Despite his weary body, Arwin didn’t sleep that night. He did his best, but he once again found himself sitting next to Lillia on her bed, enveloped in a cloak of darkness as true rest evaded both of them.
“This is turning into a bad habit, don’t you think?” Lillia asked as they waited for the night to pass.
“Certainly not a healthy one. You’d think I’d be exhausted by now, but my body just won’t accept it. It just kicks me back into awareness the moment I even start thinking about sleep.”
“It’s not just about Zeke, you know,” Lillia said. “You’re pinning everything on the Iron Hounds.”
Arwin let out a muffled bark of laughter, unable to control himself but still doing his best to avoid waking anyone up. “I know. I never said it was right. The Adventurer’s Guild is beyond me right now. I’m not strong enough to handle them yet. But the Iron Hounds – them, I can deal with.”
“And yet, they aren’t the same,” Lillia said. “You can’t treat one wound by healing another.”
“You think I don’t know that?” Arwin asked. He leaned back against the wall and craned his head back to stare at the ceiling – or rather, in the direction of the ceiling. It wasn’t like he could make anything out in the blanket of night enveloping him. “Nothing I can do can ever bring anyone back, but doing anything feels better than doing nothing.”
“Certainly not arguing that,” Lillia said. “I didn’t really have a direction I was heading in, if I’m being honest. I don’t have advice. If I’d been the one in the room with Tix, she’d have met the exact same fate she met at your hands. Maybe a worse one.”
“If that would have done anything to bring someone back, I would have done it,” Arwin said. “But I’ll settle for stopping the Iron Hounds from ever doing this again. It’s to protect other people.”
“That’s a bit of a stretch, but I see where you’re headed with this,” Arwin said. “How do we keep the rest of the Iron Hounds from seeing this happen, though? If we do something that close to their guild hall, they’ll almost certainly have someone that’ll notice the sounds of the commotion.”
“I’ve accounted for that,” Rodrick said, a grim smile passing over his lips. “But I don’t think you’re going to like it.”
The wind rustled the hood of Reya’s cloak and nipped at her eyes. She stood at the edge of a roof, looking down at the city below her. It wasn’t exactly the tallest building in the area, but she wasn’t a huge fan of heights, so it was the highest she was willing to climb.
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Day had already turned to late evening. Reya’s legs were sore from running around the whole time, relaying information from Rodrick and Anna to Arwin and Lillia, but her work wasn’t done yet.
Rodrick had been right. Arwin hadn’t liked the idea at all, but he’d eventually come around. The plan was just too good, and Arwin didn’t have any good ways to turn it down. They all wanted the same thing, and she was done sitting around and watching other people do it for her.
I just need to keep myself from getting killed in the process. Just like Rodrick said, Yul and Erik have pretty close schedules. They’re somewhere around ten to twenty five minutes off of each other, which means I need a distraction that lasts for at least thirty minutes.
It’s a damn good thing that Rodrick helped me come up with some different potential distractions for different times. He definitely knows what he’s doing. I wonder if he was a master thief or something before. Maybe he was the guy that planned the heists, but his whole crew got caught and so now he’s going around adventuring.
“Get them!” Reya yelled, not giving either group time to process what they’d seen. And, on cue, a rock flew from an alleyway, striking one of the men in the second group in the head. He stumbled, letting out a slew of curses as blood started to trickle down his scalp.
It didn’t take both of the groups long to come to the exact same conclusion – that the opposing group had sided with Reya. If they’d stopped to actually say anything, the entire plan would have fallen apart in seconds.
Unfortunately for them, the victor of a street brawl was generally the one that struck first. So, as one, the two groups charged each other, all seeking the head of the woman who stood in their center.