The road east taught Elliot three things in six days.
The first was that the world was much bigger than Hollowmere had let on, and did not care. He walked out of the valley on the second morning and the land simply kept unfolding, hills, then long tilled country, then hills again, and villages strung along the road like beads with names he'd never heard anyone say aloud. A boy could walk for a week and not come to the edge of anything.
The second was that he was hungry. Constantly. The bread went in two days and after that he worked for what he ate, a morning splitting wood in a place called Ashe Ford, an afternoon hauling sacks for a carter who paid him in cheese and looked at his hands too long. He was thinner by the fourth day and stronger by the sixth, which made no sense at all until he stopped trying to make sense of it. The green light he'd taken out of the marsh was still settling into him, somewhere behind his sternum, the way a swallowed stone settles. Etreuf had no explanation and said so, repeatedly, in the tone of a man being personally insulted by a country.
Someone in this world knows what happened to you, the demon said. Find them. Ask them. Preferably before it kills you.
The third thing he learned was that he was being followed, and that no amount of walking faster made any difference.
It never got closer in a way he could point to. It was simply there, a pressure at the back of his skull, the deep unhearable note he'd first felt in the reeds. Some mornings it was faint. Some nights it settled so heavy that he lay awake under a hedge with his fist around his mother's coin, waiting for something to come out of the dark. Nothing ever did.
He asked Etreuf about it twice more. The first time the demon said there was nothing there. The second time he said nothing at all, for most of a day, and Elliot learned more from that than from any answer.
On the seventh day the country changed.
He noticed it first in the fields. They were the right shape for wheat and the wrong color for anything, a flat, sick gray-brown, the stalks standing dry and bent as if the year had gone out of them all at once. No one was working them. He passed a plow left mid-furrow, the earth around it hardened into ruts, and the wrongness of that stayed with him for a mile: nobody leaves a plow.
Then the trees started. Not a wood, a forest, older than farming, running north as far as he could see and pushing right up against the road like a held breath. The light under it was the color of pond water.
The village sat at its edge, in the forest's shadow, with its back to the dying fields.
Elliot came into it a little before dusk and slowed without meaning to. Nothing was wrong that he could name, and everything was. Doors shut in a warm hour. Shutters latched from inside. A well with a bucket on the stones beside it and no one drawing. Somewhere a dog barked twice and was hushed by a voice he couldn't see.
Well, Etreuf said. This is a place with a boot on its neck.
Bandits?
Bandits take a village and drink it and burn it. This place is being kept. A pause. I cannot see any of this, mind. I have only your eyes and they are not good ones. But I have walked into a hundred halls that felt exactly like this, and it always meant the same thing: somebody is farming these people. Somebody who intends to still be here next year.
Elliot's stomach turned over, and not from hunger. He had a coin in his pocket and half a loaf and no plan past the next road-marker, and every sensible instinct he owned said to walk through and keep walking.
Then he saw the light in the barn.
It stood at the far edge of the village where the last houses gave out, a big sagging structure with its roof bowed like an old horse's back, and a seam of lamplight showing through the boards. There were voices inside. Men's voices, easy and loud in a village where nobody else was making a sound.
Elliot stopped in the road.
No, Etreuf said immediately.
I haven't done anything yet.
You have already done it. I can feel you doing it. You are standing in the road with your feet pointed at a barn full of armed men and you are constructing a reason.
I'm just going to look.
You are not going to just look. You have never just looked in your life. You looked into a crater once and here I am.
Elliot left the road.
He came at the barn from the blind side, low, the way he'd have come at a bird's nest as a boy, and found a gap between two warped boards wide enough for one eye.
Four men. Two by the door, playing at dice on an upturned crate; two further in, standing over something at the center post. Hunting knives, cudgels, one short sword on a hip that had clearly been paid for by somebody. They didn't have the look of villagers, and they had that particular loose confidence men only get when they've been told they won't be answered for.
At the post, bound at the wrists, was a girl about his own age.
