The bull had taken everything from him — his direction, his calm, his sense of where the
forest ended and the open world began.
He had run without a plan, which was the problem. When something that size charges at
you and the ground fractures under its hooves and the sound of it fills every available space in
your skull, the body does not consult a map. It runs. It runs through whatever is in front of it,
takes whatever turn puts the most distance between itself and the sound of those hooves, and
does not stop until the sound is gone and the legs can no longer be persuaded to continue. By
the time Kellen had reached the bank of the narrow stream and the bull had turned away and
disappeared back into the trees, he had covered perhaps a kilometre of forest at a dead sprint,
through undergrowth he did not recognise, under canopy that blocked any useful view of the
sky, in a direction he could not have named if his life had depended on it.
Which, he was beginning to suspect, it might.
He sat by the stream for a long time after the bull left — long enough for his breathing
to return to something functional, long enough for his hands to stop shaking, long enough to
retrieve both rabbits from where they had bounced loose from his satchel during the chase and
were lying in the ferns nearby. The rabbits he retied carefully. He checked both spears — the
larger and the smaller one he had retrieved after the rabbit kill — and found both still intact
across his back. He had the berries and the figs from earlier. He had the rabbits. He had his
satchel, his coat, his boots.
He did not have any idea which way was home.
The stream was the first thing he tried. Streams ran downhill, and downhill eventually
meant the river, and the river ran alongside Los — he knew this, had known it since he was
small, it was the kind of geographical fact that embedded itself in a person's understanding of
their home so deeply it felt like instinct rather than knowledge. Follow the stream. It would
take him somewhere recognisable.
He followed it for nearly an hour.
The stream bent east, then northeast, then curved back on itself in a long arc that brought
him to a wide, shallow basin he had never seen before, where the water spread thin over flat
stone and lost its direction entirely. He stood in the middle of the basin and turned slowly and
looked at the trees in every direction and recognised none of them. The canopy here was
denser than anywhere near the village. The trees were older — their trunks wider, their bark
darker, their root systems rising from the earth in great interlocking ridges that made the
ground between them uneven and difficult to read. The light that came through was the colour
of old moss, green and dim, and it gave no useful indication of where the sun was.
He was lost. Properly, genuinely lost, in the way that distinguished itself from merely
disoriented — not a temporary confusion that a few careful minutes would resolve, but a
complete severance from any landmark he could trust. The forest had swallowed him, and it
was not in any hurry to give him back.
—
He tried, in the beginning, to be methodical about it.
He chose a direction — east, because east was where the mountain range sat at the far
edge of the forest and the mountain range was visible from the wall of Los on a clear day,
which meant if he could find it he could orient himself — and he walked it as straight as the
terrain allowed, marking his path by notching the bark of trees with his spear tip at regular
intervals so he would know if he was walking in circles. He counted his steps. He watched
the ground for signs of human passage — old boot prints, cut branches, the kind of deliberate
clearing that marked a used trail. He looked for the particular worn flatness that paths
developed after years of feet.
He found nothing. No trails, no marks, no signs of any previous human presence at all.
The forest here had not been hunted recently, or if it had the hunters had left no traces his eye
could pick up. He walked for what felt like another hour and the trees remained old and dense
and indifferent and unchanged.
It was in the middle of this — somewhere between the counting and the marking and the
careful watching of the ground — that he noticed the silence.
Not the ordinary silence of a forest in early afternoon, which was never truly silent but
merely quieter than morning, the birds settled into the midday lull, the insects cycling through
their rhythms, the occasional small rustle of something going about its business in the
undergrowth. This was different. This was the kind of silence that had weight to it, the kind
that pressed against the ears and made you aware of your own heartbeat simply because there
was nothing else to hear. He stopped walking and stood still and listened.
Nothing.
No birds. Not one. Not the distant tap of a woodpecker, not the flutter of wings in the
upper canopy, not the small sharp alarm calls that small birds made when a larger creature
moved through their territory. Nothing. The insects were gone too — the constant background
hum of the forest floor, the thing you stopped hearing after five minutes in the woods because
it was so continuous that it became invisible, simply was not there. He could hear the faint
movement of air through the upper branches. He could hear, very distantly, the whisper of the
stream he had left behind. That was all.
The forest had gone completely quiet.
He stood very still and felt the hair rise along his forearms under his coat.
