Kert found out on a Selvas afternoon two weeks before departure.
Lore had not planned to tell him at the Cask. He had not planned how to tell him at all, which was its own kind of answer about how he had been handling the approaching fact of it. He had walked in the same as any other afternoon — the smell of the place reaching him at the corner the way it always reached him, the sweet-dark of the sauce and the char of the flat iron and underneath it the specific warmth of a kitchen that had been running at the same temperature for the same purpose for years. He sat at his corner table and put his back to two walls the same as every other day and the plate arrived and the cup arrived and Kert stood there and looked at him.
"You're leaving," Kert said.
Lore looked up. "How did you know."
"You've been eating like someone who is taking inventory." Kert pulled out the chair at the end of the table and sat in it with the ease of a man who had earned the right to sit wherever he liked. "How long."
"Two weeks."
Kert was quiet. He looked at the plate, at the table surface, at the cup. Outside the narrow window the Gravarn afternoon light came in at the flat angle of the low sun, throwing a long gold strip across the floor that was different from the summer light, softer and more amber, the kind of light that made the room look the way it smelled.
"Firoxy," Kert said.
"Yes."
The Cask was mostly empty at this hour — a merchant in the far corner, a pair of off-duty Knights near the door who had been nursing the same cups for twenty minutes. The flat iron in the kitchen had gone quiet, resting between orders, the faint tick of cooling metal the only sound from that direction.
"Orel told me you've been good to him," Kert said. "This year. Since the hunt." He said it to the table, not to Lore. "He didn't say it like that. He said something else that meant the same thing."
Lore said nothing.
"You didn't have to do that," Kert said.
"I know."
Kert looked up. His eyes carried the expression he used when he had thought through most of what he wanted to say and had arrived at the small amount worth saying. "The duru recipe goes with you," he said. "You already have it. Don't let whatever they call food in Firoxy make you forget what it's supposed to taste like." He looked at the plate in front of Lore, the sauce dark and fragrant, the grain turned the color of dark honey. "The sauce components I gave you before the Drake hunt — you have them still?"
"Most of them."
"I'll put together another set before you leave. Sealed. They keep for two months if you don't open them." He stood and picked up the cloth from his belt and wiped down the table next to Lore's, the movement automatic, the cloth going over a surface that didn't need it. "Come back through Adobis someday. When whatever comes next is done. The table will be here."
He went back to the counter. The flat iron hissed somewhere in the kitchen as someone put it back on the heat.
Lore ate. The sauce had soaked into the duru all the way through and every bite had the full weight of it — the sweetness and the salt and the char from the edges of the Koru where the iron had caught it. He ate slowly and watched the afternoon light move across the floor in its long gold strip and said nothing else and Kert said nothing else and that was the right amount for both of them.
Orel was at his table near the window when Lore stood to leave. His right arm was in his lap the way it sat now, the coffee in front of him gone cold, the winter light through the window catching the side of his face. He looked at Lore when Lore passed.
"Good luck in Firoxy," he said.
"Look after yourself," Lore said.
Orel's jaw moved once. "I'm figuring out what that looks like." He said it without the weight it would have carried six months ago — not resolved, just being worked. "I'll get there."
"I know," Lore said.
He walked out through the Cask's door into the Gravarn afternoon, the cold of it hitting him after the warmth of the room, the market street going about its business in the low light.
The posting farewells happened across the two weeks in the way these things happened — not gathered, not ceremonial, each one finding its own time and shape.
Brael came to the yard on the second-to-last morning. The session had just finished, the ground still marked with the morning's work, the cold of the Gravarn air sitting in the yard the way it sat at this hour before the sun cleared the eastern parapet. She leaned against the wall with her arms folded and watched the last of the circuit from start to finish without saying anything, her breath making small clouds in the cold air.
When Lore finished and came to the wall she looked at him for a moment.
"Wyrm bait," she said.
"Brael."
"You're going to be fine in Firoxy." She said it with the flatness of something already verified. "Vantis is hard but she's fair. Don't go in trying to prove the record. Just work from the ground up same as you did here."
"That's the plan."
