They climbed out of the tunnel and exited back through the shabby hut into the overgrown field. “Will do, boss,” Bonnie said, running ahead of Nick and Lucas toward the village.

Nick darted after her, leaving Lucas alone to meander back toward the tavern. He pulled out Kegan’s journal during the walk and began scratching the itch on his brain that had been nagging him since he first found it.

The first few pages were less journal entries and more Kegan’s thoughts and ideas. They detailed small activities he was planning to do with the territory, little things like a festival for all the farmers on his land, a weekly feast at the local tavern to keep morale up, or small ways he planned to improve the agricultural utility of the people. The entries discussed the people he planned to work with, the type of holidays he wanted to put together, and his hopes for the settlement near his manor. Seeing the actual town and hearing the way the people in it talked about Kegan, it was hard to imagine that he was the same man who wrote the journal, but the handwriting matched easily.

A quarter of the way through the journal, however, Lucas came across a dozen or more pages that were completely different. Whereas every other was filled from top to bottom, front to back with words, ideas, and tiny, little drawings that were either maps or inventions Kegan was working on and were crisp and neat without so much as a bend or fold on them, this one was wrinkled a little, almost as if it had been left out in the rain before drying, and clearly depicted the same woman whom he had seen in the painting. Each page thereafter was another drawing of her, and each drawing left Lucas feeling a little more hollow and empty inside.

I did this as well. Lucas stared down at the drawings, instantly feeling the loss and regret in them. He had always cursed himself for not having more pictures of Yu Hua, and he had been unable to stop himself from drawing her portrait for weeks after she was gone. He would have done anything to fill the void in him that yearned to remember her image.

The images eventually came to an end, and the words resumed. There weren’t as many as before, and most pages contained only a single paragraph.

“Freed or broken, there can be no in-between. We hold their chains, all of them, and so long as they have the strength to do so, they will pull at their chains. They will yank and tug at the collar we have fitted them with until either they or their collar break. Even if they were freed, I don’t doubt in my heart for one minute that they would try to attack us with the broken chains. I should have known this. I should have curtailed your mercy, as every history book had taught me. This was my fault. My heart was weak to your plight, and you to theirs. I’m sorry Isabel. I tried to appease them, to be good. For your sake, to make you happy, I wanted our lands to be a paradise for all people of all kinds. But I couldn’t keep them happy. As soon as our poverty demanded I tighten the slack on their chains again, they— I’m sorry.”