It was not only the silence. It was what the silence implied, which was absence — the
absence of every living thing that ordinarily occupied a forest at this hour. The birds did not
simply go quiet; they went somewhere else. The insects did not simply stop; they were not
there. Whatever had been living in this part of the forest had left, or was hiding with the
particular concentrated stillness of prey animals that had detected something and decided
immobility was the only remaining option. Either way, the effect was the same: he was
walking through a space that had been vacated, and the vacancy had a texture to it, a quality
that his body registered before his mind had a useful word for it.
He kept walking. There was nothing else to do. But he walked differently now — slower,
more careful about where his feet landed, reducing the noise of his own passage out of an
instinct he could not have articulated into a reason. He gripped the shaft of his remaining
spear. He looked at the spaces between the trees with more attention than he had been giving
them.
The forest looked back at him with absolute blankness.
He walked deeper.
The trees here were older still — some of them so wide he could not have wrapped both
arms around them, their bark deeply furrowed and dark with age, their canopy so dense that
the light reaching the ground was little more than a green suggestion of itself. The root systems
had buckled the earth in long rippling waves, and between them the soil was soft and dark and
smelled of things that had been rotting undisturbed for a very long time. He had never come
this far into the forest before. He was not sure anyone from Los came this far. The hunters
kept to the outer ring where the game was. Nobody had a reason to go deeper.
Except that he was lost, and deeper was the only direction he had.
Time moved strangely in that silence. Without the birds to mark it, without the changing
intensity of insect noise that normally told him something about how long he had been
walking, the afternoon became a single continuous present with no distinguishable parts. He
could have been walking for twenty minutes or two hours. The light through the canopy
remained the same flat, sourceless green. The trees remained old and enormous and identical.
His notch marks on the bark were the only evidence that he was moving forward and not
standing still.
He began to understand, very clearly, what it would mean to still be in this forest when
the light failed.
—
He stopped.
Not because he heard anything. Not because he saw anything. He stopped because he
had been walking in sustained controlled anxiety for long enough that something in him had
reached a limit, and the limit expressed itself not as panic but as a sudden, complete stillness
— the kind that preceded either collapse or clarity. He stood between two enormous old trees
and pressed his back against one of them and closed his eyes and made himself breathe. In.
Hold. Out. In. Hold. Out. The way Zorin had taught him when he was young and afraid of
things, which had been more often than he liked to remember.
And in that stillness, as if the quiet in his own mind had finally made enough room for it,
he heard Zorin's voice.
Not literally — Zorin was not there, was miles away in the stone house by the river, was
probably reading by the hearth and growing quietly concerned about the fact that Kellen had
not yet come home. But the memory of the words was precise, the way important things said
at the right moment tended to be precise: stored whole, retrievable intact, the voice carrying
the same quality it had had when the words were first spoken. Kellen had been twelve. He
had gotten turned around in the eastern wood during a foraging trip and had come home two
hours late and frightened, and Zorin had sat him down and said something practical because
Zorin, faced with a frightened child, instinctively reached for the practical.
If you are lost and you cannot read the trails, look for high ground. If there is a mountain
within reach, go to it. Climb as high as you safely can and look down. From height you can
see the shape of things — the river, the treeline, the smoke from the village. The forest hides
itself from inside. From above, it cannot hide.
He opened his eyes.
He turned slowly, looking through the canopy gaps for the thing he had been ignoring
because it was too far and too large to register as useful — the dark mass at the eastern edge
of the forest that he had glimpsed twice since losing his direction and dismissed both times as
background. Not background. The Black Mountain. The locals called it that without much
originality, but the name was accurate: it was dark stone, darker than the surrounding rock,
rising steeply from the forest floor to a height that cleared the treeline by a considerable
margin. From Los it was visible on clear days as a dark shape against the sky at the far edge
of the woods. It was not close. But it was there, and it was high, and from its peak a person
could see the shape of the forest and the river and the smoke from the village hearths, and
that was enough.
He set his face toward it and walked.
—
The Black Mountain announced itself first through the quality of the silence, which changed
as he approached the forest's eastern edge. The trees thinned gradually, their age giving way
to younger growth, and through the gaps between them the dark stone of the mountain's lower
face became visible: vertical, striated, the surface almost black where it caught the afternoon
light from the wrong angle. The ground underfoot began to harden, the soft damp earth of
the deep forest giving way to packed soil and then to the first outcroppings of dark rock that
marked the mountain's true beginning.
He came out of the treeline at the mountain's eastern base and stopped.
The ground at the mountain's edge was marked.