Dark hair fallen across her face. Torn traveling clothes with better stitching than anything in the village. She was on her feet, not slumped, kept on her feet by pride, from the look of it, because the rope was doing nothing to hold her up. As Elliot watched, one of the men leaned in close and said something low, and she lifted her head and looked at him.
Green eyes. Not frightened. Contemptuous. The look of someone doing sums on how much a man was worth and finding the number small.
Elliot felt something in his chest tip over.
"Why so quiet, girl?" the man said. "Cat got your tongue?"
Another laughed from the crate. "She's lucky the master wants her whole. If it were up to me"
"It isn't," said the third, without looking up from the dice. "So shut it. We hold her till Kael comes."
Kael, Elliot thought.
Note that name, Etreuf said grimly. That is the boot. That is the man farming this place. A beat. And note also that four armed men are frightened enough of him to sit in a barn all night being bored instead of stealing her and selling her, which tells you what he is. Elliot. Are you listening to me at all.
I'm listening.
You are not, Etreuf said, with the weary certainty of a creature who had been paying attention for seven days, because your heartbeat has gone up and your hands are cold and you have already picked up the plank.
Elliot looked down. He had, in fact, picked up the plank.
Give me the fire, he said.
No.
That stopped him. What?
You heard me. The demon's voice went flat and precise. Four men, an enclosed space, dry wood, and you fight like a farmhand. If I burn for you in there we will burn all of it, her, them, the roof, and the village behind it,"because you have no control, boy, none, and what happened in the marsh was not skill, it was a very large hammer swung by a very small child. A pause. You want them down. Fire does not put men down. Fire ends them.
Then what do I do?
You use the plank, Etreuf said, and you use the dark, and you hit the ones by the door first, because the ones by the door can run and fetch more. And when it goes badly, and it will go badly, you will not be too proud to ask.
Elliot let out a slow breath. All right.
"All right," Etreuf echoed, disgusted. Three hundred years. A throne within reach of my hand. And here I am, whispering barn tactics to a boy with a stick.
He was, Elliot noticed, no longer telling him to walk away.
The side door had a leather hinge and gave without a sound.
The first man never knew. Elliot came out of the dark behind him and swung with both hands and the plank took him behind the ear, and he went down over the crate with the dice still in his fist, scattering them across the floor.
The second turned into the noise. Elliot was already inside his reach. He'd never hit a man in the face before,that was the thought that arrived, absurdly, mid-swing, and then his fist landed and the shock of it went up his arm to the shoulder and the man folded.
"What's going on back there?" one of the two by the post shouted.
Elliot stepped into the lamplight with the plank in his hands. His heart was going like a bird in a box. He was aware of the girl's head coming up, of the wet gleam of the lamp on the short sword, of everything being very loud and very slow at once.
"Let her go," he said.
The two men looked at him. Then at each other. Then one of them started laughing.
"And what," he said, drawing the knife, "are you going to do about it?"
He came in fast and confident and Elliot moved faster than he had any business moving.
He felt it happen, the grain from the marsh, settled in behind his sternum, paying out. The knife came at his middle and he was simply not where it arrived; he stepped inside it the way Etreuf had shown him without ever saying a word, and drove the plank's end into the man's ribs. Something gave. The man went down retching.
The last one had the sword half out and a change coming over his face, the confidence draining down out of it, and then he stopped, because the girl at the post had gotten one hand free.
Elliot never saw how. She had a small dagger out of her boot and the rope off her other wrist and she moved like nothing he had ever watched, low and economical and fast, and she put the man on the floor with three movements he couldn't have described afterward if he'd been paid.
Then it was quiet, and there were four men on the ground, and the two of them were standing in a barn looking at each other over the wreckage.
She had the dagger reversed along her forearm. She was breathing hard. She had not, Elliot noticed, put it away.
"You can fight," he said. It came out more astonished than he'd meant.
She smirked, a small, tired, unimpressed thing. "You think I got this far without knowing how?"
