He heard the horses before he saw them.
He had been walking for the better part of a day, the pack he had made from stitched hide riding heavy on his shoulders, the bag of dried meat and the good knives and the last of his sharpened tools inside it, and the hooves came to him the way most sounds came to him now, early, clear, unmistakable. He went up a tree without thinking about it, the climb automatic, and settled into the fork of a high branch and watched.
Two riders, moving cautious through the trees. He knew the black hair before he let himself know anything else about her.
She had someone with her, an older man, grey through the hair, a spear held ready across his saddle like he'd carried one his whole life and never once put it down. They were searching. He could tell that from the way they moved, slow, scanning, calling something out low every so often that he could not make out from this distance.
He did not climb down.
He sat in the tree and watched her ride past beneath him, close enough that he could have dropped onto her horse's back if he'd wanted to, and something in his chest pulled hard in her direction, the same pull that had not gone quiet in a week no matter how much distance he put on it. He did not move. He had made his decision three days ago, alone in a cave that had stopped being a home the moment she walked out of it, and decisions like that did not get to change just because the reason for them rode by underneath a tree.
He watched until the sound of the horses faded, and then he kept moving.
The trees thinned out by midday, then stopped altogether, and he stood at the edge of Little Edelmere and looked out at grass taller than he was, gold and pale green, moving in long slow waves under a wind he could actually feel on his face without a canopy breaking it first. He had not seen open sky in seven months. He stood there a long moment just looking at it.
He found the path a few hours in, cut wide and flat through the grass, wheel ruts worn deep into the dirt. A carriage path. He was following it, working out in his head what direction might lead toward something like a town, when the smell hit him.
Blood. A lot of it. And under the blood, smoke.
He came around a bend in the tall grass and stopped.
Two carriages, both fine work, painted wood and iron fittings, one of them on its side with a wheel still spinning slow. A third burned further off, black smoke rising straight up into the still air. Bodies everywhere, more than he wanted to count, scattered across churned and scorched ground, the grass flattened and burned in patches, weapons dropped where hands had stopped holding them.
He walked through it slow, reading it the way he had learned to read a kill site, though this was nothing like anything he had killed. Some of the dead wore plain clothes, servants maybe. Some wore mail and boiled leather, guards. A few wore heavier armor with a crest worked into the breastplate, knights. And scattered among them, rougher men in mismatched leathers, no crest at all. Bandits, or something like them. Whatever had happened here, it had not been one-sided.
He was alone in the wide open with nothing but hide clothes and a bag of dried meat, and he was not going to stay that way.
He stripped out of the tracksuit for the last time.
It had held him together for seven months, patched with vine and gone thin at the knees, and he folded it once and set it aside without ceremony, because there was nothing left to feel about it that he had not already felt in the winter, and pulled a dead guard's clothes on instead, close enough to his size. Dark leather vest, brown trousers, boots that fit tight but fit. A belt with pouches and a holster he found a use for immediately, and he went through the dead methodically after that, the way he'd once gone through a kill for everything useful in it.
Coin first. He filled a pouch heavy with it, taking from every body that had any, guard and knight and bandit alike, because money did not care whose pocket it came out of. A pair of daggers off a guard, well balanced, the handles worked with some design he didn't recognize but liked the look of. A sword off one of the knights, longer than anything he'd swung before, the weight of it foreign in his hand but not unwelcome. He found an overturned carriage with a good leather bag inside, sturdy, big enough for everything he was collecting, and slung it over one shoulder like it weighed nothing at all.
He was turning to go when he heard the water, and under it, breathing.
He followed the sound into the grass, and within a few dozen strides the ground sloped down toward a river, and there, half in the shallows, was a body that was still a body in the sense that mattered. Barely moving. Barely breathing.
He walked closer.
The man was dressed nothing like the others he'd stripped. Finer cloth, cleaner cut even soaked through with blood gone dark and rust colored, the kind of clothes that had never once been made for fighting in. Eto crouched beside him, and the man's eyes snapped open and a dagger came up fast and shaking, pointed at Eto's chest.
The man was talking. Fast, panicked, in the same language Freya had spoken to him for two days, sounds Eto had never managed to pull any meaning out of no matter how hard he'd tried.
"Me not understand," Eto said.
The man's eyes went wide.
"Fucking Keth. Why didn't you say so, asshole."
Eto just stared at him.
"Are you with them?" The dagger was still up, shaking harder now. "What are you doing here?"
Eto reached out and took the dagger out of the man's hand before the question had finished leaving his mouth, the man's grip too weak to hold onto anything, and turned it over once in the light. Good steel. Nice balance. A design worked into the pommel he found he liked. He dropped it into the bag on his shoulder.
"Are you here to kill me? Who are you?"
Eto knelt down to the man's level.
"Me. Eto." He pointed at his own chest.
The man let out a wet, broken laugh that turned into a cough halfway through. "Well, nice to fucking meet ya, Eto. I'm Rordan, of House Donalia."
The coughing took him again, harder this time, blood coming up with it, spattering down his chin and into the river water pooling red around him.
"Shit," Rordan said, once he could speak again, his voice gone thin. "This should not be happening." His whole body was shaking now, small tremors he didn't seem able to stop. "Damn those fuckers. If only I'd been prepared."
He coughed again, more blood, and reached up with a hand that would barely obey him, fumbling at the collar of his ruined shirt.
"Listen." His eyes found Eto's, fixed there with the kind of focus a dying man finds from somewhere. "Whatever those bastards paid you, we can pay you more."
He was fading between words now, his breath coming shallow, but his hand kept working, pulling something free from inside his robes, a stone the size of a fist, red, catching what light made it down through the grass and the smoke.
"Running into a Keth, of all people, out here." A ghost of a laugh, no strength left behind it. "Must be destiny, or some crap like that."
He held the stone out. Eto took it.
"Take this. Get to the capital. Saurata." Rordan's voice was barely a whisper now, blood bubbling at the corner of his mouth. "Take it to my niece. Tell her it was the Okutake."
He went still.
Eto stood, turning the red stone over in his hand. Some kind of crystal, heavier than it looked, warm in a way stone had no business being warm. He set it in the bag with everything else.
Then he heard the sound, a fast wet snap of air, and his hand came up on instinct and closed around the arrow before it reached his chest.
He looked up.
Two hundred meters off, upriver, hidden behind a cluster of rocks, he caught the shape of movement, someone already nocking a second arrow.
Something dark and cold and very old moved through him, and he growled.