"Good." She looked at the yard, at the sand marked with footprints and the pressed lines of the circuit path that had been worn into it over two years. "It's been good training alongside you." She said it the way she said compliments — plainly, the weight of it clear. "Don't let whoever they give you in Firoxy talk you into bad habits."
"I won't."
"Don't say I won't. Just don't." She pushed off the wall. At the door to the main building she stopped without turning. The cold morning air sat around her. "Stay alive. That's the first job everywhere."
She went through the door.
Carev found him in the administrative corridor on the last full day, moving through the final equipment checklist. The corridor had the particular quality of late afternoon in a working building — the low light, the smell of old stone and the faint linseed of the record books on the shelf at the end. He stood in the doorway with his shoulder against the frame.
"I'm going to end up using Farren for pushups," he said.
Lore looked up. "Farren's a good weight."
"Farren is going to complain every morning."
"He complains with me. He'll complain with you."
Carev looked at the checklist. Then at the wall. "The hand signals we developed — I'm going to keep working them. The flanking sequence especially." He paused. "In case we end up in the same field one day."
"In case," Lore said.
Carev nodded once and turned and went back down the corridor, his footsteps quiet on the stone.
Farren appeared in the yard on the final morning earlier than usual, before the circuit had started, before most of the posting was moving. The yard was still in the pre-dawn dark, the torches at the gate the only light, the cold sitting hard in the ground underfoot. He stood in the center of the yard with his arms folded and looked at Lore with the expression of a man who had been thinking about something and had come to a decision about it.
"You could've picked someone else for pushups," he said. "Any of those mornings. There were always other people in the yard."
"There were," Lore agreed.
"Why was it always me."
"You were always there." He looked at him. "And you never actually said no."
Farren was quiet for a moment. Something moved in his face and settled. "Yeah," he said. "All right." He unfolded his arms. "Get down. One last circuit."
Lore looked at him.
"Come on," Farren said. His voice had something in it that wasn't an order. "Get down. I'm not going to remember you standing there looking at me. I'm going to remember the last circuit."
Lore got down.
Farren got on. The circuit ran the same as every other morning — the cold of the yard stone against the palms, the familiar weight settling, the count the body kept without being asked. The air was cold enough that each exhale made a brief cloud. The desert crows were on the roof again, two of them this morning, the smaller dispute resolved into something quieter, two birds sitting on the ridge in the early dark without apparent agenda.
At a hundred Lore stood and Farren climbed off and brushed the sand from his back. They were both breathing. The yard was quiet. The torches at the gate pushed light across the packed sand and the cold stone and the worn path of the circuit.
Farren looked at him. "Good," he said. "Now go."
Torven caught him at the eastern gate in the evening. The day had warmed through its Gravarn arc and was cooling again, the long shadows of the late afternoon stretching across the stone of the gate passage. He had been doing the hundred pushups every morning since Brael had told him to in the cave, not making it a topic, just doing it.
"Four months," Torven said. "You were right. It gets better."
"Give it another four."
"I will." He looked at the gate, at the city beyond it, at the road that went south through the market district. "I'll probably be at a different posting by then."
"Probably."
"I'll keep going anyway."
"Good," Lore said.
He went through the gate.
Vrak was waiting at the stable where the transport arrangements had been confirmed, the gate open to the road, the Gravarn evening coming on in its slow gold and red across the western sky. The wagon Garron had loaded two days prior sat heavy on its wheels, the horses standing in the cold with the patient indifference of animals that had learned waiting was most of the work.
Vrak looked at the armor when Lore arrived, at Fathom at his hip, at the helm under his arm. The amber eyes moved across the full picture. He said something in Lion-Folk — low, not for translation, just said into the Gravarn evening.
"What was that," Lore said.
"Lion-Folk say it before a hunt." Vrak looked at the road heading north, at the city buildings on either side of it, at where it opened up beyond the last of the market district and became something else. "No translation that is correct. Something like — the ground ahead does not know us yet."
Lore looked at the road.
The sky had gone from gold to deep amber to the first edge of purple above the eastern walls, the stars coming out one by one in the darkening.
"No," he said. "It doesn't."