Frostbite

Chapter Twenty

Eira left the music hall in a daze.

Had she really imagined him? She'd been so sure. So sure that he'd been there. So sure they could finally meet again, after so much time that it felt like a lifetime.

But Eira had let herself be stabbed in the heart by her hope, accursed blade that it was.

She had been foolish yet again.

The remainder of the concert she spent thinking up possible explanations as to how exactly she'd seen Cerin, unable to listen properly to the music she'd been so enthralled in before.

Ideas still shot though her head, each less plausible than the one before it. She disregarded each one of them as fast as they'd  appeared.

Nothing that had happened made any sort of logical sense. How could someone be seen by her and her alone? Eira had asked others who'd sat in other seats close to where she'd seen Cerin, their answers the same as the first: nobody had sat there for the entirety of the concert.

Eira had watched the seat with the sharp eyes of a hawk, in case of the miracle in which Cerin returned.

He had not.

One of her absurd hypotheses had been that that somehow he'd sat there completely unnoticed and that the people around him had forgotten he'd been there at all.

That one had been dismissed just as fast as all her other failed explanations. Eira was grasping desperately at nonexistent straws.

A part of her—her logical side—whispered that she'd probably imagined him; that she was going mad because of everything that had happened.

It terrified her that it was the only one she felt was truly believable. Though whether she was willing to actually believe it remained to be unseen.

When the concert reached its conclusion, Eira had left the music hall and begun to wander off aimlessly in an unknown direction. She didn't know where she was headed, and she really care.

She just needed to go somewhere.

In the end, she ended up slumped on the first bench she spotted by the riverside. The bench had creaked when she sat down on it and was in desperate need of a repaint, but it would do.

She was situated near the canal dock where barges were filled with various goods and then floated all the way down to the western border. Canals were needed to keep everything going here, due to the rivers all being much too wild and tempestuous for transportation.

Eira listened idly to the shouts of the workmen moving cargo, eyes lost in the tumbling depths of the River Linn.

A little while later, she heard church bells off in the distance peal dully—six times. The sound stirred up a distant memory of the night before. Eira recalled hazily that she was supposed to be meeting with Darrow in only an hour.

Despite the fact that getting up and walking so far to the headquarters was probably the last thing she wanted to do, Eira got to her and began trudging in the direction of the inn, fuelled only by her curiosity of what Darrow had promised to tell her.

~

Eira saw Kea before she saw anyone—or anything—else. He was leaning against the small building that stood adjacent to the inn, entirely black clothing contrasting against its whitewashed walls.