Arsanguir ran.
The forest blurred past him, every tree trunk a threat, every shadow another set of teeth. His chest heaved, ragged gasps tearing through his throat. He didn't dare look back. He didn't need to. The sounds were there—footsteps pounding, snarls echoing, wings beating against the canopy. Predators. More than one. They had been following him since he bolted, and no matter how far he ran, the sound of pursuit never faded.
He should have been dead already. He had no plan, no weapon but a knife slick with sweat in his hand. The wolf-beasts chasing him were faster than horses and clever enough to herd prey into corners. Yet somehow, he stayed ahead of them. His feet tore through undergrowth, roots snapping underfoot. His stride was long, too long, like his legs had forgotten they belonged to a farmer. Branches whipped across his face and arms, but each sting lasted no longer than a blink before fading.
The forest itself seemed to recoil from his passage.
Leaves curled away when he brushed against them. Moss darkened where his feet struck the earth. Even the air thinned behind him, birds abandoning the canopy in screaming flocks. It wasn't silence—silence implied absence. This was rejection.
Arsanguir didn't notice. His thoughts were consumed by one thing: run. His heart thundered in his ears, and every rustle behind him made him flinch, every snap of a twig sent his stomach plunging. He no longer ran like a man. He ran like a beast chased to the end of the world.
A roar split the trees behind him. One of the predators lunged.
Arsanguir threw himself sideways. His shoulder cracked against a tree, but his legs carried him onward in a staggering, half-controlled sprint. Something enormous crashed into the undergrowth where he had been a heartbeat ago, fangs snapping empty air.
He didn't think about how he'd avoided the strike. Luck. Pure luck.
Another predator joined the chase, and then another. Shapes flitted through the shadows at his sides. A massive cat with mottled fur bounded parallel to him. Its eyes glowed with Kucholel light, the kind of predator's gaze that promised no escape. Arsanguir stumbled, nearly lost his footing, but his momentum carried him forward. His knife flailed in his grip, utterly useless.
The cat pounced.
Arsanguir spun, a clumsy twist born of instinct, not skill. His arm swung wide, knife flashing. By chance—or something worse—the blade drove straight into the cat's throat. The beast collapsed mid-leap, momentum flipping its body over Arsanguir and crashing into the underbrush with a spray of blood.
Arsanguir froze, eyes wide. His arm trembled, knife slick and red. He hadn't aimed. He hadn't thought. The kill was impossible. It felt too easy.
Another growl. No time to think.
The wolf-beast lunged next. Arsanguir raised his arm to block, his knife clattering from his grip. The beast's weight hit him like a hammer. Claws ripped across his chest, and for a moment, pain lanced through him sharp enough to make him gag. But then it was gone. Already gone. Blood slicked his shirt, but the wound beneath closed in seconds.
The beast pulled back, confused. Arsanguir kicked, a desperate flail. His heel caught its jaw and sent it sprawling. He scrambled for his knife, swung wildly, and missed. Another snap of fangs drove him backward. His coordination failed him, his limbs jerking too fast, too strong. He tripped over a root, slammed into the ground, and rolled to his feet again before he realized he'd moved.
The wolf lunged once more—and then stopped. It whimpered, ears flat, eyes darting not at Arsanguir but at something around him. The air itself felt heavy. The forest creaked. The wolf bolted, tail between its legs, vanishing into the trees.
Arsanguir staggered, leaning on his knees. Sweat dripped down his brow. His chest heaved, but the scratches from the wolf were gone. His shirt still bore the blood, but the flesh beneath was whole.
He didn't think about it. Couldn't.
He kept running.
Hours bled together. The chase ended, but the forest still watched him. Rabbits darted away the moment his shadow touched them. Birds took wing long before he drew near. And yet, when he paused too long, something larger always stirred in the underbrush, circling. Testing.
The forest did not want him.
He pressed on until his legs threatened to collapse. His stomach twisted with hunger. His throat burned with thirst. The knife felt heavy in his hand, as if it had grown heavier since the chase began.
