Chapter 67: The Selvarn City (Part 2 of 2)

  The Stay

  They stayed two days.

  Selvarn did not slow for them. It absorbed the escort and continued on—markets opening at dawn, carts rattling over stone, guards changing shifts with practiced regularity. The estate kept its distance from ceremony. The children remained inside. The escort waited.

  Waiting, Laurent learned, felt different in a city. On the road, tension stayed sharp and directional. Here, it diffused. Sounds overlapped. People moved without pattern. Threats didn’t announce themselves—they blended into crowds, corners, and closed doors.

  Laurent slept poorly the first night. The bed was too soft. The walls too close. Every unfamiliar sound dragged his awareness up before he could decide whether it mattered. He lay still, counting breaths, listening to the city settle around him in layers—late voices fading, shutters closing, the occasional clatter of something dropped and retrieved.

  Morning came anyway.

  The escort rotated light duties. Equipment was checked, then checked again. No drills. No sparring unless requested. The guards treated the pause as part of the job, not a break from it.

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  Outside the estate walls, Selvarn lived. Merchants argued over deliveries. Children ran errands too fast to be safe. A man shouted at a mule until someone else laughed at him, and then he laughed too. Panic didn’t dominate the streets. It surfaced in smaller ways—a glance held too long at the horizon, a conversation lowered when uniforms passed, a door closed a little earlier than necessary.

  Laurent noticed all of it.

  He sat on a low wall one afternoon, shield resting against his leg, and watched people move through the square below. No one looked starving. No one looked safe either. Life continued in the narrow band between.

  He wondered, briefly, how many choices it took to keep a place like this running. How many people had decided, every day, to act normal because stopping would mean admitting how fragile it all was. The thought tightened something in his chest. He let it pass.

  The children never appeared in public. Messages went in and out of the estate, carried by clerks and guards. Lady Maera was visible once each day—receiving reports, issuing quiet instructions, her composure unchanged. Grace did not mean distance. It meant that even urgency arrived already shaped.

  On the second evening, rumors reached the escort through casual channels. Border skirmishes. Supply delays. A road farther north no longer considered safe after dusk. Nothing concrete. Nothing actionable. Enough to remind everyone why they were here.

  Cael paced more than usual, restless energy bleeding through his attempts to stay still. Joran watched the gates too closely. Aila read, then reread the same page without turning it. Laurent felt the pressure settle lower in his body—not as fear, but as a constant readiness that refused to switch off. Cities were supposed to ease that feeling. Selvarn didn’t. It just disguised it.

  On the morning of the third day, Captain Corin gathered them.

  “We leave today,” he said. No preamble. No discussion. “On foot. Faster pace.”

  No one questioned it.

  The city gates opened again. The estate doors closed behind them. Selvarn resumed its rhythm almost immediately, already folding their absence into the flow of the day.

  Laurent took one last look back—not at the walls, but at the people moving through the streets beyond them. Then the road took them again, and the city became just another place they had passed through, intact but unchanged by their presence.