Chapter 53.2: Farewells

More than coming, Captain Gelwin was nearly upon them when Penny returned her attention to the world beyond her and the two asura. As usual, his sylvari shadow trailed along behind him, doing nothing to mask the scorn in her gaze. Liæthsidhe stared thorns at all three of them, but Penny felt a special stab of contempt aimed her way.

Unlike his lieutenant, nothing about Gelwin was unkind. He nodded to them as he passed, gesturing back toward the gate, the wagon, and the human prisoner now settling herself atop it. “They’re preparing to leave. The three of you can make your farewells.” He hardly slowed as he passed on into the camp, toward whatever business a captain had to attend to next. Liæthsidhe kept pace.

Yissa was the first to move, but Jinkke and Penny were quickly alongside her, the former still occasionally steadying the latter.

 By the time they reached the wagon, the bulk of the Vigil-folk had dispersed back to their various duties. A human and an asura remained, but the way they stood seemed more indicative of gate duty than any sense of loyalty to Valliford.

The driver, Jindel, and her guard had all taken their places atop the wagon, and Ventyr was the only other person still voluntarily there. He was stone beside the wooden cart, hands clasped behind his back. The posture puffed his chest piously, belying the remaining injuries necessitating the cane he held behind him. He’d filled in again, having been eating well, but his stoic presence seemed more forced than it had once been.

“I will send a pigeon,” Penny overheard the sylvari saying, “as soon as you leave the gates, Crusader. I do not know what weight my words may carry with her, but Warmaster Efut is just. She’ll view things from all sides.”

Jindel’s expression was grateful, oddly unworried. “Thank you, Sergeant,” she said, offering what bow she could from her seat. “I don’t doubt my actions, though. Not for a second. Whatever comes, I can handle it.”

“It’s hard to disagree,” he said. “I stand here now because of you. Travel safely, Crusader. In my estimation, you’ve forever earned that title.” He stepped back, returning her bow, not in deference but respect. 

Catching sight of Penny and the asura from the corner of his eye, Ventyr made space alongside the wagon. Penny glanced at him sidelong, suddenly working with all her intent to hold her posture as erect as his.

“So, Soldier Girl,” Penny asked looking up at the captive with an intently sly smirk, “you’re making a run for it when you hit the treeline, right?”

The woman atop the wagon rolled her eyes to the sky but managed an amused huff. It was a sound Penny hadn’t actually expected to hear from the other woman, given circumstances. She didn’t know what had happened to the young woman in the last few days—aside from that half-dreamed, apologetic embrace she may or may not have received—but Penny would have sworn the shackles around Valliford’s wrists had somehow lightened her load instead of increasing it. It didn’t make a lot of sense, but there it was.

“Didn’t think I’d see you sober again,” Jindel retorted. “Like, ever. My tunic is still drying from all your tears… and drool.”

“Sober may still be an overly optimistic interpretation,” said Jinkke, with a glance to Penny that was somehow both wry and wary. She returned her attention to Valliford. “You have all my gratitude, Crusader Jindel. There is no estimating how badly things might have proceeded for all of us without your intervention—and without Crusader Yult’s. I would shake your hand, but…” Jinkke raised her hands, wrists together in imitation of Jindel’s manacles, and shrugged awkwardly.

Jindel nodded understanding.

“She’s right,” Penny mumbled, putting a hand on Jinkke’s low shoulder. It was half a directing gesture and half Penny trying to stabilize herself as she felt another wobble coming on. Still, she made a concerted effort to meet Jindel’s eyes. “We’d be dead without you and the norn. Maybe all of us. What they’re doing to you is—”

“It’s Vigil code, but thank you, Arkayd.” Jindel swept a sheet of sweaty, blond hair out of her face. Before she could continue saying whatever was still on her tongue, though, her countenance changed with her thoughts. “I just regret we couldn’t get everyone out.”

Penny thought she saw Jinkke look away, but she didn’t have it in her to check before her own eyes fell to the rich earth. There was silence for a long moment, no one having the courage to look at anyone else, though Penny knew the same faces were making their way across everyone’s thoughts.

Yissa broke the melancholy lull. “But you were successful at emancipating the Sergeant and me,” she said, as slowly and meaningfully as Penny had ever heard the little babbler say anything. “For that I doubt I could ever show adequate appreciation.”

