"What am I supposed to do?" Sasha said, gesturing at the crow as if she expected it to actually be able to tell her anything useful. She wiped at her eyes and began to pick up the tent poles from where they'd landed in the mud. "I can't just go back to town and demand they give him back."

The rain had begun to pick up, until the steady mist filtering through the forest canopy had become a deluge. It glued Sasha's hair to her face and made water fall into her eyes. She wished they'd left her a hair band to tie it back with, or even a piece of twine. 

The crow didn't seem bothered. Instead it preened itself while water pooled around it in Chesnut's saddle. The horse gave a snort and tossed its head, spraying the bird with rain.

No, it, fluffing its feathers up until it looked like a child's toy, then shaking its entire body. But crying in the forest hardly seems like an effective strategy.

Sasha resisted the urge to beat the creature with the tent pole, because in her previous experience attempts to assault it were frustratingly ineffective. She wished it hadn't come back. She'd gotten used to not having its useless advice echo around inside her head. She turned away from it and angrily stuffed her things back into their bags. She'd find another place to camp, one far enough away that her heart didn't hurt.

That is giving up rather easily, the crow said, with the mental equivalent of a shrug behind it to follow it up. It left the saddle horn and landed on a branch, inches from her face. Sasha jumped and just barely managed to catch herself on a branch before she'd landed back in the mud.

"There's nothing I can do," Sasha said, shaking her head. "I can't fight off a dozen grown men. I don't even know where they put him." She sniffled and wiped at her eyes again. Must just be the rain, making her weepy.

I suppose I can't convince you, the crow repeated. All that work you did traveling the mountains and attempting to save Erean was for nothing, if he rots in a jail cell.

Sasha got the briefest of flashes in her mind's eye, brief enough that she couldn't be certain if it was her that did it, or if it was the crow. Rannok chained to a wall somewhere, growing thinner and thinner as the rats picked at his flesh. She cringed and shook her head. That wouldn't happen to him. 

"Erean is dead, the crows took him. You were there," she said, shaking her head. "There was already no point to helping him." Rannok would be fine. Even if he wasn't, it wasn't her job to save him every time he got himself into trouble. She'd done enough of that. 

Are you sure?

Sasha huffed a sigh and finished placing the last of the now-soaked fabric into the saddlebags before slamming them closed. "What are you even doing here?" she demanded, her voice more high-pitched and frantic than she'd wanted. 

There was a steady pause, long enough to make Sasha hope that the creature had left. But then its presence came into her mind again, like a sharp knife.

I do not know.

"Are you sure?" Sasha said, in a tone clearly intended to mock. The crow let out a soft trilling sound and landed on her shoulder in a flurry of wings. Her spine stiffened, and she shrugged, but it did not budge.

No, it said. I am not, and that's why I am here to begin with. Another pause, though this time the crow was on her shoulder, so Sasha had no hope it might have left her. She'd never trusted it, because there had never been a reason for it to take an interest in them. Yet it had. It had followed them right up to where the roads led into the deep mountains and out of Horizon. And here it was now, after a year and a half, acting like not a single day had gone by.

I was human once, you know, the crow said, as if it had read her thoughts. Humans aren't meant to be by themselves.

Sasha laughed, dry and bitter. If the crow was ever human, it had clearly been so long that it had forgotten what that term meant entirely. Either way it didn't help the crow, and she didn't need help remembering what it was like to be human. She already knew far too well.

A crow gets lonely too, it responded. A feeling wafted off it, the sort of familiarity one got with close friends and family, even friends and family one didn't particularly like. It brought back flashes of mornings spent in the kitchen over tea and dinner by the docks. Of Damien's green eyes and how they lit up when he laughed. Of her mother's warm hugs.

Sasha wanted to retch.

"Please stop," she said quietly. "I don't want to remember more things I've lost."

And that is why you do not want to help the boy. The crow fluffed its feathers again, sending water into Sasha's eyes, She wiped it away and went to mount her horse without responding to that question. She'd lost a traveling partner. Nothing more than that. If she reminded herself, it didn't hurt nearly so much.

I was mistaken then, when I had the impression you loved him? Not that I would understand. I am just a crow.

The crow left her shoulder and landed back on the horse's saddle, until it was eye to eye with her. Its yellow eyes focused on hers, as if asking her a question she didn't know the answer to, or that maybe didn't have an answer. The fact remained that she couldn't fight off a dozen guards. She couldn't undo what Rannok had done, and she couldn't break him out of a locked cell.

Perhaps there is another town farther up the road. It tilted its head the other direction and trilled. 

Sasha sighed and shook her head, then removed her foot from the stirrup. She couldn't leave him, the crow was right. It wasn't the right thing to do. She checked her belt for a moment before remembering that they'd taken her sword and left her with nothing. That and she had no idea where she was.

The town you came from is down the road you are on, toward the valley. 

She'd just have to do without a sword.

"Don't wander too far," she said to the horses, slipping Chesnut's saddle of his back and laying it on the ground. She turned around and started down the path toward that gods-forsaken town.