The capital's roads were well-maintained for perhaps thirty miles in every direction — the practical radius of noble concern, where the stones were level and the bridges sound and the inns had roofs that didn't leak. Beyond that the road became a suggestion. Beyond fifty miles it became a memory.
Nathan ran.
Not the restrained movement he used in public — the full, unhurried extension of a body that had stopped being ordinarily human some time ago, eating distance at a pace that would have been incomprehensible to anyone who happened to see it and wasn't prepared to revise their understanding of what a person could do. The trees blurred at the road's edges. The milestones passed in rhythms.
He ran and he thought.