And then, faintly, he saw something.
Smoke.
He stopped, squinting. Smoke curled above the trees, faint but steady. Not wildfire smoke. A camp.
For the first time in days, hope clawed through the haze of survival. He stumbled toward it, weaving through trees until the forest thinned.
There, in a shallow clearing among old stones, a group of people had made camp. Their tents were small, worn, patched from travel. A fire burned low at the center, smoke curling into the canopy. Around it sat seven figures.
They looked up as he stumbled out of the treeline.
Weapons shifted. Hands moved to hilts. One figure—a tall woman with bronze skin and long braids—rose slowly, eyes sharp. Another leaned forward, squinting as if to see him better.
The strangers did not drive him away.
They watched him like men at a riverbank watch the shadow of a crocodile—wary, respectful, hands never straying far from steel. The fire heard them all and said nothing. It burned low, the wood settling with little sighs, smoke climbing past the cracked stone of the ruin and losing itself in leaves.
A pot simmered. Something starchy and salted drifted on the steam. Arsanguir's eyes followed it without meaning to. When the stocky one ladled into a shallow bowl and handed it over, Arsanguir reached too fast; the man's hand twitched, almost pulled back, then forced itself to commit. The bowl was hot. Arsanguir flinched—not at pain, but at the sudden movement.
He ate. Too quickly. The spoon clattered once against the rim and every head turned toward the sound. He slowed, shoulders tight, eyes flicking from face to face as if the air itself had teeth.
"Name's Tz'uun," said the stocky one at last, setting his hammer down with care so the ring of iron on stone would not startle their guest. Slate-gray skin, forearms like carved timber, knuckles scar-knotted. His hair was bound into thick cords that looked as if they'd been dusted with ash and then oiled smooth. The glow at the veins near his wrist was not strong—just a faint ember under skin, winking when the fire dimmed. "B'aakal—mountains, hot ones. I keep steel from shaming itself."
"Stop introducing yourself to every lost man who wanders out of a bad dream," the tall archer said mildly. He looked Ch'olan: long-limbed and narrow, skin a bronze that caught stray greens and blues when the flames leaned. His ears angled back enough to catch the forest like a sail. A small strip of beetle-shell had been woven into the braid at his temple; it shone like wet oil when he turned. "He might be a thief."
"If he is, he's a poor one," Tz'uun replied, glancing at Arsanguir's knife. "Blade's half dull."
Arsanguir tensed, unable to help it. The archer saw the twitch and looked away, careful, as if easing a door shut without sound. "Sih'nel," he said. "Keep watch, loose arrows, say little until I'm sure it won't get me killed."
"Zahyra," said the bronze-skinned woman with the short curved blade. Ixim'kin. She sat with a spine straight as a spear, desert wraps arranged so practically that they read as elegant. Her eyes caught the fire and threw it back colder. A carved sunstone hung at her throat, the edge worn smooth with thumb-rubs. "And before you ask—no, we're not from here. Before you ask again—we're not bandits. Before you ask a third time—no, we don't kill for coin. We kill for reasons. They're not the same."
A soft sound, almost like a laugh, came from the ruin's shadow. "She says that as if coin can't be a reason," someone murmured. The voice carried a damp echo, as if spoken in a hallway of wet stone. The speaker shifted into the light reluctantly. They were slim and long-fingered, skin the color of deep water with silt-whorls mottled along the collarbones. The eyes were too wide, catching the fire until the pupils were thin coins. Their hair clung in wet strands and there were faint gill-lines at the neck that flexed and settled with breath. Moss-dyed leather, coral beads, a little ring of polished shell. "Call me Vaeyo," they said after a pause that felt like the stream deciding whether to flow around a rock. "From the dips and the flooded places."
Two others shared a blanket and a bowl: Lak'te siblings, if the soft river-marks and the turquoise beads said anything. The girl—Teya—had forearms corded from hauling nets, blue wax-thread braided into her hair; the boy—Inan—held his spear with a hand that knew where the balance lived. They looked young until you met their eyes and found the same aged caution there that lived in everyone who had watched a winter break something and not give it back in spring.
