Chapter 28: The Capital at Last

A single carriage rumbled into the capital in the middle of the night. The street was pitch-black, as the lights in town had been extinguished and the moon was hidden behind the clouds. The carriage flew by like a gust of wind, turning from the main street onto a smaller road, then coming to a stop before the gates of a manor.

“Mrowr!” The horse drawing the carriage let out a strange cry as if to let the carriage’s inhabitants know they’d arrived...except the beast wasn’t a horse. It was a massive cat with fur black enough to blend into the night.

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“Sis, I ambegging you togive it a rest already!” William Stewart moaned the phrase that had grown so common, it might as well have become his catchphrase.

“Oh, calm down, William. We made it in time, didn’t we?” his elder sister Emma responded shamelessly.

“Sure, but only because we decided to have the cats pull the carriagein the middle of the night!” William groaned as he recalled their nightmarish journey. They’d nearly given up on a punctual arrival until someone had suggested letting the cats, with their superior night vision, pull the carriage through the darkness. From then on, they’d traveled day and night with hardly any rest at all, and had justbarely managed to reach the capital in time.

They’d known it would be a long journey from the border region of Pallas, but under normal circumstances they would have arrived in the capital several days ago. They’d even left early to give themselves plenty of leeway, yet somehow it had turned into a mystical adventure of epic proportions that had them arriving with only one night to rest before they would have to hit the ground running.

“I wouldn’t call this ‘on time.’ Do you really think we’d be up this early setting up the bugs’ nests if that were true?” George, the oldest, interjected when he overheard his siblings’ bickering. If everything had gone as planned, they might have gotten to the ca