The first problem with the daggers was that Elliot couldn't put them down.
Not in the way a cursed thing in a story can't be put down. He could open his hands. He'd done it four times on the first morning, standing in the gold grass with the sun coming up, and both blades had dropped straight into the dirt like ordinary iron and lain there being ordinary. Then he'd picked them up again, because the alternative was leaving two objects that had made the world ring in a field where anyone could find them.
The problem was that he had nowhere to put them.
He had no sheaths. He had no belt worth the name. He tried his pack and the fire dagger went through the canvas, the strap, and a loaf of bread without slowing, and then lay in the grass amid his scattered breakfast looking, Elliot felt, faintly pleased with itself.
"Try wrapping them," Lyssara said, not looking up from re-tying her boot.
"In what? It goes through everything."
"Does it?" She stood, walked over, and before he could stop her she picked the fire dagger up by the blade,closed her whole hand around a foot of burning steel, and held it out to him hilt-first.
Elliot's heart stopped.
"It's cold," Lyssara said. "It's been cold since we left. You've been carrying it like a live coal for eight hours and it hasn't so much as warmed my palm." She turned her hand over and showed him: unmarked. "So it's not fire. It's something that looks like fire, and it cuts what it decides to cut, and you're the one deciding."
"I'm not deciding anything."
"You're deciding constantly. You just don't know you're doing it, which is worse." She dropped the dagger into his hand. "It went through your bread because you were thinking about your bread."
She is right, Etreuf said. It is intent. I have seen a hundred weapons like it and every one of them was a disaster in the hands of a man with a busy mind. A pause. You have the busiest and worst mind I have ever been trapped in.
"So how do I stop?"
Lyssara looked at him for a second, and something in her face flickered, as if she'd caught herself about to say a sentence in someone else's voice.
"You don't stop," she said. "You get boring. Same grip, every time. Same angle. You make your hands so dull that your hands stop being a place where thinking happens." She stepped back and drew her own small dagger, reversed it along her forearm, and stood there with it as though it had grown out of her. "Ten thousand times. Then it's furniture, and you can think about anything you like."
"Ten thousand."
"Give or take."
"Who counted?" Elliot said.
Lyssara put her dagger away and started walking, and didn't answer, and Elliot, who had spent his whole life noticing things while other people were busy, noticed that she had counted.
She taught him for four days, badly and effectively.
Badly, because she had no patience for teaching and less for encouragement. Effectively, because she had clearly been taught by somebody who had none either, and she reproduced them exactly. Grip. Wrist. Elbow in. No. Again. Elbow in. She hit his forearm with a stick when it drifted, hard enough to bruise, every single time, without apology and without heat, and by the third day his elbow stopped drifting because his body had decided independently that it preferred not to be hit.
"You're not going to be good," she told him on the second evening, in the tone of a woman reading a weather report. "You've got four days and no foundation. What you're going to be is predictable, which is the only thing that keeps a bad fighter alive."
"That's the plan? Be predictable?"
"Be predictable to yourself." She threw him the waterskin. "Everyone dies the same way, Elliot. They do a thing they've never practiced, at the worst moment, and it doesn't work."
Listen to her, Etreuf said. That is the first sensible sentence anyone in this world has said in front of me.
He was, Elliot noticed, watching her constantly now. Not with suspicion, with something closer to professional interest, the way a man watches another man's horse.
You like her.
I rate her, Etreuf corrected. They are entirely different, and only one of them is useful. She was trained by a soldier who did not care whether she cried, from an age young enough that she thinks it was normal, and she is running from something she has never once named in four days of talking. A beat. I have known a great many people with that shape, boy. They are all dangerous, and about half of them are dangerous to the people standing next to them.
And the other half?
Die protecting them, said Etreuf. It is impossible to tell which is which until it happens, and I have never once guessed correctly.
They crossed the plains for nine days.
