“Why would we care—?” one of them started.

“Her sister,” the other whispered.

“Right.”

“No, but we can find out.”

She drew in breath through her nostrils and released it, looking back to the duo.

Two gnomes.

Her crew.

“He’s become used to me being there,” I said. “I need to return. I’ll leave in the morning, ostensibly to find more grog. One of you can take over then. Instead I’ll come here, sleep a bit and then patrol. Is there a pallet somewhere in here?’

“Over there.” Brix pointed to the darkness opposite the fireplace.

“We don’t light the fire, just the candles. People in the Shanty might have candles, but none have fuel. The windows are boarded. No one can see the candles. But they could see smoke from the chimney, and it would bring attention we do not want,” Brix explained.

She nodded.

“We will get extra blankets,” Gal promised.

She did not care.

She cared about nothing except crushing this Rising, then doing whatever she could to help defeat the Beast (should it ever arrive), and then going back to The Enchantments.

And with peace in all realms, she would train warriors in skills they would no longer need to use and…

That was it.

And that would have to be enough.

No war. No death. No fights.

No love.

Just…breathing.

“I’ll get back,” she mumbled, making a move to do just that.

“Are you all right?” one of them, she thought it Gal, asked.

She had always thought she’d been all right.

But she’d been shown herself in a looking glass and she realized she’d never been all right.

You could not be when you spent your life drowning.

Drowning in jealousy and hate.

Now she didn’t have that to sustain her.

And she did not have the other, the other that she was given that was true sustenance. The kind that made you feel light and free, not burdened and empty.

The other being someone telling you sad stories under the moon in the desert or holding you at night when they slept.

Serena had been wrong back then.

It was not unbearably sad the lady of the chalk fell through the nothingness, alive and holding her dead lover in her arms.

Now she knew what was unbearably sad was having no lover at all for you lost him because of your own ugliness and spite.

She knew what was truly sad was having been given something, losing it, and then having nothing.

“I’m fine,” she said, hand on the knob of the door.

“We’ll look in on you in the night, and I’ll find a way to signal that I’m taking over in the morning,” Brix called to her back.

“And I’ll get some blankets and food in for when you’re here in the morning,” Gal added.

They would get her blankets and food.

No.

She was wrong.

She did indeed have nothing.

Except, for the now, she had this crew.

It did not make her feel better.