Chapter 52.3: Mounting Exhaustion

They continued the debrief from the night before. No one was excited to continue reliving the previous day’s events, but they obliged the captain’s insistence that firm details of the situation could save further lives in the Moors. He asked questions, the group answered, and that sylvari beside the old man took incessant notes. Occasionally Penny responded when pressed, or when someone asserted a fact that was so dead-wrong that it pulled her out of her reverie. Time at once flew and froze, her mind locked in a loop of guilt, relief, and uncertainty that only ever slowed under the weight of sheer exhaustion.

Finally the proceedings ended. Silence fell, and Penny slid out of her thoughts to find a cup of weak ale between her hands. She hazily recalled it getting there alongside a lunch of something entirely unmemorable.

The old captain leaned back in his chair, mulling over some final note that Penny had missed. Then he straightened. “Well, I thank you all. For yesterday’s bravery, as well as your recounting it today.” He let his attention linger on Valliford before looking again at the rest more somberly. “And again, my sympathies for your loss.”

Before Penny could fully feel just how little his sympathies meant to her, he turned the conversation. “Now we come to our next steps.”

His eyes swept past Jindel before focusing on the three civilians beside her. “The three of you are welcome to remain here as long as you need. Our food, safety, and medical care is yours while you heal and recover your strength to travel. When you are ready to leave, you’re welcome to travel as far as you like with our provisions wagon, for your safety. It has traditionally departed fortnightly, but that may be changing, in light of recent events at Arterium Haven. I’ll have Crusader Halbor give you his schedule when it’s established. In the meantime, Lieutenant Liæthsidhe will be your liaison. Please feel free to ask her for anything you might—”

“Wait,” Penny demanded, coming out of another tired fugue and processing the man’s words several sentences too late. “Did you just say a fortnight? You want us to wait around here for a fortnight?”

The captain nodded, raising a brow. It was his lieutenant who spoke, though.

“Yes, a fortnight before our supply team departs again.” Liæthsidhe put clear challenge in her tone. “Is that a problem?”

Penny cinched her hands tightly around her cup. It was all she could do to keep them from shaking. Being trapped in that tiny camp, sweating to death and given nothing to do but to think, to remember? The thought was— gods, there was no other way to put it. The thought was terrifying.

“You’re damn right that’s a problem,” Penny spat back. “I’m not sitting on my hands in this jungle for fourteen days.”

“Oh? Do you have somewhere more lucrative to be, Penny?” It was Ventyr who rebutted this time. To say he looked worn was an understatement, but that didn’t keep him from finding a furnace of heat to level at her.

Suddenly Penny wanted to leap across the table. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Enough,” Gelwin ordered. The old man crossed his arms over his chest and stiffened, turning his attention first to his lieutenant, who stilled at his gaze, and then Ventyr, who did likewise. Then he looked at Penny—almost looked through Penny.

There was patience in the wizened man’s voice, but just barely. “Miss Arkayd, you’re welcome to leave whenever you like. I have no authority to keep you here against your will, nor would I want to. But if you leave before the supply wagon, you go alone. With that limp and the host of non-Inquest threats in the region, I fear you wouldn’t fare well. But again, the choice is yours.”

Penny thought about that just long enough to stitch together a retort. She opened her mouth, but a hand came down on her wrist, silencing her. Jinkke spoke before she could get a word out. “Thank you, Captain. What my friend intended to convey was gratitude, not unnecessary remonstration.” Jinkke shot Penny a hard look.

Penny’s mind went in a dozen different directions. It was a good thing barking defiance, storming out in silence, and begging everyone’s forgiveness were impossible to do all at the same time, or Penny might have done exactly that. As it was, she held her tongue, which might have been the most painful choice of all.

With a nod, the captain accepted Jinkke’s intercession and dismissed the three of them to rest. He instructed his lieutenant to send one of their medics to meet them at their tent for continued medical work. There was another round of hollow, reciprocal thanks that Penny forced herself to begrudgingly participate in, and the three staggered back out of the tent and into the awaiting sunlight.

