The village wasn’t a village anymore, and the city it had become offered no sanctuary. The Deerling’s corpse lay as evidence of that but the true testament was spoken by the lack of concern any of the guards showed once the Deerling lay still.

“Aww, do you know how much you just cost me!” the merchant Filgar complained, his voice full of annoyance but absent of any outrage or anger.

“Should have branded him,” Onoxo the guard said. “That just proved you can’t control the beasts. Now, are you going to brand the rest or are you going to turn around and head back to Embervale?”

Filgar grumbled and ordered his people to turn their wagons around. “Can’t afford not to sell them now. Gonna be a rough season if all the towns are acting like you idiots.”

“Take the body with you if you’re going. Can get some coin for that if his bits aren’t too old and weathered.” Onoxo waved a hand towards the fallen Deerling and Jaye took a step forward.

“Best not to draw their attention,” Shadow said, holding an admittedly insubstantial hand in front of her. “In fact best perhaps to move on to the next town. We do not like the reception they give travelers here.”

Jaye stewed in that thought for a long moment while Filgar’s wagons were turned around the Deerling’s body was collected. Far from being treated with ceremonial dignity though it was simply strung up by the feet off the back roof of the trailing wagon. Within no more than ten minutes, the merchant’s wagons were rolling back up the road and the guards had returned to postures of idle boredom. 

Everything was back to normal.

Looking at the red stain on the open ground outside the wall and the disinterest in it shown by the guards, Jaye saw something worse though. Everything had always been normal. They showed no interest or remorse for what had happened because it was what was expected. It was how things were supposed to be.

“Come, it will take somewhat longer, but a proper repast can be found elsewhere,” Shadow said.

Jaye’s feet however stayed planted where they were.

“No.” She offered no explanation at first, grappling with the disgust, and fear, and rage she felt. “They won’t know what I am.”

It was more than that, of course. Within her there was a hunger to take something back from them. An instinctual desire to poke the predator she saw before her. To prove it couldn’t catch her, couldn’t take her life like it had so many others.

“I want their food,” she said, the vengeance of taking what was theirs rising in her from a chorus of ancestors.

“We promise you it is unlikely to be worth coveting,” Shadow said. “But, yes, let us see you properly sustained.” Was he speaking of merely physical sustenance? Or perhaps the more spiritual nourishment of seeing some small spec of justice delivered? 

Jaye began to set off towards the gate but Shadow directed her attention to the remains of a small bridge which spanned the river at a point where it narrowed most.

“We see no reason to allow such paltry walls to stand against us,” Shadow said. “Head there,” he pointed towards a spot on the nearest side wall, “to where shade still rests, and we needn’t interact with any of the hapless defenders the town may possess.”

“They’ll see us when we cross the river though, won’t they?” Jaye asked, wondering if Shadow meant for her to fly them over the walls. It wasn’t a terribly appealing thought given the twin facts that birds seemed somewhat absent from the sky and the archers, at least, had proven their skill was adequate to hit fleeing targets.

“Passing unnoticed is rather second nature to one such as we are,” Shadow said. “We could likely cloud your presence were you to simply stroll through the open gate but notice there? See the silvery glint which wreathes the stonework around the gate. That is an enchantment for unveiling the invisible. A mediocre one, sufficient we believe to thwart simple spells of invisibility and misdirection, but not beyond our skills to deceive.”

“So we can use the front gate?” Jaye asked.

“Can, but possibly should not,” Shadow said. “Were it our gate to protect, we would layer defenses upon it, as we’ve done with your Seeming. That there is an obvious remedy against unseen intruders on the gate does not preclude the possibility that there are one or more hidden measures as well.”

“How do you get in then?” Jaye asked, scanning the battlements in search of a spot where the archers would not be able to spy a clever bird.

“Magic!” Shadow said, wiggling his fingers.

Jaye offer him a scowl in place of words to complain of how dubious an explanation that was.

“The shaded area,” Shadow said, pointing once more at the wall which was nearest to them.

Without audible complaints, Jaye picked a path through the forest’s edge, and walked carefully to the old bridge to find that, without traffic passing to the forest for a century, the bridge had been left to rot away in several places.

“There are spells of mending that we can…” Shadow began to say but Jaye didn’t wait for him to finish.

With a few quick hops, she used the still intact bits of the bridge to navigate to the other side of the river and then crept close to the shaded walls, expecting that at any moment a Hunter’s cry would ring out to reveal her presence.

“So what can magic do…” Jaye started to ask before she found herself standing in the shadows on the other side of the wall.

“We can continue the concealment spell, but within the city it will perhaps do more harm than good,” Shadow said as he took stock of their surroundings.

“How did you do that?” Jaye asked, her gazing flicking everywhere around her to get her bearings back.

“A bit of natural ability,” Shadow said, “and one or two decades of study. Passing from one shadow to another was what the witch designed us to do. In truth it’s easier than walking alongside you or possessing space as a body might. Bringing along another however was a rather different story. That was something we spent quite a while working on.”

 “Where are we?” Jaye asked. She was in a small, dark alleyway between two tall wooden buildings, beyond that though everything was strange and foreign to her.

“Near as can be to a traveler’s room,” Shadow said. “Let us tend to your hunger and see what information we can discover as to how we might make that a less perilous endeavor for the meals to come.”

