The thing on the plain didn't come in.
It circled the north wells until the sky went gray, and then the barking fell off, and by full sunrise the dogs were lying in the shade panting like nothing had happened. Elliot stood at the window with two wrapped daggers in his hands and listened to them go quiet inside the cloth, and felt the note under his sternum thin out and fade the way a headache does.
Korran's men rode out at first light. They came back at noon.
Elliot was in the market when they did, because everyone was, the town had made a decision about how frightened to be and had settled on curious, which was the same decision Hollowmere had made about a pillar of light, and Elliot had learned what that was worth.
They brought back an ox.
Or most of one. It came in on a flatbed with a tarp over it and the tarp didn't cover the whole thing, and Elliot got a look he wished he hadn't. It hadn't been eaten. That was the part the market kept coming back to, in low voices, all afternoon. Nothing had been taken off it. It had simply been opened, thoroughly and without hurry, and left in the grass a mile and a half from the north wells with the ground beaten flat in a wide circle around it.
Korran came out and looked at it for a long moment with his arms folded.
"Wide circle," he said, to no one. "It walked round it. For a while."
"Looking for what?" said one of his men.
The Bull didn't answer. He put the tarp back and told them to burn it and went inside, and that was the whole of the town's official position on the matter.
Elliot, said Etreuf.
Don't.
I have said nothing.
You're going to say the blades were singing.
I was going to say, said Etreuf, that they stopped when it left. Which is a different sentence, and a worse one, and you had already thought it yourself or you would not have snapped at me.
Elliot stood in the market with his hands in his pockets and the wrapped bundle under his arm and said nothing at all.
You will have to tell them, the demon said. Not unkindly. Not today. But you will have to.
Adam arrived four hours later, and Elliot heard him before he saw him.
That was the thing about Adam, he had a particular way of arguing with people that involved being extremely polite at increasing volume, and it carried across a caravan yard. Elliot was crossing the east end of the market with a sack of feed on his shoulder, earning his room, when he heard, "I'm not asking you to unload it for free, I'm asking you to weigh it honestly, which is a completely different" and stopped dead in the street like he'd walked into a rope.
He dropped the sack. He'd think about that later, that his first reaction to his oldest friend's voice was to drop forty pounds of grain in the dirt of a strange town and not care at all.
Adam was standing by a wagon with a ledger in his hands and dust to the knees and a fortnight's walking in his face, arguing with a yard clerk, and he was thinner and browner and there was something new in the set of his shoulders. He had a coil of rope over one arm like a man who had learned what to do with rope.
He looked up.
Neither of them said anything for a second.
Then Adam dropped the ledger, and crossed the yard, and hit him hard enough around the middle that Elliot's ribs went off like a struck bell and he didn't say a word about it.
"You left," Adam said, ten minutes later, sitting on the tailgate of somebody else's wagon.
"I know."
"You pulled the blanket up. You stopped, and pulled the blanket up over me, and left."
"I know."
"Don't just say I know"
"You'd have come," Elliot said.
"Yes." Adam's voice cracked on it, and he stopped, and rubbed his face with both hands. When he took them down he'd got hold of himself. "Yes. That was the point. That was, Elliot, that was the entire point of me."
Elliot looked at his boots.
"Something followed me out of the valley," he said quietly. "The first morning. I felt it on the road and it's been near me ever since, on and off, and last night it killed an ox a mile from this town and walked in a circle round it looking for something." He made himself say the rest. "I left because I thought if you were with me you'd die of it. That's not noble. That's just what I thought."
Adam was quiet a while.
"That's still deciding for me," he said.
"Yeah."
"Don't do it again."
"I probably will," said Elliot.
"I know," said Adam, and something in both of them came unknotted, and that was as much of a reconciliation as they were going to have and both of them knew it was enough.
Then Adam's eyes went to the wrapped bundle, and past Elliot's shoulder, to where Lyssara was standing at the mouth of the yard with her arms folded and her weight on her back foot, watching the pair of them with an expression like a closed shutter.