Not scratched or scraped. Not turned up by passing feet. It was darker here than it
should have been, the pale stone of the mountain's base stained in long, irregular spreads that
ran from somewhere above — from the rock face above him — and had dried in the sun to a
deep, almost black brown. His mind processed the colour before it processed the meaning,
and for two full seconds he stood looking at it with a kind of incomprehension, the way the
eye stalls when it encounters something it was not prepared for.
Then the smell reached him.
He had smelled blood before — from his own cuts, from the animals he had hunted,
from the occasional livestock injury that happened in any village. It was a specific smell,
metallic and dense, and it intensified with volume. What came off the base of the mountain
was not the smell of a small wound or a single kill. It was the concentrated smell of something
large and multiple and not fresh, baked by an afternoon of sun into something close to
overwhelming.
He took two steps back. His hand had moved to the shaft of his spear without his
noticing.
The staining ran from somewhere above him — he could see it, tracing its origin upward
along the rock face, the dark trails running in channels where the stone was grooved, spreading
wide at the base where the ground was flat enough to pool before soaking in. Whatever had
happened here had happened above first. The staining ran high. Higher than he wanted to
look at directly.
He looked anyway.
The rock face offered no clear answer at this angle — only the streaks themselves, their
origin somewhere beyond the first ledge, something he would have to climb to see. He stood
at the base of the mountain and thought about turning around. He thought about it seriously
and practically, the way Zorin had taught him to think about risk — not the immediate fear
response, which was not useful, but the actual calculation of what going forward meant versus
what going back meant. Going back meant the forest, which was silent and directionless and
which he was not confident he could navigate in fading light. Going up meant — this.
Whatever this was. Which was at least visible, at least physical, at least a known quantity in
the sense that it had already happened and was not happening now.
He started to climb.
—
The rock was dry and the handholds were good — the striated surface of the mountain
provided natural grips, the grooves and ridges in the dark stone running horizontally in a way
that made the lower face almost ladder-like for someone who had spent years climbing fig
trees and the ruined walls of Los. He climbed with both spears strapped across his back and
both hands free, concentrating on the next handhold, not on the staining that ran alongside
him as he went.
He did not look down at it as he climbed. He had made the decision to go up, and
looking at what was beside him would not change that decision and would not help him climb.
He looked at the rock in front of his face and thought about handholds and footholds and
nothing else.
The first ledge was twelve feet up. He pulled himself onto it and stood, and from here
he could see across the top of the forest canopy — an unbroken green surface stretching west
and south, the individual trees indistinguishable at this height, the whole of it rolling slightly
with the terrain beneath. He turned northeast. He could see the dark ribbon of the river, much
further than he had thought he was, curving through a gap in the forest. He could see, very
distantly, the pale smear of Los — the paler colour of stone against the landscape, the faint
vertical lines of broken towers. He was further than he had thought. Much further.
He filed that. He climbed higher.
The second ledge was broader, and here the view opened further. The sun had moved
past its midpoint and was dropping toward the western treeline — later than he had wanted it
to be, the afternoon already well past its middle. He could see the full layout of the forest from
here, and what he saw confirmed what the silence had told him on the ground: the forest to
the northeast was wrong. The canopy was unbroken but the texture of it was different — a
stillness, an absence of movement, not a leaf stirring in that quadrant even where the air
moved elsewhere. A dead section. Or an emptied one.
He looked for the route back to Los, memorised the line of the river, identified the gap
in the treeline where the northern trail broke from the forest's edge. He had what he had come
for. He could go back down.
He was turning to begin the descent when the shape registered in his peripheral vision.
Behind him. At his back, because he had been facing west toward Los and had not
thought to look east. He turned slowly.
The cave mouth was set into the upper face of the mountain at the level of the second
ledge, partially hidden by an overhang of dark rock. It was not large — four feet wide, perhaps
five high, a natural formation in the striated stone. He would have missed it entirely if he had
descended directly. It faced east, away from the village, away from the direction he had been
looking, which was why he had not seen it from below and why nobody from Los, standing
at their wall and looking toward the mountain, would have seen it either.
The cave mouth was dark.
The ground in front of it was not.
—
He counted, later, when he was trying to reconstruct the sequence of it with some kind of
order. He was not sure he got it right. Memory of the moment had the quality of something
seen under bad light — certain details impossibly sharp, others completely absent, the whole
thing with a dreamlike unreliability that he distrusted even as he relied on it.
