Tibs watched the wagon coral, attentive for anyone out of pce. Even this early, merchants were already bringing back the goods they didn’t expect to sell during the st two days. No one wanted to be overburdened at the st moment, when Rigel would have them on the road with the rising sun.

  He sensed no one with an element among the people moving about, in the corral, or within what he sensed of the city. Either the guild hadn’t learned Tyborg had arrived with this caravan, or hadn’t put their people in position yet; both just as likely. The clerk hadn’t asked how he’d arrived in the city, and he hadn’t told any of the Runners he’d talked with. With how he’d been dressed, they should be at the transportation ptform if they thought he was looking to flee the city.

  He couldn’t know what the instructor had worked out of what she’d sensed, but even if she didn’t know he’d been branded, Tyborg had registered as an Omega Runner; someone without an element. But he’d used essence to escape, a few of the adventurers who had tried to stop him could attest to that. Hopefully, not that he’d used two elements. Earth wasn’t as visible as air the way he’d used it. And if they thought he had that element, they would assume he’d use that to create effects that mimicked Earth.

  So they had to be looking for him, and because the guild didn’t believe in half measures, they had to have told the city.

  Which meant that any of the guards in the corral, watching, guarding, and helping, could have been given his description. He’d avoided them on his way here, but once he stepped into the corral, it would be impossible to do the same. The constant split attention was why Graiden didn’t rely only on them to keep the wagons safe.

  Tibs struck up a conversation with the young woman guiding the donkey and used them to hide from the guard at the gate. He stayed with her until they entered the corral, then he used helping the merchants to avoid drawing the attention of the guards as he made his way to the chief of the caravan guards.

  Graiden had a line of potential recruits leading to the table where he sat. When it was Tibs’s turn, the older man looked tired.

  “Didn’t think we’d see you back,” he said in greeting.

  “Things didn’t work out. Has anyone come asking for me?”

  The man paused, quill touching the page. “No.” The tone was suspicion, but there was no light on the word. “Should I expect someone to? Are guards going to come asking for you?”

  “No. They aren’t who I’m in trouble with.” If they knew Tibs was from the caravan, or heading there, they would already have asked. Guards didn’t lie in wait if they could get information from people. They were blunt that way.

  “Tell me this isn’t about a dalliance with someone’s special person. This is worse to deal with than guards.”

  “I wouldn’t do that.”

  Graiden studied him. “How confident are you this trouble isn’t going to come looking for you here before we’ve left?”

  Lying to the person in charge of keeping him safe was never a good idea. Caravans would protect people most cimed shouldn’t. But if the chief was surprised by someone ciming Tibs owed them? An angry man rarely felt like protecting you.

  “As confident as I can be. I didn’t mention the caravan, and no one followed me as I came.” Mentioning the potential for magical tracking wouldn’t endear Graiden to the situation. Magic almost always meant the guild, and no one wanted to be on their bad side.

  And the man wouldn’t be able to do anything about it, anyway.

  “Are you staying in the corral until we leave?”

  “Yes.” He’d made it back. He wasn’t risking not managing it a second time.

  Graiden wrote his name. “Welcome back, then. Rigel’s somewhere in here, dealing with the merchants who are joining us. Make my life easier and tell him you’re traveling with us. He’s going to have me sleep on the bench if he finds out I knew, and didn’t immediately tell him.”

  With a nod, Tibs wandered among the wagons, asking for the caravan master, and helping where he could.

  He found Rigel in a heated discussion with three merchants. He kept his distance, having no interest in listening in on arguments about pricing, pnned routes, schedules, and unreasonable inflexibility of people being paid to, as far as they were concerned, accommodate merchants’ every whim instead of protecting them.

  He’d listened in, in his early days, curious about everything. Even what went into managing something so rge, and he’d gotten headaches from it trying to understand. Finally managing understanding had only resulted in more headaches.

  The merchants threw curses at Rigel in a variety of nguages, but the caravan master had a pleased smile.

  “Is that because they’re joining?” Tibs asked, “or because you’ve managed to avoid needless trouble?”

  “What is your gut telling you?”

  Tibs rolled his eyes. “Anyone who’ll take coins from me is trouble.”

  “You should be fine. None of them sell candies.”

  “Gray said to tell you I’m back, so you wouldn’t have him sleeping on the bench, when you found out about it and that he hadn’t told you. Is he touched by Void?”

  Rigel ughed. “He’s just melodramatic. He should be a bard, with how he makes everything so much rger than it is.”

  “There are enough of them as it is,” Tibs said sourly.

  “Hardly. Everyone needs more entertainment in their lives.”

  “Then they should stop prociming their songs are truth.” He shook the mood away under Rigel’s surprised stare. “Where can I help? I have nowhere to be until we leave.”