"Right," Adam said. "And who's that?"
It did not go well.
Elliot had imagined, in the four hours since he'd heard Adam's voice, some warm scene in which the two people he trusted most in the world discovered they liked each other. What actually happened was that Lyssara asked Adam three questions in under a minute, all of them polite, all of them about where he'd come from and who he'd travelled with and who had paid for it, and Adam answered all three honestly and then said, "Sorry, is this an interview?"
"Yes," said Lyssara.
"Right." Adam looked at Elliot. "Is she always"
"Yes," said Elliot.
"He walked four hundred miles," Lyssara said, to Elliot, as though Adam were a horse being appraised. "Alone, from the exact village you left, arriving in the exact town you're in, three weeks behind you, and he found you inside a day."
"Because I asked," said Adam. "In the market. I described him. Somebody said oh, the boy the Bull put through a wall, and pointed."
Lyssara's jaw tightened, because that was, in fact, an extremely good answer.
She is not wrong to do it, Etreuf said, with what sounded like approval. And the large one is not wrong to be insulted. This is what it looks like when two people who both care about you meet for the first time and have no way to prove it. It will be tedious for about a week. A pause. Also, the large one is lying about something.
Elliot's stomach dropped. What?
Not about that. Something else, and something small, and he is doing it badly and unhappily. He has been carrying it since he arrived; he has looked at you three times as though about to start a sentence. The demon sounded almost bored. He will tell you tonight. People like that always do; it is why they are restful.
The woman who had walked in with Adam introduced herself last, having spent the whole reunion leaning against a post with her thumbs in her belt, watching.
"Vessa Turl," she said. "Guild. Ostbridge hall." She had grey at the temples, a short spear cased across her back, and the sourest face Elliot had ever seen. "You're Just Elliot."
"I'm what?"
"That's what he called you for four hundred miles. He's not a hunter, he's just Elliot." She looked him up and down without warmth. "Sit down, lad. You and I are going to talk, and you're not going to enjoy it, and afterwards you'll be better off."
They sat in the shade of the yard wall. Vessa didn't waste time.
"I walked your marsh," she said. "Six days after. I've been doing this twenty-two years and I've routed a hundred and something tags, and I stood in that burn ring for a quarter of an hour and I couldn't tell you what did it." She held up a hand before he could speak. "Don't. I'm not asking. I'm telling you what it looked like from outside, because you've never once seen yourself from outside and it's going to kill you."
Elliot shut his mouth.
"A B-tag is a two-hunter job with eight years each and a month in bed afterward," Vessa said. "That's the promise. That's what the letter means. You did it in an afternoon at sixteen with no crew and no shards and you came home with five people alive out of a larder nest, which is a thing I have personally never managed, and then you left before anyone could ask you a question." She leaned forward. "Now. Show me the bundle."
"I'd rather"
"I know what's in it," Vessa said. "He told me on the road. He didn't want to and he did it anyway, because he's frightened for you and he's not clever enough to be frightened quietly." She held out her hand. "Show me."
Elliot unwrapped one. Just the one, the fire.
Vessa Turl looked at a foot of burning steel lying cold in a boy's hands in the middle of a caravan yard in Serenia, and her face did something Elliot had not expected.
She went pale.
"Wrap it," she said.
"You said"
"Wrap it."
He wrapped it.
Vessa sat back against the wall and blew out a long breath and didn't say anything for a while. When she did, her voice had lost all its sourness, which was much worse.
"I've been in three guild halls," she said. "Big ones. Ostbridge, Serrat, and the vault hall at Marn, and Marn's the one that matters, it's where the eastern halls put the things they can't sell, can't destroy, and can't leave lying about. There's about forty items in that vault. I've seen six of them, from a distance, once, with two officers watching me do it." She turned her head and looked at him. "Not one of them was as loud as what you've just got in that cloth. And you're carrying it wrapped in an oilcloth in a market town."
