They found her at dawn, kneeling beneath the shattered rose window of a fallen chapel—hands folded, hair braided plain, face like a question someone had decided to ask of the world and then left waiting for an answer.
Someone—one of the caravan scouts—had seen a lone figure moving through the ruins with a lantern and a stack of wrapped cloth. The first thought everyone had was that the abbey was finally taking pity on the dead and cleaning up the mess the war left. The second was that someone who moved that quietly in a place like that belonged to stories, not to the practical world of bread and ambushes.
"She looks like she knows how to count prayers," Lina said, peering from beneath a cloak. "Which could be dangerous."
Aras, who liked the world to be complicated for the maximum theatrical effect, pushed the cart forward until the woman looked up and smiled the smallest, most bewildered version of a polite hello.
She was younger than Lina expected by a decade, older than a child by the same measure. Her robes were plain but clean; a string of little wooden beads hung at her throat. The scouts who had seen her swore she moved like someone who'd been taught to step lightly and think loudly.
"Good morning," Aras said, because manners sometimes disarm more efficiently than spears.
She inclined her head. "Good morning," she answered in a voice that sounded like linen and warm tea. "I am Verene." The name was modest and steady, like someone who had learned to be small and found it didn't suit her. "I keep the abandoned altars. I mend cloth for the sisters who were taken." Her hands fluttered toward the wrappings at her feet—little parcels of blessed cloth, scarves stitched with prayers.
Serane watched her with the measured quiet of a soldier checking a map. "You were alone in the abbey?"
Verene's eyes flicked to the ruined nave and then back. "Alone is a word. I kept the path clear for those who would come. I was not expecting company," she said. "But the road is loud now."
Miren, who had been leaning against a tree and cataloguing the angles of the woman's shoulders like someone reading a note, stepped forward. "You know the roads," she said. "Can you hide people if I ask you to?"
Verene's mouth curved with something like surprise. "I can hide the sound of knitting," she replied, then—because people are not simple—added, "and I can sew a pocket in a habit so deep a priest won't find it. I can move quietly and make a face that will make a guard give you an extra coin out of pity."
Aras loved that answer. It was practical and absurd in equal measure. He offered the woman a grin that had been polished over a hundred dangerous mornings and waited to see how she would catch it.
She did not catch it like a prize. She accepted it like a small, dangerous warmth and returned it with politeness that had steel beneath it.
"You're a sister," Lina said softly, trying to place the smell of incense and ash on her tongue.
"A novice," Verene corrected. "I never took the final vows. The sisters asked me to stay when they could not. I promised them I would keep open doors."
"Vergine," murmured one of the twins—Mara, who had a habit of renaming people based on immediate impressions. "You sound like a saint in a bad poem."
Verene blinked and then laughed—a tiny, bright sound. "I am not a saint," she said. "But I keep promises."
"Good," Serane said. "We need people who keep promises."
That night, after the kettle had been coaxed to life and bread passed like contraband, Aras watched Verene move. She mended a torn sleeve with hands that had been taught to heal more than cloth; she salted a wound with surgeons' imprecision and kindness. When a child woke screaming from a nightmare, she hummed low and held a cool cloth to a fevered forehead with such quiet competence that the boy's breath evened and his fingers went slack in relief.
"She's good at care," Matri said, approving, as if the woman's abilities had been inspected by a lifetime of sorrow.
Aras felt something like a new rule knock on his ribcage. People who stitched small things back together were dangerous in the best ways. They made revolutions patient.
Over the next days, Verene became a quiet presence in the caravan: mending, reading prayers to himself who asked, making small pouches sewn with secret pockets, and asking only for bread in exchange. She spoke little of the abbey's politics. She spoke much of the names of saints none of them recognized and of how prayer had once been a map for the lost.
The nickname "Vergine," which Mara had whispered with a grin, stuck because it felt at once amusing and tender. Aras liked the way her eyes brightened at the sound of it; Lina liked how Verene rolled it like a new coin. Miren watched with the kind of attentive distance that made Aras think she was either assessing assets or preparing a compliment.
