They left Tidecrest Haven mid-morning, with two bags of provisions bought at the market and the wooden document knocking against Simon's thigh with every step, hanging from his belt on a leather cord. It was a small object, not much bigger than a large coin, with the guild's compass engraved on one side and the name on the other. Simon Hans. It still felt like someone else's name.
The road climbed gently eastward, between fields fenced by dry-stone walls and rows of bare trees all bent the same way by the sea wind. Behind them the city shrank into a cluster of gray roofs and wooden cranes, then into a dark line on the water, then into nothing. Simon's ribs were still tender. Corin had put back everything that needed putting back, but his body seemed to remember the lesson on its own, and every time he breathed too deeply a faint twinge arrived, like a reminder no one had asked for.
They walked a long while in silence. It wasn't an uncomfortable silence, and Simon noticed that with a certain surprise. He pulled the guild's parchment out of his pocket and reread it for the third time, tracing the lines with a finger.
"Brackenmere," he said. "Infected field water. Problem appeared three weeks ago. Contact: Maren Holt, village head. Payment: none, admission trial." He looked up. "You realize in my old life this would've been the plot of a Sunday-night crime drama? The rural detective who sniffs out the river?"
"I don't know what a detective is," Corin said, "but there weren't dragons in your old life."
"No, but there weren't ribs broken by a kick either."
"I already fixed your ribs."
"Exactly."
Corin chuckled and didn't add anything else. They walked a bit further, and then, with no warning at all, she stopped in the middle of the road.
"By the way," she said. "Hold still a second."
Simon froze. Corin stepped closer, took his left sleeve between two fingers, and held it still. She closed her eyes. A greenish glow, thin as a vein, ran along the fabric, from elbow to shoulder, and faded out like a wave slipping back off the sand.
"Done," she said, letting go. "The mark's dissolved. As promised."
Simon looked at his sleeve. Nothing had changed, and that, he realized, was exactly the problem. "How do I know?"
"You can't," she said. "You have to trust me."
Simon studied her for a moment. Then, with a kind of crooked smile, he said: "Say it again."
Corin raised an eyebrow, but didn't back down. "The mark's dissolved."
Simon concentrated. He searched for that light warmth behind his eyes, the subtle frequency he now recognized, and aimed it at her voice the way you'd point a finger at a map. There was nothing. No crack, no smudge. Just a clear, clean silence, like bottomless water.
"Okay," he said.
"You tested me with the Whisper."
"You're the one who told me that hearing is one skill and trusting is another." He shrugged, a bit embarrassed. "I'm doing a little of both."
Corin looked at him with a strange expression, halfway between amusement and something harder to name. "I'm starting to regret teaching you," she said, and started walking again. But she didn't look sorry at all.
They stopped to eat on a low stone wall, with dark bread and a hard cheese that tasted of smoke, while the sun climbed and the road ahead melted into warm, still air. Simon chewed slowly, watching the fields, and at some point realized he was thinking about something that had nothing to do with lunch.
"I don't know what his name was," he said.
Corin didn't ask who. She stopped chewing. "The Beastman from the dice game."
"He played with me for an hour. Offered me a free hand, told me nice move. And I never asked his name." Simon turned a piece of crust between his fingers. "I don't know why it bothers me so much."
"Because he's dead," Corin said, simply. "And it feels like someone should remember him."
"He didn't have to die over a hand of dice."
"He didn't die over a hand of dice." She said it quietly, without any harshness. "Which is why it's not your fault, no matter how much you've already started convincing yourself otherwise."
Simon didn't answer. He didn't fully believe her, but for now it was enough to know that someone had said it out loud.
After a while, to change the subject, he brought up the other thing that had been nagging at him for two days. He closed his eyes and searched for that little switch he'd felt in the square, behind his eyes, and pressed it with the tip of his thought.
"Am I stinking right now?" he asked, without opening them.
Corin leaned toward him again and sniffed the air near his neck with a sommelier's expression. "You smell like wet hay," she said, after a moment. "Like it rained on a barn. This morning you smelled like inn and fish soup."
"Wet hay," Simon repeated, with a certain wounded dignity. "Not bad."
"Not bad. Strange." Corin pulled back and studied him with a touch of apprehension. "A Beastman uses it to confuse a tracker, and usually the result is a blank, not a smell. You changed something specific." She shook her head. "Don't ask me how. I don't know. But learn to control it, and don't use it in front of a Beastman unless you want to explain how a human knows how to do that."
