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I was tired, but it was still a struggle to get to sleep again after that. I tossed and turned, and spent a lot of time staring out the window. When I did manage to drift off, my sleep was restless, troubled, and brief. It was almost a relief when the sun came up and gave me an excuse to stop trying.

 

For once, I was the first one downstairs. Corbin was still in his room, though he wasn’t asleep; I could hear him moving around in there, fiddling with something. The guests were either asleep or doing a convincing imitation of it.

 

I got down to the taproom, and stopped, hesitating. It was cool, and dim, and silent. Empty.

 

The first thing that should be done was getting the fires started again. Everyone knew that; it was the first thing you did in the morning. Even if we hardly needed them half the time, it was…what you did.

 

But I didn’t deal with the fires. I didn’t start them, didn’t feed them. Corbin had always been very insistent upon that, even when I protested that I could do it. After the events of the past few days, I wasn’t sure I should argue with him on that particular topic.

 

So I left them alone, and went about my usual routine. I opened up the taproom, cleaned everything up again, and then went down to the cellar to collect things for the soup. I grabbed Changed beets and barley, onions, potatoes and turnips, a head of cabbage. After a brief pause, I grabbed meat, as well, the last of the lamb and the rest of the rabbit Black had killed. It wasn’t enough meat to feed everyone anyway, and putting it into the soup would help to stretch it out.

 

I took my time in the cellar, lingering over things. I wasn’t sure I wanted to leave, really. The cellar wasn’t a safe place, exactly, but it was a comfortable one. It was private. And it was…I knew it. I knew what to expect down here, knew what the rules were. Compared to the uncertainty and fear surrounding what was happening in the village lately, it was a relief to know.

 

But in my experience, hiding from problems was usually a temporary solution at best. Eventually, you had to do something about them. So after a few minutes, I took the food and went back upstairs.

 

Corbin was in the kitchen when I got there, making bread. “You’re up early,” he commented, not pausing as he mixed the dough. It was a simple sort of dough, as such things went; flour and salt, sugar and water, a bit of starter to add yeast to the mix. Corbin didn’t measure. He never did.

 

“Couldn’t sleep,” I said, setting the bag of vegetables and meat on the counter.

 

He did pause now, for just a moment, before resuming his mixing. It wasn’t so much a break as a stutter, a momentary hesitation before he remembered what he was doing. “Nightmares again?” he asked, trying and failing to keep a light, pleasant tone.

 

I nodded.

 

For a few seconds the only sounds in the kitchen came from the mixing of the dough and the crackle of the fire. “We can make them leave, if you want,” he said at last. “Just tell them they aren’t welcome to stay here.”

 

I shook my head. “Better we can see them,” I said.

 

Corbin smiled slightly. “That’s a good point,” he said. “Well, it’s your choice. You’re the one who has to deal with having them around. But if it gets to be too much…well, just tell me.”

 

I nodded gratefully, and grabbed a knife to begin cutting the vegetables.

---

I’d just finished hauling in water when Black walked into the kitchen. She looked cheerful and energetic and, all things considered, disgustingly perky for how little sleep she’d gotten. I felt exhausted, and I knew that she must have slept less than I did, but to look at her I’d never have guessed that.

 

I was starting to wonder whether we’d been Changed in opposite directions. I needed more sleep than a human to be functional, and it was starting to seem like Black didn’t sleep at all.

 

“Come on, Silf,” she said to me, beckoning. “I want to show you something, and we should get going before the others wake up.”

 

I looked at Corbin. He laughed and shook his head. “You might as well go with her,” he said. “Black usually gets what she wants, I’ve found. I can take care of things here for a while.”

 

I shrugged, and followed Black out the back door.

 

“All right,” she said, pausing just outside the inn. “Do you know somewhere we won’t be interrupted? Fairly nearby, hopefully; I’d rather not lose too much time walking.”

 

I thought for a moment, then shrugged and led her to my secret place, the hollow in the rock where I went when I needed to get away. It was a bit cramped for two, but it was nearby, and I’d never been interrupted there.

 

Just inside the trees, Black grabbed a pair of packs off the ground. I was reasonably confident that they hadn’t been there when we went through in the dark earlier that morning, so she must have carried them out before she came downstairs. The one she handed me was the smaller of the two by a considerable margin, but it was still a large pack, and heavy. It made me feel very glad that it was only a few minutes to our destination.

 

Black seemed rather dubious when she saw the rock outcropping. But once she’d followed me through the crack, squeezing a bit to fit through with the pack, she grinned widely. “Oh, this is perfect, Silf,” she said. “This is excellent.”

 

I shrugged. “I like it,” I said simply.

 

“I can see why,” she said, walking over and sitting down at the edge of the pocket. “It’s a nice place.”

 

I shrugged again, and hopped onto my usual rock. I curled up there, watching her.

 

Maybe a minute passed in companionable silence before Black spoke again. “I didn’t do this just to get you out of the inn,” she said. “I actually do have something to show you. Do you know how to defend yourself at all?”

 

I shrugged, a gesture that probably came across a bit oddly given that I was curled up on a rock. “I channel,” I said.

 

“You said you knew a bit. Is it enough for that, do you think?”

 

Rather than answer, I reached into my purse and pulled out an iron half-penny. I held it up in front of me, staring at it.

 

Everyone I’d talked to had their own words for channeling. Or, well, everyone who could do it; most people didn’t have the knack. Those who did all experienced it differently, though. It was a very personal sort of experience.

 

The best analogy I’d ever come up with was a river. Not a stream, like the one we’d used earlier, or even the river north of town. No, this was a real river, like the Blackwater at its stronger points, and in flood at that. The magic was like that, something so much bigger and stronger and more than me that any comparison was absurd. The scale was simply too different for there to be a meaningful comparison.

 

To continue the analogy, then, channeling was quite literally channeling the force of that water. Sometimes it went as far as building water wheels and levies, but that was difficult and dangerous. Most of the time it was more a matter of just putting a pipe into the river, aiming it more or less where you wanted the water to go, and hoping that nothing went wrong.

 

I opened myself up to the magic, and gasped as it hit me. I felt a sort of vibrating tension in my body, butterflies in my stomach and my fur standing on end. At the same time, I could feel my awareness expanding, a buzzing pressure against senses that had no name from every direction.

 

I focused that awareness on the coin in my hand, concentrating. And the I opened a channel.

 

The bit of iron shot across the pocket, slamming into the rock hard enough to shatter the coin.

 

“Damn,” Black said, staring at the broken half-penny. “That’s pretty good. Very good, for someone without training.”

 

I shrugged, struggling to close myself off again. It was always harder to block the magic out again than it was to let it in. It took a few moments, but eventually I was alone in my body again, the sense of pressure fading. “Metal is all I have,” I said, relaxing again. “They did some tests, when I first showed potential, and it was pretty definitive. Decent in metal, but no potential at all in anything else. They probably would still have trained me eventually, but…”

 

“But the attack happened first.”

 

I nodded.

 

“Can you do other things with it?” Black asked. “Move larger things, maybe?”

 

I nodded. “A few things,” I said. “Not much, but I know a few tricks.”

 

“All right,” she said. “Well, I’ll trust your judgment on that. I can’t channel, and metal wasn’t a common channel in the war, so you probably know what you can do with it better than I can.”

 

I smiled wryly, and shrugged.

 

“It won’t work inside the wards, though,” she said. “Will it?”

 

“Not well,” I said. The wards kept the vast majority of magic out, which meant that you didn’t have to worry about being Changed inside them, but it also made channeling almost useless.

 

“You still need to be able to defend yourself there,” she said. “Which is why I brought this.”

 

I’d known what was in Black’s pack, generally speaking. I could feel the metal in it while I was channeling, and there were only so many reasons to be carrying that much metal. But it was still a bit of a shock when she dropped her pack, and opened it, and I saw what was inside.

 

Weapons. Lots and lots and lots of weapons.

 

There were knives in there, blades meant for piercing armor or carving flesh rather than the daily tasks most knives were put to. A legion-issue short sword in it sheath. A light hatchet that obviously wasn’t meant to be used on wood. A pair of long, curving blades that I didn’t recognize. Even a slightly smaller version of the spear she carried with her.

 

“Go ahead and drop yours,” Black said. “There’s a bow and some arrows in there. I think that’s probably the best place to start.”

 

It was only a couple of minutes before I had the bow out and drawn, and I was taking shots at an oddly colored rock on the other side of the pocket. Black stood behind me, coaching me on how to hold myself and aim.

 

The first few shots went reasonably well. I was wildly inaccurate, of course, even at such a small distance. It was painful, too, forcing the muscles in my arms and back to work in ways that they weren’t built for. But I could do it.

 

The fourth shot was different. I knew, as soon as I released the string, that something was wrong. I felt a sudden spike of pain, and something pulled me off balance.

 

The next thing I knew, I was sitting on the ground, the bow lying on the ground next to me. My finger hurt like hell, and there was a fair bit of blood on my hand and the ground.

 

“Silf?” Black said, sitting next to me. “What happened?”

 

“String caught on my claw,” I said, stumbling over the words a little. I held my hand up, trying to keep it from shaking too much. “Tore it out completely, it looks like,” I said, looking at my forefinger.

 

“I didn’t realize you had claws,” Black said, grabbing my finger and squeezing it to staunch the bleeding.

 

“Not very long,” I said. “And they retract. Just caught it wrong.”

 

She grimaced, grabbing the bow with her other hand. “Right there,” she said, setting it down and pointing at the string. “Looks like you cut it almost completely through.” She paused, obviously thinking. “Will the claw grow back?”

 

I nodded.

 

“All right,” she said. “Bow probably isn’t the answer, then. And with how your hands and arms are built, I don’t think you’ll be able to use a sword properly. Axe or spear, then. I’m thinking axe is more likely. Are you ready to keep going, or do you want to wait?”

 

I shrugged. “I’ll be fine once the bleeding stops,” I said. “Losing a claw hurts like a bitch, and it’ll be tender for a while, but it’s not really serious.”

 

Black seemed like she was about to say something, but then she closed her mouth, and grabbed the hatchet from the bag.

---

An hour or so later, I was sitting on a rock at the edge of the fields west of town. I should probably have gone back to the inn with Black, but I wasn’t ready to deal with it quite yet. I’d have to deal with the legionnaires at some point, but at the moment I just didn’t quite feel up to it.

 

So I went here, instead, to watch the river. There was something very calming about it. The motion, the sound, the way the light sparkled off its surface.

 

It was peaceful. I felt like I needed something peaceful right now.

 

I’d been sitting there for maybe three minutes when I heard a voice. “You mind if I join you?”

 

I glanced over and saw Sumi, the older legionnaire of the group. I tensed briefly, then shook my head sharply and went back to staring at the river.

 

He sat down next to me with a sigh that made me think of tired muscles and creaking bones. I noted that he left a few feet between us, leaving me plenty of personal space. “What’s your name?” he asked. “I didn’t catch it the other night.”

 

“Silf.”

 

“I’m Sumi,” he said. “It’s nice to meet you.”

 

I nodded, a bit stiffly.

 

“You don’t like us very much,” he asked. “Do you?”

 

“Don’t know you.”

 

“But you got stiff when you saw it was me,” he said. “And the other day, when we showed up, I thought you were about to bolt.”