"We found the ruin at dawn," Teya offered, as if to excuse the closeness of their tent. "It's the roof that drew us. It doesn't leak. Not yet."
Inan set the butt of his spear by his heel and eyed Arsanguir with a blunt curiosity that felt honest rather than cruel. "You run loud," he said.
"Inan," Sih'nel warned.
"What? He does. Heavy. And then light in bursts. It's like when you throw a line in the river but it drags and skips because of a snag. It's a noise you don't forget."
Arsanguir's hand tightened around the bowl. Another quick movement somewhere at the edge of his vision—Tz'uun adjusting the pot on the fire—made his shoulders close like a trap. It wasn't a choice. His body had decided first.
Zahyra saw it and lowered her blade a fraction on purpose, then deliberately set it farther from reach. "Let him breathe," she said, not to him but to the others. To the air. "Let him eat."
He did. He took care to lift the spoon slowly and set it down quietly this time. A moth batted at the smoke column and then veered away hard when it drifted too near Arsanguir, as if the plume that rose from the pot went thin where he sat. Teya noticed. She looked from the moth to the man and folded her mouth closed on what she was about to say.
They resumed what they had been doing when he arrived, but not in the same way. Sih'nel fletched an arrow with long deliberate strokes, the little feathered vane turning under his thumb like a fish in a careful hand. Tz'uun began working a dent out of a pan with the shoulder of his hammer, the rhythm slow—tap, turn, tap—each strike announced first with a breath so the sound wouldn't startle. Vaeyo stitched a tear in a roll of netting with a bone needle, the line pulled tight with an economy that spoke of a life hauling something heavier than thread from black water. Zahyra traced a fingertip over the smooth edge of her sunstone, then hooked it back under cloth where it could rest against skin. The Lak'te siblings shared a quiet argument about whether to set a second watch in the hour between moonrise and midnight.
Arsanguir ate and kept one ear cocked for the forest. Every snap in the brush made him glance sideways, ready to spring. The brush did not answer. Small creatures had gone elsewhere. Larger ones waited and watched from the rim of the clearing, thinking long thoughts with their fangs out.
"Where are you headed?" Sih'nel asked without looking up.
"Through," Arsanguir said.
"That is not a place," Zahyra murmured.
He swallowed. "Away."
Tz'uun scratched his chin. "Away is a place. It's big and shaped like every hill you've left behind."
"Do you come from Olkab proper?" Teya asked, voice gentle as she could make it without sounding like pity. "Or from the edges? There's a difference."
"Edges," Arsanguir said. The word scraped its way out. He didn't explain edges meant a little house and a girl who read Kucholel in a living building that pulsed like it was breathing. He did not say Itzima's name. Saying names pulled things toward you, and the forest had pulled enough.
Sih'nel lifted his gaze finally, measuring. "Bandits took your food?"
Arsanguir's jaw set. "They took something."
"Enough," Zahyra said. Not a command, exactly. The kind of caution that grew from a sandstorm seen too far away to outrun but too close to ignore.
Vaeyo tilted their head. Their eyes reflected the fire and then rejected it, a little inverted flame coiling across the surface. "The trees hate him," they said quietly.
Inan frowned. "They can't hate."
"They can bend," Vaeyo replied. "And they are bending away."
Arsanguir's spoon clinked. He had meant to ease it down. He had. The sound was small and still the noise cracked through him like a thrown stone. His fingers stuttered. The bowl rocked and would have tipped if Teya's hand hadn't slid in quickly, steadying it. She did not touch his skin. She touched the ceramic. He noticed the kindness and the distance, both.
"Thank you," he said, and the words sounded rusted.
"Eat," Teya said.
He ate. And while he ate, the camp allowed him the courtesy of pretending not to watch him.
It was kindness. It was a test.
Tz'uun went back to his pan. Tap, turn, tap. "You can bed down on the far side of the wall," he added. "Out of the drip line if it rains. We shift watches near midnight. If something bites you in the dark, shout like someone we like."
