Three weeks had passed since the crimson rain.
Norvale had changed in small ways that were difficult to name individually but impossible to ignore collectively. Doors stayed open longer. Voices carried further. The village felt like a place that had exhaled after holding its breath for years and was still getting used to the sensation.
Seren noticed all of it from a careful distance.
She had stayed longer than she intended to. She was aware of this. She had told herself several times that she would leave — that staying anywhere too long was a habit she couldn't afford — and each time something had interrupted the intention without quite explaining itself.
Usually that something was Clara.
Not through anything deliberate on Clara's part. She didn't ask Seren to stay. She didn't make arguments or appeals. She simply continued existing in her particular practical way - tending her herbs, making questionable breakfast, occasionally saying something dry and accurate that lodged itself in Seren's mind for hours afterward.
It was deeply inconvenient.
This morning Clara had left early for the forest edge to check on something she refused to specify beyond "plants." Seren had offered to come. Clara had looked at her for a moment with the expression she sometimes wore when calculating whether an offer would cause more problems than it solved.
"You'll step on things," she had said finally.
"I step on things with purpose."
"That's not better."
She had gone alone.
Seren sat outside the cottage now in the pale morning cold, her sword across her knees, sharpening it in slow careful strokes. The whetstone moved evenly. The sound was familiar in the particular way that repetitive things became familiar — not comforting exactly, but grounding. Something to do with her hands while her mind refused to settle.
She had been thinking about the Underground again.
Not the trial itself. Not the final checkpoint. She had stopped turning those memories over directly — there was nothing new to find in them.
It was the phrase that kept returning.
To abandon desire is to survive eternity.
She had spoken it without understanding it. The words had surfaced from somewhere she couldn't locate and arranged themselves correctly before she had consciously chosen them. That bothered her in a way she couldn't articulate cleanly. Understanding things was important to her. Understanding where things came from was more important.
She didn't understand where that had come from.
The whetstone slowed.
Footsteps approached from the forest path - Clara's particular rhythm, unhurried and even.
She appeared through the tree line carrying a bundle of something dark green, her coat damp at the shoulders from morning mist. She stopped when she saw Seren still outside.
"You've been sitting there since I left."
"I was sharpening."
"For three hours?"
Seren looked at the blade.
"It needed thorough sharpening."
Clara set her bundle down near the cottage door and studied her for a moment with the particular attention she sometimes directed at plants that weren't behaving as expected.
"You're thinking too loudly again," she said.
"I don't do that."
"You do. Your jaw does something." Clara made a vague gesture near her own face. "Like this."
"That's not a real description."
"And yet you know exactly what I mean."
Seren did know exactly what she meant. That was the problem.
She set the whetstone aside and looked out toward the village. From here she could see the edge of the main road — just barely. Enough to notice if someone unfamiliar came through.
She had been doing that more frequently lately. Noticing.
"Clara."
"Mm."
"How long have you lived here?"
Clara paused in sorting her herbs.
"Most of my life," she said. "Why?"
Seren considered how to phrase it.
"Do people know where the cottage is? Specifically."
A short silence.
"Not really," Clara said slowly. "I prefer it that way." Another pause, more deliberate now. "Why are you asking?"
Seren didn't answer immediately.
She wasn't entirely sure how to explain the feeling — the low steady pressure that had been building at the back of her awareness for the past several days. Not fear exactly. More like the particular alertness that came just before a situation changed. She had felt it enough times to recognize it without being able to prove it.
"No reason," she said finally.
Clara looked at her for a long moment.
"You're a terrible liar."
"I'm an excellent liar."
"Not with me."
That landed somewhere Seren didn't have a name for yet.
She picked up the whetstone again without resuming the sharpening. Just held it.
"Someone came through the village recently," she said. "Asking questions. The innkeeper mentioned it this morning when I passed."
Clara went still.
"What kind of questions?"
"The careful kind."
The herb bundle in Clara's hands remained motionless.
"About the curse?"
"Among other things."
The morning air sat between them quietly.
Clara set the herbs down and looked out toward the road - the same narrow visible strip that Seren had been watching all morning. Her expression was difficult to read. Not afraid. Something more considered than fear.
"How long do you think we have?" she asked.
The question was so direct and so calm that it took Seren a moment to register it fully.
She looked at Clara.
Clara looked back without flinching.
"I don't know," Seren said honestly.
"Estimate."
"Long enough," Seren said. "Not long enough."
Clara nodded once - the small decisive nod she made when filing information away rather than responding to it emotionally.
Then she picked up her herbs and went inside.
Seren sat with the whetstone in her hand and the road visible at the edge of her vision and the word we sitting somewhere in her chest like something she hadn't been handed in a very long time.
She didn't move for a while after that.