 

“Not fond of the legions.”

 

He nodded. “I figured it was something like that. We’re not here for your friend, if that’s what you’re thinking. Hideo was trying to scare him the other day, but the truth is, nobody cares anymore.”

 

I was tempted to ask what he was talking about. Clearly he knew something about Corbin’s history, which was something I’d been wondering about for a few years now.

 

But, then, even if I asked, could I trust what a legionnaire said about it? Probably not. So I just shrugged.

 

I expected him to say something else at that point, or just leave. But instead he sat there, letting the silence thicken until I felt pushed to fill it. “I grew up in the Whitewood,” I said. “And I was there when it burned.”

 

Sumi sighed, a long, quiet sound. “Ah,” he said. “That wouldn’t leave you with good memories of the legions.”

 

I shook my head.

 

“I was there, too,” he said. “The whole Fourth Skellish was, we were the backbone of the assault force. I was just a foot soldier, didn’t have anything to do with the orders. But it was still…I’m not proud of what we did.” He shrugged. “Don’t expect that makes it any better, but it’s all I have to offer.”

 

“Where is the road going?” I asked quietly.

 

He snorted. “There is no road,” he said. “You already knew that, I’m guessing.”

 

I nodded.

 

“They’re going to keep saying there is,” he said. “Keep stringing people along. But I’ve never been much of a one for the cloak and dagger.”

 

“What are you doing here, then?”

 

Sumi smiled at me. “I wouldn’t worry about it,” he said, standing. “It’s nothing to do with you.” He looked down at the river for a moment, looking pensive. “This place reminds me of Kaido Shrine in the capital,” he said. “Sometimes people go there to get clean.”

 

He shook his head abruptly, and started to walk away. “Good luck, Silf,” he said. “I’ll see you around.”

 

I watched him go, leaving me alone with the river.

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I wasn’t sure what woke me, at first. I was awake, but it wasn’t clear why; there was no sound of movement from below, no sunlight coming in the window.

 

Then I heard the tapping again. It was a quiet sound, very quiet, barely audible even to my ears. But it was there, and it was too regular to be explained by the wind.

 

I looked out the window, more carefully this time.

 

Black, clinging to the wall, smiled at me through the window, and waved. Her skin looked very dark under the light of the moon.

 

I frowned, worried. Then I got out of bed, and walked over to the window, and undid the catch.

 

“What are you doing here?” I asked, my voice catching in the middle of the sentence. I coughed, and a spike of pain went through my throat; if I didn’t know better I would have thought I’d torn something.

 

Well. Today, it seemed, was not going to be a good day.

 

“Our imperial friends are leaving,” Black said, not taking any obvious notice of my lapse. “Very quietly, in the dark. I want to know where they’re going, and I thought you might too.”

 

I didn’t hesitate a moment before nodding. I was curious enough that I would have probably wanted to know anyway, but the events of the past few days settled any doubts I might have had. There was something strange going on here, and I needed to know what it was.

 

I couldn’t afford for anything to happen to Branson’s Ford. It was a terrible, dying little town in the middle of nowhere, but it was all I had.

 

“All right,” Black said. “Go ahead and get dressed, then. They were moving pretty slowly, I think we should be able to catch them. You do all right in the dark, I’m guessing?”

 

“Eyes aren’t bad,” I said, throwing on a simple wool cloak. “Ears are better. I get by.”

 

“That’s good,” she said. “I’m counting on you knowing the terrain better than them to keep us out of sight. Come on.” She dropped rapidly out of sight.

 

I followed her out, latching the window behind myself. It looked like Black had fallen straight to the ground, but I wasn’t comfortable with taking that much of a fall, and I took the tree down like usual.

 

“This way,” she said, the instant I was on the ground, starting around the corner of the inn. “They left their horses. Probably wanted to avoid the noise and the delay. But it means we should be able to catch up to them pretty easily.”

 

I nodded, and hurried to catch up to her.

 

Black moved through the trees with perfect confidence, heading southwest into the trees. I was impressed, though I supposed it made sense. Her eyes were huge; it fit that she would be able to see in the dark.

 

I couldn’t see so well in the dark. Better than human, but certainly not as well as a cat; things were little more than grey blurs in the moonlight. But Black hadn’t been wrong; I knew this ground about as well as anyone. I wasn’t worried about stumbling.

 

We kept going, heading southwest into the forest. I didn’t see any signs of a trail, but I trusted Black’s judgment. If she said they went this way, she was probably right.

 

I still raised an eyebrow when I realized we were going past the warding posts, though. Not so much that Black was going outside the wards; she was as Changed as I was, after all, and had about as much to fear from the magic outside the wards. But everything I’d heard suggested that the people of Akitsuro went to great pains to stay inside warded areas. They’d had the wards long enough now that whole generations had grown up with them, being taught from birth to think of them as their bulwark against the dangers of the outside world.

 

What was so interesting in this forest that it had brought the imperial contingent out from behind their wards? What was so secret that they had to do it in the dark hours of the morning?

 

We kept going for a few minutes. Then I heard a voice, drifting towards us on the wind.

 

It was speaking Tsuran, rather than Skellish or the pidgin of the two that people in Branson’s Ford mostly used. I knew Tsuran, but it had been years since my language lessons, and this was true imperial, not the accented version I’d grown up with. Between that and the distance, I couldn’t quite pick out words.

 

But I could pick out the sound. That was Andrew’s voice, and he sounded nervous.

 

I stopped dead where I stood, and looked around. “This way,” I said after a moment, turning slightly to the north. “Stream.”

 

“What do you want that for?” Black asked, following along.

 

“They have a fire channeler,” I said, picking up speed. “Can feel your heat. Wet our cloaks and he won’t feel us.”

 

“Ah,” Black said. “I didn’t realize he was fire.”

 

It only took a minute or two for us to reach the stream I was thinking of. It barely deserved the name, really; it was barely a trickle, running along the bottom of a small ravine. It was dry more often than not, and only running now because of the heavy rains we’d had earlier in the summer.

 

But it was water, and it was cold, and that was what mattered. I took off the heavy cloak I’d thrown on earlier, and shoved it in the water, making sure to soak the whole cloak. Then I pulled it out, wrung out enough of the water that it shouldn’t drip, and draped it around my shoulders again.

 

A shiver ran through me as the wet fabric settled onto me. But it was a momentary thing, almost more a trained response than something that was really justified. The fur on my shoulders and down my spine was enough to keep the fabric from lying flush against my skin, and it would take time for the cold water to reach my skin.

 

Black did the same thing just downstream from me, not even flinching as she put her cloak on again. Though she had clothing on underneath, which probably mitigated the shock somewhat.

 

We kept going, moving back towards their path. I kept to the higher areas, thinking that it might give us a better line of sight on them. I wasn’t expecting to actually see them, not with lighting this bad, but I thought Black might be able to.

 

As it turned out, I’d misestimated them. They were carrying an alchemical lamp, one much brighter than I was used to seeing. It shed enough light that, from above, I could actually see them before I could hear them.

 

All five of them were there, and looking ready for a war. Sumi and the man whose name I didn’t know both had their short swords drawn; Sumi was at the front of the group, and the other man was at the back. Aelia, just behind Sumi, had her arbalest drawn and loaded, and in front of the other swordsman Andrew was carrying the lamp in one hand and a knife in the other.

 

The only exception was the surveyor–Hideo–who looked completely at ease. He was wearing his imperial robes rather than armor or anything more suited to the wilderness, and he didn’t have any weapons in sight. He looked so spectacularly casual that if I couldn’t see his surroundings I might think he was strolling in a city park.

 

“I don’t get it,” Andrew said, glancing around nervously. “I thought the sightings were east of town.” I could hear him quite clearly now, though we were still plenty far enough away to avoid being noticed. Being Changed had its advantages.

 

“Yes,” Hideo said, in a tone of obviously forced patience. “And the townsfolk didn’t react when we said we were attacked there.”

 

“So?”

 

Aelia was the one to answer him this time, clearly taking pity on Hideo. “Towns like this love to ask strangers questions,” she said. “Gossip is half of what there is to do in these towns. So if there were ghouls east of town, they would have gone into stories about them when we said that.” She paused, glancing at some perceived noise in the underbrush, before continuing. “They’re denning somewhere else and just attacking to the east,” she said. “Bet on it.”

 

I paused. “What’s she talking about?” I asked, in a whisper.

 

Black shook her head. “First I’ve heard of it,” she said. “Odd that they would send this group to deal with ghouls, if that is what they’re here for.”

 

I nodded. Ghouls were…well, they were certainly dangerous, in their own way, but it was a constant sort of danger. They could kill you if you made a mistake, but they were a monster that everyone learned to live with. The empire might send a few legionnaires to deal with a ghoul outbreak, but they wouldn’t send a scholar.

 

Irritatingly, they fell silent after that, leaving me with more questions than I’d had before. I supposed we’d gotten lucky to hear as much as we had, but still, it was irritating having them only explain the barest part of what was going on.

 

“What’s the other half?” Andrew asked suddenly around a minute later.

 

“What?” Aelia asked, sounding a bit annoyed now. She might be more willing to answer his questions than the rest, but clearly she wasn’t thrilled about dragging the rookie along.

 

“You said gossip was half of what there was to do in a town like this one,” he said. “What’s the other half?”

 

“Get bored, get drunk, and get laid,” she said. “Usually in that order.”

 

I had to chuckle at that. Aelia might be a bit crude, but she clearly understood places like Branson’s Ford well enough.

 

“Enough,” Hideo said sharply, his voice cutting through the night like the crack of a whip. “We’ve gone far enough, and not seen any sign of the ghouls. We need to head back if we’re going to reach the inn before dawn.”

 

“That’s our cue, kid,” Black whispered to me. “We want to stay ahead of them.”

 

I nodded, and started heading back. I knew a more direct route back to the inn than the one they’d taken out.

---

Back home, Black followed me up through the tree to my room. She waited for me to slip the latch open again, and then waited for me to go inside.

 

“I’ve got a question, if you don’t mind,” she said, sitting down on the floor next to the window.

 

I shrugged, and went to the closet, pulling out more clothing. I didn’t really need it for warmth, not on a warm summer night, but now that we weren’t in a rush it was worth making the nod to propriety.

 

“You’re obviously a pretty young girl,” she said. “It can be hard to tell with the Changed, sometimes, but I’m usually fairly good at recognizing that, and you don’t give me that feeling. You can’t be much above eighteen, can you?”

 

“Seventeen,” I said, sitting on my bed and looking at her.

 

“I figured it was something like that,” she said. “But you seem rather mature, for your age. And you know how to hide from a fire channeler.”

 

“I know about channeling,” I said, shrugging.

 

“Can you channel, then?”

 

“A bit,” I said. “Metal. I taught myself some things.”

 

“But not fire,” she said. “And you don’t have a formal education in it.”

 

I shook my head.

 

“But you know what to do about it,” she said. “That’s the exact trick we used in the war. You’re fast enough to keep up with me, and you speak Tsuran. And then there’s the way you look at the people in this village. The way they look at you.”

 

I just waited. Black had a point, and she’d get to it; it wasn’t worth wearing out my throat to push her.

