Ch. 441 - Barely Recognizable

Simon went without food the day before, but because his little companion was now awake, he stopped hiking early that night and hunted up a rabbit. It was skinny and barely worth the effort, but he still dressed the carcass and roasted it so that Nara would have something to eat.

She was not grateful for the charred flesh or the water. She wanted only her mother and some porridge, but Simon could provide neither. Though she barely ate a thing that night, her first words the following morning were, “I’m hungry.”

Simon had planned for that and saved her a leg of cold rabbit, which she sullenly accepted. As she ate and walked, she wouldn’t even look at him; he’d clearly betrayed her with this maneuver to force her to eat what she had refused the night before. He was only able to make that up to her that evening when they stopped in a village with an inn. It used up more than half of Simon’s scrounged coins, but he paid for a room, a bath for the girl, and fresh bread with butter, just to try to make her happy.

That didn’t stop her from crying herself to sleep, but Simon figured that would be a part of her life for a long time to come. If I just went to the wyvern level and waited quietly for a few decades, I could be there in time to save her parents, or even to defeat the centaurs, he reflected before dismissing the notion.

While he wanted to save everyone, he wasn’t going to wait decades each time to do it. As much as he wanted to, he’d been worrying more and more lately about the consequences of having too many Simons in the world at any one time. Something about the way the threads of fate started getting weird told him he should probably try to minimize that going forward.

Wouldn’t that be ironic?Making the whole world crash, killing everyone while trying to save them.

Instead of lying awake half the night thinking about that, he went back downstairs once Nara was asleep and diced with a few of the other merchants that were still awake. Simon often gambled for fun and for information. Losing a few coins and getting drunk made him seem harmless.

Tonight, though, he wasn’t after information; he was after cash, and so instead of making the wrong moves, he made the right ones. Most dice games had flaws in their odds. Simon had understood that for dozens of lives. Some players seemed to get that, too. Certain bets were considered lucky for that reason, but they didn’t have the math to understand why that was the case.

Simon spent three hours in front of the fire, and quit only when a new player brought in loaded dice that felt different in his hand. In that time, Simon more than doubled the money he’d started with and left more than a few unhappy faces wanting a chance to win it back.

“Jussst one more throw!” a bearded man with angry eyes insisted. He had a darkness to his aura that indicated a problem, but Simon’s vision was still too blurry to say if the man was just a liar and swindler or something worse.

Simon ignored the request, but he did wedge a dagger in his doorframe for the first time in many lives. He didn’t expect someone to try to slice his throat for a handful of coppers, but he had Nara to consider.

Fortunately, there was no violence that night, and in the morning Simon treated the girl to a steaming bowl of porridge before they were off again. As they left the village, he wanted to buy a donkey; that would have gotten them to Crowvar faster, but for once, he didn’t have the cash for such a luxury.

“I guess a new Daisy will have to wait until later,” he breathed as they left town while most everyone else was still asleep.

He didn’t really need the donkey, though. After another day, he saw Crowvar in the distance. He wasn’t surprised to see it, but he was surprised to see the condition it was in. In Simon’s last few trips through here, it had been an ugly, war-scarred shadow of the city he’d lived in, but now, it was in pretty good shape.

As they got closer, he could see that a war had indeed been fought. He clearly hadn’t done anything that had prevented the orcs from coming, but whoever had done the defending and the rebuilding had done a better job of it than old Baron Raithwaite. He’d hid inside his keep while the city had been trashed, but someone had held the line and kept the worst of the damage to one long section of the city wall that had clearly been knocked down and rebuilt with fresh stone.

The difference was even clearer when he got inside. The last time he’d been here, most of the city had shown some kind of damage, but this time, if he hadn’t been looking for it, he might never have found it. That made him smile.

Finally, someone is taking care of this place, Simon thought with a satisfied nod.

Most of his memories of this city weren’t very positive. In fact, most were terrible, but he still took satisfaction in the knowledge that with the problem removed, things had gotten better. If he’d left Varten here to be rescued and take over the city, it would have stayed the same shithole it had always been.

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Part of him thought he should find out who the new boss was and send them flowers. He might have, if he had the ready coin. Instead, even as he opened his mouth, he froze, as flowers triggered a somber memory.

This is the first time I’ve come back without visiting Freya’s grave, he realized. He felt bad about that. In fact, he felt a compulsion to rectify the oversight at that moment, and only because Nara looked at him strangely, as if to wonder why he’d stopped, that he forced himself to move again.

