“I don’t want to be the roadblock,” said Verity. “So I’ll do another few, but if it’s travel all the time and there’s considerable danger later on… maybe you should start speaking to the alternates you had in mind.” She seemed to regret saying that as soon as she said it.
“I bought a dagger in Tarchwood,” said Alfric. “With my own money. It can teleport one of us to it, which means we can cut out six miles of travel for someone, and if it’s a condition of you coming with, then I’d be fine using it like that. We can also probably augment it to take all of us, which cuts travel time in half.”
“Hmm,” said Verity. “It seems generous to use it for me.”
“Yes,” said Alfric. “But I think you’re well worth it.” He shifted in place for a moment, keeping his eyes on her. “Verity, can I speak with you privately?”
Verity’s eyes were on him, boring holes into him. Something had changed between them, and Hannah wished she knew what. “You knew me by reputation.”
“Yes,” he said. He looked to the doorway leading out of the kitchen. Verity wasn’t moving though. After a moment of hesitation, Alfric continued. “Your parents were worried about you. They were making some discreet inquiries as to whether they could get someone to, first, find you and, second, go check up on you.”
“My parents sent you here,” said Verity. Her arms remained folded across her chest, but her stern posture gave way to confusion. “But surely not to have me go into a dungeon.”
“No,” said Alfric. “No, decidedly not. I had never really had any intention of spying on you for them, but I knew enough about you to know that you were quite skilled, and… I had been trying to put together parties. I watched them fail in one way or another.”
That, for Hannah, helped a few things fall into place about Alfric. Why the rush? Well, perhaps because he’d seen parties fail before, either through scheduling or personal issues, or collapsing when it came time to actually fight monsters. Hannah wondered just how many failed parties he’d had. Now that they’d been through one dungeon, and proven that they could do it, Alfric was willing to slow down and invest some time.
“And if I had said no?” asked Verity.
“I would have tried a few other approaches with you. If it had still been a firm no, I would have confirmed for them that it was really you,” said Alfric. “Then I’d have done my best to scrape together a party without you, using the funds they’d given me.”
Verity nodded. “And if you know all that, you know… certain other salient information about me.”
Alfric nodded slowly.
“Which is?” asked Mizuki.
“I haven’t said it out loud because I assumed that Verity would prefer it to be private,” said Alfric.
Hannah felt the pull of curiosity, and immediately her mind went to work thinking of all the possible options that it could be. A disgrace of some kind seemed the most likely, but there were many options for the specific variety. A child out of wedlock, a failed engagement, a social embarrassment, a crime of passion… None of them fit. None immediately made sense of Verity. That said, Hannah was aware that she didn’t know Verity all that well.
“I think I need a moment to myself,” she said. “I’ll be upstairs.”
She left the kitchen, moving with the same grace as before, not teary-eyed, but certainly not looking like she was pleased.
“She’s only second elevation though,” said Mizuki. “She can’t be that good, right?”
“You’re the one that said elevation was bunk,” said Alfric. “And yes, there are reasons to believe that Verity is far more proficient than being a bard of second elevation would imply.”
“Seems crazy to come out all this way when the answer might have been no,” said Hannah.
“There was payment either way,” said Alfric. “And a place like this is the ideal starting location. I still need to send a message to her parents, but I’m hoping to get her input on that, once she’s had some time to process. If she’d have said no, I’d have sent them a message anyway and taken the money for it, not that I would have been proud about it.”
“Cold,” said Mizuki with a whistle.
“A parent has a right to know,” said Hannah. She looked at the stairs. “I hadn’t realized she’d run off like that.”
“She deserves her privacy,” said Isra. She was leaning up against the chiller with her arms folded.
“About the other issue,” said Alfric. “The one that I haven’t spoken about. I’d prefer if the three of you didn’t snoop or pry. She’ll tell you when she’s ready, if she’s ever ready and if this doesn’t make her want nothing to do with me.”
“You know, she just moved in today,” said Mizuki. “You could have waited.”
“Waiting this long was already a violation of disclosure,” said Alfric. “I couldn’t wait until we’d done another dungeon run. It wouldn’t be ethical. Arguably, it wasn’t ethical to wait as long as I did. Besides, her parents will make other arrangements if I never report back to them through a guild messenger like we’d planned. It’s better for Verity to know now, so she can do something about that. I’m open to some deception though.”
“You know this raises all kinds of questions,” said Hannah. “Like why she ran away from home, and what her parents are like, and all those kinds of things.”
“She came to Pucklechurch to get away,” said Alfric. “My guess is that people not knowing much more than that she came from Dondrian was part of the point. I probably should have spoken with her separately, insisted on it, but I wanted my own deception to be out in the open, and if she wanted to leave because of it, I didn’t want it to be on her to explain things.”
He looked somewhat deflated. Hannah could imagine him rehearsing what he’d said and preparing to tell Verity. She wondered if it had gone better or worse than he’d expected, but her prior experience with telling people things you didn’t want to was that he probably just felt a bit hollow and unsure. She’d have to ask him, later, perhaps much later.
“I’ll go up to her,” said Hannah.
“No,” said Mizuki, who was looking out of sorts. “She said she wants to be alone, leave her alone.”
“I’m a cleric,” said Hannah. “Part of that is talkin’ to people about their problems. When people say they want to be alone, sometimes that means they think other people won’t understand. Even if she doesn’t want to share, we can talk around it. Talkin’ is what I’m trained for, it’s what I spent some years in seminary learnin’.”
“I guess,” said Mizuki, but she seemed doubtful.
Hannah left the others to go upstairs and briefly overheard something about druids, but then she was out of earshot and up on the second level. She didn’t actually know where Verity’s room was, but the layout was as pleasing to her as on the ground floor, with two staircases up and rooms of equal size, one being the blue-tiled bathroom with a huge claw-foot tub, the other three being bedrooms. Hannah found it by process of elimination, as two of the bedrooms were open, one of them with a large four-poster bed that must have been Mizuki’s, the other with stripped-bare bunk beds that must have belonged to her sisters.
Hannah tapped lightly on the final door.
“Come in,” replied Verity’s soft voice.
“Hullo,” said Hannah as she entered. She closed the door behind her and sat on the bed next to Verity. Already, Verity’s things had been strewn about the room, with a pile of poetry books slumped on one shelf and clothes in a loose pile on the floor. “How’re you doin’?”