 

“You’re not from around here,” she said. “Are you?”

 

I shook my head. “I was in the Whitewood,” I said. “Came south after.”

 

Black went very, very still. “I see,” she said, and she did seem to be looking at me in an entirely different way, now. She looked like she suddenly understood a great many things. “Your parents,” she said, in a tone that made me think of someone handling something fragile. A bird’s egg, perhaps, or an irreplaceable work of art. “Did they…?”

 

I shook my head again. “They died in the attack,” I said. “I got lucky and made it out.”

 

I could almost see the thoughts running through Black’s head, as she looked at me. I could see her picturing me, trying to get out of the Whitewood at the end. Picturing a Changed girl, injured and alone, on the road south afterward, with all the other refugees. I could see her reconsidering how she thought of me.

 

“I’m sorry to hear that,” she said, her voice suddenly sounding softer than I’d heard it before.

 

There it is, I thought, having to work to contain a bitter laugh. What did you do in the war? Well, now you know.

 

It didn’t look like Black was enjoying the knowledge. It was a revelation, but not something anyone was happy to hear. The sacking of the Whitewood was one of the ugliest stories from a very ugly war. People were happier to forget that it had happened.

 

I couldn’t blame them. I would have liked to forget it, too.

 

“You said you fought,” I said. “Here?”

 

“In Skelland, yes,” she said. “Not in this exact area; I was mostly fighting north of the Blackwater.”

 

“What did you do?”

 

She stared at the floor, and didn’t say anything for a long moment. “I killed people,” she said, finally. “A lot of people.”

 

“I don’t understand how you could do that,” I said. I was looking out the window, now, not at her. I could just see the sky beginning to lighten to grey with the coming sunrise.

 

“I thought it was necessary,” she said. “We all did. I know it seems monstrous, now, the things we did. But at the time, we had our reasons.”

 

“Was it worth it?”

 

Black sighed. “I don’t know,” she said. “At the time, I thought so. I really believed in what we were doing. But now, looking at you, it’s…not quite as simple as that.” She fell silent again, brooding. “It seems like nothing is ever simple.”

 

I nodded. “Thank you for telling me.”

 

“Thank you for listening,” she said. “You should get some sleep, Silf. Morning isn’t far away now.”

 

I nodded. She climbed out the window, and dropped to the ground. Presumably she would climb back in at her own room.

 

I latched the window again behind her, and then I went and sat on my bed.

 

I spent a long, long time staring at the locked box at the foot of the bed. I didn’t open it, didn’t even reach for the key that I always, always carried. I just looked at it.

 

And then I curled up, and I went back to sleep.

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The rest of the day was uneventful, but…tense. There was a sort of nervous energy in the air, a sense of barely concealed anxiety. It wasn’t just me, either. Corbin’s face was far away as he went about the daily chores, and when it was done he didn’t polish bottles or find other work to keep his hands busy. He just stood behind the bar, staring at nothing. Black was still out in the forest, and I wasn’t sure whether she’d be coming back.

 

Around noon, we once again had a few people come in for food and drink at the middle of their workday. The crowd was actually larger today, and younger. They were clearly hoping to see the imperial surveyor. They would have known he arrived before he even reached the inn; it was hard to keep secrets in a town like Branson’s Ford.

 

If that was what they were expecting, though, they were disappointed. The surveyor and his staff were tucked away in their rooms, and seemingly not inclined to leave. Not a one of them had so much as poked their head downstairs since they went up.

 

Somehow that didn’t make me feel any better. I was just as glad not having the legionnaires around, but I couldn’t forget that they were here. It felt…ominous.

 

I was agitated through lunch, distractible. I wasn’t quick to respond the way I usually was; several times people had to remind me that they’d said something. They noticed, too. Ketill’s young son Karl joked about how I was probably mooning after the surveyor, and that was why I was distracted. Gunnar looked uncomfortable when he heard that, and he looked at the floor, but he didn’t correct the boy.

 

I laughed it off, and for once I was glad that my throat was so damaged. My laugh sounded strange enough that it was hard to tell when it was forced. I went back to work, and managed to keep my focus more clearly on what I was doing.

 

It wasn’t so long before they left, after that. It was becoming clear that the surveyor wasn’t going to be attending lunch, and with Black still absent they had nothing much to gawk at. Roughly an hour after they got there, each of the workers tossed back a last drink for the road and handed over a few coins. Corbin handed back their change, instant and exact as always, but his face was distant, and his movements were mechanical. He didn’t talk, or laugh, and his expression was so blank and empty it was barely an expression at all.

 

Once the taproom was empty again, I had my own lunch. The soup didn’t have any rice today, since that was a bland staple in the south, but I’d thrown in a Changed variety of beet that was apparently a delicacy in Akitsuro, and it tasted good enough. I ate two bowls of soup, and a slice of coarse bread, and a lightly roasted leg from the rabbit Black had killed the previous day.

 

After lunch, I spent an hour in the silent taproom with Corbin. We didn’t work, or look at each other. Then I went to the woods behind the inn and was quietly, violently sick.

---

Hours passed. The imperials still hadn’t come down from their rooms. A part of me wanted to sneak up and see if I could eavesdrop on them, and figure out just what was so bloody interesting up there. Another part wanted nothing more than to run, and keep running as far as my lungs could carry me.

 

I tried to slip out to my hollow for a nap, since I hadn’t quite gotten enough sleep the previous night. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I had a nightmare. I was screaming and running and I was so confused and I didn’t know where to go and it hurt and I couldn’t breathe and everywhere there were screaming running people and my throat hurt and I couldn’t see and there was blood everywhere and–

 

And I woke up. I was soaked in a cold sweat, breathing hard, whimpering. Long minutes passed before I could get my breathing under control again. When I tried to stand, my legs were shaky, and I had to sit down.

 

It had been a while since the nightmares came last. I wasn’t happy to see them again, but it was, under the circumstances, probably to be expected. Somehow, I didn’t think I was going to be sleeping much for a while. Old habits, as they say, die hard. Sometimes I wonder whether they die at all; it doesn’t feel like it. You can cover them up, but scratch the paint and there they are, good as new.

 

I went back to the inn, and drew a mug of beer to take the edge off the memories. Corbin watched, and he didn’t say a word.

 

It was around sunset when our guests showed themselves again. Or, well, one did. It was the legionnaire who’d been in the heavier armor, I was pretty sure, the mage. He wasn’t in the armor now, though; he was wearing casual clothes of some light fabric I didn’t recognize.

 

“Corbin?” he said suddenly, poking his head into the taproom from the kitchen. I jumped slightly, but managed to control my reaction quickly; it was easier, without the armor. “That’s the name, right?”

 

“That’s me,” Corbin confirmed, sounding wary. “Did you need something?”

 

“If it’s not too much trouble,” he said, with a wry sort of smile. “You mentioned food earlier, I was wondering when that was. Stomach woke me up, and rations are getting old.”

 

“Soup and bread are ready now,” Corbin said. “Pie is in the oven, and I was about to put on the lamb, so those will be done shortly.”

 

“I can wait for that,” he said, smiling more broadly now. “Thank you kindly, I’ll be down in a few minutes.” He pulled his head back through the door, and I heard his footsteps on the stairs.

 

“Polite young man,” Corbin said quietly, watching him go. “And he’s wearing cotton this far north, too. He must be new.”

 

Black came back around five minutes later, and went straight to the fire. She didn’t say a thing, just sat down as close to it as she could physically get without scorching the chair and rested her spear against the wall. The villagers began trickling in at around the same time; unsurprisingly, there were many more of them than usual. There were people there that I hadn’t seen in months, Harald and Johannes, Livy the mayor’s daughter. Everyone in Branson’s Ford had heard what was happening now, and every one of them was acutely aware of what it might mean.

 

For the first time in a long time, things felt hopeful in that taproom. The laughter wasn’t forced, it didn’t have an edge of desperation to it.

 

Which was good, because it helped to cover the raging anxiety I still felt. It covered for Corbin’s empty expression, and the way Black kept glancing at the door.

 

The legionnaire walked into the taproom a few minutes later, as we were still handing out soup and bread to everyone that wanted it. He seemed a bit surprised to see how rapidly the taproom had filled up, but he took it in stride, taking a seat at the bar. Two more of the imperials followed him in a moment later, the woman and one of the swordsmen; the other swordsman and the surveyor were nowhere to be seen.

 

“What can I get you folks?” Corbin said to the legionnaires with a smile, as I continued fetching bowls of soup, and slices of bread, and plates of lamb in gravy.

 

“Food for all of us, I think,” the mage of the three said. “And…do you have any alchemical liqueur?”

 

“That I do,” Corbin said. “Cherry, blackberry, grapefruit, and mint.”

 

“The blackberry sounds perfect,” the legionnaire said.

 

“That’s a silver penny a glass,” Corbin said, retrieving a tall, slender bottle from the shelf behind the bar. It wasn’t one that I’d seen him open before; if not for the constant cleaning it would likely have had a thick layer of dust on it.

 

“That’s a bit steep,” the legionnaire said.

 

Corbin shrugged. “Not many alchemists around here,” he said. “I couldn’t charge less or I’d be losing money on the deal.”

 

“Fair enough,” he said, smiling again. “Ah, hell, it’s worth it.”

 

“Says you,” the other man said, snorting. “I’ll stick with beer, thanks.”

 

“Vodka for me,” the woman said. “And a cup of water.”

 

Corbin nodded and started pouring drinks, while I got their food and the water. Once that was done, I went to stand in the corner behind the bar. It was the darkest, quietest corner of the room, far from the fireplace and the tables. I stood there, and I watched.

 

The villagers were intimidated, I could tell. It was hard not to be intimidated by the representatives of the legions. I wasn’t the only one with bad memories on that topic, either; Ketill kept shooting them dark looks, and Ilse left within a few minutes of their arrival.

 

But the people of Branson’s Ford weren’t shy by nature, as a rule, and again, they were desperate. It wasn’t long before they were asking questions, pestering the legionnaires, who put up with it in good humor. Standing in the shadows, and listening, I heard a great deal. More than any of them would likely have guessed.

 

The mage’s name was Andrew, a more northern name; he was probably born after the expansion started. He was younger than the rest, and it bothered him, though he tried not to let it show. He was unfailingly polite, and seemed as intimidated by the villagers as they were by him. He was indeed a channeler, and specialized in fire. He got drunk rapidly, and when he did he became expansive, loud, and apologetic.

 

The other man was the oldest of the bunch, a man named Sumi. He was quiet, and not as relaxed as the others; he kept looking at the exits, checking his balance. He had a great many scars, and he moved like someone who was starting to get old, starting to slow down and get stiff. He drank beer, and not much of that, not enough to get drunk; he was clearly irritated that Andrew was drunk.

 

The woman was named Aelia, and appeared to be somewhat intermediate between the other two in personality. She seemed more experienced than Andrew; she talked to him in a way that made me think of a woman talking to a younger brother she was fond of. But she was more expansive than Sumi, and far more talkative. In particular, she seemed to have an endless string of dirty jokes, some of which were impressively obscene.

 

That was the general impression I got of them on a personal level. It was comforting, in some ways. They were surprisingly human, with the armor off. After a few hours I could almost see them as people rather than legionnaires.