Penny blinked, unsure if the brevity was just her hallucinating. But just as quickly, the asura collected her thoughts and set to spewing them at breakneck speed. She dove headlong into a dramatized recounting of the tests she and Ventyr had witnessed in their captivity, recalled her own choices that had gotten them into that captivity to begin with, praised Jindel and Yult’s combat skills at length, and proposed honoring the soldiers’ respective sacrifices with mentions in scholarly records and potentially naming future archeological discoveries after them. It went on long enough that Penny couldn’t decide whether the potion or the scholar was more to blame for her growing nausea.

Yissa’s diatribe came to an end at long last, and the wagon’s driver began to fidget with the reins. He was getting ready to leave. Penny, though, couldn’t shake the feeling that more needed to be said. She didn’t know what, but it was something, something she had to say, to offer—anything.

“If they do kick you out,” she suddenly blurted, “come find me.”

“She is still drugged,” Jindel scoffed, glancing at Jinkke.

“No I’m not—well, not really.” Penny glowered, but her feeling and expression of indignation quickly softened. “I just want to help is all. If you need a place to stay, or work, or whatever, let me know. I’ll do what I can.”

“In Divinity’s Reach?”

She’d been speaking on instinct, but that question tripped her up. “No, not the Reach.”

Jindel raised an eyebrow in unspoken question.

“I can’t say where I’ll land yet. Don’t know,” Penny admitted. Suddenly she wished she was asleep again. “There are a lot of moving parts still.“

“Right,” Jindel said, brow still raised spuriously. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

Before Penny could really feel self-conscious, the wagon driver, clearly tired of listening, reined the oxen into movement. The wagon pulled away toward the gates, and Jindel shifted her focus to what was ahead.

Penny found heat rising inside her as the timbers of the palisade gate came back together, shutting the crusader off from their sight. A rush of dizziness halted the complaints rising to her lips, though. She caught herself by pressing a hand on Jinkke’s shoulder. Instead of rebuffing it, the asura met the gesture with one of her own, putting a stabilizing hand to Penny’s back and ushering her back toward the heart of the camp.

“See?” Penny said, forcing the quipping tone into her voice. “Life of the party.”

She couldn’t see Jinkke’s expression beneath the tidied bob of her golden hair, but the asura’s eye-roll was enough to be felt. It may have been the latent effect of the drugs still, but that sense brought a slight but genuine smile to Penny’s face. It felt good.

That feeling, though, didn’t last long. Lifting her eyes to the path ahead, Penny found Ventyr several paces ahead, clearly trying not to acknowledge her approach as he conversed with another vigilman.

She groaned under her breath, shoving aside another rush of dizziness. Yes, the groan was for Ventyr, but it was also for herself, for what she knew she was about to do. Jinkke’s three-fingered hand still pressed against the small of her back felt less like hers and more like Minkus’. Again, it was probably the potion talking, but Penny could almost feel him pressing her forward.

Penny drew herself up and pulled a step away from Jinkke’s hand, clearing her throat. The other soldier turned first, and Penny recognized the boyish crusader who’d come to summon her to breakfast a few days past. He was larger, broader in the chest and arms than she’s remembered. He still had the round, baby’s face she remembered, but— hell, maybe she’d misread him.

Ventyr continued speaking to the young man, unmoved until he’d finished his thought. Only then did he turn, eyes hard as stone despite the sunset heat of his suddenly flaring bioluminescence. He really wasn’t as good at hiding his temper as he wanted people to believe.

“Jinkke,” he said with a nod. “Penny.”

Jinkke returned the greeting.

“Morning, Vent,” Penny said. She felt so strangely unaccustomed to speaking when she didn’t want to—and gods, she really didn’t want to.

“It’s mid-afternoon,” Ventyr corrected. The sharp lines of his face hardly shifted.

“Right.” Penny suppressed annoyance and embarrassment at the correction. She threw a thumb at Jinkke. “Smalls says the healer’s cocktail laid me out pretty well. My head agrees.”

“Yes.” Skepticism filled Ventyr’s voice. “Multiple people around the camp experienced what you look like laid out.”

What the hell was that supposed to mean? Penny scratched uncomfortably at her head, stymying the question before it could find voice. “Yeah. I heard that too. Nothing more fun than a medically induced bender.”

Ventyr’s tight expression never changed, but his fist took to reflexively clenching and unclenching around the cane at his side. Was steam coming off the wooden handle?