Inan grinned despite himself. "We'll decide after the shouting if we like you."
Sih'nel's mouth twitched. "I like him fine if he eats quietly."
Arsanguir tried. He lifted the spoon slowly, the way you lift a floorboard that might creak. He kept the metal from touching the bowl at the end. The steam fogged his face and stung his eyes. He didn't rub the sting away; wiping his face required the hand to move fast near his own eyes and that felt like letting a hawk dive.
"You look like someone parted company with sleep a while back," Zahyra observed. "When it goes, it never says where."
"Doesn't write," Tz'uun agreed. "Just takes the single blanket. Leaves you the scratchy one."
Vaeyo's damp echo threaded the next words. "Sometimes it leaves you and sometimes the place does. You can't tell which until morning."
The forest offered nothing to that. The forest listened.
A stray coal popped, a fire's small cursing. The ember jumped and rolled. Arsanguir jerked away—a violent, animal motion—knee knocking the stone ring. His left hand spilled forward into the edge of the flame. Heat bit skin. The smell came, sharp and meat-sour.
Teya gasped. Inan moved as if to grab him and then stopped because grabbing was not a gift to give a frightened thing.
Arsanguir yanked back his hand so quickly the air made a sound. His face set, the old reflex of a man from a village suddenly performing, as if making a face could convince pain to pass. He tucked his burned palm under his forearm, pinning it like a misbehaving bird.
No one spoke. Firelight threw them all against the ruin wall like mural figures held in a moment.
The blisters rose. The blisters smoothed. The skin pinked. The pink dulled and then settled to the same sun-browned tone as the back of the hand. The whole of it took the time between three breaths and four. The smell drifted away as if embarrassed to have come.
Tz'uun's eyes narrowed, not unkindly. Sih'nel's jaw went tight in a way that promised attention, not violence. Zahyra's face did not change. Vaeyo frowned in the manner of water when a stone dropped where it shouldn't.
"Just a scratch," Arsanguir muttered. The words were something to hold, not a truth to share. He tucked his hand deeper out of sight and made a show of pushing a coal back toward the pile with a stick, as if that had been the point of the motion all along.
Teya looked at Inan. Inan looked at Sih'nel. The string of the archer's bow creaked once and then eased.
Zahyra blew out a long breath. "You can sleep in sight," she said. "Not a threat. Not yet. But in sight."
"In sight," Sih'nel repeated, as if he had been deciding between 'in sight' and 'with a rope' and had chosen the kinder of the two.
Tz'uun passed Arsanguir a folded square of cloth that looked like it began life as a shirt. "For your hand," he said, as if the evidence of its necessity hadn't just evaporated. "Sometimes the thing that hurts is not the skin."
Arsanguir took it and held it and did not bandage the uninjured flesh. "Thank you," he said again, the words a little less rusted.
"Why are you out here?" Vaeyo asked, not unkind. "This is not a river you can drink from. This is a river that drinks."
Arsanguir's gaze slid past them toward the trees, toward the night that had his shape stamped into it and had not yet decided whether to keep it. "Because there are places I can't be," he said.
"That's the same as 'away,'" Inan said quietly.
"It always is," Tz'uun grunted. He rolled his shoulders. "We keep rotation. I take first with Sih'nel. Zahyra with Vaeyo after. Little fish"—he nodded to Teya, who made a face at the name like she'd been called it a thousand times—"you and your brother take last until the sky argues with the birds."
"Birds never win," Teya said. But the joke sat like a worry bead in her palm; she kept rolling it.
Sih'nel stood. The motion was slow, unthreatening. He took his bow and leaned against the ruin where the wall met the old doorway. His body pressed a long shadow over the glyphs scribed into the stone. The carvings caught the light in soft lines, the language not one Arsanguir knew, but one the world remembered. Kucholel used to hum in such places. Now it had the tired quiet of a drained man.
"Be still," Zahyra told the fire, dropping a pinch of something powdered into the coals. The smoke thickened and sweetened, a temple trick learned to calm noise. "We don't need our guest to jump out of his skin because a log sneezed."