 

Apparently they’d been resting most of the day; they were attacked by a group of ghouls on the road east of the village, and while none of them had been injured, it had turned into a lengthy running battle and left all of them feeling like they could use a day to recover. Andrew, in particular, was clearly shaken by the whole event.

 

Beyond that, though, they were far less forthcoming on the topic of what they were here for. The villagers questioned them repeatedly on that topic, with very little result. Sumi just grunted, Andrew was immensely proud to be on the mission but obviously didn’t know the details, and Aelia told them to ask the surveyor. Hideo, she called him, very informally.

 

They didn’t provide any real information. But then, that was informative in itself. There were only so many reasons why they wouldn’t be telling the villagers all the details, and none of them lined up with the official purpose for their visit.

 

It was worrying. As though there were anything about this whole situation that weren’t.

 

The night went on longer than most nights did, and it ended on a happier note than any night I could remember in that inn, at least for the villagers. But morning was still early, and the impromptu celebration had to end. The villagers made their way to their homes, and the legionnaires went up to their rooms.

 

Corbin and I stayed in the taproom for a time, cleaning and putting everything in order. Notably, Black stayed below as well. She didn’t say a word, but she and Corbin were giving each other very significant looks, the sort that made me think they knew something I didn’t.

 

Not that I didn’t know enough. There were no ghouls to the east of Branson’s Ford. It was bad terrain for them; too much competition with beasts from the river, and not enough cover. There were sometimes ghouls in the forests to the south, or the hills to the west. But never to the east.

 

Everything was silent when I went upstairs, the surveyor and his legionnaires sleeping in their rooms. Every door was locked. I made my way to my own door, at the other end of the hall with plenty of empty rooms between them, and unlocked it.

 

Inside, everything was the way I’d left it. Nothing had been touched, nothing had been disturbed. The locked box was still very securely locked.

 

I let out a sigh of relief, and locked the door.

 

I stripped, moving slowly and feeling like I was in a daze. I set the clothes aside, and checked the lock on the door again, making very sure that it was locked. After a few moments I barred it as well. Then I curled up on the bed, and stared out the window.

 

Sleep took a long time to find me.

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The lunch crowd wrapped up their business fairly shortly after that, and left. There was no surprise there. There was work to be done in the fields–and, for one of them, at the forge–and any break from that work to sate their curiosity had to be a short one. You had to make hay while the sun was shining. It was the way of things.

 

After they were gone, and the taproom fell silent once again, Black got increasingly fidgety. Corbin and I were both used to it, and we settled easily into our routines; he polished the bottles behind the bar until they sparkled in the light from the alchemical lamp, while I swept the floor again and made sure that the furniture was all right where it belonged, to the inch.

 

Black, though, wasn’t used to sitting in an empty taproom waiting for something to do, and it clearly grated on her. She got fidgety, and then she got twitchy, and then she jumped to her feet abruptly. “I’m going to go take a look around town,” she announced.

 

“Silf can show you around,” Corbin said, not seeming surprised. He didn’t even pause in polishing a sealed bottle of red wine from the western coast, where grapes tended to grow better than they did here.

 

I nodded, rather eagerly, and got to my feet. Black laughed, and said nothing.

 

Giving a tour of Branson’s Ford wasn’t something I’d been called on to do before. Most of our guests weren’t terribly interested in the village; it was a place you passed through, nothing more.

 

It wasn’t a hard thing to do, though, as such. There wasn’t a lot of village to tour.

 

Black was taller than me, but didn’t know the area and didn’t move as quickly, so we ended up keeping more or less the same pace. That was actually rather impressive; more often than not I found myself waiting on people. I supposed that if she was a hunter, though, she spent a great deal of time walking, mostly through rough terrain. And she was Changed.

 

I started with the center of town, such as it was. There was a cluster of nine buildings, all rather simple in construction. Where the inn had a good stone foundation, thick wooden walls, and a slate roof, these were built on dirt and roofed with thatch. The walls, at least, were sturdy enough; lumber was easy enough to find here.

 

“Is this it?” Black asked, looking around.

 

I shook my head. “Some of the farmers live out by the fields,” I said. “This is just the town proper.”

 

My tone was a little defensive, but mostly it was dismissive. I could understand her confusion; the town center of Branson’s Ford was not an impressive sight. There was the blacksmith’s, which was currently still and cold; coal was expensive, and there wasn’t enough work to be worth lighting the forge every day. There was the general store, which acted more as storage than anything, since Ilse’s stock was basically just whatever she bought off traveling merchants or villagers who went to the market. There were some houses, only half of which were even inhabited. None of the buildings, not even the mayor’s house, had a second floor.

 

A bustling metropolis, it was not. The only person in sight was Sigmund, sorting through a pile of metal scraps outside the smithy. He waved when he saw us, and then apparently fumbled something, because he flushed and went back to focusing on his work.

 

We kept going, and it wasn’t long before the trees thinned out and we saw the fields. They were…well, more expansive than the town center, but not necessarily more impressive. There were a few houses, and we could just barely see the orchards to the southeast, but by and large it was just flat fields out to the trees. To the southwest they ran up against the hills instead, where the sheep and goats were taken out to graze.

 

And to the north, across the fields, was the source of the village’s name. The Blackwater was a rather impressive river, and mostly it was too deep and fast to cross safely. No one in their right mind, no matter how much of a rush they were in, would set foot in the rapids of the Blackwater.

 

Here, though, the river spread out. It was broad, and shallow, and slow. Branson’s Ford was the only actual ford across the river for a hundred miles in either direction.

 

“That the mill?” Black asked, nodding towards a large structure on the bank of the river to the west. We couldn’t see the wheel from this angle.

 

I nodded.

 

“Does the miller live out there, then?”

 

I shook my head. “Big house back in town,” I said. “He’s the mayor.”

 

Black snorted. “Of course,” she said. “So he pretty much completely runs town, then. Lovely.” She paused. “Maybe you can answer a question for me, then. Something seems off about this place. The fields are fairly extensive, that’s a large mill. And if a Count lived here, it must have been fairly important. How did it go from that to…this?” She gestured vaguely back at the center of town.

 

“The ford,” I said. “It was important, brought merchants through. Then the empire came. Legion engineers built a bridge over the river east of here. Not as far out of their way.”

 

“Ah,” she said. “And with an easier route, the trade dried up.”

 

I nodded.

 

“That’s why people were so excited to hear about the surveyor, isn’t it?” Black asked, sounding like she already knew the answer. “If they build a road through here, it will bring the merchants back. It might make Branson’s Ford matter again.”

 

I nodded.

 

“Thanks,” she said, thoughtfully. “That explains some things.”

 

On the way back to the inn, she killed a rabbit and a squirrel with a sling. When I looked at her oddly, she said that it wasn’t good for a growing girl to eat nothing but soup and bread, and she wanted to make sure I got some meat tonight.

---

The next morning came early, too. I’d gone to sleep earlier this time, and I felt almost rested. I wasn’t expecting Black to wake me, since she’d said she would go hunting in the morning. But I wanted to get my sleeping done earlier, so that I wouldn’t have to waste hours on it while she was around.

 

Instead, I was woken up by someone pounding on the front door, hard enough to rattle it in its frame. “Open up,” he shouted, before pounding on the door again.

 

I sat bolt upright in my bed, startled out of sleep. My heart was racing. There was something…very familiar about that voice. It took me a long second to remember where I was. To remember when I was.

 

When I did, I could calm myself a little. I wasn’t back then; things were better, now. It hadn’t been a fever dream.

 

But I was still distinctly concerned. I wasn’t entirely sure why, but something about this situation felt…distinctly foreboding.

 

Moving as quickly as I could, I threw on clothing and went downstairs, locking the door behind myself.

 

As fast as I’d gone, though, Corbin was faster. I’d barely made it to the taproom when he was at the door, undoing the locks. They slid home with a soft click-click-click, and he leaned the bar against the wall, and he pulled the door open.

 

The person standing outside was in legion armor. One set of armor looked a lot like another, but this was regulation-issue, I’d recognize it anywhere.

 

I flinched away, and took a couple steps back until my back was against the wall next to the kitchen door. I was whining softly, and my ears were laid back flat against my head. I got the noise under control after a moment, and started breathing again, but I was still tense, legs bent and ready to run at a moment’s notice. Not for the door, that would be too obvious, but the stairs were close. I could get out my window and lose them in the trees; there wasn’t a chance the branches would hold them, not in that armor. If I could make it to the warding posts, I would be fine.

 

Corbin shot me a quick glare and then turned back to the legionnaire. “Come in,” he said, stepping out of the way.

 

The legionnaire did, and then more came behind him. There were four of them in total, three men and a woman, all human. Of course they were human; there weren’t many of the Changed in Akitsuro, from what I’d heard. Two of the men had the standard short sword on their belts, while woman was carrying an arbalest. The last man was wearing heavier armor than the rest, and carrying a number of leather pouches, but didn’t have an obvious weapon. Almost certainly an alchemist or a channeler, then, which made him the most dangerous of the group by far. I’d only seen legion war magic once, but if he was anything like that he could kill everyone in Branson’s Ford and never even break a sweat.

 

My attention was mostly caught by the fifth person in the door, though. He was…striking.

 

It would have been hard to find a stronger contrast to the rest of the group. He was shorter than they were, and looked nothing like a soldier; he barely had more muscle than I did. If anything, he reminded me of a scribe I’d known back in the Whitewood, a kind older man who’d given me candy and a place to hide when the other children wanted to pick on the Changed girl.

 

But I knew enough to be afraid of him anyway. He was wearing robes in the black and gold of Akitsuro, which meant he was an imperial officer of some kind. And that meant that he was, in all probability, in charge of the legionnaires.

 

“Good morning,” he said, sweeping into the taproom with a broad grin and a confident stride. “I am Surveyor Hideo Azukara, with the Akitsuro Engineering Corps.” He held out his hand.

 

Corbin stared for a second before he shook it. When he did, I was guessing he almost crushed the smaller man’s hand in his grip, though the surveyor didn’t show any sign of pain. “Corbin,” he said, his tone flat. It sounded strange after the surveyor’s much more grandiose introduction, abrupt and almost threatening.

 

“I’m sure,” the surveyor said with a charming grin. “The legion sent me to look into the possibility of building a road through this area for easier access to the western coast,” he said.

 

“I’m sure,” Corbin said, letting the other man’s hand go. “Which legion?”

 

The surveyor’s grin got a little wider. “Fourth Skellish,” he said, almost smugly. It meant nothing to me, but Corbin actually flinched.

 

“I see,” the innkeeper said.

 

“My guards and I will be in the area for some time,” the surveyor said. “I have to examine the surrounding territory, you understand, make sure that it’s suitable. As this appears to be the only inn in town, we’ll be looking to rent rooms here for several days.”

 

“Silver penny a night,” Corbin said instantly. “Per room.”

 

I gaped. I’d never, not even when the inn was at its most crowded, seen him charge more than a bronze penny for a night. He was asking the legionnaires for ten times what anyone else had to pay.

 

And none of them batted an eye, either. The surveyor pulled out a black cloth purse, and handed over a large silver noble, worth five silver pennies in itself. It was a coin that I’d only seen the wealthiest of merchants use before. “A pleasure doing business,” he said, smiling. “It’s wonderful dealing with a man who can keep his word, isn’t it?”

