It had been a long three days.

Hazel was sitting with her knees drawn to her chest as she gazed dully out over the cavern. She, Alistair, and Rikki were still reeling from the whirlwind of everything that had happened recently. On the first night, Alistair had come back empty-handed from his hunting trip with Crow. She could still vividly remember the troubled look on his face as he announced to them that their leader had taken off without warning. At the time, no one had thought too much of his disappearance. While it was out of character for Crow to leave without giving an explanation, he had said he would be back soon, and they had all believed he would come back. How foolish that had been.

She closed her eyes, taking a shaky breath. They shouldn’t have brushed it off so easily. Someone should have gone after him. When that strange Younisian boy had shown up the next morning with news of the thief’s death, it had felt like a weight had been dropped on all three of them—a weight of shock at the suddenness of it all, of sorrow for his loss, and most of all of guilt that they could have prevented it if any one of them had gone after him in the first place. Piled with the still-fresh loss of Simon, it had just been too much for the remaining three to bear, so they had spent the next two days in mourning.

However, the time had looked different for all of them. Rikki had become inconsolable and cried constantly during her waking hours until she’d had no tears left to shed. She had also stopped eating, which reminded Hazel of how she had become when she’d lost Simon about two weeks ago. It was clear to both her and Alistair that, while the feelings seemed to have been unreturned, Rikki had been in love with Crow. It hurt the herbalist to see the other woman so heartbroken, especially since she had gone through the same thing so recently. Losing a loved one wasn’t a pain she would wish on anyone.

Alistair hadn’t been much better off. While he’d mostly kept his appetite, he had also shed quite a few more tears than Hazel had been expecting from him on the day Hartley had delivered the news. It seemed he had developed a close friendship with Crow during the time they’d been together, because he hadn’t even cried that much when Simon had passed. She supposed she must have underestimated how good of a friend and leader the thief had been to his companions.

Among the three of them, she was the only one who hadn’t shed any tears. It wasn’t because she didn’t mourn Crow’s loss, but rather because she simply didn’t have any more grief to spare. Instead of being overcome with sadness like the two thieves, she had been stricken with a numbness from the shock of learning they had lost him too. It was probably for the best, since she was the only one amongst them in any condition to prepare food and begin packing up their supplies—they had decided the day before that they were going to move to Younis with Hartley, since it seemed like Brerra was going to lose the war—so she had taken over as a sort of temporary leader for them now that Crow was gone.

Thinking about it now, Hazel decided she should probably keep working on packing for them. She climbed to her feet from where she had been sitting and stepped over to the supplies, but before she even had a chance to get started, she froze at the sound of a voice outside the hideout: [color=fff79a][b]“Alistair? Hazel? Rikki?”[/b][/color] At the sound of it, everyone in the cave got up from the various places they had been sitting or lying about, instinctively reaching for their weapons.

In the next moment, Alistair knitted his brow confusedly as he recognized the voice, “Is that—”

“Penelope!” Hartley exclaimed, scrambling to his feet and dashing for the entrance. Just as the knight came into view, the boy wrapped his arms around her in a tight embrace.

Hazel stared at the knight—or rather, [i]knights[/i], since there were two of them—in surprise. What was Penelope doing here? She had no more reason to visit the thieves now that Crow was dead. The herbalist had thought she would have just gone back to her life as a knight, since she had nothing to risk anymore. Shifting her weight slightly, she took a step towards the cave entrance. Even though she wasn’t officially the leader, she still felt like it was her responsibility to protect the mourning criminals while they were in no condition to defend themselves. That meant being the one to question their unexpected visitors.

“What are you doing here?” she asked with more curiosity in her voice than accusation. Penelope had actually been by Crow’s side when he’d been killed, so she couldn’t have been doing well. Out of respect for her loss, Hazel couldn’t bring herself to be as hostile to the other woman as she normally was.