Spero's Arc

Chapter 5 of 10

By morning Spero could climb. His legs shook, but Valeria kept a hand on his back the whole way up the tower stairs. The top room was small and cold. A sealed box sat on a rotted table. Inside was the mission report. Spero read it twice. The words did not change. His sister's escort had ended when the knight she guarded vanished. No one knew if she lived or died. The page gave him nothing to hold. "There's no answer here," he said. His voice came out flat. "Just that she disappeared." Valeria did not answer. She was crouched by the far wall, pulling something loose from a gap in the stone. She held it up. A strip of purple cloth, torn and frayed, faded pale at one edge. Spero's chest went tight. "That was hers." He took it with both hands. "She wore a cloak that color. I'd know it anywhere." Proof. She had stood in this room. She had been alive at least this far. Then Valeria pulled out a second thing, and her face changed. A tabard, stiff and dark with old blood. She turned it over slow. "This is a knight's," she said quietly. "Not hers. His." She met his eyes. "Somebody bled out in that armor." Spero stared at the stains. His hope and his fear sat in his two hands at once. The cloak said she lived. The blood said something went very wrong. "If the knight died," he said, "then she was alone up here." "Or she got away," Valeria said. She gripped his shoulder. Her grip was hard, steady, the grip of someone who did not do soft comfort. "Cloth doesn't tear off a dead body and hide in a wall. She left this on purpose. She wanted somebody to find it." He wanted to believe her. He folded the cloak scrap and pushed it into his pack. "Then we don't stop here." They walked two days to the nearest town. In its center stood a small stone chapel with a notice board under its roof. Families pinned pleas there for the lost. Spero wrote his sister's name, her age, the purple cloak. He pinned it up with hands that finally felt like his own again. A gray-haired woman tending the board leaned in to read it. She tapped the paper. "Purple cloak. Green in the face, near collapse. A girl like that came through weeks back." She looked up. "Headed for the Platinum Imperial." Valeria went still. "The Platinum Imperial." She said the words like they hurt. "That's where I'm from." Spero looked at her. The lead pointed straight into her past, the place she had never once spoken of. "Then that's where we go," he said. Valeria's jaw worked. She nodded once. "Yeah," she said. "We go home. Mine."