Jaye nodded, flipped the hood of the cloak up to ward off the slight chill of the early spring day and left the alley to find herself at an open door which led to room that was already half full of other travelers.

She wasn’t sure what she was supposed to do inside, but the moment she stepped past the door, a server who was carrying a tray of bowls directed her to an empty space at the room’s bar, and she’d barely finished sitting down when a bowl of stew slid in front of her.

“Six bits,” the server behind the bar said. Jaye glanced up to find a large man, human though if there were traces of Tauren blood in his ancestry Jaye would not have been surprised.

Jaye felt coins drop into her hand, a gift from Shadow. She rebelled for a moment against paying for her meal when she’d meant to pilfer it to put some tiny hurt back on the humans. 

Was it justice to steal from someone who hadn’t been present or a part of the crime she’d witnessed? Her mother wouldn’t have thought so. 

Jay placed the coins on the bartop before taking the spoon that was offered, hungrier perhaps for whatever elusive measure of justice she could grasp than for the food in front of her, but for the time being, the food would do.

“You sure you want to use these?” the man said, holding one of the coins up to light from the nearest window.

“Yeah,” Jaye said, giving the stew an appraising sniff before risking a repeat of her earlier experience with Shadow’s cooking.

“Let me guess, you’re an adventurer? Just got back from some monster ruins?” the man said. “You know you can get these old coins converted at the guild right? Even copper bits like this usually go for more than the copper their made of.”

“It’s okay,” Jaye said. “The stew was quick. It’s worth it.”

The man gave a disbelieving laugh at that, but his smile was soft.

“Careful saying anything good about the food here. People will think you took a few too many hits to the head from the monsters. I’m Boltran, if you need anything else, just shout. I still got half an ear that can hear good sometimes.”

The stew was quick. Whether it was cheap or not, Jaye didn’t really know since she’d never used human money to buy anything before. Good was also a debatable quality, though her hunger, which had returned with ravenous force, gave it a seasoning and spice which elevated it to a level it perhaps would not have reached otherwise.

“You’re an adventurer too?” a thin young human lad said as he claimed the seat next to Jaye’s. “Did you get to see the Uprising down around Dawnfield?”

“Yeah,” Jaye said, truthful on the second question at least.

“Sounded like it was pretty awful. They lost Dawnfield?”

“And more,” Jaye said, remembering that the Hunters had talked about Cropshare falling as well.

“Are you here with your party?” asked the boy? Man? He seemed to be somewhere in the middle, but Jaye remembered Shadow’s claim that casters rarely appeared as their true selves.

“Don’t have one,” Jaye said, and couldn’t fight to keep the wince out of her voice at everything else she didn’t have.

“Oh, ouch, I’m sorry. My name is Telman. I’m part of a new party, and I was wondering if you could tell us what it was like?”

Jaye glanced around, wondering if Telman subscribed to the same regal set of personal pronouns as Shadow did. The group of other humans clustered around a nearby table who were all staring in Telman’s direction suggested that was not the case however.

“It was bad,” Jaye said, keenly aware of both her inability to convincingly speak of the battles as an adventurer would and how little she cared to recall the experience she did have with the Uprising and its aftermath.

Telman looked as though he was going to ask for more information but paused with a pained expression.

“Oh. I see. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have bothered you,” he said and got up to leave.

Had she still been in the Refuge, Jaye would have assured him that nothing he’d said bothered her, and if she’d still been in the Refuge that would have been true. With no kinder option occurring to her, she simply let him go without further discussion and got back to her stew.

“It would seem our ruse is having the desired effect,” Shadow whispered to her. “With your staff and cloak, people are naturally assuming you to be a caster.”

“Is that really a good thing?” Jaye whispered back, leaning a bit further over her stew so the hood of her cloak would hide her whispering better.

“That will be for you to decide. Denying one’s true self carries unpleasant costs, but that is not the same as allowing any and all access to secrets they would harm you with,” Shadow said.

“Why did you give me old coins before?” Jaye asked, a memory of the dead Deerling flashing through her at the thought of all of those who would wish to do her harm.

“We presumed you had none of your own,” Shadow said. “The barkeep’s suggestion for converting them may have merit however. All of the currency we carry was struck at least a century ago if not more. Newer coinage, struck by one of the local lords, would attract less attention.”

“He said ‘the guild’ could change them?” Jaye asked, unclear on exactly why one coin would need to be exchanged for another.

“The Adventurer’s Guild we imagine. Riversbough was too small a century ago to host one but at its present size…no even at its present size, it is odd that there should be a chapter of the guild here. We were given to understand that as freelance agents who sought their fame and fortune among perilous enterprises, the population of adventurers in the Free Dukedoms amounted to no more than a dozen or two active parties at a time. Riverbough has grown but not so large as to maintain a facility on the off chance an adventuring party should wander by?”

“There’s a party over there though,” Jaye said without glancing at the table where Telman had sat down.

“Something has changed,” Shadow said. “There simply should be the need for so many adventurers that we could run into one by chance during our first meal in the city unless…”

The first of the screams from outside the tavern cut Shadow off. 

“Whatever could….” Shadow was at a loss, but Jaye wasn’t.

She knew what screams like that meant.