it would be different, serving such a man, with fervor and faith in his burning blue gaze. Raum had saved him, Raum had fed him, and Abel had thought - he had thought -
(well, it is not the first time the world has proven him a fool and a child).
Like the others he cares nothing for names; for a moment he only considers them all and wonders who is to lead. When no one else speaks he does, his voice soft as a blanket of dust in the echoing dark of the cave, flat as an alter-stone.
“There is a point just after dusk where the guard shifts. When I left,” (he does not say the name of his home; he might choke on it, it might catch like grit and sand between his teeth) “there were only two of them, but there may be more now.”
His lips press tightly together when he scans their faces again, two pale as moons, one shadow-dark as his own. It is not failure he thinks of; it is of a people in the heart of winter with no food. Abel licks his teeth and says, “I know the secret pathways of Denocte. If we are swift - if we are not stupid - we should not fail.”
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