 

Once again, I found myself wondering what I was missing. I didn’t understand what he meant by that parting comment, but Corbin looked like he was about to strangle the surveyor on the spot. He might have tried, if not for the legionnaires standing right there. “Food will be ready in the evening,” he said, almost snarling. “Charged separately.”

 

“I look forward to it,” the surveyor said. “In the meantime, we have horses that need cared for.”

 

Corbin looked at me. I took the hint gladly, darting for the back door so that I wouldn’t have to actually go past the legionnaires. I didn’t have that much experience stabling horses, but I knew more or less what to do. And given that these were legion mounts, I was guessing that they were very well trained.

 

As I walked around to the side of the building where the stables were, I saw Black. She was standing out past the stables, far enough into the trees that she could vanish at a moment’s notice. She was staring at the inn, and she looked…worried.

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Upstairs, I went to my room, and locked the door behind myself. I glanced around the sparse room, more by habit than anything else.

 

Everything was where it should be. The bed in the middle of the room, the desk, a few books. The locked box was still locked, and it didn’t look like anyone had tampered with it.

 

I let out a breath that I hadn’t realized I’d been holding.

 

I thought about grabbing a book on my way out, but a yawn decided me against it. I went straight to the window, undid the latch, and slipped out to stand on the ledge outside. It was a sturdy wooden ledge, the sort that had been fashionable in these parts around fifty years earlier. It had been put in more for aesthetics than any structural reason, and I wouldn’t have trusted it to hold much weight. Which was fine by me, since I didn’t weigh much.

 

A bit of string was enough to close and latch the window behind myself, and then I turned away from the window. There was a sizable oak tree growing outside my window, one that had been old when I got here. The nearest branch was plenty thick enough to hold my weight, and it was just a few feet away, an easy jump from my ledge. It was a familiar, practiced movement, and I didn’t have any trouble at all in making it.

 

For most people, I thought, clambering around the branches of the tree might have been frightening. I was around thirty feet above the ground, jumping from branch to branch. For someone that grew up in the Whitewood, though, this was familiar ground. I knew which branches were thick enough to be safe and which weren’t, I knew how to recognize damaged wood that I couldn’t trust my weight to.

 

I walked easily in to the trunk, then hopped up to a higher branch and climbed out the other way, around the corner of the inn. A quick jump took me across the gap to another tree, this one a spruce. I swung to the next branch down, ran and jumped to another spruce, and then hopped to the ground.

 

I was grinning by the time I felt dirt under my feet again. I liked climbing. It was like carrying water, in a way. Comforting.

 

I started to jog off through the trees, then caught myself yawning again and had to slow to a walk.

 

It still only took a few minutes to reach the edge of the village. The manor had only barely been included within the wards, and that reluctantly. The old Count was not popular with the people.

 

A couple minutes later, I reached the edge of the village. It wasn’t obvious, at a glance, where it was. At a glance, it looked like any other patch of trees.

 

It wasn’t until you looked closer that you saw the warding posts.

 

Some alchemical items were flashy and dramatic. Others, like the filter I’d used earlier, or the icebox, didn’t look like much at all. They did their job without any fuss at all.

 

The warding posts were one of those. They looked like simple poles of black iron, around a foot taller than me, spaced out roughly every fifty feet. Up close it was easy to see that there was more complexity to it than that. A complex web of geometric designs was traced out over the surface of each post in what looked like silver, bronze, glass, and stranger substances. The whole thing was covered in a layer of alchemical enamel to keep the patterns from being marred.

 

I didn’t know how the warding posts worked. No one did, really, except for the imperial engineers who installed and maintained them.

 

But I knew what they did. The posts were what maintained the web of wards around the village. They kept the monsters out, kept the magic out. There was one like it around almost every settlement claimed by Akitsuro. They were the emperor’s great invention, the reason why Akitsuro had gone from a minor coastal kingdom to an empire in the space of a few decades.

 

The warding posts were fragile, and imperfect. Occasionally something slipped through. But they protected people. Even the most fervently anti-imperial people of Branson’s Ford were glad to have the warding posts, and there weren’t many of them that would willingly set a foot outside the wards.

 

I stepped past the invisible boundary they marked without a second thought. I wasn’t concerned about ghouls so close to the village, and the magic itself wasn’t really a concern. There wasn’t much it could do that hadn’t already been done to me.

 

The forest here was, for all practical purposes, the same as that inside the wards. But it felt different. It felt…remote, and private. The hushed air under the trees felt more peaceful, and less ominous.

 

I kept walking, more slowly now. There were no real paths out here, but I knew the way, and there was no hesitation in my stride as I turned and started off to the south. The ground got rougher here, steeper. That was the other reason the inn was at the edge of the wards, when in other directions they extended out to the enclose the farms. The ground here was too steep to farm readily; it wasn’t even worth the effort of logging.

 

It was perfect for me, though. There were lots of large trees around, and it was steep enough that I could go on all fours to relieve some of the strain on my back. It wasn’t really any easier–the changes to my spine and hips weren’t dramatic enough to make walking on four feet easy, even on a slope where my arms could comfortably reach the ground. But it was a different posture, and that helped.

 

I walked for a few more minutes, up into the hills, until I saw my destination. The rock outcropping was distinctive, and large enough to easily see over the trees. It wasn’t precisely impassable–I could probably have climbed it–but it was harsh enough to discourage the casual interest.

 

I made my way to the base of the rock, where a raspberry bush concealed a narrow crack. I dropped to my knees and squeezed past it, accepting a few scratches as the cost of doing business. After a moment of crawling through the dark I emerged into a sort of pocket in the rock, maybe fifteen feet across.

 

I’d found the crack picking berries, and looked inside out of curiosity. Since then the hollow had become my secret place, where I could go to get away from things.

 

There wasn’t much there. A flat rock that would be in the sunlight once the sun rose a bit further, a scraggly pine tree, some thin grass. As private places went, it was far from extravagant.

 

But it was mine.

 

I climbed onto the rock, and curled up, and went to sleep.

---

Judging by the position of the sun it wasn’t so much later when I woke up. A few hours, maybe; it was somewhere around noon.

 

It’s amazing what a difference a few hours can make. When I woke up again my head felt much clearer; I was able to focus properly, I felt less jittery. It was still less sleep than I was accustomed to, but I knew better than to try for any more right now. I was rested enough that curiosity was outweighing fatigue, and that meant that more sleep was impossible.

 

I hopped off the rock, and made my way back to the inn. I very much doubted that I’d see anyone in the woods out back of the inn, but I was still slow and cautious on the way back, checking every few seconds to be sure that no one was there to see me. When I got close I climbed back into the trees to enter my room by the window.

 

It was probably unnecessary. But Corbin was the only one who knew about this particular habit, and I’d rather keep it that way. Explaining things to anyone else would be…difficult. Far simpler to just pretend that I’d been up in my room resting.

 

Once I was in, and my window was securely latched behind me, I took a moment to check my appearance in the mirror. It was a full-length mirror, quite possibly the only one in the village. The alchemical treatment to produce mirrored glass was relatively simple, but it involved some expensive materials, and even a scrap of one was a luxury. One as tall as I was was…beyond extravagant.

 

I’d found it in the cellar, not long after I moved in. Presumably, it had once belonged to the late Count. Occasionally I thought about what scenes might have been caught in the mirror back then, but not often. I’d heard enough stories to know that I didn’t want to know.

 

Right now, I just wanted to make sure that I looked relatively presentable. Anything past that was out of my reach, but I could at least look like I’d been in my room rather than running around in the woods.

 

So I pulled my black hair back from around my face, combing out most of the knots and pulling out the pine needles that had lodged in it. The patchy fur on my face was generally too short to catch anything, but I brushed my fingers through it just in case.

 

The clothing, at least, I didn’t have to worry about. I was wearing wool homespun and leather, the same as almost everyone else in the village did. It was too tough to show much in the way of wear, and if there were burrs or pine needles in it people would assume that they’d been stuck there since I was last out fetching wood.

 

Once I was satisfied, I left, locking the door behind myself, and went downstairs.

 

Corbin was in the kitchen, staring at the stove. I could smell another pie baking, but at present he was just standing there, and it was obvious that keeping an eye on the pie was just an excuse not to be in the taproom. He barely even glanced at me as I walked past.

 

Black, unsurprisingly, was sitting tight by the fire. She looked bored, which I couldn’t really blame her for. I was rather well acquainted with being bored in that room.

 

“Silf,” she said, turning to look at me immediately. “Have a nice nap?”

 

I shrugged, smiled, and grabbed a mug from behind the bar. I found that I was thirsty after the walk back to the inn.

 

There were a great many bottles behind the bar, and two large barrels–one of beer, one of vodka. The vast majority, though, I didn’t touch. Corbin wasn’t insistent upon it, but I knew he disapproved of me drinking strong alcohol. More importantly, so had my parents. So mostly I drank water, or milk, or cider. Occasionally a cup of small beer or wine.

 

I was in a self-indulgent mood today, though, and it was a special day. So instead I opened a small, sealed bottle and poured it into the cup. It looked vaguely like watered-down milk, but it was actually a thin drink made from rice and spices. It was, apparently, popular in the heartland of Akitsuro, where those were more readily available; this far north it was an expensive luxury.

 

I took the cup and went to sit with Black, though I left rather more room between myself and the fire than she had. I took a slow sip of the drink, savoring the sweet-spicy taste, and waited.

 

Black seemed content to sit in silence for as long as necessary, so in the end I was the first to speak. “When are you leaving?” I asked, barely loud enough to be heard over the fire.

 

She started to speak, hesitated, then shrugged. “I don’t really know,” she said. “I don’t really plan my travel out much anymore. I just stay in places as long as it feels right, and then I move on. I’ll probably be here a few days at the least, though.”

 

I nodded. She hadn’t really answered me, but then, that was an answer in itself.

 

“You seem a little desperate for company,” she said. “How long has it been since you had any guests here?”

 

I frowned, thinking. It was harder than it should have been to put a number to it; the days tended to fade together. “A little over a month,” I said eventually, not sounding as confident as I’d have liked.

 

If Black had looked any more shocked at that, I think she’d have actually sprayed cider across the floor. “A month?” she asked. “That’s…a month? How do you even stay open as an inn if you go a month between guests?”

 

I shrugged. “The manor was sitting empty before Corbin got here,” I said. “The Count died in the war, and nobody else needed the space. And we are usually more busy than this. It’s just…been a bit of a dry spell.” I swallowed tightly and took another sip of the rice drink to soothe my throat a bit.

 

Black looked dubious, but she nodded. “I can see why you’d want to have someone around, though,” she said. “It must get boring being all on your own here.”

 

I shrugged again, and started to answer. Then I paused. I could hear footsteps outside.

 

Ah, of course. Today was a field day, but the farmers had to be dying to find out more about Black. They wouldn’t actually take the day off–they were far too practical for that, as a rule, and the harvest waited on nobody. But some of them would certainly take the excuse to come to the inn for a bit of lunch, and if they happened to see her there, well, what a nice coincidence.

 

I held up one hand, tossed back the rest of the rice drink, and then went to stand behind the bar.

