The road to the capital took eleven days, and they bought their way onto it with Mira's sword.
A merchant caravan was leaving Calder Reach at dawn, forty wagons of salt and dyed cloth bound for the city of Aurenhold. Its master, a barrel-chested woman named Haldis Brandt, needed escorts after losing two guards to Gravehounds. She looked at Mira's B-rank card, then at Nathan's thin frame, and said, "He's your brother?"
"Cousin," Mira said.
"Can he fight?"
"No."
"Can he cook?"
Nathan hesitated. "I can learn."
Haldis snorted. "Then he can carry water. Fifteen silver a day for the two of you, and if you bring trouble to my wagons, I'll leave you in the first ditch I find."
It was the best offer they'd had. They took it.
---
For three days, the road was blessedly dull. Nathan hauled water, scrubbed pots, and learned the names of the wagon drivers. Mira rode the flank on a borrowed mare, wind coiling around her wrists, scanning the hills. At night they slept under the wagons with the other hands, and nobody asked them anything.
Nathan kept the folded scrap of paper in his coat. *Thank you for seeing me.* He took it out sometimes by firelight and tried to remember who had written it. The harder he pushed, the more it felt like pressing on a bruise that had no source.
"Stop," Mira said on the third night, not unkindly. "You're worrying it."
"I can't remember him."
"Then it's a good thing you kept the note." She leaned back against a wheel. "That's what the words are for."
He nodded, but he didn't put the paper away.
---
On the fifth day, the beasts came.
They erupted from a stand of dead pines, six lean, long-limbed creatures with hides the color of rust and mouths split nearly to the ears. The drivers called them thornback stalkers, and for good reason: each carried a row of barbed spines along its spine, which it could launch like arrows at close range.
"Wagons in a ring!" Haldis roared. "Guards forward!"
Mira was already moving. She spurred her mare into the gap, wind howling around her blade, and the first stalker went down in a spray of black blood. A second lunged. She turned it with a cut that sent it spinning into the dirt.
The third beast saw Nathan.
He was crouched behind a water barrel with a bucket in his hands, which was absurd and useless, and the stalker's head swung toward him with a low, interested growl. Its spines rose. The barbs gleamed.
*Small,* Ossian had said, though Nathan could no longer remember the face that had said it. *Like a needle, not a sword.*
He didn't aim at the beast. The thought of reaching for something that large made the hollow stir hungrily behind his ribs, and he forced it down. Instead he looked at the spines, the thin, deadly bristles, and picked a single one.
The one pointed at his chest.
*Only that,* he thought. *Only that.*
The spine disappeared.
There was no sound and almost no sensation, only a faint prickle behind his eyes, as light as a sneeze. The stalker's shot went wide and buried the other spines harmlessly in the barrel. The beast snarled, confused, and Mira's blade took its head from behind.
Nathan sat very still, bucket still in his hands.
It had cost him almost nothing. He checked, probing carefully through his mind the way you might test a tooth. After a moment he found it: a taste. The flavor of the winter plum jam his grandmother made every autumn. He could remember that it existed. He couldn't remember what it tasted like.
It was a small loss. A very small one.
It still made his chest ache.
"Are you hurt?" Mira was beside him, her face flushed, her hair loose from the fight.
"No."
"What happened to the spine?"
"I... missed." He swallowed. "It missed me."
Her eyes narrowed. Then she looked at the barrel, with its neat row of embedded barbs, and the empty gap in the line where one should have been. She said nothing, but she held his gaze a moment longer than she needed to.
"Next time," she said quietly, "you tell me the truth."
"I will."
"Say it properly."
"Next time, I'll tell you the truth."
"Good."
---
That night, the caravan camped in a hollow beside a dry riverbed. The fires burned low. Haldis posted double watches. Nathan lay beneath the third wagon with his coat wrapped around his shoulders, listening to the crickets, and did not realize he had fallen asleep until the touch woke him.
It was very light. A thumb, pressed gently to the center of his forehead.
His eyes flew open.
A figure crouched over him in the dark, a slender person in a pale gray traveling cloak, hood drawn so low he couldn't see a face. One hand rested on his brow. The fingers were smudged with something dark and powdery.
"Be still," a soft voice whispered. It was a young woman's voice, almost kind. "It will not hurt. I only wanted to be certain."
Nathan tried to cry out. His throat wouldn't obey. The thumb pressed once more, then withdrew, and the figure slid backward into the darkness like smoke.
"The Chorus remembers," it murmured. "Rest well, child. You have very little time."
Then it was gone.
Nathan lay frozen, heart pounding. Beside him, Mira slept on, one arm flung across her face.
He touched his forehead with shaking fingers. They came away gray.
Ash.