The trouble with deciding to stop running is that you still have to deal with whoever's already caught up.
The man who asked questions did not leave Thornwatch. He settled. Three days after the shadow-wolf cull, he was still at the Lodge, still buying rounds, still salting the ground with his easy, warm, terrible little questions — and I was still eating every meal in a hood, drinking ale I didn't want in the darkest corner, being, as far as anyone could see, one more nameless hunter with nothing to hide and nothing worth hiding it.
"He's not leaving because he's found nothing," Vera said, low, in the cabin. "He's not leaving because he's found almost. That's worse. A man who finds nothing rides on. A man who finds almost digs in and waits for the almost to become a something."
"So we make the something look like a nothing," said Lila, who had been unusually quiet and was therefore, I'd learned, unusually dangerous. She flipped her grubby notebook shut. "We can't scrub what he's felt. But we can give him a better thread to pull. A shinier almost, somewhere else."
The plan was Vera's, executed by Lila, and it was a small masterpiece of frontier gossip. Over the next two evenings, in the warm noise of the long hall, a rumor grew — the way rumors grow best, from three different mouths that had never coordinated, each one certain and each one slightly wrong. A hooded figure, seen four days east, out toward the Cinderfen outposts. Strange kills. A chill in the woods. A young man who kept his face down and paid in old coin. Lila seeded it into two drunk trappers and Bruno, bless his uncomplicated heart, repeated it as gospel because by the third telling he genuinely believed he'd seen the man himself.
I watched Renn — that was the name he'd given, Renn, plain as a stone, and about as likely to be real — catch the thread. I watched him not react. That was the unnerving thing about him: he never leaned in, never brightened, just filed each piece away behind those flat, patient eyes and kept smiling and buying rounds. But on the third morning his horse was saddled.
He found me by the water barrel before he went. Alone. Which meant he'd waited for alone, which meant the whole friendly performance had never once stopped being work.
"Cinderfen, they tell me," he said pleasantly, cinching a strap. "Long ride. Cold country."
Stolen novel; please report.
"So I hear," I said, in Bruno's flat drawl, keeping my eyes on the bucket.
"Mm." He didn't mount. He stood there a moment, looking at me, and when he spoke again the warmth had thinned to something almost like honesty. "Here's a thing I've learned, hunting men. The bounty says one thing — the Demon King of Ash, the end of the world, alive or dead. And then you get to a place, and you feel a wrongness in the woods, a night where wolves die too quiet, and you look around for the end of the world." His flat eyes moved over me, unhurried, thorough — I understood, suddenly and completely, why Cassia and this man were the same kind of dangerous. "And what you find is a polite lad in a hood who won't meet your eye. The math doesn't close. And a bounty man who chases math that doesn't close ends up dead, or worse, wrong in front of people who paid him."
My heart was going very hard. I said nothing, because nothing was the only safe thing to say.
"So I'll ride to Cinderfen," Renn said, swinging up into the saddle at last, "and chase the shinier almost, like I'm meant to. But I'll tell you what I told the old woman who runs your Lodge, since you've clearly all got the same disease of protecting strays." He gathered his reins. "I'm the first. I'm not the last. The purse is too fat and the prophecy's too loud. There'll be others, and the next ones won't waste a warm week being pleasant." He looked down at me. "Whatever you're hiding — and you are hiding, lad, I've been doing this too long to pretend otherwise — get better at it fast. Or get somewhere the paper never reaches. There's less of that than there used to be."
And he rode out the north gate, into the cold, chasing a lie four days east, and left me standing at the water barrel with a bucket going still in my hands.
Osla was watching from the Lodge door when I turned around. She didn't say anything. She just gave me one long look out of her good eye — the same look Odo had given me, the same I know what you are and I've decided it doesn't change what I owe you — and went back inside to her stew.
That night I told the others what Renn had said. All of it. The first, not the last. The math that didn't close.
"Then we'd better close it ourselves," Vera said, unrolling the stolen sheaf across the cabin floor, "before someone less kind does it for us. We start tomorrow." She tapped a symbol on a brittle page — the same ring-and-slash we'd found carved under Odo's floor. "And we start with these. Because I keep finding this mark in a scroll that reached across worlds to grab you, Adrian, and carved into bedrock older than the kingdom, and I refuse to believe those are two different accidents."
[Rank E: progress 44%.][Objective (self-set): investigate the origin of the relic circles.]
"Where do we even look?" I asked.
Lila was already grinning. "Oh, that's easy," she said. "We look for whoever's been watching you since the Weeping Grove."