 

The door opened a few seconds later, and half a dozen people walked in, five farmers and Sigmund, the blacksmith’s apprentice. They were in high spirits, talking and laughing; apparently they’d been telling some joke at Sigmund’s expense, because the young man was blushing furiously, and Kurt elbowed him lightly in the ribs as they walked in.

 

Gunnar was the one to speak up, though. The middle-aged farmer looked at me, just for a moment, then looked at the floor. “Is Corbin here?” he asked, rather lamely. Gunnar was always rather awkward around me. He still remembers what happened when I first got to Branson’s Ford, and he knows damned well that I won’t forget.

 

I nodded and ducked back into the kitchen, where he was taking the pie out of the stove. It was steaming gently, the crust a perfect golden color. Corbin’s pies were always perfect.

 

“Lunch crowd?” he asked rhetorically. “I’ll be out in a moment then.”

 

Less than a minute later we were both out in the taproom, playing out the same old dance as usual. We served out bowls of soup and slabs of bread, and mugs of beer and cider. Corbin was everywhere at once, always right there to take coins and toss out change, passing over another cup almost before the first one ran empty.

 

I tried to find work at first, but there was barely enough to keep me occupied, and it was obvious that even that was more Corbin making sure that there was something for me to do than anything. Six people, and familiar people at that, just did not need two people working. After a few minutes, I gave up and ladled out a bowl of soup to sip at while I stood behind the bar and watched.

 

The talk was lively today, and lighter than it had been in a long while. The weather was good, and it looked like we might finish out the summer without any more flooding. Even better, Karl Anders had just gotten back from taking a load of raw wool to the market, and he had news. Apparently the empire was sending an assessor to Branson’s Ford to look into the possibility of building a road in this direction for trade.

 

Black just sat by the fire, and listened. If she had any thoughts at the idea of an imperial road through town, she didn’t show them.

 

We all knew what was coming, though, and I’d barely finished my soup when it happened. It was Otto who broached the subject. He’d been putting back vodka with his soup rather than beer, and was already starting to show it. Not surprising; it was common knowledge that their fields had been flooded out at the start of summer, and it would take a miracle for them not to go hungry this winter.

 

It might have been that he was drunk, or that he was desperate, or just that someone had to do it. But I knew as soon as he opened his mouth what was about to happen.

 

“So,” Otto said to Black, in a casual tone so forced it was almost painful. “What did you do in the war, eh?”

 

And there it was. The other question that every stranger was asked. The question that had come to define an entire generation, on numerous levels. No one wanted to know the answer, not really, and yet they couldn’t keep from asking.

 

I was just glad that people seldom thought to ask me about it. I looked too young to have been involved in the war, and the people who knew better also knew better than to ever mention it.

 

Black was silent for a long moment, long enough that I wasn’t sure she’d answer at all. When she did finally speak, her voice was barely above a whisper, and her tone was bleak. “I fought,” she said. And then she fell silent again.

 

“That all you have to say?” Otto asked.

 

She considered that for a moment as well. “Yes,” she said at last. “That’s all.”

 

Otto nodded, and went back to the banter. I was guessing that was the last that would be said on the topic, at least for the moment. It was generally understood that if someone didn’t want to elaborate on an answer like that one, you didn’t want to press.

 

Within a few seconds Corbin was back to his usual routine, talking and laughing with the rest of them, his hands resting on the bar when they weren’t busy. If the laughter was a little forced, and the good humor seemed to have gone out of him, no one would remark on it. It wasn’t an unusual reaction when someone mentioned the war.

 

I was guessing I was the only person in the room who could hear the wood of the bar creaking when he gripped it. And only someone who knew him would note how his gaze lingered on Black, and see the hate and the hurt buried there.

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Morning came early. There was no surprise there. It was what morning did.

 

This morning was, or at least felt, earlier than many. I was still tired, still rubbing sleep out of my eyes, as I left my room and stumbled downstairs. Left to my own devices I’d have stayed in bed for a few hours longer. But I could hear people downstairs, movement and talk and a quiet laugh, and the notion of going back to sleep while I could hear that was absurd.

 

Corbin was usually very good about not making noise early in the day. He never mentioned it, probably in case I was sensitive on the topic, but I knew it was for my sake. But for once we actually had a guest, and business meant a reason to be active at the crack of dawn.

 

I didn’t resent that. I could always take a nap later. And the business–the busyness–was worth it.

 

I knew this place was meant to cater to visitors, that guests staying overnight was the whole point. But it happened so rarely that they felt more like an interruption, a burr in the smooth routine of our days. Some guests could be incredibly irritating in that way. Black, though, didn’t really alter the routine at all. She just moved it up by a few hours.

 

Corbin was in the kitchen with some fresh kindling, coaxing out a fire in the stove. I walked past him to the taproom, past Black at the bar, and to the front door. I unlocked it, a rather involved procedure. It had grown to be a matter of habit, but the truth of the matter was that it was rather absurd: four locks, a bar, a chain, and a chunk of stone to act as a doorstop.

 

Once that was done I started working in the taproom. It was already clean from the previous night. Every night, the tables were wiped down with a damp cloth, the floor was mopped, the bar was polished to a sheen.

 

I started sweeping the floor anyway. I attacked the job with a will, sweeping aggressively at nonexistent specks of dirt. The worn bristles of the broom barely whispered against the wooden floor.

 

It was utterly unnecessary. But it was something to do, something to keep my hands busy while I waited, and I threw myself into the work as though I truly cared about doing a good job of it. Black sat at the bar, and sipped at her cider, and watched me with an expression of vague bemusement.

 

Finally, after around five minutes of that, Corbin emerged from the kitchen. He went straight to the fireplace in the taproom, where he started to stir the banked coals into life. That meant it was my turn in the kitchen. I stopped pretending to sweep and went back behind the bar.

 

Down in the cellar, I went looking for food. There was plenty there, though anyone else would have had a hell of a time finding it. The cellar was organized more or less at random, the contents scattered around to try and make the huge space feel less cavernous. Huge casks of beer and vodka stood next to sacks, barrels, and racks of bottles. There were less inn-like things there, as well, things that had been left by the manor’s previous owners. Suits of armor, moth-eaten tapestries, that sort of thing. In one corner was a rack, stained with blood and worse. Until I’d seen it I used to assume that the stories they told about the old Count’s second son had to be fabrications.

 

It was an eerie cellar, to say the least. It didn’t help that the maze of mundane stores and sudden nightmares was dimly lit at best, just a single alchemical lamp near the stairs to cast a light through the space.

 

I wandered through the cellar, picking things almost at random and tossing them into a bag. A handful of potatoes from a barrel tucked away in the corner, some sweet onions from another barrel close to the door that was almost empty. On a whim I grabbed a few handfuls of rice from the sack; it had to be imported all the way from the heartland of Akitsuro far to the south, since the climate here in the north didn’t support it, but it was still cheap.

 

Corbin had asked me once whether I got bored of the same soup every day. I’d told him that it wasn’t the same. Sometimes there were beets in it, or turnips. Or carrots. Or cabbage. And sometimes there was a marrow bone to use for stock, and it was entirely different.

 

 

Upstairs, I set the bag in the kitchen, where Corbin was already mixing dough for bread. He barely glanced at it as I left it and went out the back to fetch water.

 

I often heard people complain about hauling water. I didn’t understand why. It was, for me, among the most pleasant tasks of the day. It was…comforting. You couldn’t really haul water wrong. I pulled the bucket out of the well, and carried it into the kitchen, and dumped it into the heavy iron pot. Then I did it again. And again. And again.

 

My arms were burning and I was breathing hard by the time I poured the last of the water into the pot. The soup today would need more water than it often did, since there was rice.

 

And, I remembered, we had a guest. There was a good chance that someone would be eating this soup other than just Corbin and myself.

 

Once the pot was filled with water, I slid the alchemical filter off the pot. It had a fine layer of sediment on it, trapped by the bright glass baffles. The water from our well was clean, but there was nothing like an alchemical filter to make you very aware of how dirty water could be and still be clean.

 

I didn’t particularly care. But Corbin was adamant about filtering the water before cooking with it. Something about metals in the water, which struck me as a strange thing to complain about when we were putting it into a metal pot, but I didn’t argue with him. It was, I’d found, generally easier to go along with Corbin’s eccentricities than argue with them. And it wasn’t like it was hard to use the filter anyway.

 

I took the filter outside and washed it with another bucket of water, rinsing the thin layer of sediment away. I carried it inside, and put it back in the drawer where it belonged. I took a knife from the drawer and sliced most of the vegetables, which Corbin would fry in a bit of oil before putting them into the soup.

 

And then, like I did every day, I stuttered to a stop. The soup was ready, or at least as ready as it could be until the rice had cooked. The bread was ready, the individual loaves set aside to rise. The rest of the lamb was in the alchemical icebox in the cellar, already cut, and it wouldn’t take much time at all to cook. The taproom was clean.

 

There was nothing left to do.

 

Corbin had the same reaction I did, a sort of frozen, uncertain pause. His hands kept twitching at his sides, like they wanted to be moving, touching, working. I kept glancing around the kitchen, like I would suddenly see something else that needed doing.

 

The silence stretched on for perhaps a second and a half before it was interrupted by a particularly loud pop from the new fire in the stove. I jumped a good inch into the air, my head twisting to stare at the flame, my ears instantly laying back against my head.

 

It took a second or two for me to relax, and turn away from the fire. I was blushing.

 

“Do you want to go back to bed?” Corbin asked, breaking the silence just as it settled into the frozen, awkward silence that sometimes swept over the inn. “I can handle things from here, I think.”

 

I shook my head and looked out at the taproom.

 

“I can take care of our guest, too,” he assured me. “She’s not the sort to ask for all that much. And I don’t have much to do here anyway.”

 

I looked at him incredulously, then rolled my eyes before looking back out to where she was sitting at the bar.

 

“All right,” Corbin said, with a hint of a laugh in his voice. “You can go talk to her. Just…be careful, Silf. That’s not someone to take lightly.”

 

I bobbed my head in a quick nod, shifting my weight impatiently from one foot to the other. Corbin nodded, the laugh more visible in his eyes now, and I was off for the taproom, barely keeping my pace in check enough not to seem pathetically eager.

 

The guest–Black–was still sitting at the bar, spear in easy reach by her side. She was staring pensively into her mug of cider, expression vague. I thought her expression was vague, at least. It could be hard to read the expressions of the Changed until you grew to know the details of their features, their shape, their movement.

 

She watched me as I slipped out from behind the bar to sit next to her. It was a rather intense gaze, one that I knew rather well. Usually I saw it before this much time had passed, but Black had barely noticed me the previous night. It was only after Corbin said I could stay and listen that I had become interesting enough to really see.

 

Now that I was, I got the same look from her that I got from everyone, sooner or later. The one that said what are you?

 

It was a bit different, coming from another of the Changed. It was the same way I’d looked at her, last night. Most of the time the humans, the people who didn’t know what being Changed was like, looked at the surface. They wanted to gawk at the mutations and the twisting of the flesh, the obviously inhuman features.