"It wasn't—" Arsanguir began, and stopped, because protesting a thing that was true required a different kind of courage than the kind he had on hand.
Teya pushed a second bowl toward him, gentler than the first. "More," she said. "You look like the world bit you and didn't finish the meal."
He took it. He made the spoon behave.
They did not ask him the questions they wanted to ask. Not yet. Instead they told a little of themselves the way travelers do when the dark is listening.
Tz'uun spoke of a village whose roofs had to be chained down in wind season and how the children ran on the chains like alleys. He did not say why he left. He did not need to—his hammer had a crack along the haft wrapped in leather; a soldier's crack.
Sih'nel said he had been paid once to sing to vines and make them lift a dead man so his wife could see him one more time. He said the vines obeyed him because he asked rather than ordered. He did not say whether the man was glad about being stood up that way. He did not say whether the wife wept.
Zahyra broke a scrap of flatbread in half and said, "The desert is not empty. It's full of everything that does not need you." The way she said it sounded like a blessing and a warning and a home all at once.
Vaeyo told a single sentence: "I pulled a ring from a drowned man and returned it to his wife and she threw it into the water again." The ring now hung on Vaeyo's wrist on a thong of eel-hide, not worn as wealth, but as tide.
Teya and Inan traded a story back and forth like a ball thrown in shallow water, about a flood that surprised the river and turned every path into a boat-path. Their father had told them to memorize the sound of the current under the floorboards; their mother had told them to memorize the sound of each other sleeping.
"And you, Arsanguir?" Zahyra asked finally, not gently, not hard. She had made a habit of letting questions arrive and then not pushing them through the door.
He looked at his hands. The right one bore the memory of a burn that was already not there. The left one remembered a pitchfork and a ring on a chain and a weight he couldn't name. "I worked a field," he said. "I walked rows until the rows walked me. I thought about a road I hadn't seen and a beast I'd never fight. I thought about the day I'd be someone different. Now I don't think about anything."
"That last part is false," Sih'nel said softly. "You think about everything. But you don't let any of it sit down."
Arsanguir's mouth tightened. The forest flexed at the edge of the clearing, as if testing the word "sit" and deciding against it. Somewhere far off, a night bird called once and then corrected itself, voice trailing away as if embarrassed to have sung within earshot of a boundary.
Vaeyo's eyes shifted toward the dark between the trees. "Things with teeth are out there that don't like what the night smells like near him," they said. "Things with older teeth like it too much."
"Older teeth?" Teya asked.
"Teeth that were teeth before teeth," Vaeyo said simply. "Go to sleep."
They did. They lay themselves beneath oil-cloths and patched canvas, and sleep came the way it comes to honest workers and liars alike: in snatches, guarded by turns. Sih'nel stood a long time at the doorway, bow down, eyes on the place where the treeline kept its counsel. Every so often he would look over his shoulder at Arsanguir, not unkind, the way a man glances at a torch he has placed near a dry curtain.
Zahyra's turn came after. She walked a circle with a small lamp, not to see but to be seen by whatever would think twice about testing light. She stopped once near Arsanguir and adjusted a blanket that had slipped from his shoulder. He did not wake, but his body coiled tight as if the blanket were a snare before it recognized the weight and let it be.
Near dawn—somewhere in the hour when the dark thinks about letting go—Inan heard a skitter and sat up with spear in hand, breath held to hear better. The skitter repeated: not claws, not paws. Beetles. A tide of them, black as seeds, surging toward the ruin's corner—and then parting around the spot where Arsanguir lay as if there were oil on stone. They rejoined on the other side and continued. Inan dug nails into his palm until it hurt, because pain made things look more like themselves sometimes. The beetles were still beetles when he opened his fist. Arsanguir was still a man. He told himself both things could be true.
The last watch was always the worst. It taught you whether you belonged and whether you regretted it. Teya walked it with him, the two of them casting little circles of voice back and forth to keep the world honest. They did not speak of the beetles. They spoke of how bread always tastes like smoke when you eat it near a story that hasn't finished.
