By the time they got there, the camping site was empty.
Prince Baelor walked through it slowly, with his men-at-arms at his back, taking in what was left. He could see the flattened grass where a tent had stood. He could see the cold fire pit, and the ash long extinguished. A few small stakes still in the ground where something had been tied. Someone had lived here for several days and had left in a hurry, clearly.
One of the witnesses he'd brought pointed at the flattened grass and confirmed what he'd already surmised, that yes, this was where he'd seen the two knights going after the trial. He thanked the man and dismissed him.
A guard stepped forward. "Should we continue searching for them, your grace? If we widen the—"
"No." Baelor looked around the site once more. "They clearly don't want to be found. That much I can tell. Let them be. It's not worth the manpower anyway."
The guard nodded and stepped back.
Baelor crouched near the edge of the fire pit. He looked at the cold ash, then at the ground around it. Something caught his eye. A small thing, easy to miss. He picked it up and held it between his fingers.
A strand of hair. Ashen, almost white, the colour of it unusual enough to make him still for a moment. Almost like a Valyrian hair, but not quite.
He turned the strand of hair over once.
Then he let it go and watched it drift down to the grass.
He stood, straightened his coat, and walked back toward the meadow without looking back.
—
The road north was quiet in the morning. Finn walked with his bag on his shoulder and his compass strapped to his wrist, the needle holding pointing on what was ahead of them. His side now had all but healed. Ciri walked beside him, her sword on her back, back to normal.
"You know," she said, after a while. "A horse would be good right now."
"And put them where?" Finn said. "We can't bring them through the portals. More a burden than anything."
Ciri opened her mouth, she was about to retort but nothing came up. Then she closed it. "Fair point," she muttered.
They walked on. The road curved around the edge of the meadow and then straightened out toward a low treeline in the distance.
Eventually the road gave way to a narrow path, and the path gave way to undergrowth, and they pushed through it until the trees thinned around a low ruin half-swallowed by moss and old roots.
"We're here." Finn said, seeing his compass turning a hundred and eight degrees. He was standing at where the portal is about to appear. "And now we wait," he said.
Ciri looked at the ruin. She looked at the trees. She sat down on the wall opposite him and let out a long breath. "I always forget how boring your way of travel is."
"If you don't like it," Finn said, smirking, "you could always leave using your powers. When the portal opens, I go through, you teleport off somewhere else. The Wild Hunt follows your trail and will never have the effort to chase mine."
Ciri was quiet for a moment. She picked at a piece of moss on the wall beside her, toying with it.
"Could I follow you?" she said. "For a few more worlds."
Finn looked up, raising his brow.
"I feel like I have more room to breathe this way," she said. "If I use my powers, they know where I am almost immediately. But since I've been travelling your way—" She looked at the trees around them. "No red riders in sight. Not once."
Finn looked at her for a moment, smiling a little.
"Then don't complain about the waiting," he said.
Ciri rolled her eyes. She settled back against the wall and pulled her knees up and looked at the pale sky through the gap in the branches above them.
They waited.
—
The first world after Westeros was a dead one. The desert kind, though not the same as the one where Finn and Ciri had met, just sand and rock and nothing else. They crossed it in a few hours and found the next door without much trouble.
The second world was water. Almost entirely water, a grey ocean stretching in every direction from a small rocky outcrop where the portal had dropped them. They stood on another rock for two days in the wind and the waves before the next door opened. Finn spent most of it reading. Ciri spent most of it complaining. A few times she was almost just tempted to leave Finn then and there.
The third world was where things got complicated.
The ruin they found to go to another world was small and the door to it was made of old wood that had warped in its frame over however many years it had been sitting here, which meant it didn't close properly and certainly wasn't built for what Ciri was currently asking it to do.
She had her back against it and her boots dug into the cracked stone floor and her whole weight thrown into keeping it shut. On the other side, something was hitting it, and the impact shuddered through her spine and into her teeth.
It was shaped like a bat, roughly, if a bat were the size of a cart horse and had considerably more in the way of appetite. She could hear it through the wood, the wet sound of it, the scraping of claws finding purchase on the door's edge.
"Any time now!" she shouted impatiently.
"Wait," Finn said in front of her, who was rummaging through his bag.
"I have been waiting—" Another impact. Her boots slid an inch across the stone. She drove them back. "Whatever you're looking for, use a damned normal sword instead and come and help me!"
"Just—" Ciri could hear the sound of things shifting in the bag, glass clinking against something. "—wait."
"Finn!"
"I got it."
She heard him stand. She heard a sound she didn't recognise, a soft mechanical click, and then a hum that started low and built into something more louder, and then the ruin filled with a blue light.
"Move!" he said.
She moved, not even arguing.
The door came off immediately, the monster filling the frame with its wings folded and its mouth open and its eyes catching the blue light and reflecting it back. It was bigger than she'd thought. It was also looking directly at Finn, who was standing in the middle of the ruin with something in his hand that was not a sword.
It was the length of one. It had a hilt. But the blade was made of literal light that looked pure and solid and humming at a pitch she felt behind her back teeth.
Finn stepped forward and swung.
The thing split. That was the only word for it. The blade went through it like there was no resistance at all, tearing through the wing and body, and both halves hit the floor in separate directions and didn't move again.
The ones behind it had stopped in the doorway.
Finn turned to face them. The blue light swept across the ruin's wall. One of the creatures made a sound she'd never heard before and threw itself backward off whatever it had been clinging to. The others followed, a rush of wings and displaced air, and then the doorway was empty and the sound of them was moving away through the dark outside, fading fast.
Then, silence.
Ciri looked at Finn. She looked at the thing in his hand. She looked at the two halves of the creature on the floor.
"What," she said, "is that."
"Quite nice, right?" Finn looked down at it. "I got it from one of the worlds I travelled through. Again, another world based on a fiction in my world called Star Wars. I got it from pure coincidence, really. I was caught in a warzone. Found someone dead, still holding it. It seemed wasteful to leave it."
Ciri opened her mouth. Wanting to question further.
But then the portal opened behind them.
It tore the air apart in the centre of the ruin, orange light flooding the space, the hum of it cutting through whatever she'd been about to say. Finn turned the blade off and clipped the hilt to his belt rather than putting it away. He picked up his bag.
"Let's go," he said. "I hate this world."
Ciri looked at the two halves of the creature on the floor. She looked at the doorway it had come through. Outside, the dark was absolute and the sound of wings was still fading somewhere in it.
She turned and followed him through the portal without further argument.