"Got it."
Simon released the little switch. He didn't feel anything, but Corin nodded, satisfied, as if she'd verified everything had gone back to normal.
Brackenmere appeared in the early afternoon, after a bend in the road that dipped down into a flat valley crossed by a stream. It was a small village, some eighty stone houses with thatched roofs, gathered around a well and a stalled mill, with fields spreading out all around. From a distance it looked like a peaceful place. As they got closer, Simon understood what was wrong.
It wasn't the sight. The fields were yellow, sure, with a sickly tint that matched neither a season nor a drought: rows of wilted vegetables, stalks bending over on themselves like old shoulders. But it was, above all, the smell. He caught it from two hundred yards away, a sweetish, sour scent that worked its way into his nose and made his stomach clench. Rotten, yes, but with something else underneath, something more insidious, like fruit left to ferment in the sun.
"Gross," he said, covering his nose with his sleeve.
"Wait till you smell it up close," Corin said.
A half-flaked wooden sign announced BRACKENMERE in faded letters. The doors of the houses were almost all shut, and the few people out and about moved with the slowness of those who've stopped hoping for a change. A man repairing a fence looked up, saw Simon, then saw Corin, and his face hardened slightly. A woman pulled a child away from a doorway who'd been staring at Corin's pointed ears with a curiosity free of malice.
Simon felt Corin stiffen beside him, and for a moment the old cold anger rose from his stomach, the one from the inn. Then he remembered dinner, her tired voice: if I react, I'm the one who pays for it. It didn't always go well, she'd said. You couldn't always answer by the book.
So he didn't answer. Instead he did something smaller.
The village head was waiting for them in front of the mill: a woman in her fifties, broad-shouldered, with the thick hands of someone who's worked the land her whole life and an air of stubborn exhaustion, the kind that has no intention of bending even now. She watched them approach, and her eyes settled on Simon, as if silently asking which of the two was in charge.
"Maren Holt?" Simon asked, and held out the parchment, but didn't make the motion to hand it to her directly. He turned it and shifted it slightly, so the paper ended up closer to Corin. "We're from the Explorers' Guild. But she's the one who actually knows about this stuff. This is my first job."
Maren looked at him for a second too long. Then, with visible reluctance, she shifted her eyes to Corin and took the parchment. She read it, or pretended to, her lips moving faintly.
"Simon Hans," she said, looking at the wooden document hanging from his belt. "A northern name."
"Very," Simon said, with the most serious face he could manage.
Corin, behind him, coughed. It sounded like a real cough, but Simon caught the suppressed shake underneath.
"We called the guild three weeks ago," Maren said, handing the parchment back to Corin. "Didn't think they'd send two kids."
"We've seen water go bad before," Corin said, in a practical tone that left no room for argument. "It's not rare, and usually it's not as complicated as it seems. Show us the channel."
The irrigation channel ran along the edge of the fields, a ditch a couple of yards wide, dug by hand and reinforced with flat stones, carrying water from the stream to the cultivated land. It would have been a nice spot, once. Now the water flowing slowly between the banks had the wrong color: a murky brownish green, with an oily film on the surface reflecting the light in uneven streaks, like gasoline in a puddle. Along the edges, among the dry reeds, lay the bloated bodies of dead fish.
The smell, from there, was almost unbearable. Simon breathed through his mouth, keeping his sleeve pressed over his nose, and tried not to think about what he was inhaling.
Maren stopped a few steps from the bank and went no further. "It started three weeks ago," she said. "First the plants, then the animals. The goats won't drink anymore. Two children are sick, fever and vomiting. Old Doral says it's a curse, but Doral says that about everything, even when the bread doesn't rise."
"The well?" Corin asked.
"The well's fine. For now."
Corin knelt on the bank. She pulled a small glass vial with a cork stopper out of her bag, filled it with a quick motion, and held it up against the light. Then she uncorked it and sniffed, with an expression of total concentration. A faint greenish glow passed between her fingers, slowly, like a breeze. Simon had the feeling he was watching someone listening to music too distant for anyone else to hear.