When the ash turned the color of old coins and the ruin breathed its first dry breath of the morning, Vaeyo stirred and sat up on their elbows. Their wide eyes narrowed to something nearer human, and they listened the way water listens, which is to say with everything.
"None of you slept," they said.
"We slept," Tz'uun grunted, already rolling his shoulders toward the day. "We just didn't believe in it."
Zahyra cinched the wrap at her waist and looked to the trees. "We move," she said. "The ruin has done its duty. It gave us a roof for a night and kept its secrets to itself."
Sih'nel nodded. "We keep to the east path. The western thicket's full of thorn and tooth. The northern ridge watches back."
Inan glanced at Arsanguir, who sat up the way a hare sits—suddenly, all at once, every part of him arriving at the top of himself as if hauled on a rope. He blinked at the light as if the light were new.
"You can walk with us," Teya said before anyone else could make the shape of the offer. "If you mean to go 'away,' we're headed in some of every direction. We'll peel off. You'll peel off. Roads like that don't argue."
Zahyra considered that, then nodded once. "In sight," she reminded, softer than last night.
"In sight," Arsanguir said back. The words fit a little easier in his mouth this time.
He rose. The muscles in his legs bunched and released with a strength that did not quite match the way his balance shifted—too quick, too much, a horse learning its legs have grown in the night. He caught himself on a stone with a palm that had no mark on it. The stone seemed to pale where his skin touched it and then darken again when he pulled away. If anyone saw that, they did not mention it. It was morning. Morning belonged to the things you could carry.
They doused the fire with care. Not because of fear of ash spreading—rain had come in the night in a fine mist and left everything settling—but because the little rituals of leaving a place intact were how you told the world you meant to return to it someday. Tz'uun scattered the coals with a stick and did not look at Arsanguir when a few sparks curled away from the man as if shy.
They gathered their gear and shouldered it in the ways that had grown into their backs over years. Zahyra checked the line of her blade and the hang of her water flask. Sih'nel set three arrows within easy reach and two more where his hand would find them if his mind was busy with his feet. Vaeyo wound the eel-hide thong twice around a wrist. Teya packed the net with the stubborn love of someone who had learned to make a net from a string and a wish. Inan tapped his spear-butt twice against stone, once for luck, once for truth.
Arsanguir tucked his knife into his belt. It felt both heavier and lighter than it had last night, as if the knife couldn't decide who it belonged to.
"Let's stitch a line," Tz'uun said, and set off at a pace that told his knees what to do and his heart to stop complaining.
They moved. The forest opened and shut around them like a throat swallowing. The path east wandered the way honest paths do—meaningfully but with second thoughts. Birds began to test the air again, a few notes at a time, as if trying out a morning they weren't sure had earned them yet. Here and there a little animal risked a rustle, found the rustle traveled poorly where Arsanguir walked, and retreated.
He kept his distance without being told. Ten paces behind, sometimes eight, never less than five. Close enough to be "in sight," far enough that his shadow did not cross theirs. Once, a bramble arched across the path and then lifted half an inch higher when his boot stepped, as if discovering a new law: where he placed his foot, the ground politely unmade its grip. He did not see it. Zahyra did. She did not stop walking.
They did not speak much. They would in time; the road mills words down to something you can digest. For now they traded what the day required: Sih'nel's hand up signaling stillness; Vaeyo's small hum that meant water nearby; Teya's sharp hiss when Inan almost stepped into a hollow and the hollow almost stepped around him.
They paused at a little stream to drink. The stream made the noise streams make when they're surprised to see company. Arsanguir crouched and reached. The water shied against his palm and then yielded, as if told to by something older. He brought it to his lips and drank and did not taste the metal that had lived in it since last winter. He drank like a man. He wiped his mouth like a boy who had been told to wipe his mouth. He glanced up quickly when a bird shook water from its wings nearby and jolted as the sun struck a leaf in a way that made the leaf into a knife for a heartbeat.