It was at dusk, on a side road where the smell of wet earth made a good excuse for silence, that the caravan was tested anew. A small band of men, ragged and violent, emerged from behind a copse of hawthorns and demanded toll. They smelled like old grudges. Their leader—young, quick-tempered, with a face that was trying too hard to be fierce—looked at the caravan and decided to be the sort of man who earns stories.
"Coins," he barked. "Your papers. Your souls, if you have them."
Aras stepped forward with his usual theatrics, charm like a shield and Keen at his hip. He started to joke, to grin, to make the kind of show that usually turned ambushes into tavern-tales. The men laughed at first, not loudly, but enough to keep their hands near their weapons.
Then the leader's eyes landed on Verene. For a strange second, the world tilted. He saw a woman in plain robes, hands folded, and somewhere in his small, cracked chest something recognized the idea of holiness and responded with greed.
"You," he snarled. "Girl. Give me your beads."
Verene's jaw did not wobble. She could have offered them calmly. She could have given them away like a prayer. But her hands went to the pouch at her belt and withdrew not beads but a small, darked blade—thin as a needle, folded into cloth. She unfolded it with a motion that had the neatness of someone who'd practiced the move a thousand times.
The men paused. Not because they respected the gesture—most had never respected anything but their hunger—but because they were not expecting the subtleties of a woman who kept altars and took knives to cloth when she needed to.
Serane drew her sword with the speed of a struck bell. Mara and Fina leapt with a practiced chaos of trap and rope. The leader charged, sure of his size.
Verene did not fight like a soldier. She moved like a seamstress with scissors: spare, precise, lethal in a way that involved less blood and more surprise. Her blade flicked, catching the leader's wrist and severing the tendons that made his hand a weapon. He screamed—a raw, surprised sound—and fell to his knees, clutching a useless fist.
Aras, who loved theatrics, felt the muscles in his face change into something more honest: respect.
"You keep a blade," he said afterward as they bandaged the man's ruined hand with strips of cloth, "but you sew also."
Verene's answer was modest. "Some prayers need stitches," she said. "Some vows require defense."
That night, after the men had been bound behind a tree and given the choice between walking away or staying to be fed, the caravan gathered. The barn smelled of smoke and the damp of the road. The children had already been given extra loaves. Lina, who had watched Verene's blade sing like a whisper, regarded the woman with new recognition.
"Why were you at the abbey alone?" she asked, voice small and careful.
Verene looked at the moon. "I kept the doors open for those who would run," she said. "The sisters taught me more than prayers. They taught me to make small places safe. If I could not be with them—I would keep the place so someone else could use it."
Aras sat, slouching, and felt a steady pull he could not seem to charm away. "Do you want to join?" he asked, not with a joke this time but with a plainness that carried the weight of an invitation.
Verene's eyes shone quickly with things unsaid: fear, the memory of stone and chant, and the knowledge of living a life that required small, constant courage. "I promised the sisters," she answered. "But promises can be stretched if needed."
Lina's laughter was accidental relief. "Stretching promises is our trade," she said.
Miren, who had been watching the exchange like someone cataloguing a strategy, added, "We need people who can hide, sew, and surprise a man who thinks only of ledgers. We need those who keep small lights alive."
Serane, who had been silent, finally spoke: "You're not a child. You are one of us if you want to be. We fight for people like you."
Verene hesitated like someone taking the measure of a new name. Then she nodded. "I will stay," she said. "For as long as you need a seam in the world."
And so, by the light of a new moon and the smell of warm bread, the caravan gained a new member: a novice who kept altars and hid blades, who could pray and prick a man's wrist with the same deftness. The nickname "Vergine" stuck—less an insult than an affectionate mishearing of a woman complicated and whole.
That night Aras lay awake thinking about what it meant to collect people whose lives the ledger tried to forget. Verene had been a small, bright answer to the question: what do you do with a life someone tried to tuck away like an old letter? You open it. You read it. You stitch it back into place.
Outside, the road whispered. Inside, a blade lay wrapped in cloth on the table like a secret and a promise. The caravan slept, full of small repai
rs and louder plans. The world would count them if it could. They would keep living anyway.