 

Someone who knew better, though, tended to look past that as relatively unimportant. They wanted to see what lay under those features, what they meant. What had been gained in the Change, and what had been lost. Last night I’d seen Black’s odd hairless skin and thought that she might not be able to regulate her body’s heat properly. I’d seen the strangely proportioned limbs and the flexible movements, and I wondered whether her joints weren’t articulated the same way a human’s were. I saw the huge dark eyes and wondered whether she could see better in the dark than they could.

 

Similarly, she looked at me and looked past the surface to the implications. She connected the dots to see the shape that was implied by what was missing, as much as what was present.

 

“Your name is Silf, right?” she asked, looking back at her cider. It was a weak attempt at courtesy, when she’d already stared too much for me to have missed it, but I could appreciate the thought.

 

I nodded, a quick gesture that was in the shoulders as much as the neck. It had taken me a bit to figure out how to mimic a normal nod, with my neck, but I’d figured something passable out.

 

“You don’t talk much, do you?” Black asked. It had a rhetorical tone to it. She’d already seen what was missing, there.

 

I shook my head anyway, smiling a little. Not very wide. A wide smile from me didn’t look much like a smile to most folk, I’d found.

 

“Can you?”

 

I paused, humming slightly. It felt…tight, tense, like stretching a muscle that was stiff, or trying to swallow something just slightly too large. It hurt a little, but mostly it felt tight.

 

I felt a quiet surge of relief at that. It was going to be a good day, then. That was…very good. It would have been quite typical for me to have a bad day when we had an interesting guest for once.

 

“Some,” I said quietly. Talking hurt more than humming, like usual, and it sounded…wrong. My voice was rough and breathy, and the enunciation was horrid. But it was understandable. “Some days more than others. Hurts, and if I talk too loud it tears things in my throat. But I can talk.”

 

She nodded, clearly not surprised. “That’s something, then,” she said. “Sometimes the more extensively Changed can’t talk at all. The vocal cords are too altered.”

 

I shrugged, nodded. I hadn’t heard that it was a common complaint, but I knew that I was relatively lucky. Plenty of the Changed had lost more than I did in the transition.

 

“Let’s see,” she said, sounding pensive now. “Corbin will have taught you to read and write, if you didn’t know already. But I imagine that has to get tedious, and I don’t want to make you talk if it hurts you. So I guess this’ll be a largely one-sided conversation.”

 

I shrugged again. “I can talk some,” I said. “It’s a good day. Just quiet, and not so much.”

 

“That’s something,” she said again. “Do you want something to drink, then? Does that help?”

 

I snorted and rolled my eyes again, gesturing behind the bar. It was an expansive sort of gesture, one that took in the whole of the inn.

 

Black chuckled. “Okay, I deserved that one,” she said. “Your place, not mine. If something to drink would help you’d have it by now.” She took a sip of her cider, probably reminded by what she’d just said. “What did you want to talk about, then?”

 

“Where?”

 

“Where did I come from, you mean?” She shrugged. “Northwest, most recently. Out near the coast. Plenty of places before that, but that’s where I was last.”

 

I hesitated. There was something about her voice that discouraged questions. If she’d sounded any more closed off, I didn’t think she’d have said a word at all. But I was starved for news from the outside world, and I couldn’t stop there.

 

I didn’t want to risk alienating Black entirely, though. So rather than anything personal, I went for the most generic of questions, the one that every traveler asked and answered in every town.

 

“The roads bad?” I asked, not looking directly at her. My voice sounded pathetically hopeful, at least to me.

 

If Black noticed that, she didn’t comment. “Don’t really know,” she said. “I don’t actually spend much time on the roads. I work as a hunter, you see, and you don’t see much game on the main roads.” She took another sip of cider; it had to be almost gone by now. She was silent for a moment, long enough that I wasn’t sure she’d continue. “But yes,” she said, finally, suddenly, breaking the silence before it could really settle in. “The roads are bad, from what I’ve heard. Not as bad as sometimes, but…bad.”

 

I nodded. It fit with what I’d heard from other travelers, and from the villagers after their rare trips out. Things weren’t as bad as they could be; there weren’t many deserters this far south, and the empire kept the major roads in good repair. Things weren’t as bad as they could be, but they were bad enough.

 

I started to ask another question, but interrupted myself with a yawn. Black grinned, her teeth startlingly bright against her dusky skin. “Tired?” she said, her voice teasing. “Maybe you shouldn’t have stayed up late to listen in, eh?”

 

I flushed and shrugged awkwardly, not wanting to explain the reality of things to her. It wasn’t a conversation I particularly wanted to have.

 

She apparently misunderstood, or perhaps she understood perfectly. Either way, the teasing expression fell away instantly, too fast to have been really sincere in the first place. “Get some more sleep, Silf,” she said. “I’ll still be here later today, and we can talk more then. I’m sure Corbin can take care of things for now.”

 

It was a good suggestion, if somewhat misguided, and I didn’t want to explain to her why what she was saying wasn’t exactly possible. So I smiled sheepishly, and shrugged, and made my way upstairs.

 

Black’s eyes never left me until I was out of sight, and her expression wasn’t teasing at all now. It was quiet, and flat, and far too interested for comfort.

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It was not an otherwise remarkable night when she arrived. As usual I was working in the taproom. I carried food, the usual dense bread and thin soup, and then today also slabs of roast lamb in gravy and slices of apple pie. I carried drinks, small beer and stout, cider, the occasional round of whiskey or brandy. I collected the empty dishes and brought them to the bar to be reused. In all, nothing unusual.

 

There was slightly more of a crowd than there often was. It wasn’t hard to guess why, either. The apple harvest was just coming in, and fresh pie and cider were enough to bring people in. It wasn’t every day that there was lamb, either. Between the two there were twelve people in the taproom, as opposed to the more common half-dozen, or the even more common two.

 

Twelve people still wasn’t enough to keep me busy. I was standing behind the bar when the tavern door opened.

 

That was…not a cause for fear, precisely, but a cause for interest, and enough that every eye in the place turned to that door. It was getting toward late evening, and people didn’t tend to go out much after dark. They were too scared.

 

Being out at night wasn’t dangerous, not really. In the wards, even out at the edge of the wards where the inn was, it was safe enough. Even outside the wards I wasn’t sure whether it was really dangerous; there were beasts that shunned the daylight, but just as many that weren’t active in the dark. It was anyone’s guess which set was worse.

 

But being outside after dark felt dangerous, it frightened people, and that was enough to keep most of them indoors after sunset unless they had somewhere to go. Seeing who was braving the dark to come to the inn this late was enough to draw everyone’s interest, given that there was nothing else to hold it.

 

When they did, well, that was when interest escalated to concern. The new arrival was a stranger, in a place where strangers weren’t an everyday sort of occurrence. She was wrapped in heavy fabric, the hood of her cloak pulled low to hide her face, and she was armed. The spear she was carrying was a simple weapon, but no less dangerous for that.

 

Most of the people in the bar tensed at that. A few of the farmers reached for knives, the simple knives they carried in case they needed something sharp ready to hand. Sigmund didn’t reach for a weapon as he started to stand, but he didn’t much need one; the blacksmith’s apprentice was strong enough to break someone just fine with his bare hands. Old Jakob, sitting in the corner of the room, had one hand on his bow, but then he usually did.

 

And I could see that Corbin had one hand on the arbalest behind the bar. That wasn’t a tool, the way the farmers’ knives were, or something you used hunting like Jakob’s bow. A hunter didn’t need a bow that could put a bolt through a breastplate. That was a soldier’s weapon.

 

He’d never said where he got the arbalest. I’d never asked.

 

“Changed?” Corbin asked. His question had a perfunctory, almost rhetorical tone.

 

She hesitated, but she didn’t have much in the way of a choice. The weather didn’t justify covering yourself that thoroughly, and that pretty much just left her not wanting to be seen clearly. She could be Changed, or she could be an outlaw of some kind. If she denied the first possibility, people would assume the second.

 

So, after a moment, she nodded, the movement visible mostly just as a twitch of the hood.

 

A few people in the taproom relaxed. Corbin looked relaxed, but he was still ready to shoot her at any moment. “You’re welcome here,” he said. “Nobody’s going to cause trouble for you. My brother’s Changed, and I won’t have anyone making an issue of it.” His words were directed mostly at the other patrons, as though they needed a reminder that Corbin didn’t put up with people harassing the Changed in his inn.

 

She nodded again, and when it became clear that more was expected of her she sighed and reached for the hood with her gloved hands.

 

Almost every eye focused on her, even more sharply than before. It was funny, in a way; the villagers didn’t want to stare, but they couldn’t tear their eyes away. The sick fascination, the need to see what was under that hood, was enough to overcome their decorum and sensitivity, which were never that strong. So there were a bunch of people looking in her general direction, and trying to pretend that they were actually looking at something else or just happened to be facing in that direction, when everyone knew better.

 

There were a few exceptions, of course. Corbin was openly watching her, as were Jakob and a few of the older farmers, Ketill and Gunnar, Otto and his wife Ilse.

 

Had anyone been watching Corbin instead, they might have seen something interesting. For an instant, as she lowered the hood, the innkeeper looked…shocked. He was startled, caught totally off guard by what he saw, to the point that he couldn’t keep his usual genial mask on. The expression that replaced it was there and dead faster than a spark off the fire, but if they’d have seen it in that time they would have had no doubt what it meant. He recognized her. And judging by the way that he put the mask on again a moment later, and didn’t say a word about it, he didn’t want them to know that.

 

Lucky for him, then, that they were all so preoccupied at the critical moment. None of them was looking his way.

 

I was, though. How the people reacted to seeing how she was Changed interested me far more than her actual appearance anyway.

 

When I did look, it was almost disappointing. She looked…relatively normal, as such things went. A sort of ash-grey skin, huge dark eyes, no hair, but nothing too dramatic. The basic structure of her face, what went where and the general shapes of things, didn’t seem to have been altered.

 

I felt a slight but noticeable surge of jealousy as I saw that. She looked more human than I did.

 

“All right, have a seat,” Corbin said, his hand dropping from the arbalest’s grip. “You want anything?”

 

“Meat,” she said, slinking into the room with a sort of slick grace that made me think her limbs weren’t likely built in the same way as a human’s. “Water. And…pie, with milk.” She made her way to a chair next to the fire and folded herself up onto it, the spear resting against the wall. It would have been uncomfortably close to the roaring fireplace for most people, but she didn’t even take off the cloak. Combined with the skin oddity and the lack of hair, it made me wonder whether she had diminished capacity to control her own temperature.

 

Conversation resumed fairly quickly, though it wasn’t the same as it had been. The people weren’t talking about the day in the fields, or the weather. They were talking about the stranger. There was hushed speculation about who she was, where she was from, what she was doing here. No one came right out and asked her any of those questions, but few of them were discussing anything else.

 

I went to get the things she’d asked for. Water, from the well behind the inn. The roast lamb was sitting out next to the oven, with the pie. That morning’s milk in the cellar to keep it cool through the day. It didn’t take me long at all to assemble the things and carry them out.

 

She took them easily, more so than I would have guessed. Most people would struggle to manage that many dishes without a table or bar to rest them on, but she didn’t have any trouble juggling them. Within a few seconds she had the water on the floor beside her, the pie balanced in her lap, while she held the plate of meat in one hand. Her fingers were surprisingly long compared to the size of her hands.

