Lost Ones - A False King

Chapter 12 - The Gravestone

Three days later, early in the morning, a carriage is parked next to the gatehouse by the double gate. Inside, Lina and Vyncent wait for Emmod, Novel, and Enryn Barber, who will pick up the brothers and bring them to join them.

Vyncent has his arms crossed and is tapping his fingers against them. His gaze keeps drifting to the window, accompanied by frustrated sighs.

"Where are they?" he growls, casting a disdainful glance at the empty street.

"They should be here any moment," Lina tries to calm her brother.

"I hope so," Vyncent mutters. "I didn't get much sleep, and I hope for their sake I didn't wake up this early for nothing."

"What was going on with you last night anyway?" Lina asks, puzzled.

"Wait, you were awake?" he asks, concerned.

"I didn't sleep a wink," Lina says, shifting restlessly in her seat and clenching her hands. "Not that it would've made much of a difference if I had. Were you moving furniture around? It sounded exhausting."

"Training," he replies curtly.

"But not alone, right? I could've sworn I heard Cecie."

"Really?"

"Yes," Lina says. "She's been different ever since she was assigned to you..."

"Whatever," Vyncent interrupts, cutting off his sister before the conversation becomes awkward. "Maybe you just heard the maids. They were up late finishing some tasks for Father and Mother," he shrugs innocently. "They were probably figuring out how to make this morning's farewell as unpleasant as possible for us," he adds, causing Lina to smirk as well.

"You know how they are," she says. "But honestly, that farewell felt like it was for eternity," she jokes, making Vyncent smile too.

The previous night, their father had been plagued by all sorts of thoughts about what could go wrong today. The most absurd ideas crossed his mind.

'What if Nikolas falls asleep while driving the carriage and loses control? What if Emmod and Novel offer his children some strange berries, giving them terrible diarrhea on the way? What if Lina and Vyncent go into the sea and get eaten by a wild ponkyl?' (Ponkyls = the largest predators of the world's oceans, feeding only on other predators.)

These dreadful worries kept him up for a while, until Joane finally managed to get him to sleep late in the night. As a result, Joane was even more exhausted than Edmur two hours later when they said goodbye to their children.

Even though it was Edmur and Joane's idea to keep today's plan as secretive as possible, in the end, they were the ones who made sure the whole castle had known for three days that something was going on. The staff learned that Lina and Vyncent would be leaving for a day, but with whom and where remained a mystery, despite their best efforts to find out. Not even their coachman, Nikolas, knows where they're going, as he'll only receive the instructions from Enryn Barber in a few minutes.

Lina and Vyncent are wearing dark hooded cloaks, though Vyncent has a different one on than usual. He's avoided wearing his usual cloak to not draw unnecessary attention, since the Elmhart crest, a battlement, is displayed on his personal cloak.

In contrast, Lina's cloak is noticeably oversized. She could pull the hood over half her body, and the sleeves dangle past her hands. If the sun hadn't occasionally peeked out from behind the clouds, the tired people in the castle might have thought it was a ghost stumbling towards the carriage.

"Leave the cloak alone already," says Vyncent, while Lina unsuccessfully tries to tame the cloak.

"Worse than a dress," she grumbles.