The grey light of predawn had not yet touched the forest floor when the first tree bled.
Mirra Ashvale saw it happen. She was walking three paces behind Caelen Duskbane, her boots sinking into soil that crunched like old bone, when the amber welled at the base of a trunk wider than any cottage she had known. It moved slowly, thick as cooling tallow, catching no light because there was none to catch. The darkness itself seemed to drink it, and yet the sap glowed, faintly, the color of an old wound remembered.
She stopped breathing without meaning to.
"Mirra." Caelen's voice came from ahead, low, almost swallowed by the hush of the canopy. "Keep pace."
She did not answer at once. Her eyes stayed on the trickle of gold. It traced a line down bark that was not bark at all, she realized, but stone given the shape of a tree. Petrified. Every trunk in this place was stone, and yet they stood with their branches tangled overhead as though still reaching for rain.
"Mira." Softer now. A warning.
She caught up to him, boots crunching.
The forest of Blackbark had a name in the old songs her grandmother used to hum while grinding binding chalk. Blackbark. The trees that wept. The place where a binding should never be attempted by an apprentice whose hands still trembled at the summoning circle. She had not told Warden Selka Orin that. She had not told anyone.
"You saw it," Caelen said. Not a question.
"Yes."
"Don't touch."
"I wasn't going to."
A pause. His profile cut sharp against the grey, jaw tight, eyes already moving to the next tree, the next shadow. "Yes you were."
She flushed and said nothing, because he was not wrong.
Behind them, two figures moved in careful silence. Scout Petra Halen ranged the left flank, her bow unstrung but in her hand, her head tilted as though listening to something beneath the wind. Thornbound Selka's Friend, the great hound whose name Mirra had never quite learned to pronounce without stumbling, padded at the right. Its shoulders brushed the underbrush. Its breath came in soft plumes that the cold air turned to smoke.
The forest made a sound that was not a sound. A settling. A presence.
Warden Selka Orin walked at the column's center, her hands loose at her sides, her pale eyes fixed ahead. She had spoken little since they had passed the boundary stone two hours before. The boundary stone had been easy to miss, a low thing half-swallowed by moss, but Selka had stopped before it and read the faded carvings aloud to no one in particular. A prayer, Mirra thought. Or a warning.
Now the Warden spoke.
"Duskbane."
He turned his head.
"Send Petra forward a hundred paces. I want to know what the canopy looks like from the inside, and whether the path holds to the east."
"It holds," Caelen said. "I've seen maps."
"Everyone has seen maps. I want eyes."
A beat. Caelen lifted two fingers, a small motion. Petra ghosted ahead without a word, boots finding roots and stones without sound. Thornbound Selka's Friend watched her go, then turned back to the Warden, who laid a hand briefly on its head. The hound leaned into the touch for half a heartbeat, then resumed its pacing.
"Ashvale."
Mirra straightened. "Warden."
"You have your chalk."
"Yes, Warden."
"And your grandmother's sigil."
It was not a question, but Mirra answered anyway. "Yes."
"Good." Selka's gaze swept the trees ahead, and something in the lines of her mouth tightened. "Because we are walking into a place where chalk and sigils are the only honest speech. If you feel anything in your hands, anything at all, you will speak it. Even if it makes no sense. Even if you think you are imagining it. Understood?"
"Understood."
Selka looked at her for one measured breath. "You are not imagining things here, child. That is the last comfort I can offer you."
They walked on.
The sap appeared on every third tree, or every fifth, or perhaps on every tree but only when one was not looking directly at it. Mirra tried to count. She lost the count twice. Each time she looked back, the trunk she had passed was clean and grey stone, no gold, no wet trail. Each time she looked forward, another was weeping.
The smell reached her before she noticed it. Not rot. Something older. The scent of a forest floor after the first frost of autumn, when the leaves have stopped their slow rot and the earth itself seems to hold its breath. Cold, mineral, faintly sweet. Her grandmother had called it the smell of waiting. She had never understood what that meant until this moment.
Caelen slowed until he walked beside her. He did not look at her when he spoke.