What he saw first was the shapes. Irregular, bundled, distributed without pattern across
the ledge in front of the cave mouth and extending into the cave's visible interior — the outer
dark allowing only the first several feet to be read, but those several feet were enough. Shapes
of varying sizes, some large, some small, some he could identify by their outline and some
he could not.
Animals. Hunters. Both.
The animals were various — he could see the bulk of a large boar, two or three deer,
something with thick grey fur he could not immediately name, and smaller shapes that
resolved, as his eyes adjusted, into wolves. Two wolves, large ones, lying on their sides with
their legs extended in the particular total stillness of things that had been dead for some time.
The human shapes were worse.
Three of them. Men, from their build, dressed in the heavy practical clothing of forest
workers — thick vests, sturdy boots, the leather equipment straps of hunters. One lay just
outside the cave mouth. Two were visible inside it, partially in shadow. He could not see
their faces. He could see that they were not moving, had not moved, would not move, in the
absolute unambiguous way that death communicated itself to anyone paying attention.
None of them had been eaten.
That was the detail his mind kept snagging on, the detail that made everything worse in
a way he could not immediately organise into coherent thought. They were here, all of them,
animals and people together, and none of them had been touched since they fell. No scavengers
had come. Whatever killed them, or whatever they had come here to escape, had been
sufficient to keep everything else away. The carrion birds that followed death through any
forest were not here. The insects were not here. Nothing was here except the bodies and the
smell and the silence and Kellen standing at the edge of the ledge with his hand on his spear
shaft and his body doing something complicated that was not quite fear and not quite anything
else he had a name for.
He had never seen a dead person before.
He had known, in the abstract, that people died. He had attended the winter
remembrance, had heard the names read out, had understood what the names meant. But the
gap between understanding death and standing twelve feet from its physical reality was wider
than anything he had prepared himself for, and he stood in that gap for several seconds that
felt much longer, not moving, not breathing properly, not thinking in any linear way.
Then his body made the decision for him.
It turned. It moved. It took him to the edge of the ledge and found the handholds by
memory rather than sight and began the descent before his conscious mind had formally
agreed to anything. He climbed down fast — too fast, the way fear made you fast in ways that
were dangerous — his boots finding the footholds with the desperate precision of someone
who could not afford to miss. The rock face blurred past him. His palms burned against the
stone. Somewhere around halfway down he stopped looking at his hands and just moved, and
the ground came up under his feet harder than he expected, and he was at the base of the
mountain, and he was running.
—
He ran without looking back.
Back into the treeline, back under the canopy, back into the green-dim silence of the
forest that he had been desperate to escape twenty minutes ago and now entered without
hesitation because anything was better than being on that ledge with those shapes behind
him. His boots hit the packed earth of the forest floor and he ran — not the blind panicked
sprint of the bull chase, which had been reaction, animal and immediate — but something
different. This was running with full awareness, running as a person runs when they know
exactly what they are running from even if they cannot see it, when the image of it is perfectly
clear behind their eyes.
He had the direction. He had memorised the line from the mountain ledge. He held it
in his head and ran it, and the forest moved around him in the peripheral blur of speed, and
he did not think about anything except maintaining the line and staying upright and not
stopping.
He had been running for perhaps five minutes when it happened.
He felt it before he processed it. A change in the air. A pressure, a density, a quality
of the air around him that was simply wrong in a way he could not immediately name. Like
the air before a lightning strike, charged and taut and carrying the specific expectation of
something about to happen.
He stopped.
Not a decision. His body stopped. His feet stopped mid-stride and set themselves on the
ground and would not move, as if they had received information from somewhere below
conscious thought and acted on it before the rest of him had been consulted. He stood in the
forest with his weight forward and his remaining spear raised halfway and his mouth open
from the exertion of running, and the forest was around him, and the silence was absolute,
and something was there.
He could not see it. He could not hear it. He could not point to a direction. It was a
presence the way gravity was a presence — omnidirectional, total, not located in any single
position but everywhere at once. The air around him had acquired a texture that had not been
there a second ago, a quality of being occupied by something that did not occupy space the
way physical things did.
He stopped breathing.
Not deliberately. His lungs simply paused, as if even the movement of air in and out of
his body was too much noise, too much disturbance to risk. His heart was going very fast but
even his heart seemed to him too loud, a drumbeat in a room that required silence. He stood
with his weight distributed across both feet and his spear in both hands and his body in the
particular locked stillness of something that has gone completely prey, and he did not move a
single muscle, and the forest held its silence around him like a hand holding a breath.
