The guards that guided Sonder kept a distance, widening it slowly the longer they walked.
She noticed, but she didn't care.
The path they followed curved away from the manor but not to the dock where the ship was.
But the sea must have been somewhere close by, though she couldn't see it.
The ground evened out, and the wildness of the vegetation thinned out until trees and plants only appeared in a controlled manner.
In the distance in front of them, Sonder could see something that resembled a castle.
It lacked elegance and was built into a natural formation of rock on the far side of the island.
It was older than the manor and seemed like a soulless imitation of actual castles she had seen.
She looked at it as she was walking.
The silence between Sonder and the guards was one of discomfort.
There was no talk between them or glances exchanged.
The usually stone-faced guards, men who didn't rattle and couldn't be themselves, who stood in front of terrible things because those terrible things were simply the nature of their work, were rattled now.
It wasn't fear exactly, or not only fear. There was something else in it. A kind of recognition, uneasy and unwilling, the way you recognize a face that belongs to someone you would rather not have met.
They knew what she was or knew what she wasn't.
Not human. Not entirely. Something that reminded them of their kind, though not quite that either. Something adjacent to it.
She wasn't prey, clearly. Not fully an outsider.
They had no word for someone like her, especially not someone who reminded them so much of their leader.
The mock castle grew larger as they approached.
The gates were open. She didn't know if that meant they were expected or if the gates were simply always open, which seemed like a statement of its own.
They passed through them.
The courtyard was wide and poorly lit, but there were torches, if just a few, burning at intervals along the walls.
They were spaced out too far apart, leaving long stretches of shadows between them.
It gave the impression of a place that didn't expect visitors, or didn't care to accommodate them.
Or simply, they didn't understand what the torches were really for, as the man-eaters could see in the dark, but imitated what they'd seen in other castles.