  “Other than helping the merchants, there’s little to do. Tomorrow night, when Torus is three fingers above the tree line, we’ll start harnessing the horses.”

  This time of the year, Torus appears a few fingers ahead of the sun, then vanished into its brightness, with Cra not even appearing. Those were the days the chase exhausted her, or so people believed. He’d done so too, until he’d come across a schor’s writings, expining that Cra was always there, always trailing a hand’s span behind Torus, but that just like Torus vanished when there was too much sun, it simply hid her.

  He’d spend days, after reading that, peering at the sun, looking for Cra, for a hint that she was, as the schor cimed, always there. He had Light as his element, so it shouldn’t hide things from him, and he’d almost dismissed it as yet another thing schor didn’t actually know, when he’d seen Cra, just before the sun had broken over the city wall, and swallowed her into its light.

  “Be sure to rest, Tyborg,” Rigel called, as Tibs headed to help merchants. “Once the packing gets underway, you don’t be able to get any.”

  That wouldn’t happen, he was certain. Not with the guards here. Even when he’d found well-hidden holes, his sleep had been fitful. Here? In what was basically the open? Sleep wouldn’t come even if he was able to use Darkness to drain his strength away.

  The others wouldn’t appreciate it, but he’d nap on his horse once they were moving.

  * * * * *

  The coral’s stable was the chaos of horses protesting being harnessed. The usually docile animals had grown used to only standing, grooming, and being walked and, like most people, weren’t looking forward to having to earn their keep again.

  He held one, keeping it steady, while the stable hand harnessed it. A pque had the name of the owner, so Tibs brought the horse to that wagon and helped attached it, then returned to help with another horse, and repeated the process. It would go on until they were all done and then—

  The whinny was accompanied by a scream of fear and pain. He gnced over his shoulder. The horse was coming down from rearing and galloping for the open doors. Those attempting to stop it were thrown aside. Its eyes were wide and wild.

  There was little to be done with spooked horses other than letting them calm down, but right outside the doors were the wagons and the already attached horses, tight enough this one would injure some, panic others.

  Another grabbed the reins, only to be pulled off her feet, then receive a hoof in the stomach.

  Tibs ran for it.

  He’d have to be careful not to give away how he did it, but he couldn’t risk the injuries a general panic among the horses would cause. Rigel would have to pay for the healing, the repairs, and the dey.

  This could ruin a caravan master.

  It reared, and he stepped aside, avoiding the hooves, and using Earth to keep his footing steady on the loose dirt. He added strength to his legs and leaped to grab its neck as it came down. He closed a hand on the incompletely secured harness, and he pulled as his feet touched the ground, but the horse bucked. The only thing that kept the harness in his hand was the earth he’d used to lock it closed, but he had to let the motion pull him off his feet to avoid questions he didn’t want to answer.

  He righted himself, bringing his feet under him and in front, looking as if he was trying to bring it to a stop by pnting the heel of his boots in the ground.

  An etching of air would get him on the animal’s back, and from there he could bring it under control, but again, questions.

  He reached for the dangling rein, but they kept bouncing away, and each time he let a hand go of the harness to do that, he was jerked off bance and had to right himself again.

  With the wagons outside visible and the attached horses already agitated, he couldn’t risk missing again. He used an air etching when he reached for the rein, used Earth to lock his hand on it and pulled.

  He barely kept out of the hooves as it tried to rear, but he managed to turn it around, and stable hands joined in, gaining full control of it.

  Graiden glowered. “What were you thinking?”

  “That if it reached the others, people would get hurt.” He winced as he handed the rein to a stable hand.

  “And what about you?”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “I don’t have any use for a guard who can’t hold his sword if there’s fighting to be done.”

  “I’ll be—” he bit back the pain as Graiden grabbed his shoulder.

  “That isn’t fine,” the man snapped. “You should have let the people here, those trained for this, deal with it.”

  Tibs didn’t have a comeback, still dealing with the pain and the surprise at how much there was. The chief’s grip wasn’t that tight. His etching had to have been imperfect.

  “Gray.” Rigel joined them. “Let the man go before you rip his arm off and it can’t be tended to.”

  “Rigel, I can’t have—”

  “Good men, more interested in keeping others safe than themselves?” The caravan master smiled. “I seem to remember patching a certain someone more times than I should have, because he kept jumping into trouble that wasn’t his to resolve.”

  “And I learned my lesson.”

  Rigel rolled his eyes.

  Graiden let go and Tibs gingerly moved his arm against his chest. He could sense the damage to his shoulder. Much more than it should have been, and stretching down to his elbow. But he’d let the etching go, so he couldn’t look it over to see how it had been fwed due to his distraction. If he’d paid attention as it happened, he would have reinforced the etching, or made a life essence splint.

