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What if things don't go well with the grooms? What if there is no room for you to board your stage, your team and your tack, and Nasturtium takes it upon himself to help by reaching out to his friend? There is nothing for it now though. There was nothing for it then, either. It is just ... you wish your best option wasn't such shit. You sorely want to sigh in frustration, though you lock your jaw shut instead as Nasturtium leads you into his office. When you finally lay eyes on what must be your papers sitting atop his desk, you cannot help but feel marginally better about your prospects. There is a small service besides the desk, topped with a bottle and pair of glasses - but hastened by the prospect of "Wilhelmina's" father waking up sick and alone, not knowing where his daughter is, they remain unmentioned and untouched as he rounds the desk ahead of you, to collect a pen and pot. You have to remind yourself how you decided to spell Wilhelmina, but luckily only three signatures are needed from you, so you manage to keep each of them consistent enough in between scanning through the documents, just to make sure everything is as it should. Nothing jumps out at you, but contracts and the like are all alien to you, so you have to doubt if anything actually would ...
"Alright then, that is it. All in your name."
They are just two short sentences, but somehow, everything seems much more real, all of a sudden. You are actually going to be able to leave the Mount, to go wherever you can drive your team and lie your way through. It isn't going to be easy, by any stretch of the imagination; horses are going to need fodder, water and rest, a stage is an inherently attractive target to Highwaymen, and most of all, until you actually forge a Family Patent, you aren't going to be able to prove that you own any of this - or that you have the right to be on the Thoroughfares in the first place. Still ... you are actually going to leave.
Without father.
It takes the Breadth-Entire of your Thread, but you manage to keep your face even through that blow. Adrift as you may be, before you can be carried away out into waters darker and deeper still, you remind yourself how many little clues you had stumbled across, that you simply had to turn your back on as you didn't have the time. If you are going to be waiting until tomorrow night to leave, then perhaps you might have time? You'd certainly like to think so, but you have been so poor at estimating the time that 'moving house' was going to take, you are not sure if you can count on that. Besides, shouldn't you be taking any extra time for yourself, you know, to <span class="mu-i">sleep</span>? As it is, you are near dead in the water; sustaining yourself for another night on naught more than catnaps - especially when the roads are in such a state - seems to be black askance. But this is your father. He could be in danger, he could need your help ... and if you leave the Mount without him, whose to say that the twain shall meet?
