Aurelie ran down the steps, skipping three, four at a time. That evening, Leila had been placed on watch as the men had gone out on a hunt, restocking their meat supplies, and the women exhausted themselves helping Orken prepare for the spell.
When Aurelie turned the corner, her heart swollen with fear and dread, she fully expected to not see Leila in that basement. She was there, however. Unconscious and tied up with the prisoner's role, but there.
The remains of the prisoner's chair lay scattered around Leila. Her cheek was sliced and oozing with dark blood. The top of her head had been colored crimson and splinters clung to her hair.
"Is she alive?" Aurelie asked and was instantly surprised at how disconcerted her voice sounded.
How was she going to explain this? Even with Leila lying on the floor unconscious, Aurelie knew that neither Orken nor Kirin would let this go. Everyone else had been absolutely fine watching the prisoner, everyone but Leila. This looked bad.
"Forget about her, he's gone. Do you have any idea what that means?" Daerious shouted and closed his eyes in regret of his outburst. He rubbed his hands through his hair and paced to where the prisoner had been seated earlier that evening.
Aurelie was surprisingly calm, her breath heavy from jumping the steps, and her heart strumming to regain rhythm. "I was awake the whole night, I didn't hear any of this," she said. "You can hear a bloody pin drop in this place when everyone's asleep."
The ripe scent of cranberries filled the air second before she felt Kirin enter the basement. He stood directly behind her. "Do you see now why I killed that hunter?"
Her jaw was clenched and her chest still ripe with anger.
Aurelie stiffed. "Well, we can't bloody well change anything, now can we?" she asked him, adding just enough of his words into her sentence. "Oh, that's right, here's a thing that'll fix everything; I'm sorry, Kirin. Truly."
She moved away from him to sit beside Leila. The ropes that had been used to secure the prisoner were bound around her wrists and ankles. Blue bruises had formed underneath the ropes.
A flame ignited on the tip of her finger, Aurelie pressed it against the rope and waited for it to catch fire. Daerious held out a brief hand to stop her but then withdrew it and let Aurelie continue, himself confused as to what they ought to be doing.
Kirin leaned against the wall, his eyes glued to her. He crossed his arms and exhaled. "The first thing we can do is not act like children," he replied.
"Is that why you didn't tell me? Because you think I am a child?" she spat. This was not the time, but if she did not blurt out the words, they would suffocate her. "That makes all the sense in the world then, that you would think you're able to make decisions about where I live without consulting me."
"You are acting like one right now," he said loud enough for just about anyone to hear. "Do you realize what this means?" Kirin asked. "We all have to leave now, not only you. They might already have guards coming here, and if the King is still at his castle he will arrive here with his men by this evening. If he's at his castle . . . If not then we have a couple of hours. So, can you please focus on the current problem? You can hate me again when we are safe," he said, curved his back, and pushed away from the wall, leaving the room.
Aurelie opened her mouth to retaliate, but Daerious saved her the embarrassment.
"What are we going to do with her?" Daerious' gazed over Leila.
"Can we take her upstairs? Sasha probably needs to take a look at her wounds. Her head looks pretty bad."
"We have bigger things to worry about than creating comfort," he said, sounding as bitter as Kirin.
"You think I don't know that?" she asked him.
Aurelie became the common enemy. Daerious avoided facing her, and hovered over Leila, folding the rope, which should rather have been chucked away. He wrapped it around his wrist, and unwrapped it again, then chucked it angrily aside.
"Sometimes it's hard to tell," he replied and swooped down to pick Leila up from the ground. Pieces of wood fell from her and scattered on the ground. Quite a lot of blood had pooled up below her. Aurelie worried about the extent of her injuries and winced slightly at how wildly Daerious was handling her limp body.
Daerious moved past Aurelie and she put a gentle hand on his elbow. Fighting him would solve nothing, neither would showing him that what he said had offended her.
"This affects me too. Do you think I don't care? I did the best I could. I thought he could help us somehow gain an advantage over the King. He almost did too, you know that. Orken was so close to getting into his head and he was important, I just know he was." He shook his head at her response. Aurelie swallowed hard and felt her cheeks brighten. Aurelie was tired of having to defend her every action. She was used to having to deal with Kirin but Daerious turning away made her insides turn. "Have you never made a mistake, Daerious?"
"I've never made one that affected so many people," he said, and walked out of the room, carrying the limp Leila as if she weighed nothing at all.