"Then why were you tied up?"
The smirk went out. "Because there were eleven of them yesterday." She rubbed her wrist where the rope had been, and did it in a way that let her keep the blade between them. "Who are you?"
Elliot lowered the plank. He was shaking now that it was over, hands and knees both, and he tried to make it look like he wasn't.
"Just someone who couldn't walk away," he said.
She stared at him.
Then she laughed, one short breath of it, more disbelief than humor, and said, "You idiot."
"That's"
"You shouldn't have done that." She was already moving, checking the men on the floor with her boot, hunting the room with her eyes. "You've made yourself Kael's enemy. Do you understand what that means? Kael doesn't forget and he doesn't forgive, and now he has your face."
"Then I'll be careful," Elliot said.
She looked back at him over her shoulder with an expression he couldn't read at all, like he'd said something in a language she'd stopped expecting to hear.
She thinks you are a lunatic, Etreuf observed. For once, the girl and I are in perfect agreement.
What do you make of her?
That she is lying about everything and will go on lying, that she has been running long enough to be very good at it, and that she is worth more to somebody than four armed men. A pause. Which makes her a rope around your neck. You have no money, no power, and no allies, and you have just picked up the one object in this village that a dangerous man is coming for. If you had any sense you would leave her in this barn and take the south road.
And if she were you, Elliot said, she'd leave me.
Yes, said Etreuf, without a flicker. That is what I have been telling you.
Lyssara had gone to the barn's back window and was scanning the dark with the flat efficiency of someone who had done this in a lot of rooms. Behind her the lamp guttered, and its flame leaned, slightly, steadily, toward her back, though the window was shut and there was no draft in the barn at all.
Neither of them saw it. "We need to move. They'll have missed a check-in by now, and there's a camp at the"
She stopped talking, because Elliot wasn't listening.
Through the gap in the boards, out past the fields, past the black wall of the forest, there was a light.
It was low and green and it did not flicker like fire. It sat above the trees like something patient. And the moment Elliot's eyes found it, the deep unhearable note that had been walking behind him for seven days rang, not louder. Nearer. It went through his teeth and his sternum and settled into the place where the marsh-grain had lodged, and against his skin his mother's coin came suddenly, gently warm.
He stepped toward the window without knowing he had.
"There's something out there," he said.
The girl followed his gaze, and everything went out of her face at once.
"That's the cemetery," she said. "That's his. If you value your life at all, you'll stay away from it."
"What is it?"
"A graveyard the size of a town, and every stone in it his." Her voice had gone hard and quiet. "He buries the dead for free. That's how it starts. Then one day he owns everyone who ever handed him a body." She caught his sleeve. "There's a road south. We can be out of the valley by"
"I have to go there," Elliot said.
She let go of him like he'd burned her. "Why?"
He opened his mouth and found he had no answer that would sound like a sane person's. Because a light in the sky had picked him. Because a thing had been walking toward him for seven days. Because there was something under his ribs that had toppled towers and did not know what it was looking at anymore. Because his mother's coin was warm.
Because the green light knew his name. He was sure of that, suddenly, the way you're sure of the shape of a room in the dark.
"Because it's been calling me since before I got here," he said. "And I'd rather meet it standing up than have it find me asleep."
The girl looked at him for a long moment.
Then she swore under her breath, fluently, with real feeling, in a way that suggested a childhood spent around soldiers, and pushed past him toward the door.
"Fine," she said. "But you go in the dark and alone and you'll be a coffin by morning. So I'm coming, and you're going to do exactly what I tell you, and when I say run, you run." She glanced back. "What do I call you?"
"Elliot."
"Lyssara," she said, like she was handing over something she'd rather have kept.
Boy, Etreuf said quietly, as the two of them stepped out into the dark toward the trees, I want it on record that I advised against every part of this.
Noted, Elliot said.
Every part.
Noted.
The forest closed over the road, and ahead of them, patient as ever, the green light waited.