The dawn came at last.
But it brought neither daylight nor warmth. It only deepened the dread that hadn't left Rudra since he had entered the Perma Forest last night.
Unlike the skies in Partha, the sky here did not light up with a sliver of gold at the treeline. There was no warmth creeping over the horizon to awaken the flora and fauna. The air somehow grew colder. The sky went from dark to a deep purplish blue, as if someone had spilled an ink pot.
The Benevian soldiers had long stopped using their torches, which were barely orange smudges against the thick, ever-growing mist and the bleak, pale light of dawn that lacked any life or warmth. Nayan, for her part, had stuck close to Rudra, both palms on his back, treating him like a portable heater. As for Tish and the Prince, they had kept to the center of the procession, as secure as they could be amid the Royal Guards and the soldiers. At some point, the Prince had coaxed the Saintess onto a horse. She had protested, of course, being the stubborn asshole she was, but the night-long exhaustion had won out over her stubbornness. Within minutes she was nodding in the saddle, head ducked, chin against chest, hands barely holding the reins.
The Benevian Prince watched her fondly instead of worrying about an accidental fall and head trauma.
The idiot Prince had graciously accepted Berkin's invitation to the Kroskoslav town, though Rudra was sure that even without an invitation, he would have followed Tish into Kroskoslav territory like a puppy.
Rudra himself felt as if his knees had long ago taken a vacation to some summer mansion in southeast Partha. He had been starving for so long that the hunger in his stomach had turned into a permanent bellyache. Swallowing hurt, whether from thirst or from the still-healing wound of the shapeshifter's bite, he wasn't sure.
Close to them walked a smaller group of six soldiers carrying Mirek's corpse, now wrapped in respectable white cloth. The Kroskoslav had handed it over as a gesture of goodwill, and Mamon had ordered the bearers to stay with the rest of the group. Wandering through the forest in a small party, with shapeshifters lurking around, would have been far too dangerous.
Rudra had upheld his end of the deal. The dead had been found. He knew that staying any longer would be unwelcome, and that Nayan's chances of survival literally depended on every minute decision he made. And yet, he couldn't just leave.
Not after he had smelled these men and felt genuine uneasiness. Not since Saroth had a human unsettled him. Because each of them didn't just smell like a distinct human being. They smelled like several people at once, like the souls of different persons living in each body and across the entire group, until each scent lost its individual identity and became part of a single organism, like a thousand mushrooms rising from one buried fungus: separate faces above the ground, one body beneath it.
And if he left, he would be leaving Tish with these strange people, under the protection of an army that had frozen at the sight of a single shapeshifter, and a Prince who didn't even know how to secure her properly on a horse before letting her doze off recklessly.
Rudra felt no relief that the impenetrable veil of night had finally lifted. Dawn brought with it a horrifying clarity that the darkness had so kindly hidden from them: the sheer number of Kroskoslav townsfolk.
They were everywhere. They stood between the narrow gaps in the trees and walked beside and behind them, all dressed in pristine tunics and fur-lined clothes. Mostly quiet. Mostly watching. Mostly.
Now and then there was a snicker, which Rudra had become used to. The unwanted, eerie laughter had become the new normal of this strange morning.
By the time the deep purple had paled into a dull gray, they reached the Kroskoslav territory, a massive town that sat in the crook of the elbow of the Perma Forest, closely surrounded by the deepest of the faded winter greens and separated from the capital by miles. Rudra looked up. The stone wall rose sixty feet into the sky, topped with multiple watchtowers, none of which was occupied. Instead, hundreds of people stood by the gate.
Instinctively, Rudra tensed. They neither rejoiced nor bowed. Almost everyone, irrespective of age, leaned on sticks, and some sat in curious wheeled seats, like bath-chairs with wheels attached (Really, what the fuck is that?!), with only a few exceptions. But that didn't make them look any less intimidating.
Rudra fell back a little, letting the marching soldiers enter first. He turned his head slightly. "We can leave now," he whispered to Nayan. "Fly to Amber Grove. Leave Benevia. Leave Partha—"
"And what?" Nayan scoffed. "Watch you chew your nails and cuticles for the next half a century, worrying about the Saintess?"
"I am not worrying," the protest was immediate, too quick. "It's just frustrating to see the very person who tried to save me in the past timeline have the survival instinct of a duck sitting on a plate."
"Frustrating? And yet you keep watching," retorted Nayan, and shoved past him, walking forward with a lazy confidence. Rudra let her. He waited two seconds before resuming his babysitting duty over his own General.
He followed the Benevian soldiers through the wide wooden gate and froze. The view that greeted him was... complicated, to say the least.
He walked forward. The Benevian soldiers instinctively parted to make way for him, though he hadn't asked them to. And then Rudra found himself standing before a statue of a woman in the same robe, with the same unnecessary number of ribbons, that Tish wore. She stood amid a pack of white marble wolves with her palms turned upward, and the sculptor hadn't given her the face of someone in distress or fear. She looked kind. Almost welcoming.
It took Rudra a moment to see what was wrong with the wolves. They weren't circling her. They were pressed against her, muzzles buried in the folds of her robe, jaws closed around her forearms, her ribs, the soft stone of her throat. And not one of them was looking at her face. Her face looked out over the gate, patient and serene, at everyone coming in.
Everything else in this town was old: moss-stained walls, cracked cobbles, rotting wood. The statue alone was spotless. Her hands, her hem and her ankles had been rubbed smooth and faintly yellow by countless palms, as though people didn't just revere her but touched her every day. And around the wolves' carved teeth, the marble had a faint rust-brown tint that no scrubbing had ever removed.
And the face. It wasn't just similar to Tish's. It was almost another version of her. The statue's head was tilted the way Rudra had seen Tish tilt hers a hundred times when she was thinking (usually about her stupid saintly duties). It had the same stubborn chin, the one that jutted out whenever she argued about something illogical, like saving creepy people deep in the forest. And the eyes. The carved eyes were the same shape as Tish's, and they still held a faint pigment of the same blue tint. Gods knew the statue had the same wide eyes that made Rudra want to shrink back and burst into flame at the same time. Even Nayan, who had seen plenty of fucked-up shit by the misfortune of following Rudra around, shifted uneasily beside him.
"Beautiful, isn't... she?" said Berkin. Rudra found him standing beside Tish, several feet to his left. He pointed one thin, shaky finger. "She is Saintess... Anastasia Luwen," Berkin gurgled out after some struggle. "The Saintess befol'e you."
Rudra walked toward Berkin, Tish and Mamon. He told himself he was getting closer to listen better, even though dragons didn't need to get close to eavesdrop.
Mamon, for his part, looked... solemn. As for Tish, who had finally slid off her horse, she looked half asleep and half confused as to why a fifty-foot version of herself was standing in front of the town gate.
"Right, Saintess Anastasia," Tish said. She tried to sound as solemn as Mamon looked, but the hair in her mouth was damaging her saintly appearance. "She was martyred. The texts don't say where or how. They just say she was one of the bravest Saintesses ever to grace Benevia."
"She indeed... was," answered Berkin, his eyes shining in the first morning light. "She saved us. And now..."
He grasped Tish's hand, and his grip, which had been so fragile in the forest, tightened. "So... you will."
"You will," Berkin said again, softer, as if repeating it made it true.