Chapter 3: Part 7 - Weapons and Enemies

Erin wasn’t going to panic. She knew, as the camp descended into chaos, that she absolutely couldn’t let herself. The moment she gave in was the moment Light’s Memory was lost.

“Quiet!” Erin bellowed over the cacophony of raised voices, bringing them to a stuttering halt. No one had bolted out of the camp, at least. Ivar and Roan were both armed, Amber and Ruby looked murderous, and Oska had gone as white as untrodden snow. No one had come to blows, though, or decided to take matters into their own hands.

Good. Her guild might be loud and argumentative, but at least they had some discipline.

“Oska.” Erin swung towards him and waited for his gaze to meet her own. “Are you sure Auri can’t have just wandered off?”

Someone ‒ perhaps Ruby ‒ made a faint noise of derision. It was a slim possibility, Erin knew. There was no question that the girl was missing. Amber had already opened the tent, revealing an empty bed and a gaping hole in the rear wall ‒ which also meant it was unlikely her disappearance was an accident.

Oska could have been carved from marble. “No,” he said, the word clipped. “One minute she was here. The next…”

“A spell or a portal, then,” Amber said.

Erin nodded, then gestured to Ivar and Roan. Neither needed to be given an order before they slunk off into the night.

“Is there a spell she could have cast herself?” Erin asked.

Oska gave a jerky shrug.

“To travel far enough that Oska couldn’t feel her?” Amber put in. “Unlikely.”

No, this sounded like either mesmer magic or some device that none of them had come across before.

“There’s really only one possibility,” Amber went on, her voice sounding too loud in the midnight silence. “Artair knew what she was before the rest of us did. Is it any wonder he’s taken her?”

Oska shuddered but didn’t speak.

“Taken,” Ruby said, her voice low and almost seductive, “or she went willingly.”

Oska’s head came up. He stared at Ruby, his hands trembling and a vein pulsing in his forehead. He looked, Erin thought, as though he was ready to stab someone.

Erin studied him uncertainly. After all these months, she thought she understood Oska and his hatred for Artair. Auri, though? The girl was mysterious without even trying. Erin wasn’t sure any of them could predict what she might do.

“Oska,” she said gently, before he could decide attacking Ruby was a good idea. “Is there any chance Auri might have chosen to go?”

Oska was silent for a long time. Finally, his shoulders slumped in defeat. “I don’t know.”

He was saved from more questions by Roan’s return. The charr appeared between two tents, his arms folded. “No footprints around the tent,” he said gruffly. “There’s some disturbance of the undergrowth on the hillside to the east, but it’s limited. Whoever was up there probably didn’t weigh much, but that’s all I can tell you.”

So not a norn or a charr, Erin guessed ‒ but that didn’t rule out Auri and it likely didn’t rule out Artair, either.

A cold, yawning pit seemed to open in the bottom of her stomach. It was Artair’s attack outside the Grove that had persuaded Taria to send her grandchildren out here. It was Artair’s attack, once again, that had left them panicking back at the guild hall. Marissa’s injuries, that vision of Artair himself ‒ and then they’d arrived in the Wildlands all spoiling for a fight. If he’d wanted to set them against one another to provide a distraction for Auri’s disappearance… He really couldn’t have done a better job.

“It’s time to go,” Erin said firmly. “Amber, pack up the camp and take Taria’s people back to the manor. Speak to her personally, if you can.”

“I’ll go with you,” Ruby said quickly.

Amber narrowed her golden eyes, but it was a measure of how serious the situation was that she didn’t argue.

“The rest of us will return to Lion’s Arch,” Erin went on. “Roan, how long is Ivar going to be?”

“I’m here,” Ivar called, stepping back into the circle of firelight. “I followed a deer trail north, but there was no sign it had been used by anything except animals. There was nothing else to go on.”

Erin shot Oska another look. The thief’s jaw was clenched. “We’ve done all we can here,” she said, speaking mostly to him. “Artair knows better than to leave a trail.”

Which meant Auri could be just about anywhere in Tyria by now ‒ and they all knew it.

Unfortunately, Erin’s desire for speed didn’t seem to translate to Taria’s servants. She gritted her teeth as Burg insisted the entire camp be packed up and nothing left behind. In the end, Erin offered to carry three of the tents herself, just to get everyone moving. As they headed south, the heavy tent poles jabbed her in the shoulder with every step, keeping time with the words running through her head.

You’ve failed. You’ve failed. You’ve failed. It didn’t matter that no one had tried to blame her for Auri’s disappearance. Light’s Memory was her guild and she was responsible for everyone in it. Worse, she’d reacted to the attack on the guild hall exactly as Artair had known she would. She’d played right into his hands.

It was noon when they arrived back in the city. It was a relief to send Amber, Ruby, and Taria’s people off through the gate to Divinity’s Reach, all their equipment in tow. At least, it felt like a relief until Erin realised what she was left with: namely Oska, who looked like he’d swallowed acid and it was eating him alive.

He hadn’t spoken for hours. Erin studied his face, trying to make sense of the emotions flickering across it. Anger, guilt, bewilderment ‒ and was that resignation, as though he’d somehow expected this to happen all along?

“We’ll get her back,” Erin said, as the guild hall came into view. The workmen had been busy; the new roof was almost complete.

“What if Ruby was right?” Oska said, so crisply that Erin blinked in surprise. “What if Auri chose to go?”

Erin thought uneasily of Jean and the girl he loved. Vasha had chosen Artair, extraordinary though it seemed. Might Auri have done the same?

“You think she did,” Oska said flatly, which was enough to tell Erin she’d hesitated too long.

“Auri’s the only one who can answer that,” she said. “Auri and you. If you don’t know what your sister was thinking, none of the rest of us can hope to guess.”

She hadn’t intended to sound accusatory, but Oska winced. “I suppose even I don’t know Auri as well as I thought,” he said, his voice small.

They walked on in silence, which gave Erin time to realise all manner of horrifying things. For one, they seemed to have gone from an assumption of kidnap to one of Auri going with Artair of her own free will. If that was true… Auri didn’t seem like the type to play at spying and double-crossing, as Jean had done. There was every chance she’d deliberately become their enemy.

Both an enemy and a weapon, now in Artair’s hands. The real question, of course, was what he would do with her.