The inside of the carriage smelled like old wood and inside it was lots of dust along with Andreas, Nanna and Anat.
Morning light came through the gaps in the paneling in thin parallel lines, and in those lines the dust moved constantly, unhurried, going nowhere in particular.
Nanna had her sleeve pressed against her nose and mouth. She didn't complain. She just sat with her back straight and her eyes slightly watery and the expression of someone enduring a situation they hoped to be over soon.
The blue cat was asleep within ten minutes of the carriage moving, curled against Andreas's thigh and he had one hand resting on it without appearing to have made a conscious decision to do so. His other hand held a golden pen loosely between two fingers, and the pen was spinning. Not the way a pen spins when someone rolls it across their knuckles. Spinning in the air, slow and even, at about the height of his chest, turning on its own axis with the speed that generated wind that pushed a few of Andreas's hair strands.
Anat watched it for a moment. Then she looked away and looked at the carriage instead.
There wasn't much to look at. A single travel bag wedged under the seat oppositeto him where andreas set, it was small and worn at the corners, the kind of bag that had been packed quickly or packed with very little. No crates. No second bag. No evidence of the particular organised weight that accumulates around a person who is going somewhere they intend to stay.
She thought that.
A man with a horse and a carriage and almost no luggage, taking a road that passed Bohwood.
That last part was the detail that didn't fit neatly into any comfortable explanation. The Bohwood path was shorter — that much was true, and a man who needed to be somewhere quickly with limited resources might reasonably choose shorter over safer. But the missing persons and terrible monsters along that stretch were not rumour. They were a pattern, consistent enough and old enough that even people who didn't believe in what lived in those woods knew better to not test the stories. You didn't take that road unless you had very little left to lose or very good reason to believe nothing in Bohwood would find you interesting.
Anat watched it from the corner of her eye, the way she watched most things indirectly amd not with any expression that would indicate she was watching at all. It was spinning against nothing. No thread, no mechanism, no explanation that fit inside the boundaries of the power systems she understood since she didn't feel any source of power like mana being used.
She spent another few minutes watching it and thinking about what that meant, and came to a conclusion she didn't particularly like, and set it aside with the rest of the things she was setting aside for later.
Outside, the road unrolled steadily beneath them. The morning light was fully up now, warm and ordinary, sitting on the fields and the distant treeline with the indifference of light that had no opinion about what it illuminated. Prence City was still an hour away.
Nanna sneezed into her sleeve and looked at Anat with watering eyes.
Anat looked back at her with an expression that conveyed sympathy without promising anything would change.
The cat shifted. Andreas's hand moved with it automatically, still asleep, still holding nothing, the pen still turning in the air above his open palm like it was keeping time.
Anat turned back to Andreas.
Who watching Nanna with an expression that had no particular content in it — not concern exactly, not indifference exactly, just the look of someone observing a situation they hadn't decided what to do about yet.
"Sir Andreas," Anat said. "May I ask you... are you truly fine?"
He looked at her. "Huh. What am I not supposed to be?"
"No no it's just that we saw you in a state we would consider practically dead so uhm... so—"
"Right." He nodded slowly, like the memory was arriving in pieces. "That did happen." A pause. Then a short quiet laugh, more air than sound. "Hehe. It's kind of funny when i thimk about it. Even if it did hurt like hell."
He said this with the same tone a person might use to describe dropping something heavy on their foot. Then he turned to look at Nanna, who had been watching him the way small animals watch things larger than themselves — very still, tracking movement without making any.
He stopped the spinning of the golden pen and let the pen fall into his opend hand and reached into the pocket of his dark brown coat and dropped the pen in. Then he held out his open palm.
The pull was subtle at first. Anat felt a gentle insistent pressure, like the air in the carriage had decided it had somewhere else to be. Nanna blinked and looked around, confused by the feeling.
Then they saw it.
The dust was moving. Not drifting the way it had been, not caught in light and going nowhere, it wad moving with direction and purpose, converging from the corners and the gaps in the paneling and the spaces between the floorboards, drawn toward Andreas's outstretched hand in slow thin streams that thickened as they came.
Within a minute the air in the carriage was noticeably cleaner. Within two it was clearer than it had any right to be given the state of the road outside.
In the center of Andreas's palm sat a small dense lump of dust compressed into something that was almost stone, smooth and irregular, ash-grey.
He looked at it with mild interest, then closed his fingers around it.
Nanna looked at Anat. Anat kept her face still. Nanna looked back at Andreas and then down at her feet and sat quietly for several minutes, breathing experimentally, with the cautious relief of someone who had been in discomfort long enough to not quite trust that it had stopped.
Then, slowly, she looked up.
"Uh...um. Andreas. Sir. Mister." She stopped. Started again. "Thank you. I didn't mean to be a bother."
"Oh don't worry." He was looking out through one of the gap in the paneling at the passing fields, chin resting loosely in his other hand. "I don't mind."