Elliot had thought the country outside the forest was big. He revised the word four separate times. Serenia went on and on, gold grass to the knee, cut through by cart tracks and the occasional line of poplars marking a watercourse, and towns every two or three days sitting low on the horizon like ships. It was the richest land he had ever seen and it was worked by people who lived thin, and it took him five days to work out why.
"Somebody owns it," he said, on the road. "All of it. This whole plain belongs to somebody."
"Zyrion," said Lyssara. "This is the green edge of the desert empire, and it feeds a lot of people who never come here." She glanced sideways. "You didn't know that."
"Hollowmere thought there were seven kings and the details were somebody else's problem."
"There are seven kings," she said, "and the details are the only thing that's ever killed anybody."
On the sixth day a caravan overtook them and offered water, and Elliot learned what the daggers were going to cost him socially.
He had them wrapped by then, Lyssara's solution, in the end, which was to wrap them in a bolt of oiled cloth and make him decide, out loud, every morning, that today the blades would not cut cloth. It worked. It was also, she pointed out, the most alarming thing about them.
The caravan master was a broad, pleasant, incurious man right up until the wind lifted the corner of the wrapping.
Elliot watched him become a different person in about a second and a half.
"That's a nice piece," the man said, in a voice that had gone silky. "Wouldn't have thought it. Where's a lad get a thing like that?"
"Inherited," Elliot said.
"Inherited." The man smiled. "Fine thing to inherit. I'd give you forty silver for the pair, sight unseen, and a place on a wagon to Serenia town, and you'd not have to sleep in the grass again."
Forty silver was more money than Elliot had held in his life, by a factor he couldn't do in his head.
Take it, said Etreuf.
What?
Take it, and then follow him at nightfall and take it back, and the wagons as well. The demon sounded almost cheerful. He is going to try to kill you either way, boy, look at his hands, not his face; the hands have already decided, and I would rather we struck first with forty silver in our pocket than second with nothing.
"They're not for sale," Elliot said.
The pleasant look stayed on. Lyssara had gone very quiet at his shoulder and had not, Elliot noticed, moved her hand toward her boot, which was somehow more frightening than if she had.
"Course not," said the caravan master. "Course not. Water's free, mind. Take what you need."
They took none of it, and walked, and the wagons pulled ahead and were out of sight by dusk. That night Lyssara didn't sleep and wouldn't say so, and they were moving again before first light, and for two days after that Elliot kept looking over his shoulder at an empty road.
Nothing came. That, Lyssara said, was the good outcome, and Elliot should not expect to get it often.
And that, said Etreuf, is what those blades are. Not a weapon. A reason. Everyone who sees them will invent one.
The eighth night, camped in a dry watercourse with a small fire, was the first time they talked properly.
It started because Elliot asked her the wrong question. He had wanted to ask it since the cemetery and had been building up to it badly for a week.
"Why didn't you take the south road?"
Lyssara fed a stick into the fire.
"You keep asking me that."
"You keep not answering."
"That's usually a hint."
"I know." Elliot turned the wrapped bundle over in his hands. "I'd still like the answer."
She was quiet for long enough that he thought that was the end of it.
"Because you offered," she said.
"That's not"
"It is, though." Her voice had gone flat, and the flatness was doing work. "Do you know how many people have ever offered me a way out with nothing attached to it? One. Just now. Eight days ago, in a fog, by a boy with a marsh monster's leftovers in him and no idea what he'd walked into." She poked the fire. "Everyone else in my life has wanted something. My " a hairline pause, a whole biography in it ". The people who raised me wanted something. The people who taught me to fight wanted something. Every man in that barn wanted something. Kael wanted something, and at least Kael was honest about it, which I hadn't realized was rare until I met you."
"I want something," Elliot said.
"Do you?"
"Yeah." He looked at the fire. "I want somebody to still be there in the morning. That's, I've been walking for two weeks and I keep waking up checking. It's stupid."
Lyssara said nothing for a while.
"That's not wanting something," she said at last. "That's just being lonely. It's a different shape." She lay back against her pack and put her arm over her eyes. "I'll be here in the morning. Don't make it a thing."