  Worse than that, Graiden had gotten him to cry out at the pain, so he couldn’t apply a purity etching to fix it.

  “Come Tyborg.” Rigel motioned for him to follow. “Sarnita can look your arm over. At the very least, she’ll have something for the pain.”

  He had to decide between healing himself, and pying at being injured, or remaining injured. Pying at having an injury was risky. One moment of inattention, and he had to expin not only how it was he wasn’t injured, but why he’d acted like he was. Remaining injured meant he wouldn’t be able to help if there was trouble until he was healed. And while he could use his life essence to accelerate the healing over weeks, where a purity etching would repair everything over hours, he still had to be careful not to heal too quickly.

  He should have read about how long people took to heal. There would be a range. It was how it went when people were studied. And he’d know how quickly he could do it without attracting too much attention.

  Sarnita was a herbalist. She sold herbs and drinks made of them. She knew the methods of extracting their essence, and, using the essence of different liquids, she could restructure it into doing something that resembled one of his purity etching. It wasn’t alchemy, the way the books described it, since that involved pulling the essence out of the items entirely, which let that be stored, and then combined with other essences that had been extracted the same way.

  But it was close, as far as Tibs was concerned.

  The woman’s skin was darker than his, and her hair so curly it didn’t fall to her shoulders even if it stretched wide around her head. She dressed in light and colorful fabric and ughed easily. The only times Tibs didn’t see her smiling were when, like now, she saw someone injured.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  “Tyborg kept a spooked horse from running rampant,” Rigel expined.

  “Pulled my shoulder,” he added and earned himself a suspicious look from her. “It’s happened before.”

  “You’re in the habit of running after fleeing horses?” she opened the back of her wagon and indicated the steps. “Sit. Rigel, help him take the jerkin and shirt off. I have to see the skin to tell how serious this is.”

  Tibs wanted a way to convince both this wasn’t needed. That the injury wasn’t as bad as it looked. He was usually better at keeping track of his injuries and dealing with them as they occurred.

  The ck of sleep. He could deal with some through an etching of purity, but it wasn’t the same as when he suffused himself. There was always some left behind and it added up and eventually his attention wasn’t what it should be.

  He could slip away. Even without using an element, Rigel wouldn’t be able to hold him, and he could avoid anyone else who tried to keep him from leaving. But then what? Stay in the city until another caravan? Months in a city where the guild was searching for him? Wander the wilderness on his own? Even with preparations, the wilderness was never a pleasant experience.

  So he endured Sarnita’s gentle ministration. Noting that while the poultice she applied to his shoulder did nothing to the damaged essence, the pain did diminish. She soaked bandages in warm water that smelled of tree sap before wrapping them over his shoulder and arm. She had him hold his arm against his chest as it cooled and he sensed the essence shift as that happened. He didn’t have wood, so he couldn’t tell what happened, but as water essence drifted away, the bandages hardened until he couldn’t move his arm.

  He’d never seen sap do that.

  “Don’t force it,” she advised. “It’s not magic, so it can break.”

  Not magic the way he did it, certainly, but something had happened.

  “It’s just to held keep your arm and shoulder in pce while it heals.”

  “How long?” He extended the other arm, and Rigel put it through his shirt’s sleeve.

  “It’ll be healed before we reach the next city.”

  He stared at her. There was no way he was waiting that long. “I tell that to Gray, and he’d going to leave me behind.”

  “I’ll talk to my man,” Rigel said. “I’ll make him see you are good for more than swinging a sword.”

  “How long, Sarnita?”

  “How long did it take to heal the st time you pulled your shoulder like this?”

  Minutes? Not an hour, at least. His purity etching was effective, and as painful as it had been, the damage itself wasn’t significant. “I don’t remember.” Making his tone dejected took no effort.

  She smiled. “If you take care not to strain it, I’ve seen injuries like this go away in a few of weeks.”

  Weeks. He’d be able to remove a few days from that and not draw suspicion, but weeks?

  How had he screwed up such a basic etching? It wasn’t like he’d been worried about drawing attention with a ck of injury. It was the perfect situation to use people’s belief in luck being a thing.

  Once his shirt was on as best as it could be, with one arm that couldn’t be moved, Rigel patted his good shoulder. “I’ll keep Gray off your back while you heal.”

  AnnouncementBottom Rung is avaible on KU: https://amzn.to/3ShmXzW

  You can read the previous arc in Tibs story here

  Do you have opinions and suggestions? feel free to leave them in the comments.

  Thank you for reading this chapter.

  If you want to watch me writing this story, I do so on Twitch: https://v/thetigerwrites Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, from 8 AM to 11:30 EST

  If you want to read ahead, you can do so by finding Stepping Wild, on Ream Stories where the story is multiple chapters ahead even at the lowest tier, and the support helps ensure I can work with a minimum of real-life interruption.