Penny set all of it aside. “Look, the other day, at the Inquest place, what I tried to say was that I wasn’t right—the deal I made with Skixx that is—it wasn’t right. I had my reasons and all, but it was still dolyak shit to stab you in the back that way.”

“It doesn’t matter, Penny. There is no going back.”

His words were the right ones, the ones that should signal her absolution. But his tone was all wrong. He’d always been stiff and straight, but there’d been a peacefulness to it before. Now, here, he was strident and harsh, more iron than wood. Three days between her first attempt and this one hasn’t changed anything.

“What do you want from me?” Penny asked after a pause. She hated putting herself in the position of weakness. It always cost her. “What do you need me to do to make up for—”

“What do I want, Penny?” His facade shattered like ice under a spring thaw. “I want none of this to have happened. I want to have completed my mission without getting put in a glass cylinder. I want Crusader Yult and Minkus to live. I want you safely back in Divinity’s Reach, working out your next self-serving business deal as far as possible from any of this.”

His heat found its answer in hers. She’d almost held it, but at the mention of Minkus, Penny’s tongue was set loose. “That’s low, Carrot-stick. Gods, it doesn’t even make any sense. I had a hand in Skixx getting away with your crystals—I did. But all the rest of what happened? Are you kidding me?” Penny jabbed a wild finger in the general direction of Thaumacore, invisibly distant to the west. “You saw how much of that jade stuff they had out there. That was so far beyond what Skixx took, how do you figure I had anything to do with that? I don’t even know why they needed to screw with my life for those few extra slivers to begin with. And what in Torment do you think makes me responsible for the Inquest catching you? I wasn’t even there!”

Her words were coming so quickly now, revved to life by anger at so many things beyond Ventyr that she didn’t even recognize what came out next until it was free. “And don’t even start with who we lost. If you want to talk about Minkus, then let’s remember whose ass he died trying to save!”

They both froze as her words hit the hot summer air. Penny felt her eyes widen in surprise. She tried to keep her maddened glare on him, but couldn’t. Gods, what had she done now?

“That wasn’t right,” she started. For more reasons than she could handle, it wasn’t right. “You weren’t the reason for Minkus. I was. He—”

“Enough, Penny,” Ventyr barked. “I know who you are, and you only prove it again and again. I have more important things to do.”

She fumbled for words, but before she could straighten the thoughts in her head, Ventyr excused himself, hobbling away on his cane without casting another glance back. This time Penny knew she saw smoke coming off the handle of his cane. She also knew he’d made his judgement. Maybe she’d thought there was hope before, but she’d been wrong. He hadn’t lied; there would be no coming back, not with him.

“Smoke and sparks,” Jinkke mumbled beside her. “You really stepped in that oil slick.”

Penny put a hand over her eyes, as if it would make the world around her disappear. It didn’t.

She let her hand fall aside and took a deep breath. Jinkke now stood directly before her. Beyond the asura, Penny could see and hear glimpses of the camp carrying on as though not a thing in the wide world had changed. She supposed it hadn’t.

“That was intended as a joke,” Jinkke said. She met Penny’s eyes more softly than usual, those damned lilac eyes threatening to disarm everything inside her. “You do comprehend that my brother was correct, don’t you—as usual?”

“What are you talking about?” Penny asked.

“In the Inquest lab, after your first attempt at reunification with the sergeant,” Jinkke said, a touch of sass entering her voice again. “The rest of us witnessed the entire exchange.”

Penny grimaced, recalling that similar scene. She didn’t want to be reminded.

“Minkus was correct,” Jinkke repeated. “He expressed it in his own unique way, of course, but the principle was sound. Either then or now, Sergeant Ventyr could have forgiven you and rectified the whole situation; it was within his power to do so. My brother certainly would have.”

“Would have?” Penny said, only vaguely realizing she was thinking out loud. “He did.”

Jinkke nodded, repeating the words. “He did.”

A moment of silence passed between them, filled with a shared grief that seemed ironically to lift the weight of the last few minutes. In very different ways, Penny had lost two friends, but somehow the loss of the one managed to soften the loss of the other. Gods, even after his passing, Minkus didn’t make a rip of sense.

“I need food,” Penny said.

“I’m sure you do,” Jinkke replied. “Mess tent?”

“Do I have any option?”

A grin touched Jinkke’s cheeks. “Not as of yet.”