You are being played, Etreuf observed.
No, Elliot said. I don't think I am.
Everyone thinks that. It is the definitive symptom. A pause, and then, grudgingly, in a tone Elliot hadn't heard from him before,not warmth, but a kind of irritated accuracy: ...Although she did not have to say the part about the people who raised her. That was a mistake, and she does not make mistakes, which means she chose to make it. The demon sounded personally aggrieved. Which is what an honest person does. How tedious.
Elliot smiled at the fire and didn't say anything.
The coin sat cool against his chest, doing nothing, the way it had done nothing for eight days.
He noticed Etreuf noticing it.
Don't, Elliot said.
I have not said a word.
You've been not-saying-a-word about it since the tomb.
I have been thinking, said Etreuf, which is different, and I will go on doing it, and you will not enjoy the conclusion. And that was all he said about the coin, then, and for a good while afterward.
They came into Serenia town on the tenth day, in the flat white heat of afternoon.
It was bigger than Hollowmere by ten times and poorer than it looked. Dust everywhere, packed hard in the streets and hanging in the air; low mud-brick houses with flat roofs; a market square full of noise and awnings and flies. There was money moving through the place, Elliot could see it in the grain wagons and the trader stalls, and almost none of it seemed to stop.
Elliot noticed the other thing about four minutes in.
"Nobody's looking at us," he said quietly.
Lyssara's eyes flicked across the street. "Say more."
"We're strangers. Two of us, armed, filthy, come in off the plain road." He'd grown up in a town where a new face was an event for a week. "In Hollowmere half the square would've found a reason to walk past us by now. Here nobody's even looked up. They're deciding not to."
Yes, said Etreuf, with real interest. Now that is a trained population. Somebody has taught these people that noticing is expensive.
They asked after a room and got one, over a stable, cheap. They asked after news of the north and got a great deal of nothing. They asked, twice, about a temple in the mountains, and the second time the woman they asked stopped smiling and found something to do.
It was the old man at the edge of the market who finally beckoned them over, weathered, sunken-eyed, sitting in the shade of an awning with a tray of nothing much in front of him.
"You're strangers," he said. "What brings you to Serenia?"
"Information," Elliot said. "About the north. A temple in the mountains, if there is one."
The old man's face changed the way the others' had, but he didn't look away.
"You'll not get that in this market," he said. "Nobody here sells anything the Bull hasn't priced."
Lyssara's head came around. "The Bull?"
"Korran Uldar." The old man said the name the way you'd name a season. "Runs this town. Runs the road for forty miles either side of it, and the wells, and who talks to who. A giant of a man, skin like stone, you can't cut him, lad, I've seen it tried by better than you. Strongest man any of us has ever laid eyes on." He shrugged. "But he's got answers. He's got everyone's answers, because he's had twenty years of everyone's business passing through his hands."
"And if we ask him?"
"Then you'll pay his price." The old man went back to his tray. "He'll set one. He always sets one. And you'll not like it, and you'll pay it anyway, because there's no one else to ask."
"Where do we find him?"
The old man tipped his chin at the far edge of town, where a long low building sat apart from everything else behind a wall, with crude banners hanging off it and men lounging at the door in the shade.
"He's not hard to find," he said. "That's rather the point of him."
Elliot, said Etreuf, and there was an edge in it. The first thing approaching enthusiasm the demon had shown since the tomb. A strongman with a monopoly on information, in a town that has been taught not to look at strangers. Do you understand what we have walked into?
Trouble.
Opportunity, said Etreuf. You want a road north. He is the only gate. There is no going around a man like that, and there is no bargaining honestly with one either, because he has not had to bargain honestly in twenty years and he has forgotten how it is done.
Elliot looked across the dusty square at the den, and at the men at the door, and at the whole quiet trained town that had decided not to see him.
"So what do we do?" he said aloud, and Lyssara looked at him sharply, because he hadn't meant to say it aloud.
We go in, said Etreuf, and we find out what he wants.