He folded those words inside the drawing and then ran back through the Well to the graveyard fence, and through the graveyard to find Kyrie’s cell. He didn’t know how he was going to find her, but caught sight of torchlight spilling out of one of the dungeon windows. He ran up to it, and when he heard the footsteps of the guards and saw the light growing dimmer, he looked inside to see Kyrie tied at the wrists and lying on the floor. And he heard her sobbing.
He wanted to call out to her, to talk to her as he had snuck an illegal conversation with her in the camp. But now the risks were too great. He threw the note in the cell, just in front of her. Her hands were tied behind her back, and the light slipped quickly out of the room, so she wouldn’t be able to read it until dawn, but the message was delivered, just the same.
In the dim light of a distant torch, Jaysynn saw her head turn toward him, but he backed away from the window before they saw each other’s faces, leaving her in the ever-growing darkness of her cell.
He knew he had to go. He could feel the night growing heavier. He could feel his heart rate accelerating and his temperature rising. As he backpedaled away from the window, a group of soldiers came around the corner and one of them yelled out, “There he is!”
Jaysynn took off running, and the men were after him, running hard. He was quick with his movements, but many of them were running a faster sprint through the moonlit graveyard, and none of them had hiked ten miles that night, so they were fresh.
When he reached the fence, they were almost on him. He hurdled it in stride and so gained a little ground on them. From there he ran hard down into the Well. His footing was not always sure, but in desperation he ran down the steep slopes faster than they were willing to, and was soon deep inside.
This was not a circular crater like the Jalseian Well. It was not a majestic canyon like the one in Thyrion. It was once the mountain lake of magic, with fingers creeping out in all directions, and much of it cutting into the side of the mountain. Now that it was destroyed, it was full of rubble from small avalanches, but it was also full of caves, caverns, and below-the-surface channels. One deep pit was once an ancient spring from whence the substance of magic rose from the middle of the world to come to Falcon Point. Islands had once stood in the middle of the Well, and now they were great mesas in the middle of a wasteland.
And this, though not the urban environment that Jaysynn was most familiar with, was the perfect landscape for his skills. They had almost laid hands on him at the edge of the graveyard, but in here, Jaysynn was quickly up a hill and down another, scaling rock walls and dropping from them, and leaping across canyons too far for his would-be captors.
It was not a fast place to travel, but Jaysynn moved through it as quickly as anyone could. When he was on the other side, the darkest hour of the night was past. The sun was still a ways from rising, but the sky was growing lighter east of the mountains. He climbed out of the rim of the Well and left the soldiers behind him, scrambling around in the blackened badlands.
From there, Jaysynn continued to run through the city until he was on the verge of collapse. He knew he had to get far from the Well or those same soldiers would eventually find him. At last, barely able to stand, he crawled down into a roadside stone ditch—used to transport waste water out of the city. He climbed into a place where the ditch disappeared under a crossroad. At that time the sun was fully risen, but in his covered ditch, just big enough for a squatting body, with gray water running over his ankles and along the seat of his pants, he fell asleep.
It was a hard-earned sleep, but unlike his rest in the refugee camp, this one did not wash away the worries of life. It was a fearful sleep. Even though he was desperate for it, it was a watchful sleep: he could not submit himself to rest.
Yet it was a long sleep. When he awoke, it was late afternoon. He had escaped a dungeon to find rest in a cramped stone ditch, drenched with the refuse of the rebel city. But he knew where he was, and he knew why he was there.
It wasn’t for freedom that he escaped: he had never been free, except as the Watchman, so it was a virtue that hadn’t crossed his mind that night. It wasn’t for comfort or survival. He was as likely to survive by working with Vac as he was by making a life for himself in this hostile new world, and as for comfort—he was sitting in the filth of an enemy people. And he didn’t escape in order to protect the secrets of Thyrion (what little he knew of them). He wanted justice of the same kind that Vac wanted.
His reason for escaping was something different: he escaped because there was a crack in the wall. It shouldn’t have been there. The guards should have studied the cell more carefully before putting such a high profile prisoner in it. And if there was a crack in the wall, maybe his escape was a work of fate. And if it was a work of fate, maybe the crack itself was a miracle. And if a miracle of fate were possible, then maybe Jaysynn had waiting for him, somewhere on the outside of that prison cell, a destiny.
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