"Your grandmother's notes. The ones in the binding chest. Did she write of this place?"
Mirra swallowed. The binding chest was in the cottage at Greenvale Hold, under her cot, wrapped in oilcloth. She had read the notes until the ink had wormed into her thumbs.
"She wrote around it," she said. "Mentioned the Blackbark twice. Said the sap would call to a binder. Said a binder should not answer."
"Ah." The word was a small knife, perfectly clean. "And yet here you are."
"I'm not here to answer it."
"No. You are here because your Warden ordered it, and because you cannot say no to a woman who has earned the asking."
Mirra's jaw tightened. "That's not fair."
"It is not meant to be fair. It is meant to be accurate." He paused. "I was a sentinel. I learned to speak accurately and to be disliked for it. One compensates the other."
She almost smiled. Almost.
Ahead, Petra had halted at the crest of a low rise. She turned and raised one hand, palm flat. Stop. The column slowed, then stopped. Thornbound Selka's Friend growled once, low, a sound felt more in the ribs than heard.
Selka moved to the front. Mirra followed because her legs decided it before she did, and Caelen fell in at her shoulder with the ease of a man who had spent years learning to be exactly where he was needed.
The rise gave onto a shallow valley. The trees grew denser there, and older. Their stone branches had twisted together until they formed something like a roof, broken here and there by gaps that showed only deeper grey. The sap was everywhere. It ran in thin lines down trunks and pooled at roots, and where it pooled it seemed to catch and hold a light that did not exist.
But that was not what Petra had seen.
In the center of the valley, on a stone that rose from the earth like a buried shoulder, sat a figure. Cross-legged. Still. The shape of a person, but too tall, and too thin, and made of something that was not flesh. Mirra's first thought was that it was a statue. Her second thought was that statues do not breathe.
It breathed. Slowly. A long rise of the chest, a long fall. The rhythm of sleep.
"Gods," Caelen murmured.
"No," said Selka, very quietly. "Not gods. Worse."
The figure turned its head, just a fraction, toward the rise. Toward them. The face was smooth, featureless, the color of wet clay. Where eyes should have been there was only the faint amber glow of the sap, caught and held in hollows that had never been carved.
It watched them without watching.
Selka raised a hand. Hold.
The column held.
Mirra's fingers had gone cold. She looked down and saw that her right hand had curled into a fist at her side, the nails pressing crescents into her palm. The chalk in her satchel felt heavier than it had any right to feel. The sigil-stone, wrapped in linen against her ribs, pressed against her skin like a small, insistent heart.
"Ashvale," Selka said, without turning. "What do your hands say?"
Mirra closed her eyes. She let her breath settle. She let her mind do what her grandmother had taught it to do, which was to listen to the place where the body meets the world, the place where chalk and sigil and breath became a single tongue.
Cold. A deep, geological cold, the cold of stone that has never known sun. And beneath it, slow, a pulse. Not a heartbeat. A tide. Something vast, turning in its sleep.
"It is bound," Mirra whispered. "It is bound here. In the roots."
Selka's silence had a shape to it. The shape of a held breath.
"How do you know?" Caelen asked.
"Because it cannot move." Mirra opened her eyes. The figure on the stone had not moved. The amber in its hollow eyes pulsed once, faintly, as though in answer. "It is a prisoner. It has been a prisoner for a very long time."
"And it is waking," Selka said.
"Yes, Warden."
The Warden of the Greenvale Hold looked at the figure, and the figure looked back with its hollow, glowing eyes, and between them there passed something that Mirra could not read. A recognition. An old debt. A warning.
Selka turned.
"We do not approach. We do not speak to it. We circle wide to the east and we keep our chalk close. Ashvale, you will mark our path as we go. Duskbane, you will watch her marks as though they were your own heartbeat, because if she falls behind we will not turn back for her."
"Warden," Caelen said, very low, "if she is to mark, then I should mark beside her. Two hands, two sets of eyes."
Selka considered him for a long moment. "Do it."
