Leaving the quiet edge of the forest behind her, Juliet — caked in mud, sweat, and dried blood — made her way back toward the hole in the mountain.
Sunlight fell across a small clearing where members of the Marigold Guild moved with urgent purpose. Most of them were clustered around the entrance to the dungeon beneath the cliff, which had widened enough by now that one could peer down into the darkness below.
Juliet spotted them as she emerged from the tree line on the opposite side.
"***Juliet!***"
Helen saw her first.
The moment her aunt's joyful cry rang out across the clearing, every head turned. People came running — blankets in hand, words tumbling over one another — crowding around her shivering body in a warm, chaotic press of relief.
Roy moved instinctively to shield her, trying to part the crowd with his body and guide her through, but Juliet stopped him with a small shake of her head.
"I'm alright."
She wasn't. Her legs trembled beneath her with every step, and the edges of her vision swam with exhaustion. But she gathered every remaining scrap of willpower into a fist and held herself upright through sheer, stubborn refusal to collapse.
If it weren't for that determination, she would have crumpled right there in the dirt and slept where she fell. But there was something she needed to do before she could finally surrender her body and mind to rest.
Juliet scanned the crowd with bleary, searching eyes — and found him.
He came pushing through the gathered people, shoving his way to the front, his face already crumbling.
"Hey!... Ju—"
Theo's complexion drained to chalk the instant he saw her. The rest of his words dissolved before they could form.
Juliet ignored every offered hand, every concerned voice, every person reaching for her. She walked straight toward Theo with a single-minded focus that bordered on predatory, as though she had been waiting for this moment through every cold, hungry, lightless hour underground.
Theo, perhaps mistaking her intent — perhaps simply unable to resist the sight of her stumbling toward him like a newborn fawn — opened his arms instinctively.
Anyone would have done the same. She looked so fragile, so small, so utterly spent that the natural human response was to catch her.
"J-Juliet! Y-you don't have to—"
He never finished the sentence.
***BANG.***
"*Ghaa—!*"
Juliet's fist connected squarely with his solar plexus.
Theo folded like a paper lantern in a rainstorm — eyes bulging, mouth gaping, all the air driven from his lungs in a single strangled wheeze.
The guild members who had been preparing themselves for a tearful reunion — some already dabbing at their eyes, others arranging their faces into expressions of tender emotion — froze in bewildered silence.
"***Juliet!***"
Gray and Isaac arrived from the opposite direction at a sprint, skidding to a halt before the scene.
"What in the world is going on?" Isaac demanded.
Theo, still doubled over and fighting for breath, squeezed his eyes shut. Something resigned and doomed settled across his face — the expression of a man who has accepted that judgment has come and there is no escaping it.
"I..." he began hoarsely.
"We just got lost."
Juliet's voice cut cleanly across his, severing the confession before it could take shape.
"No — it's not—" Theo straightened with visible effort, mouth opening. "*Ouch!*"
Something — or rather, *someone* — came down on his foot with the full, deliberate weight of a boot heel. He hadn't even recovered from the blow to his stomach, and now a sharp, grinding pain radiated up from his toes.
Juliet, of course. She didn't even glance at him.
In the end, the true architect of the entire disaster stood mute and motionless beside her, unable to utter a single word while she spoke on his behalf.
"Forgive me, Uncle." Juliet's voice trembled. Tears gathered at the corners of her eyes — shimmering, perfectly timed, devastatingly convincing. "It's all my fault. Please don't be angry with the wizard."
"What? What does *this* have to do with *me*?"
Ethelid, who had been calmly tending to his wounds by the fire some distance away, looked up with genuine bewilderment. But no one afforded him the opportunity to protest.
"It's my fault," Juliet continued, her lower lip quivering with masterful precision. "I thought everything would be fine, but I... I was too confident..."
She delivered her account with brevity and careful omission.
Magda, a woman from the nearby village of Kanavel, had spotted their procession and begged for help finding missing children. Juliet, moved by her plea, had agreed without hesitation. She and Ethelid followed Magda up the mountain ridge to the area where the children had last been seen. They discovered the entrance to a dungeon — and as they approached, the rain-weakened ground collapsed beneath their feet, sending all three plummeting into the depths. Because Juliet had been in a hurry, she hadn't given Ethelid time to properly charge his tracking bracelet, convinced they wouldn't need it for so short a journey.
"Why — *why* would you do something so foolish?!" Isaac's composure shattered like thin glass. "Going up there alone, without a charged bracelet, without telling anyone—!"
He rarely raised his voice. This was not an occasion that permitted restraint.
But his anger guttered as quickly as it had flared. Juliet swayed on her feet, and for one terrible instant, he saw how close she was to simply dropping where she stood.
Isaac drew a long, steadying breath. When he spoke again, his tone was stern — carefully, deliberately stern, as though sternness were a mask he was holding in place with both hands.
"We will discuss this later. Right now, you need treatment. *Immediately.*"
The moment the words left his mouth, Gray and several guild members swept in, taking Juliet by the arms and all but carrying her toward the waiting carriage.
---
Isaac turned away with an exhale that emptied him.
"I don't even know how to thank you for this."
Not far from where he stood, a group of people had been watching the entire scene in silence — roughly ten men and women, tall and imposing, their expressions carrying a faint, guarded detachment.
They were dressed uniformly in white. Loose, flowing robes reminiscent of ancient priestly vestments — but the fabric was wrong. The weave was too fine, too luminous, embroidered with gold thread in patterns that no human loom had produced. These were not garments made from any textile common to human society.
