Three days out from the Fall, the road north had found its own rhythm, which was the rhythm of too many people walking in the same direction for not enough food.
Adam had positioned them in the middle of the column — not the front, where the pace-setters were and where you got looked at, and not the back, where the exhausted fell behind and got separated, but the middle, where anonymity was easiest and the pace was dictated by the people ahead rather than any decision of his own.
Ciri had accepted this positioning without comment, which he’d taken to mean she’d analyzed the logic of it herself and arrived at the same conclusion.
They had been walking for six hours since dawn.
His feet knew it.
Hers probably did too, though she gave no sign.
A column elder named Torben, who had appointed himself the column’s authority on the grounds that he owned two carts and a mule, had made his feelings about the two unattached children known twice already — the first time by looking at them, the second time by directing a question about their household past them to nobody.
Adam had not engaged with either approach.
He was watching the column’s flanks.
“You keep looking east,” Ciri said.
“Patrol grid runs north-east to south-west,” Adam said.
“If a sweep comes, it comes from the east.”
“How do you know what direction the grid runs.”
“I’ve been watching where the patrols appear and disappear for three days.”
This was true.
It was also not the whole answer.
He was aware that she was aware it was not the whole answer.
They walked for another ten minutes before she said, very quietly, the thing she’d been working toward since the steading: “What are you not telling me about me.”
Not about the route or about your powers or any of the other things she’d circled.
About me.
She’d found the specific question she needed to ask.
Adam kept walking.
He looked at the road ahead — the column’s back, the dust, the autumn-lightened trees to the west, the yellow-brown of the Cintran lowlands that stretched north and would eventually become something colder and harder.
“There are things,” he said, “that I don’t know how to explain yet.
That I need to understand better before I—”
“That’s not an answer.”
“No.”
“Stop giving me non-answers dressed as answers.
I grew up in a court.
I know what they look like.”
She was not wrong.
He stopped walking.
She stopped two steps later and turned.
Her face was doing the flat-assessment thing — not anger, which would have been easier, but the careful evaluation of a person who had decided to find out where the load-bearing wall was before she leaned on anything.
“Some of it,” he said, which was more honest than anything he’d said to her yet, “I genuinely don’t know how to explain.
Some of it I don’t think you’re ready to hear.
Some of it I don’t think it’s safe to say out loud on a road with other people’s ears.” He held her gaze.
“All of it is real.
None of it is meant to manage you.”
She looked at him for three long seconds.
“You said ‘yet,'” she said.
“You need to understand better yet.”
“That’s a timeline.”
“That’s a timeline.”
The flat-assessment face continued for another two seconds.
Then it did something he hadn’t expected — not softening exactly, but a recalibration, the face of someone who had received partial information, categorized it as incomplete but not a lie, and decided to defer the account for now rather than forcing a reckoning that wouldn’t yield what she needed.
“Fine,” she said.
Which again was not acceptance.
But it was a different fine than the steading’s fine — this one had something practical in it.
“I need something to do,” she said.
“Give me something real.”
He looked at her.
Then he looked at the column’s eastern flank — the gap between the outermost walkers and the tree line that was, right now, about forty meters, and that the column’s elected authority Torben was not watching because Torben was focused on keeping his mule content and his carts moving.
“Scout the eastern flank,” he said.
“Forty meter radius.
You’re looking for movement in the trees — anything that breaks the pattern of wind in the leaves.
If you see horses, you don’t approach, you come straight back and you tell me the direction, count, and approximate speed.”
She had already started moving.
He caught her arm, not hard, just a stop.
“Don’t get seen.”
She gave him a look that communicated, very clearly, that she had been evading palace guards for entertainment since she was eight and didn’t need the instruction.
He let her go.
Torben appeared at his elbow approximately thirty seconds later, which was longer than he’d expected.
“You can’t just send a child into the woods,” Torben said.
“She volunteered,” Adam said.
“She’s twelve.”
“She’s very good at not being seen.” Adam kept his eyes on the tree line.
“Also, the eastern flank has been unmonitored for three hours.
If there’s a patrol sweep, you’ll find out when the soldiers arrive in the column.
Or I can find out now.”
Torben considered this, looking at Adam, then at the tree line, then at Adam again.
“You’re strange children,” he said.
“Yes,” Adam agreed.
Torben went back to his mule.
From the far left side of the column, moving along the edge of the tree line at a pace that was casual and consistent enough to read as a child wandering, Ciri was barely visible through the column’s dust.
He tracked her position by the specific way she moved — forward-leaning, low center of gravity, the walk of someone who had been told by a grandmother’s guards to glide, child, not stomp since before she could remember.
She was good.
He heard Jaskier before he saw him.
The bard had attached himself to the column’s tail the previous afternoon and had been working his way forward one conversation at a time, which was his navigational strategy through most situations.
His voice was recognizable from forty meters — not because it was loud but because of the specific cadence of a man who was performing even when nobody was asking for a performance.
He was explaining the Fall of Cintra to three refugees who had been in the Fall of Cintra.
“A terrible, magnificent catastrophe,” Jaskier was saying, in the tone of a man taking notes.
“One feels the epic quality of it immediately.
The scope.
The tragedy.”
One of the refugees, a woman of perhaps fifty with the patient face of someone who had decided that the only sane response to the world ending was to be polite to everyone until she had an opportunity to be somewhere else, said: “My house burned down.”
“Yes, exactly.
Exactly that.
The personal within the historical.
That’s the line.”
Adam did not quite smile.
He filed the bard’s presence — road north, three days out, exactly where he should be — and returned his attention to the tree line.
Ciri came back from her first circuit seventeen minutes later, moving at the same casual pace she’d left on, and dropped into step beside him.
“Two riders,” she said.
“Northeast, maybe two miles, moving parallel to the road and slightly slower than our pace.
Not sweeping — they’re following.
Scouting ahead of something.”
“How long have they been on that bearing?”
“Since I first saw them.
They didn’t change when I moved.” A pause.
“Which means they’re not tracking me.
They might be tracking the column.”
He thought about that.
“You’re sure of the direction?”
“Yes.” No hesitation.
“I oriented on the sun.”
He looked at her.
She looked back, direct, with the specific expression of a person who had just done a real thing and was waiting to see whether it would be treated as a real thing.
“Good work,” he said.
Which was accurate.
The expression shifted a fraction — not pleased exactly, but something that had needed acknowledgment and had gotten it.
“Next task,” she said.
He almost laughed.
He stopped it in time, not because the situation didn’t warrant it but because she was absolutely serious and treating the almost-laugh with the seriousness it deserved seemed correct.
“Give me an hour,” he said.
“I need to think about those riders.”
She accepted this and moved to the column’s inner middle, where the crowd was thickest, and became anonymous the same way she’d become anonymous on the eastern flank — completely, and with the ease of someone who had been practicing the skill since before she had a name for it.
Adam turned the riders over in his head.
East, paralleling, slower than the column.
Following was not the same as hunting.
Following was a scout maintaining contact on a target without closing.
Which meant the target was the column, and the close was coming, and the decision about when to close was being made by someone who wasn’t the riders.
He had no Sight left to tell him when.
He had, instead, a twelve-year-old girl who could navigate by the sun and count horses at two miles and come back with a direction, distance, and behavioral inference, and who was currently making herself invisible inside a refugee column and waiting for him to give her something useful to do.
He watched Jaskier settle in beside the fifty-year-old woman and begin composing, out loud, a verse about her house burning down.
That’s going to be a terrible song, he thought.
Probably.
He kept walking north.