She was gone back into the house before Corren found anything adequate to say in reply, and he stood a long moment on the dock with the bundle of bread still warm from her hands, turning over, not for the first time, how much heavier an honest goodbye sat than a dramatic one ever did.
The road north traced the Nyr Forest's ragged edge for two full days, pine giving way slowly to scrub and bare stone as the country climbed toward the demon border, and Corren spent most of the second day's ride with Doss's father's journal open across his lap, working through the Zoroastrian entry Master Doss had pointed him toward once the fever crisis alone had stopped occupying every corner of his attention.
Whispered verse, profound and true, shapes my being, a different hue.
He read the translated couplet a dozen times before Nyla, riding close enough to catch his silence for what it was, finally asked what precisely was wrong with it.
"Nothing's wrong with the translation," Corren said. "That's the problem. It's accurate, and accurate isn't the same as correct, not with this family of language. Old Zoroastrian chants carry gender and case markers I haven't seen anywhere else I've worked, and whoever rendered this into common speech flattened every one of them into something that reads clean in translation and would, if I actually spoke it this way, ask the working to shape a form that has no fixed gender or intention behind it at all. That's not a small omission. That's the entire spell arriving with no instructions for what, specifically, it's supposed to become."
"Can you fix it."
"I can try." He turned the page, found the original script reproduced in Doss's father's careful hand beneath the couplet, and spent the better part of an hour working through it the way he'd once worked through a damaged papyrus fragment in his old life, testing each disputed ending against the grammar he already half-recognized from other, better-preserved Persian-family chants he'd encountered since arriving in this world. By the time the sun had dropped low enough to throw their shadows out long and thin across the road, he'd settled on a phrasing that specified both the intention and the shape it was meant to take, rather than leaving either open to whatever the caster's own uncertainty happened to fill in.
He tested it that evening, alone at the treeline while Nyla kept watch over their small fire, and felt the working take with a cold, unfamiliar shudder that started at his spine and worked outward, his own face rearranging itself under his fingers into features he'd worn for thirty-one years in a life that had ended on a university lecture hall floor. He caught his reflection in the flat of his own blade a moment later and found Professor Kael Richards looking back at him, tired around the eyes in exactly the same way he remembered, and felt something considerably more complicated than the mana drain settle into his chest alongside it.
"It worked," Nyla said, without needing to be told, her sightless face turned toward him with the same unhurried accuracy she brought to everything. "Your heart changed when your face did. Not the shape of it. Something underneath the shape."
"I don't know what to make of that," Corren admitted, honestly, turning his borrowed hands over in the firelight.
"You don't have to know yet," Nyla said. "I've found that most true things arrive before anyone's ready to make sense of them. Making sense of them is usually a separate, later job."
The cabin at the Nyr Forest's border sat exactly where the journal's marginal map promised it would, tucked into a bend where the treeline met the Ashen River's headwater, smoke curling from a crooked chimney into a sky gone the flat grey of coming rain, and Corren heard the argument inside before he'd finished crossing the last stretch of muddy yard.
"You can barely stand upright anymore, old man, and you're talking about crossing the border again like it's still fifteen years ago!"
"I am perfectly capable of standing, Vance, and considerably more capable than you seem willing to credit me for!"
Corren knocked, mostly out of courtesy for a conversation he had no intention of pretending he hadn't overheard, and the door swung open on an old man with a wild grey beard and sores visible at the collar of an open shirt, a younger man standing behind him with his arms crossed in the specific posture of someone who'd had this exact fight more times than he could count and expected to have it several more before either of them gave an inch.
"We don't get many visitors," the old man said, eyes moving over Corren and Nyla with open, unguarded curiosity. "Especially not two who managed to reach this door without a single horse's hoofbeat announcing them first. I'm Cyril. This ill-tempered young man behind me, who apparently believes concern is the same thing as respect, is my son, Vance."
"Corren," Corren said, offering the name without hesitation, some instinct telling him a man this far past caring what the Kingdom thought of anyone wasn't likely to sell a fugitive out even if the name meant something to him. "This is Nyla. Master Doss sent us. He said you'd been chasing a cure for Scarlet Fever most of your life."
Something shifted behind Cyril's tired eyes at that, sharp enough that his whole posture straightened by a visible degree. "Doss's boy. I taught his father everything he ever knew about alchemy that he didn't already know better than me, which admittedly wasn't much even then." He stepped back from the doorway, waving them both inside with a gesture that carried real urgency underneath its hospitality. "Sit. Tell me everything. My whole life's work has been circling this exact disease, and I would very much like to know what's finally brought someone to my door asking about it who might actually be able to do something with the answer."