"Easy," Teya said from the far bank, not because she thought he was fragile, but because the world was.
They started again. The ruin fell behind them and took its roof and its secrets with it.
By midmorning the trees thinned, and the forest changed its mind about what kind of forest it meant to be. The light grew broader. The shadows stopped thinking they were in charge. Somewhere to the south, a stand of tall reeds rattled in a wind that didn't quite reach them, and that made Sih'nel frown—wind that arrives where it wasn't invited tends to bring friends.
Tz'uun slowed at a rise, hand lifted. He turned so he wouldn't have to raise his voice. "We come upon an old road," he said. "The kind that remembers wheels. We'll cross it rather than take it. Roads that remember wheels also remember who used them."
Zahyra's mouth made an agreement line. Vaeyo's eyes went to the ditches on either side, as if measuring how fast water would carry a body if a body fell into it. Inan twirled his spear once and then looked guilty and stopped. Teya adjusted the net on her shoulder and hid a wince because the cord bit the same bruise every step.
Arsanguir nodded and stood still. Standing still didn't sit well in his legs. They wanted to twitch. They wanted to sprint and fail at sprinting. He forced his weight into heels and told his calves to stop guessing.
They crossed the old road at an angle that didn't make it feel like they were trying to get somewhere too quickly. The ruts held rain from three storms ago and a cartwheel's ghost. At the far side, Tz'uun hunkered and touched two fingers lightly to the mud. He didn't need to say it. The mud said it for him: no cart this week, maybe last. Boots. Four. One child. A goat that hated being a goat. The goat's opinion of life was stamped deeper than the child's.
"East," Sih'nel said.
"East," Zahyra agreed.
They found a pace they all could hold without arguing with bones. Arsanguir matched it. When a wasp traced a quick line near his ear he jerked, hand half-raised as if to swat steel. Inan pretended to cough to hide the small laugh that leapt up uninvited. Teya glared at him and he accepted the glare because it meant he was still someone who could be scolded.
By high sun, the forest had forgiven the morning enough to be green again. The birds forgot themselves and sang more than they meant. They were out of sight of the ruin and out of earshot of whatever congregation of teeth had decided to hold vigil there last night. The road along the world straightened a little, like a man squaring his shoulders when he sees the day finally wants to be made.
Only then did Sih'nel fall back a pace so he could walk near Arsanguir without stepping into the man's shadow. The archer did not look at him. He looked at the path, at a beetle hauling a prize that had not consented to be hauled, at the heel-prints Tz'uun left that looked like proof of labor, at the fine balance marks where Zahyra's feet placed less than half herself on the ground. When he spoke, it was into the air just above Arsanguir's shoulder.
"You don't have to tell us anything," Sih'nel said. "Not yet. Maybe not at all. But when we move as one thing, the thing needs to know whether it's moving with a knife or with a hand that holds a knife. Both are fine. Both are different."
Arsanguir's fingers flexed at his side. "I can carry," he said. It wasn't an answer. It was what he had that wasn't a secret.
"Good," Sih'nel said, and eased forward again, satisfied with having named at least one truth that didn't bite.
By the time the sun changed its mind about where it sat in the branches, they'd decided the day didn't plan to break them. They'd decided they would let it be right.
They would be wrong soon enough. For now, that was a mercy.
They walked on, seven figures in loose file, a new weight hanging behind them that did not yet know how to call itself by name. The forest watched them go with the same attention it gave to storms and seeds and men. The little animals came back to the path and the large ones kept their judgments to themselves. Somewhere behind, the ruin warmed its stones, old carvings tasting the sun like bread, keeping the shape of a night that had not slept and had not needed to.
And when evening would come—because evening always comes—it would find a group that had learned how to keep a stranger in sight without putting a rope on him, and a stranger learning how to place his feet so the ground did not flinch.
None of them would sleep easily that night either. But with each mile, the reason changed shape—from fear into caution, from caution into curiosity, from curiosity into the first thin threads of something that could hold its own weight if asked.