*COMPLETE* "People don't believe in us anymore. They don't believe that in the end we will do what is right. We can't let them down. We can't let Ben win."
Decisions made on top of the lonely, wind-swept cliff of Lethinor reverberate around the five...
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He's not surprised to see her.
The thin rays of sunlight are almost blinding as the cell door creaks open, golden beams catching all the dust and debris that drifts, ghost-like, across the chilled air. At first she is just another cast shadow, the light billowing past her tall, lean form and hiding her face from his eyes.
Then the door clicks shut.
The first thing he thinks is how familiar this stranger is. All the key ingredients are the same, the basic formula something that feels like home, but the summation is alien, remote. He remembers before how her skin almost glowed like sunlight, soft and coppery, and how she felt like life distilled down into one shifting, shining form. Something to grasp at, hold close, covet. Her skin is ashen now, even in this heavy, blue light, and paler than before, wan. He had wondered, back at Helm's Hollow, if it had been a trick of the firelight, the smoke, but it is something more permanent.
He wonders if this is his work.
She's wearing armor. He wonders if this is her new attire, or something worn especially for him. A sign of distrust, a projection of strength, an act of war. The part of his brain that clicks and spins away whispers about what this must mean, what this implies about all the thundering, shuddering things going on upstairs, but all he thinks is how uncomfortable she must be. He remembers when she first tried on the Jarles uniform, the look on her face when they told her she'd wear it in Morgalth.
He wonders if she means to speak to him this time.
She's watching him warily, as if she was the one in these heavy manacles and not he, and he knows that at last she is not giving him the benefit of the doubt. Not anymore.
She shouldn't be alive, he thinks, helplessly watching the way air mists out of her mouth, spectral white, and the subtle way her chest rises and falls with each breath, the blink of lashes against shadowed skin. I shot her clean through with the bow. How is she alive?
He's ruminated long on this, his mind trawling with theories, suspicions. That old fool Ruben had shown up on Lethinor without warning, he had been able to get into the library, and he knew they had the bow. That was not the last time Ben saw the old Skill master either; there he was again, that vain, pitying look on his face, when the lackey, the child, and the Smith Skiller had delivered them to the Halften soldiers.
He has some part in this, some role I did not foresee.
If he is to make conclusions based on this shallow information, Ben would hazard the bow might be a fake. Yes, Allayria separated it from him the moment she discovered it at Helm's Hollow, but it could have been a ploy, an act to convince him still it was the real bow.
Or she could have not known.
But she hadn't come for the bow, that much was clear—she had come for the little, black book and all the secrets whispered in there. He doesn't need it anymore; he has read it all, committed the necessary evils to memory, but it could have been a useful tool to sway people. Hard, undeniable evidence.