"It's not an ordinary poison," she said after a long moment. "It's not swamp rot either, or carcasses in the stream. The rot's there, but it's secondary. There's something else underneath." She frowned. "A sweet note, almost sugary. And a taste of copper, deep down."
"Sweet," Simon repeated.
"Like honey left out in the sun." Corin corked the vial again. "It's not natural."
"What do you mean, not natural?" Maren asked, in a voice that didn't tremble but strained not to.
"That something or someone brought it there. From upstream." Corin stood, brushing off her knees. "The stream rises in the hills, to the north. If the water was clean up until three weeks ago, the cause has to be somewhere along its course. Any idea what might have happened?"
"No," Maren said.
"And has anyone of you gone up to check?"
"No one's gone upstream," Maren said. "We haven't had the time, with the fields to save."
Simon was looking at the bank, absently, at the oily sheen on the water. It was pure chance that he caught the crack.
It was small. Thin, almost delicate, like the vein of a leaf against the light. But it was there, sharp and unblurred, right at the exact point where Maren's voice slid over the word no one. It wasn't the lie of someone who knows how to hide it — it was the lie of someone who's never gotten used to lying, and says it with a hard face because the hard face is the only thing she has left.
Simon's eyes rose to Maren without his deciding to. She wasn't looking at him. She was staring at the stream, toward the hills, with a tension in her shoulders that hadn't been there before.
Simon said nothing. He remembered Corin's words, her tired voice in the common room: reacting isn't always the right move. He tilted his head slightly and simply committed it all to memory — the sentence, the crack, the direction of her gaze.
Corin shot him a glance, very brief, sideways. She didn't say anything either.
After a while, Maren offered them a place for the night, with the reluctance of someone doing it out of duty rather than generosity: an empty stable behind her house, with fresh straw and two rough blankets. There were no other places, she said, and no one in Brackenmere would take a half-elf into their home, but she added that second part under her breath, without looking at Corin, like a half-confession.
Simon didn't respond, but thanked her for both of them.
They had dinner with a thin soup, cabbage and little else, which Maren sent over with a boy of eight or nine, a skinny kid with messy hair and a pair of enormous eyes. The boy set the bowls down in the straw and didn't leave right away. He stayed, staring at Simon with the look of someone who's wanted to ask something for a while.
"Are you really an adventurer?" he said.
"I'm a dockhand with a job," Simon said. "That's a different thing."
The boy didn't seem convinced. "My sister's sick," he said. "They say it's the water. But I drank some yesterday and I'm fine."
Simon stared at him. The sentence had come out with a child's simplicity, no shadow of a crack, expecting nothing. He wasn't sure whether it was a useful clue or just pain, but he filed it away.
"What's your sister's name?"
"Lys."
"All right, Lys," Simon said. "We'll try to get that water clean again, so she feels better."
The boy nodded, very serious, and vanished into the dark with a little hop.
Corin waited until his footsteps had faded. "You shouldn't make promises."
"I didn't promise. I said we'd try."
"To an eight-year-old, that's the same thing."
Simon looked at the soup. He didn't argue. He knew she was right, and he also knew he couldn't have done otherwise.
"Maren's lying," he said, after a while, quietly. "When she said no one went upstream. I heard the crack."
"I know."
Simon looked at her. "You heard it too?"
"No," Corin said, with a kind of smile. "But I saw how her hands shook, when I asked. You don't need a skill to tell when someone's hiding something from you. You just need to actually look at them." She paused. "The Whisper gives you certainty. Your eyes give you suspicion. Better to have both."
"So what do we do?"
"Tomorrow at dawn we head up along the stream, before the village wakes up," Corin said. "We don't tell her anything. If she has a reason to lie, I want to see what's up there first."
Simon nodded. He lay down on the straw, the rough blanket pulled up to his chin and the wooden document still hanging from his belt, pressing against his hip. Corin, on the other side of the stable, wrapped herself in her own blanket with her back against the wall.
For the first time in days, he realized, there was no one to run from and no one chasing him. There was just the straw, a blanket, and Corin's back breathing slowly on the other side, and that was enough.
He stayed awake a long while, listening to the night. From outside came the rustle of water in the channel, a slow, steady sound, the sound of liquid sliding over smooth stones. A quiet noise, almost reassuring.
Simon wondered, staring at the dark ceiling, what kind of water could have such a peaceful sound and such a wrong smell.