At first glance, they might have passed for temple clergy. But Isaac — who had spent decades as a mercenary and deputy head of the Marigold Guild, who had learned to read danger in the set of a stranger's shoulders — understood instinctively what they were.
*Forest people.*
He bowed his head and spoke with careful, genuine gratitude.
"Thank you for saving my niece."
Isaac fought to keep his composure steady. In all his years — through every negotiation, every ambush, every impossible situation his long career had delivered — he had never once stood in the company of werewolves.
The forest race was legendary for its reclusiveness. Their hostility toward humans was not rumor but established fact, passed down through generations of cautious avoidance. And their king — the ruler of the Silver Forest — was said to despise humans so thoroughly that he refused even to speak with them.
Yet the young man who stood at the front of the group — the one to whom Isaac now directed his gratitude — did not match the stories at all.
He was the youngest among them by a visible margin. But Isaac's practiced eye identified him instantly as their representative — the one the others deferred to, the one whose stillness carried the unmistakable gravity of authority.
And he was *smiling*.
"That's not something to be grateful for," the silver-haired young man said, his tone easy and unhurried.
Isaac felt a faint, cautious ember of hope kindle in his chest.
*Come to think of it...*
There had been a rumor — recent, fragmented, never confirmed — that the master of the Silver Forest had changed. The forest people's reclusive nature made verification all but impossible; the whisper had drifted through guild channels like smoke, impossible to grasp. No one knew whether it was true.
But *if* it was — if a new master ruled the forest — and if, contrary to the ancient disposition of the werewolf race, that master held no hatred for humans...
Then perhaps this young man's warmth was not an anomaly. Perhaps it was a reflection of something larger. A new path. A new era.
The possibility shimmered before Isaac like light through a crack in a closed door.
He straightened, composed himself, and extended his hand with the careful formality of a man who understood exactly how rare this moment was.
"My name is Isaac Lebatan. I represent the Marigold Guild."
The young man regarded the outstretched hand for a moment — a beat long enough for Isaac's heart to tighten — then accepted it.
"I'm Romeo Baskal." A pause. The smile widened, just slightly. "But you can call me Roy."
"Thank you again for saving my niece. I truly don't know how to repay such a debt."
"No need." Roy released his hand. "I was only paying off one of my own."
"I'm sorry — what do you mean?"
Confusion flickered across Isaac's face.
Roy simply looked at him, golden eyes glinting with a quiet, knowing amusement — and offered nothing more than a mysterious grin.
---
## — The Road to Carcassonne —
"I'm sorry. It's all my fault."
Juliet's voice emerged small and muffled from beneath the layers of blankets piled over her body.
It was the first time in what felt like an age that she wasn't lying on open ground. Somehow, Helen had procured a carriage — not merely functional, but *beautiful*. Four horses drew it, and the interior was upholstered in thick, impossibly soft fabric that turned the seats into something closer to clouds. Lying across them felt like resting on a bed that happened to move.
Juliet had no idea where Helen had found such a vehicle in the middle of a remote mountain region, but she had a strong suspicion that the considerable influence of the Marigold Guildmaster had been involved.
"No — *I'm* the one who should apologize." Helen's eyes glistened. She looked at Juliet with an expression of such anguished guilt that one might have thought *she* was the one who'd spent three days underground. "I left you alone. I should never have—"
"Aunt Helen—"
"Don't. Just sleep." Helen's voice softened, the command wrapped in tenderness. "The more you rest, the faster you'll heal. We'll be right outside — call if you need anything at all."
"...Yes."
Juliet felt a twinge of embarrassment at being fussed over like a small child, but she was too exhausted to resist.
Before leaving, Helen told her what had happened while she and Ethelid were missing. The main body of the procession — everyone except the search parties — had continued on to Carcassonne as planned. What remained was a small, quiet convoy: Juliet, her family, Roy and his pack of werewolves, and a handful of guild members escorting the carriage as it crawled along the mountain road at a gentle, unhurried pace.
---
Some time later, Juliet turned onto her other side and found herself gazing at a glass on the small table beside her.
Cold iced tea. Beads of condensation clung to the glass like tiny jewels, catching the light that filtered through the carriage curtains.
*Where on earth did they find ice out here?*
Even for a guild as vast and resourceful as Marigold, sourcing ice in these remote mountains couldn't have been simple. But Juliet didn't need to wonder long about who had brought it.
The answer was just outside her door.
"Hey — what are you doing out here?"
"Oh... nothing. Don't bother me. Go away."
"What? How funny! Come on — tell me. What are you doing?"
"I said *nothing!* Stop asking and just — go—!"
Theo's voice — pitched low, strained with the effort of being quiet — hissed through the thin carriage wall. Gray's reply was lighter, threaded with the unmistakable lilt of an older brother who has discovered exactly which nerve to press.
Juliet smiled.
The muffled sounds that had tugged her from sleep earlier — she understood now. It had only been Theo, hovering outside her door like a guilty dog that couldn't bring itself to leave the porch.
She opened her eyes a fraction.
*So his conscience is eating him alive.*
*Good.*
She wasn't ready to forgive him. Not yet. Perhaps not for a long while. But the knowledge that he'd been standing guard out there — too ashamed to enter, too worried to leave — settled somewhere warm and unexpected in her chest.
Juliet leaned her head deeper into the soft pillows and let her eyes drift closed. Whether it was the fever or simply the accumulated weight of three days without sleep, consciousness began to dissolve at the edges, gently and irresistibly.
Within moments, she was asleep — truly, deeply asleep — rocked by the carriage's gentle sway as it carried her, at last, toward Carcassonne.