"I didn't steal them," Elliot said. "They "
"I don't care." Flat. "That's not the problem. Lad, the problem isn't where it came from. The problem is what it does." She jabbed a finger at the bundle. "Things like that have a pull on them. That's what makes them worth vaulting, not the edge, the pull. Put one in a room and every hungry thing for fifty miles knows the room is there."
Elliot's mouth had gone dry.
"There's something out on the plain," he said. "It's been circling the north wells two nights. It killed an ox last night and didn't eat it."
Vessa Turl looked at him for a long moment.
"Aye," she said. "There is." She stood up and slapped the dust off her knees. "And it walked past four villages to get here, and it's not looking for cattle, and I'll tell you the same thing I'd tell any first-year who came to me with this, and then I'll help you anyway, because I'm apparently that sort of fool."
"What's the thing?"
"You're not a hunter, lad," said Vessa. "You're bait."
Adam told him that night.
They were sitting on the stable roof with their backs against the warm brick, the way they'd sat on Adam's landlady's roof a hundred times, and it was so nearly ordinary that Elliot let himself have about ten minutes of pretending before Adam ruined it.
"I went to see Old Hesk," he said. "Before I left."
Elliot didn't move.
"He told me about your mother." Adam was looking straight ahead at the dark plain. "And he made me promise I'd say it to your face and not by any other way, and I've been carrying it four hundred miles and I've started this sentence about nine times."
"Say it."
So Adam said it. All of it, carefully, in the order Hesk had given it to him, the way a man does when he's been rehearsing on a long road.
That she'd walked into the valley on the winter road, on foot, in the coldest month, pregnant, from a direction with nothing in it.
That she never once said where she'd come from, not in six years, and she'd talk about anything else until your ears fell off.
That she watched the east road every evening, with her child asleep on her, and she wasn't watching it hopefully.
That twice in six years, men had come through Hollowmere asking after a woman travelling alone. Well spoken. Good horses. Nobody the valley ever saw before or since.
That both times she'd been three days gone into the hills before they arrived. And nobody had warned her. She'd just gone white one morning at her washing and packed the child and left.
Elliot sat very still through all of it.
"And the fever," he said.
"That's the part he made me promise about." Adam's voice was careful. "He says he tells people she caught the fever nursing the sick, and half the town in the doorway when she went, and he was there, and all of that's true." A pause. "But he says she wasn't sick that morning. And a man came to the door in the afternoon. And Hesk never got a look at him, and nobody else in Hollowmere remembers him at all, Ell. Not one person. He's been asking for forty years."
The plain was very dark and very wide.
Elliot found that his hand had gone up to his chest, to the small hard shape of the coin under his shirt, and that he was holding it through the cloth the way you hold something that might get taken.
Etreuf, he said. His voice inside was not steady.
I am here.
Did you know?
How could I possibly have known, said the demon, and for once there was no edge on it at all. I have been in this world for a month. I know nothing. I have told you so a hundred times and you have never once believed how completely I meant it. A pause, and then, slowly, in the tone of something laying its cards down one at a time: But I will tell you what I think, and then I will not raise it again tonight.
Go on.
A woman walks out of a place she will not name, alone, in winter, carrying a child. She is hunted by men nobody remembers. She never once uses the thing around her neck, never sells it, never opens it, in six years of being poor enough to walk through snow in bad boots. Etreuf's voice was very quiet. She was not carrying a keepsake, Elliot. She was carrying you, and she was carrying that, and she went into the smallest and least important valley on the map and she stopped moving. That is not a woman running away with a memento.
Then what is it.
That, said Etreuf, is a woman hiding something.
He said nothing more about it. He kept his word and let it lie, and Elliot sat on the roof beside his oldest friend with his fist closed around his mother's coin, in a town with a wall in it he'd been thrown through, while somewhere out in three hundred miles of black grass something that had walked past four villages went on looking for what it had come for.