Simon felt like he’d put a lot behind him with Zoa, but he didn’t feel like he’d put so much behind him that he’d forget to honor his first wife. Instead of visiting that little unmarked plot of land, he vowed to gather some wildflowers and visit her tomorrow. For now, he needed to find them a place to stay for a night or two while he figured out where to drop Nara off.

While she’d been cranky on the last leg of the trip, that quickly faded when he secured her some warm vegetable soup, while he settled for some bread and cheese. Simon was hungry enough to eat both their meals, but he had to save enough silver to do a little dicing in the evening.

For now, he merely listened to the chatter, hoping to learn a bit about the new Crowvar. There, he gained little. There was plenty of gossip, and even some talk of the centaur menace, but most of the grievances that the other travelers discussed were too personal to parse much either way.

“The caravan is late,” one man grumbled. “Elsie never misses a deadline. Something’s wrong.”

Another said, “It’s hard to feel too bad for the villages when they coulda moved behind these stout walls a long time ago. Lords above know the Baron told them to.”

Simon didn’t even try to figure out who they were referring to, but it was clear that the situation was coming to a head. Some whispered the King's men were coming south to help; others insisted it was a rumor. Simon took Nara up to their room before the tension of the room soaked into her.

He stayed up there until dark and told her a bedtime story to try to get to sleep. She asked, “When will mommy and daddy get here?” but Simon just changed the topic. They had enough problems without the tears that would follow.

When that was done, he checked the mirror and confirmed that he’d done enough to solve this level. Then he went back downstairs and diced some more. This time, he wasn’t trying to win big and alienate people. He just gathered stories and news as he made a few coins. The news wasn’t so grim that he felt the need to change his plans with Nara, but it was bad enough that it tempted him to stay.

He asked around, and there were a couple of orphanages in the town these days, in light of everything that had happened. So, that was probably the best place for the girl to end up, regardless, provided that he saw bright auras instead of dark ones the following day.

Only the fact that the new Baron seemed to have a decent head on his shoulders kept Simon from spending another life trying to grind the horselords into dust. The way people spoke of him made it sound like he was already spending half his time in the field routing the bastards, and Simon doubted he’d have to come back to this level another time.

It’s always best if people solve their own problems, Simon reminded himself as he trudged upstairs to bed. Just because every battle needs to be fought doesn't mean you have to be the one to do all the fighting.

That night, he slept poorly, though if he was honest, it was more because he hated the idea of dumping the girl than because of the coming war. Centaurs weren’t orcs; they wouldn’t breach fortifications.

In the morning, he bought Nara some oatmeal and left her with the innkeeper’s wife, who seemed half smitten with her, and went to run his errands. Before he visited the orphanages, though, he left the walls and went to gather white daisies and blue forget-me-nots. Then he made the trek to Crowvar’s cemetery, where he found something unexpected: there was a grave where there shouldn’t be one.

For a moment, he worried he’d crossed timelines to one where he actually marked Freya’s falling, or that his doppelganger had left him a surprise. It proved to be neither.

What Simon found on the plot of land that should have been empty was a war memorial. That angered him, even though he had no reason to be upset. This might be sacred ground to him, but to everyone else it was just an unused plot in the cemetery. With a recent war, it wasn’t at all surprising that the cemetery had grown.

The monument itself was nothing special, artistically. It was some brave nameless soldier, embossed into a large stone slab, along with a list of names of those who had fallen and a prayer to the gods to “Vouchsafe the souls of these heroes forevermore.”

It wasn’t what he’d expected to find, but it was a version of a battle he’d fought in before, the day before he lost her, so it was probably a fitting epitaph for a woman who never existed. He stood there for a long minute in reflection of Freya and the dimly remembered tides of battle on that terrible day, all the while trying to figure out who the man they’d used for the engraving was.

He looked too familiar for Simon to believe that it was someone who had simply been invented. It wasn’t the Duke, or even an aged-up version of Varten or his brother. It didn’t look anything like him. Still, there was something familiar about the man.

“He must have been a guard that performed especially valiantly that day,” Simon murmured as he finally stooped to deposit his little bouquet of wildflowers at the base of the memorial with the other offerings.

He felt a little silly doing so, but not as silly as he felt when someone picked that moment to ride up to him. “Did you know someone who died on the walls?” the voice asked.

If the statue had been naggingly familiar, then the voice was instantly recognizable. Varten. Much older than he’d been when Simon had left him, but there was no mistaking the flat affect or the aristocratic tone, even after all these years.