 

“Thanks,” she said, smiling. Her mouth stretched too wide and narrow, but her teeth looked very normal.

 

I dipped my head in a quick nod and went back to standing behind the bar, weaving my way through the tables and the chairs. Most of the people didn’t bother pulling away from me. They’d grown accustomed, over time.

 

People wanted to stay and talk, to speculate over the stranger. Her arrival was already the most interesting thing to happen in weeks.

 

But it was already getting late, and tomorrow would be another early day. The farmers had to be out in the fields early, weeding and tending the plants, harvesting the early crops. Sigmund would be put to work fixing the plows and scythes, the dozens of small things that got damaged in the course of the work. Jakob…well, it was anyone’s guess what Jakob would be doing

 

In any case, it was late and work was early. Their desire to stay and talk didn’t outweigh that; it never did. That was the way of things.

 

Jakob was the first to go, standing suddenly and walking from his place in the corner to the door. As though that was a signal, the rest of the crowd started to wrap things up as well. They finished their meals, drained their cups, and left their money on the bar. Most of them paid in small coin, iron pennies and half-pennies, a bare handful of bronze. A couple of the coins were old, from before the war, and as such almost worthless. Outside villages like this one, coinage that wasn’t Imperial was barely worth the metal it was minted on.

 

Corbin snatched the coins up like he truly needed the money, all the same, and tossed out change with easy speed. They didn’t bother checking the coins he gave them. It seemed odd that the innkeeper could track what each of them had bought and calculate their change without ever pausing, but Corbin had demonstrated that his change was always correct. Always.

 

I stood and watched. I had nothing else to do at the moment.

 

Finally Sigmund took his two iron pennies and a half and left, and the taproom was empty and silent again. I was still there, and Corbin, like usual.

 

And the stranger was there. She showed no signs of leaving.

 

“You’ll be wanting a room, then,” Corbin said, after a long moment of silence. It wasn’t a question. He wasn’t pretending that she was a stranger to him, either. His gaze was too focused, too familiar for that.

 

“For tonight, anyway,” she said, shrugging. The shrug was strangely loose, fluid in a way that humans weren’t. It made me suspect that she had an oddity of some sort in her shoulders, perhaps in her joints in general.

 

“Upstairs,” he said, producing a small key from his pocket. It was brass, and sharply angled, nothing like the keys used in a warded lock. “Second door on the left.”

 

She nodded and took the key before slipping up the stairs. She took her spear with her.

 

Corbin waited a few moments, then looked at me. “You may as well turn in for the night,” he said. “I can clean up here.”

 

I cocked my head to the side, looking at him curiously. Usually I stayed to put the taproom in order again after the night’s business was gone.

 

“I need something to keep my hands busy anyway,” he explained. “And it’s an early day tomorrow.” He made a vague shooing gesture at me.

 

I waited a moment longer, then shrugged and headed for the stairs myself. I could hear him stacking the chairs onto the tables as I left, clearing the floor to mop it clean.

 

Upstairs, everything was still and quiet. The only light in the hall came from under the second door in the left; the stranger had taken an alchemical lamp up with her, but from behind the door very little of the light made it out to the hallway.

 

That was fine. I did quite well in the dark; dim was better than bright to my eyes, generally. And besides, I knew this hallway well enough to walk it blindfolded with perfect confidence. I walked it every night, and nothing changed.

 

Nothing ever changed here.

 

I made my way to my door, the last door on the right, and unlocked it with a key that looked very much like the one Corbin had given the stranger. All of the locks in the inn were those intricate tumbler locks, which no one else in the village had. I didn’t know whether he’d found them here or brought them himself.

 

Inside, I locked the door behind myself and went to stand by the window, drawing the curtain aside to let the pale light of a crescent moon into the room. I didn’t have a lamp in here, alchemical or otherwise. I didn’t need one; the window was more than enough for me. When the sun was up I had to keep the curtains drawn to keep the light to a manageable level.

 

When Corbin had converted this building from an old manor house into an inn, he’d left a full, expansive suite of rooms for my use. I had a bedroom not much smaller than many of the houses in Branson’s Ford. A water closet with a mechanical plumbing system, which I was confident no one else in the village could claim; even the mayor used a chamber pot.

 

Despite the size and apparent luxury, though, the room was…sparse, almost stark. I had very few belongings. There was a square bed barely large enough for me to lie on without hanging off the edge, the mattress of which was only marginally softer than the floor; I’d found that sleeping on anything much softer than that led to problems with my back. There was a stool and a small wooden desk with a handful of books sitting on it.

 

And there was a small, locked metal box sitting at the foot of the bed.

 

For all that it was sparse, though, the room felt comfortable. It could almost feel like home.

 

I abandoned that thought before it could go any further. I had no desire to follow it again.

 

Instead, I curled up on the bed, looked out the window, and waited.

---

It was hard to estimate the passage of time, under the circumstances. I could track the passage of the moon across the sky, and that provided some inkling, but it was vague at best. I was guessing I waited for half an hour, but it might have been a fair bit more or less before I heard footsteps on the stairs.

 

The sound was enough to bring me out of a light doze. My ears perked up and I sat upright on the bed, listening closely.

 

It was Corbin. I knew that without even having to think. I knew his tread, the sound of him on the stairs. I could count the stairs by his steps, two at a time, and then I heard the door. First door on the left, at the other end of the hallway from mine, the only door in the inn that I didn’t have a key to.

 

Normally that would have been the end of it, the last event of the day. This time I thought there might be something else.

 

I wasn’t disappointed. Not a minute passed before I heard another door open, and close. Another set of footsteps, lighter and quicker than Corbin’s. A very soft, gentle tap.

 

I smiled slightly in the dim half-light. I hadn’t thought they’d want to wait until morning for…whatever was going on. I knew that they weren’t strangers, but saying what they were to each other was beyond me.

 

I gave it a handful of seconds, then slipped off the bed and across the room. I unlocked the door, slipped out, and locked it again behind myself. Then I crept down the hallway.

 

In a half-penny drama, I would have snuck up to the peer through the keyhole. The reality was rather different. Corbin’s locks didn’t have the sort of keyhole you could see through anyway, and with my hearing I hardly needed to press my ear against the door. Halfway down the hall was sufficient, and far less likely to get caught. I stopped there, squatting in the middle of the hallway, and listened.

 

“…say I was expecting to see you again,” Corbin said. His voice was a bit muted, muffled by the door, but understandable. “How’d you even find me?”

 

“Random chance, believe it or not,” the stranger’s voice said. “I’ve been wandering ever since…that. Didn’t have a clue you were here until I opened that door.”

 

“Hell of a coincidence.”

 

“It is,” the other voice agreed. “What name are you using these days, anyway? Don’t want to give your game away.”

 

“Corbin. You?”

 

“Black.”

 

He laughed, a short, harsh laugh without much in the way of humor in it. “Very imaginative.”

 

“It does what it has to do,” she said. I almost thought I could hear the shrug in her voice. “Speaking of, you have a Changed brother? I didn’t realize that.”

 

“Of course not,” Corbin said. He sounded almost insulted. “It’s a simple fiction. Something to make the persona seem more real to them.”

 

“Oh, please,” Black said. “Let’s not kid each other. You’re giving those clods more than enough to go on if they decide to pay attention. The real reason, please.”

 

He sighed. “I see your wit isn’t particularly changed,” he said. “Fine. It gives them an obvious reason for me to have the girl around. One that makes sure they won’t push boundaries. These ‘clods,’ as you call them, might not understand much, but they understand family.”

 

“You know she’s listening, right?” I started at that, caught off guard. I hadn’t made a sound, hadn’t moved close enough to block what little light might enter the room from the hallway. Black shouldn’t have been able to detect my presence.

 

Unless she could smell me, or see the heat of my body through the walls, or any number of equally outlandish senses. The Changed could be hard to predict, in that way.

 

“I’d be worried if she weren’t,” Corbin said. “Silf’s a curious girl. Very inquisitive. And besides, it saves me the trouble of having the conversation twice.”

 

“You aren’t concerned she’ll tell people?”

 

He laughed again. “She won’t. And if she did, who’d take her seriously? The only guest we’ve had in months got up after dark and went over to my room, where we spent a while talking. They aren’t going to assume anything incriminating from that.”

 

“I know exactly what they’ll assume from that,” Black said dryly. “And I’m not sure I care for the notion.”

 

“I wouldn’t worry about it,” Corbin said easily. “I know Silf. She won’t tell anyone about this. And we can shoo her off when we get to something actually private.”

 

“It seems a needlessly complicated way to have a conversation. Why not just invite her in if you want her to hear?”

 

“Silf would rather do it this way. She’s…got some issues.”

 

My lips twitched at that. He knew me so well.

 

“One of yours, then?” Black asked.

 

There was a very long, very thick silence. “She is now,” Corbin said at last. “Anyway. Are you staying in Branson’s Ford very long?”

 

“I hadn’t expected to,” Black said. “I seldom stay in one place for long. A night or two in a town, at most. But if you’re here I suppose I might stay a time. It’s not like I have anywhere else to be.”

 

He grunted. “Yeah. You went north after the war, right? Any news from that direction?”

 

Black sighed. “Nothing worth the bother of sharing,” she said, a bitter note entering her voice. “Empire keeps rolling north, same as always. They’re fighting in the Tears now, you know that? Clear into the mountains.” There was a slight rustle of fabric, as though from someone shaking their head. “What about you? Any news down here?”

 

“Just what I hear from the people passing through town,” Corbin said. “Not that there’s many of those. It’s been a hard year. Roads are bad, and getting worse. More ghouls this past year than usual for these parts. They say the rebels started up again last year, oh, maybe eighty miles south of here.”

 

I could almost hear Black perk up at that. “Did they get anywhere?”

 

Corbin snorted. “Of course not. Empire sent maybe a quarter of a legion for them. Doubt it was two weeks before they were swinging from trees like common bandits. My guess is that’s about what they were, too. The people handed them over themselves.”

 

“Damn shame,” Black said.

 

Corbin sighed. “Can we not do this tonight?” he said. “I’m too tired to do this again.”

 

Black laughed at that, a rather thin sound. “Fine,” she said. “There are some other people I should be asking after, anyway.”

 

“And that’s my cue,” he said. “Silf? Go to your room. I mean it. If you miss anything you shouldn’t I’ll tell you tomorrow.”

 

I hesitated, torn. I wanted rather badly to stay and listen in. This conversation, vague and confusing as it was, was easily the most interesting thing I’d heard in months. I’d already heard enough to keep me busy puzzling over it for weeks, and it seemed it was just now getting to the good part.

 

But clearly Black had some way of knowing I was here, so I couldn’t trust that I could listen in and not be caught. And Corbin had sounded dead serious as he told me to leave. I knew better than to disregard that tone of voice.

 

Reluctantly, I padded back to the other end of the hall, the last door on the right. I unlocked it, and locked it again behind myself. I stripped, hanging the clothing neatly in one of the closets, and then I drew the curtains to keep the moonlight out of the room. Finally, I curled up on the bed, idle thoughts and frantic speculation chasing each other around my head, and waited for sleep to claim me.

 

I didn’t bother with a blanket, any more than I ever did outside the deep part of winter. I had enough fur to do the job just fine.

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