They spent the next few hours ducking around corners, hiding in alleys, and otherwise avoiding whatever Porttegat officers crossed their path. If Felix was organizing a resistance, it seemed King Ehrryn was stepping up his game to cast it into squalor. The whole city was swarming with way more security than Rusk had seen the last time he was here. Guards on every corner, every street, every walkway. The back alleys even had a few, along with the square where they’d found that one hanged Hero so long ago. Rusk cursed in the older language the whole way through the city.

Eventually he paid enough attention to their uniforms to notice that a Guard and an Officer were differently dressed. The guards would turn the other way, but the officers scoured the streets fervently, seeking out anyone and everyone suspicious or who may have had ties to the Official Heroes from Sanctuary. On one occasion, Flow got caught between two officers after coming through an alley the wrong side with Rusk right behind her. He had to yank her back and they ran for their lives while whistles blew and a general commotion chased after them. Their clothes were the problem, Rusk realized as he looked Flow up and down and then reassessed his own wardrobe.

“We need better clothes. Something simpler to blend in.”

Flow tugged at the dress she’d acquired in Sanctuary’s Stronghold. She’d stolen it off one of the dead that didn’t rise, and she was sad to see it torn from her, but they had no other choice. It was alerting people to their presence and causing them to be discovered. It had to go.

They ducked into the nearest shop, and wouldn’t you know it the woman who was manning the shop was the spitting image of Mandy. Turned out that was just wishful thinking. When she spun around she didn’t have Mandy’s face at all. Rusk released a sigh of relief mixed with disappointment. Of course she wouldn’t be here. She’d told him she would be in the capital.

The shopkeeper hooked them up with the drabbest most boring garb she could dig out of the back of the store. Rusk looked down at the worn leather and wondered how many had worn it before he had. It was clearly broken in, and in awkward places that hung uncomfortably across his frame. His arms were free to show his scars, and he wondered if perhaps he should cover them.

Then Flow came out of the back room wearing a peasant dress, and he noticed she’d hidden her shock of white bangs underneath a paperboy’s cap. She didn’t look feminine because the dress was too small in some parts and too large in others, but her toughness hadn’t faded. Something about the way she walked.

“They say they see wondrous things a few towns over,” said the shopkeeper. “By the coast but not quite there. Oh, the old Felix would approve.”

“And the new one?” asked Rusk, sensing some double speak.

The shopkeeper shrugged with innocence. “Heaven knows where the new one is. They say he got whisked away. Oh, the town’s all a rumble.”

As they left the shop, the shopkeeper tucked a scrap of paper into Rusk’s pack. He found it when they reached the city’s gates. Apparently leaving the city wasn’t so much a crime as arriving, because as he and Flow left they noticed far more security on the way in than the way out, but Rusk still waited until they were a ways down the road before opening the scrap of paper.

It was written in the older language.

It was coordinates. Directions. And then in crude handwriting different from the rest, a little poem that was indecipherable besides the phrase Felix Reign.

“Looks like he really is coordinating resistance against King Ehrryn.”

“This Felix,” said Flow. “You know of him?”

“Yeah.” Rusk smiled fondly, remembering the debacle with Mayor Rose, the dungeon. The way Felix had remained defiant to protect Loretta. “He’s a friend. Trustworthy. Loyal.”

“Then I agree he should reign. Surely he’d do better for this territory than the necromancer king.”

“I’m inclined to agree with you,” said Rusk in a poor approximation of Felix’s voice. He realized just then how long it had really been since he saw his friend. “We should keep moving.”

They walked to the paper’s destination.

Many of the towns were the same, but some were different. Some had extra security. Others were abandoned. Flow took in the sights as if they hadn’t ever been anything but what they were now, but Rusk looked upon some sectors as if a great sense of loss had overcome him. He kept walking. They couldn’t get caught up in emotions over things already lost. Not now. Not when the king had so many towns in his pocket. Even Town Rose had been demolished. They learned from the barkeep, who was still sifting through the rubble, that the king had demanded the town be destroyed after finding out its leader had been usurped.

“No use for weakness in my kingdom,” quoted the barkeep.

“I’m sorry,” said Rusk.

“Fresh starts require some destruction. You got Loretta out of here. I never thanked you for that.”

“You were the new leader, weren’t you.”

“Yes.”

“Again,” said Rusk. “I’m sorry.”

Flow shifted her weight on her feet.

“You two just get that nasty king out of us normal folk’s business, you hear?”

“That’s the plan.”

They passed the town where Rusk had met Greil for the first time, and Rusk consulted the map to find they were going in the wrong direction. Something had messed with their internal compass. Flow could read the land better than a map, and through combined effort they found their way back to the correct course.

The sound of buzzing flies kept invading Rusk’s mind.

Flow kissed him for the first time when he was shaking his head trying to rid it of the sound, and in that moment it seemed a fire burst into him and purged Rusk of anything but her lips, her skin, her hair under his fingertips.

Things were different between them when they reached the outpost they’d been directed to.

But Flow didn’t seem to mind. Rusk on the other hand was feeling mighty embarrassed. He’d thought his feelings for Mandy were these type of feelings, but now that he experienced them with Flow, he knew they hadn’t been.

A crusade was waiting for them at the outpost, and it wasn’t a friendly one either. The outpost was at the edge of a forest, though not Rusk’s forest, and the Elva warned caution into every fiber of his being.

The necromancer was here, he knew in his veins. He’s here.