Seconds passed.
He did not know how many. Time had done what it did in the classroom — become a
single undifferentiated present with no measurable parts. There was only the stillness and the
presence and the absolute ringing silence and his own heartbeat and the question of whether
what was around him would resolve into something visible or simply remain what it was: a
weight in the air, a density, a sense of being observed from a distance that was not a physical
distance but something else entirely.
And into that stillness, uninvited, came the images.
Not memories. Not things he had seen. Things his mind built out of the raw material of
what he had found on that ledge, assembled with a vividness that surpassed anything
imagination should have been capable of. He saw the hunters on the ledge standing, alive, the
moment before whatever came for them arrived — saw the look on the face of the one nearest
the cave mouth, the look that was too sudden for preparation, the look that was only pure
unmediated encounter with something the mind could not categorise quickly enough to protect
itself from. He saw it as clearly as if he had been there. The body of him was still perfectly
still but the inside of him was watching it happen, unable to look away, unable to stop the
construction.
Then the village.
Los, in the image his mind made of it, was exactly itself — the northern gate, the market
lanes, the fountain with its collection of leaves, the stone house by the river. Ordinary and
complete, the way you saw the things you loved, all their details present simultaneously in a
way reality never quite allowed. And then the image changed and it was still Los but it was
the Los of the ruins, of the dead empire's bones — the towers broken, the plazas empty, the
market lanes silent — except it was not old ruin, it was new ruin. Recent. The kind of ruin
that still had warmth in the stone. He saw Zorin's house and he made himself stop seeing
what was happening to it and was unable to completely succeed.
He saw himself on the ledge, lying still, the third figure.
He saw the forest continuing after. Trees growing over the ledge, the stone darkening
with time and weather, everything receding back into the indifferent life of the forest until the
mountain and the ledge and the bodies on it were simply part of the background,
unremembered by anything that mattered. He saw it so clearly and so specifically that it felt
not like imagination but like a preview, something being shown to him rather than constructed
by him, and the distinction terrified him in a way that the first image had not.
He was sixteen years old and he was standing in a silent forest with something invisible
all around him and the inside of his head was showing him the end of everything, and the
marks on his body were burning.
Not warm. Burning. The bracelet marks on both wrists and the ring mark at the base of
his first finger on his right hand and the long mark running from his forehead down the left
side of his neck were all burning with the same precise, focused heat, and he had not noticed
when it started because the rest of him had been too occupied, but it was there now, sharp
and unmistakable, and he did not know what it meant but it was the most physically real
thing about this moment and he fixed on it with everything he had.
Real, he told himself. The burn is real. Your feet are on the ground. The ground is real.
The spear in your hands is real.
He breathed.
The presence did not move. Did not press closer. Did not do anything except remain.
And then, between one breath and the next, it was gone. Not gradually. Not a fading.
One moment it was there — total, omnidirectional, filling the air around him — and the next
it was not, and the air was ordinary air, and the forest was the forest, silent still but only
forest-silent, and the marks on his body were cooling toward their usual faint warmth, and he
was standing on the ground with a spear in his hands and a clear direction in his head.
He stood there for three more seconds, making sure.
Then he ran.
—
He came out of the northern treeline at a run and did not slow down.
The forest gave way to the scrub ground between the trees and the wall, fifty metres of
open land that the village kept clear for visibility, and he crossed it without thinking about
anything except the gate ahead and the wall and the stone of it and the lamplights already
lit on either side of the arch in the early evening air. The sun was low. He had been in the
forest for most of the day. He had not eaten since the figs that morning and his legs were
doing something uncertain beneath him, not quite reliable, running on the last of whatever
the adrenaline had left behind.
The guard saw him from a distance.
Kellen was perhaps a hundred metres from the gate when he registered the figure on the
wall above the arch straightening, leaning forward, and then moving with the deliberate speed
of someone who has seen something requiring response. A second figure appeared beside the
first at the parapet — the two of them exchanging a word before one began making his way
down from the wall. By the time Kellen reached the gate itself, both guards had come through
to the outer side, and he recognised them.
Fenwick was the nearer one — one of the younger guards, broad-shouldered and
unhurried in his manner, the kind of steady presence that inspired confidence that nothing was
about to be made worse. He had spoken to Kellen before without the expression of someone
managing an uncomfortable situation. That was rare enough to have been noticed and
remembered.
