The city was still burning when Ciri stopped looking at it.
She had made herself look long enough to be certain — that the keep’s banner was gone, that the black smoke was not the smoke of a house fire that would be put out by noon, that the sound she had heard two hours ago in the royal apartment’s anteroom and had been running from ever since was the sound of something that had already ended.
She made herself look until she was certain, and then she stopped looking, because there was no useful information left in looking and the boy beside her was clearly waiting for her to stop.
He was trying not to show that he was waiting.
She filed this.
“My name is Ilara,” she said.
“Ilara of the lower city.”
The boy’s eyes moved — not to her face, which would have been the obvious tell, but down and to the left, which was the direction of a person who had just heard something wrong and was deciding whether to correct it.
He caught himself.
It took him a half-second too long.
She filed this too.
“Adam,” he said.
Just the name.
Not my name is Adam, the way a real introduction worked, but Adam the way you said a word you’d been using a long time and didn’t need to explain.
“You knew where I was,” she said.
“I heard—”
“You came from the west.” She had not forgotten.
She had been running corridors in her head all day and she had not forgotten the direction of anything.
“The east tower faces south.
You came from the west.”
He said nothing.
He had the stalled look of someone choosing between two bad answers — which meant neither was good, which meant the true answer lay somewhere else entirely.
She looked at his hair, which was white.
Not bleached white the way a Witcher’s was — she had seen paintings of Witchers, had read the descriptions in the herbology texts her tutor had inexplicably included in her education, had understood that the white came from the mutations, from the Trial of the Grasses, from the things done to a body to make it into a weapon.
This was different.
This was the kind of pale that belonged to a person who had always been that color, the same way her grandmother’s hair had been silver since before her grandmother could remember.
The Continent had no name for a boy who looked like this and moved like this and knew things he couldn’t know.
She didn’t have a name for it either.
That was, in her experience, the beginning of something she needed to understand before it became something that owned her.
“You knew my name,” she said.
“My real name.”
“Most people in the lower city knew the princess’s description,” he said, which was technically true and not an answer.
“You weren’t looking for the princess.” She watched him.
“You were looking for me.
There’s a difference.”
It stayed open, which was not what liars did.
Liars got careful.
This was someone who had decided, in the half-second available for deciding, to let her see that she was right.
“Yes,” he said.
“Why.”
“Because—” He stopped.
Started again.
“Because the road north is safer than the road south.
Because you need someone who knows the road.
Because standing in the city waiting for someone who knows the road is how you die.”
All of that was also true.
All of that was also not the answer.
She looked south.
The smoke was a continuous column now, the kind of thing you could see from sixty miles away, the kind of signal that told every army on the Continent that something had finished.
She thought about Calanthe — the specific way her grandmother’s eyes had gone when she was deciding something irreversible, the quality of stillness before a hard order.
She thought about Eist, who had gone out to the field defense because he would not watch from walls when there was fighting to be done, and who had not come back.
She counted them quietly, the way you counted things you needed to make real.
Grandmother.
Eist.
The guards at the inner keep.
The chamberlain on the gallery floor.
She did not let herself count further than that, because the list would not have a bottom and she could not afford the bottom right now.
“It’s cold,” she said.
Meaning the fields.
Meaning the wind off the ash.
Meaning something she couldn’t find the word for, a thread in the air that had nothing to do with the season — there and gone, like a wire brushed in the dark.
He looked at her sharply.
She didn’t know why.
“We need to move,” he said.
The outriders she heard before he did — hoofbeats, not the heavy cavalry pace of a column but the loose two-by-two canter of a search pattern, which meant they were looking rather than going somewhere.
She caught his arm and pulled and they went flat into the ditch at the road’s edge without discussing it, because there was nothing to discuss, and lay in the smell of burned grass and ash and waited while the patrol went past.
Four of them.
Black plate.
They were looking east, into the fields, which was why she and Adam had not gone east.
When the sound faded she sat up.
Her hands were shaking, which she was aware of and considered irrelevant.
“Can you keep doing that,” she said.
Not a question about the air in the corridor — she wasn’t going to call it what she suspected it was, not yet, not until she had more data.
About the knowing.
About the routes.
About the thing he was clearly using that he clearly wasn’t going to explain.
“Yes,” he said.
“Most of the time.”
Most of the time.
She noted the qualifier.
She had grown up in a court where qualifiers carried as much information as the thing they qualified.
“Then you’re useful,” she said.
Which was as far as trust went, for now.
He looked like he’d been about to say something else, something that would have been more honest and cost more, and had decided against it.
She saw the decision.
She let it pass, for now, because the road north required moving and she was not going to have this argument in a ditch while outriders were still within earshot.
She stood up.
He stood up.
They went north.
She did not look south again.
Behind her, invisible and miles away, Calanthe’s banner hung in someone else’s window; and in the field below, in a trampled place that had been a field defense two hours ago, Eist Tuirseach of the Skellige Isles lay in the grass, and the longships that would have sailed for him would now sail for no one.
She was alone, except for the boy ahead of her who knew her name and wasn’t explaining why.
She had decided: she would go with him exactly as far as he was useful.
Not one step on faith.
Adam, three steps ahead and not looking back, was thinking something she couldn’t read from his shoulders.
But his shoulders were bowed under something heavier than his pack, and she was fairly certain it was the weight of a choice that had cost him something he hadn’t told her about.
She decided she would find out what it was.
Eventually.
She went north.
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