After such a long time in the thick shade of the mess tent, the sun was almost blinding. Penny blinked several times to adjust, and a figure approached, skirting between her and the crusader stationed outside the tent. It was Jindel’s guard. He slipped through the door flap, almost ghostlike despite his chainmail armor. With the three civilians out of the way, apparently it was time for the Vigil folk to return to the business of defending the world and punishing their most honorable members, starting with Crusader Jindel.

Penny stopped, glancing back at the tent for a moment, as though she could see what was happening beyond the entrance. She sneered again at the thought of that captain and his two sylvari flunkies casting their hypocritical judgements on Crusader Jindel—what a crock of shit.

“Is there a problem?” The voice of the crusader stationed beside the door flap snapped Penny back to reality. And like that, the problem facing Jindel and every single problem facing Penny all came shockingly back into relief.

“Too many to name,” she groaned.

Before he could say anything further, Penny waved the statement away and started off toward their tent. Behind her, she heard Jinkke say something to the tent guard before the slapping footfalls of the two asura followed after her.

If Penny’s mind hadn’t been so full of half-complete and wholly unwanted thoughts, it might have taken a minute to get across the camp to their tent. As it was, she found herself at the threshold with no recollection of the distance she’d just traversed. It was just as well; she’d seen enough of the camp to know it wasn’t much to look at.

She slipped inside with Yissa on her heels. The asura settled in without hesitation, crawling onto her cot and almost instantly falling asleep. It was no wonder, of course. The scholar may not have taken as many wounds as the others, but she and Ventyr had been confined to spaces not three strides across, stripped, and starved for at least two days. And that had happened immediately following a hike across a hundred miles of wild terrain. Dark circles beneath Yissa’s eyes, sallow skin, and evident weight loss told the tale to anyone with eyes in his head.

Penny felt a stab of jealousy as she sat on her own cot. The light blanket hanging loosely off the end was exactly as she’d left it early the night before, because Penny had hardly used the cot. Because Penny hadn’t slept. And as the thought of Minkus, dead and alone in that Inquest courtyard danced across her mind again, she had the strong sense she wouldn’t be sleeping tonight either.

Penny threw a fist into the blanket, and she almost screamed. A lance of agony shot through her middle: the wound in her side complaining at the sudden movement. She doubled over.

It took a moment, but the knife-edged pain ebbed back to a dull throb as Penny held herself, gently checking her bandage and the wound beneath. It was still a poulticed, meaty mess, which she assumed was a good thing.

Light flashed in through the tent flap as it opened, and Penny’s attention rose from her injury. She hadn’t even noticed Jinkke entering the tent, but her friend was already stepping back outside with something in her hand. She clutched the thing close, as though it could jump from her grip at any moment, but Penny couldn’t make out what it was against the backlight of the outside world.

Penny grimaced, in part because the sight of someone’s silhouette against a doorway full of daylight sent an all too familiar shiver down her spine. But it was also the returned awareness of how she’d left things with Jinkke the night before. She owed— well, she owed Minkus a lot of things, but this was one she actually thought she could come through on.

Bracing herself against another stab of pain—this time all the way down her left side, not just her midsection—Penny hobbled forward, getting her steps level just as she reached the tent flap. “Smalls,” she groaned, throwing back the flap. The daylight blinded her again, and she squinted to see where she was going. “Hey, wait up.”

Rubbing sight back into her eyes, Penny thudded into something waist-high and soft, nearly knocking it over. The object cursed. “Smoke and sparks! Observe where you’re ambling.”

“Gods,” Penny sputtered, backing away from what she now recognized as Jinkke. “I just— Sorry, I wanted to catch you.”

Beneath her sunlit, golden hair, Jinkke’s dark face came into clearest focus first. “How far did you anticipate I’d be able to go?” Her eyes were red, and her face seemed as drawn by gravity as someone decades older. Penny didn’t remember her looking so worn in the mess tent, but then she hadn’t really looked—she hadn’t wanted to.

Trusting her own knack for fumbling headlong into trouble, Penny took a deep breath, opened her mouth, and let it run.