Beside him stood Brennan — the older guard who worked the northern gate on the
evening rotation, a heavyset man with a short grey beard and the particular watchful stillness
of someone who had spent decades observing the same stretch of wall and had learned to
distinguish between things that mattered and things that did not.
Kellen came through the gate and his legs decided they had done enough.
He did not fall. He caught himself on the gate post with both hands and held on and
stood there with his forehead pressed against the stone and his breathing ragged and his
satchel still somehow on his shoulder and the rabbits still tied to it, which struck him, in the
particular deranged clarity of complete exhaustion, as almost funny.
"Easy," Fenwick said. Close. He had crossed the distance quickly and had one hand on
Kellen's shoulder, not gripping, just present, the way you steadied a horse — a point of
contact that said I'm here without demanding anything. "Easy. You're inside. You're through."
Kellen's breathing was too fast and too shallow and he knew it and could not
immediately fix it. He pressed his eyes shut and concentrated on slowing it the way Zorin
had taught him, and after a long moment the breathing began to cooperate.
"Come sit down," Fenwick said. "Right here. Gate post. It's not comfortable but it
holds you up." He guided Kellen to the base of the gate's inner post and Kellen sat down
with his back against it and his arms across his knees and his head down and just breathed
for a while.
Brennan crouched a few feet away, elbows on his knees, watching with the patient
expression of a man who had learned long ago that the first words out of a person in this
state were rarely the useful ones. He had his small logging board in one hand and his chalk
in the other, but he had not begun writing anything yet.
Fenwick waited. He did not fill silence with words. He had the quality, rare in Kellen's
experience, of someone who understood that a person arriving in a state like this needed a
moment before they needed to be spoken to, and he gave it without being asked.
After perhaps two minutes, Kellen lifted his head.
"There's a mountain," he said. "The Black Mountain, east side of the forest." He
stopped, organised the next part. "On the second ledge — there are bodies. Hunters, I think.
Three of them. And animals, several. Wolves. Boar. They've been there for a while." He
stopped again. "They weren't eaten. Nothing touched them."
Both guards went still in the way of people receiving information they recognise as
important. Brennan began writing.
"How high up?" Fenwick asked.
"Second ledge. Maybe thirty, thirty-five feet. There's a cave at that level, east face.
The bodies are in front of the cave and inside it."
"How many did you say?"
"Three people. More animals. I didn't count carefully." Kellen looked at him. "I was —
I didn't stay long."
"No," Fenwick said, simply. "You wouldn't." He was quiet for a moment. "Was there
anything else? Anything in the forest on your way back?"
Kellen looked at the ground between his boots for a moment. He thought about how to
say it in a way that would not produce Brennan's expression.
"In the forest, about twenty minutes from the treeline," he said. "Something was there.
I didn't see it. I felt it — the air changed. A pressure everywhere at once, not in one
direction." He paused. "It didn't move toward me. It was just there. And then it wasn't."
Fenwick looked at him for a long moment. His expression was the expression of
someone who had spent years standing at the edge of a forest that had a reputation, and had
heard enough from enough people to have a considered relationship with the fact that the
forest occasionally produced things that did not fit into clean categories.
"You're not the first person to describe something like that," Fenwick said. "You're the
first in about a year." He stood. "Can you walk?"
"Yes."
"Then go home, eat something, stay there." He looked at Kellen steadily. "We're
passing this up the line tonight — both of us, together. Not to the logging board. Directly to
Maren Voss."
Brennan looked up from his board and nodded once, confirming it.
Kellen almost said something about the last time a report had gone nowhere, but he
looked at Fenwick's face and stopped. This was not that.
"All right," he said.
He stood. His legs held. He adjusted the satchel on his shoulder and looked at Fenwick
once more.
"The hunters on the ledge," he said. "Someone should know who they are. Someone
will be missing them."
Fenwick's expression shifted — something brief and contained, the look of a man
allowing himself a single moment of something before putting it away. "Yes," he said.
"Someone will be." He nodded toward the lane. "Go home, Kellen."
Kellen went.
Behind him the gate stood solid and lit against the falling dark, and the wall of Los rose
on either side of it, and the forest beyond was silent in the early evening in a way that anyone
who knew the forest would have known was not right. But the wall was stone and the lamps
were burning and the stone house by the river was a ten-minute walk through familiar lanes,
and Zorin would be there, and there would be food and firelight and the sound of the river,
and right now these things were enough to put one foot in front of the other and keep going.
The marks on his body had cooled to their ordinary warmth.
He did not yet understand what their burning had meant.
But he would.