Aurelie slid her back down the wall and lowered her head to her knees. She closed her eyes, fighting against the sting of tears, but to no avail. The tears slipped through her lips and rolled down her cheeks. Her chest vibrated with silent sobs.
Kirin approached. The air and water squelched within his moist shoes. He stood in the doorway, and looked her way, inhaling as if to say something, but then stopped. Aurelie turned away and hid her tear stained face behind her palm, breathing through her mouth.
"We need you up here," he said. "We have to pack and leave soon. We want to be out of here before the sun comes up."
At least, he still cared a little. She doubted very much that Kirin gave two damns about whether or not she was helping the others pack.
"I'll be right there," she mouthed, her voice stuck in her croaky throat. She coughed and said it again. Kirin hesitated at the door, then left. She followed him shortly after feeling guilty about sulking while the others packed.
Upstairs, the people rushed about around her. A heap of suitcases lay by the front door of the inn. A couple of children came by and threw more on the heap, then skipped off into the crowd.
Sasha leaned over a couch. "Resilio," she chanted. The couches' bottom half shrunk in size, taking on a triangular shape. Its feet were tiny as marbles. The couch rocked, almost tipping over. "Resilio," Sasha repeated, and the top half reduced in size. She stepped over it, and went to the next couch, repeating the spell.
Aurelie gripped railing of the staircase and was about to sneak upstairs when Sasha caught her.
"Come pick these up, Aurelie," Sasha instructed.
Aurelie paused. She did not want to show her face around them today, but she forced herself to.
Daerious risked his life that day for her in the tavern, and since that time she had brought only trouble their way. She felt mighty bitter about everything.
"Alright," Aurelie said. She followed Sasha around the room and packed the furniture into Sasha's large dark leathered suitcase until the room was bare of anything but dust.
"Is there anything else I can do?" she asked when they had finished, wanting desperately to disappear from the center of the room and to hide in her bedroom.
"I think you've done quite enough," a voice behind her stated. When she turned around, people were scattered all about, and the person who had thrown the salt on her wounds had merged into it. She accepted it. Whoever it was, was right.
She bit her lip and lowered her eyes.
Sasha's hand stroked her back. "I think the kitchen is the only thing I haven't packed yet," she said. "This really is not your fault, dear, that wizard had managed to find us before all of this happened. We would have had to find a new place to hide out regardless. To be quite honest we should have moved the second Daerious brought you to us. We have been reckless to think that we were safe here for so long," she told Aurelie.
"It is my fault, if I let them do things their way, we would have still had a home," she answered, tears welled up once more, but she pushed them back.
"We still will, we just need to move the location. You brought back humanity, your innocence added more light to the life of these people. They might not like you very much now, but we all appreciate the difference you have made to all of us. We are fighting this war with you. We used to share your beliefs but somewhere along the way we lost sight of them. You came to remind us what we stand for. Do not doubt yourself because of that. We are fighting a killer and we think it's okay to be doing that through killing. You're right about one thing, it isn't. We need to be better. The others will see this soon enough. " She patted Aurelie on the back.
The words were meant to bring comfort, but Aurelie felt no such thing. "I should have let them handle it. Your words are kind, Sasha, but they are not true," she said. Her emotions had drained away, and her body filled with something far worse, emptiness.
"What kind of leader follows?" Sasha asked her, her brows curving up in question. "None that I want to follow." She balanced the suitcase against her hit, flipped it closed and clicked the lock.
A family of three stood at the door, their faces creased, and their eyes droopy. The mother muttered something to her daughter, and the girl straightened her posture. It was the new family Kirin had saved. They had just got out of trouble, and here was Aurelie, dragging them right back into an even bigger mess.
"Maybe I am not meant to lead," she said after some time.
"I'm not sure that you have a choice," Sasha said, closed her suitcase, and rose to her feet. "Go grab the things in your room. We will be packing the inn soon," she added and disappeared into the kitchen.
The door to her bedroom was blocked by a group of people. Now that everyone rushed, and ran from room to room, the inn seemed a too small to contain all the people.
"Excuse me," she said and squeezed past them. They split, and she almost jumped through her door, before one of them could hurl an insult.
Her room was empty. Dust covered the space where her bed and closet had stood, and her leather bag was tossed into the corner by the window. That's all she had to show for the last eighteen years of her life.