They moved. Petra dropped back to the column's center, hand on her bow at last. Thornbound Selka's Friend ranged ahead, muzzle low, growling softly at the air itself. The column bent east, skirting the valley's rim, keeping the stone distance of a hundred paces between themselves and the figure on the rock.
Mirra unslung her satchel with fingers that did not quite obey her. The chalk came out in a small block, the color of old bone, smooth from use. She knelt at the column's edge and drew the first mark on a root that rose from the earth like a knuckle. A small circle. A line through it. The mark of a path that had been walked and would be walked again.
The chalk caught on the root and held. The root was warm.
She looked up. Caelen was kneeling two paces away, his own chalk in hand, watching her. He had not yet made his mark. Waiting.
"You first," he said.
She nodded and stood. He knelt and drew his own circle, his own line, in a hand that was steadier than hers but no less careful. When he rose, he did not brush the dust from his knees.
"Stay close," he said.
"I intend to."
"You always intend. It is the doing that concerns me."
She did not rise to it. She was learning, slowly, that the way to answer a man who spoke accurately was to be accurate in return.
They moved. The forest watched them go. The sap wept. The shadows, she noticed at last, did not move with the things that cast them. They slid across the stone ground like dark water, independent of branch and trunk and the low hulk of the hound, and where they passed, the air grew colder still.
Selka's Friend did not warn them. The hound stopped, and the silence it left was the loudest thing Mirra had ever heard.
Then the air tore.
It came from the blackbark oak to their left, the one with the trunk wider than a cottage and the limbs that hung low enough to brush the moss. Not from the trunk. From beneath it. From the root-crown, where the wood met the earth in a chaos of knobs and ridges, and where the shadows had pooled so thick and still they looked like spilled ink.
The thornbeast erupted from the root-crown in two pieces that were, for one terrible heartbeat, the same piece. A shape of bark and bramble and old brown sap, the size of a yearling calf, and behind it a second shape that was the same shape repeated in a slightly different position, as though the forest had stuttered. Both shapes opened mouths that were not mouths, only gaps lined with thorns, and made a sound that was not a growl but a long hiss, the kind a kettle makes just before it screams.
Mirra's chalk hand came up by reflex, the block held out in front of her like a candle against a draft. A binding-mark, the simplest ward against small predators, half-remembered from her grandmother's lessons. Her fingers would not close. Her fingers would not close. Her fingers would not close.
Caelen was faster than the things were slow.
He had not been standing close to her. He had been standing close to the oak, two paces ahead and to the left, his weight on his back foot the way a man stands when he is listening for something he does not want to hear. When the first thornbeast came out of the roots, he was already turning, and when the second came, he was already moving, and the long knife he wore at his hip was in his hand in a motion that was less like drawing and more like remembering the blade was there.
He did not aim for either shape's center. He aimed for the gap between them.
The knife went in at the place where the first shape ended and the second began, the place that should not have been a place at all, and the thornbeast screamed the kettle-scream and folded in on itself like a leaf thrown on a fire. The second shape lunged for Caelen's arm, thorns catching on the leather of his coat, and Mirra heard the cloth tear, saw the dark of his sleeve darken further with something wet, and then Caelen brought his knee up under the thing's jaw and his elbow down on the back of its neck and the thorns parted with a sound like wet kindling and the beast was on the ground.
It was not dead. It was trying to reassemble itself from the pieces that had scattered across the moss, each thorn still twitching, each piece reaching for the next.
Caelen did not let it.
He kicked the largest piece aside, stamped on another, and then, with a motion that looked almost casual, drove the knife into the place where the thing's heart would have been if it had had a heart. He leaned on the hilt. The thornbeast shuddered, made one last hiss, and went still.
The forest held its breath for the space of three heartbeats. Then it let it out in a long slow sigh of wind through leaf and limb, and somewhere a bird tried a single tentative note.
Mirra's knees gave out. She did not fall. She sat down very suddenly on the moss, her satchel digging into her hip, her chalk hand still raised in the air in front of her face as though she had forgotten she had an arm. She stared at the dead thornbeast. She stared at Caelen.
He was breathing hard. The tear in his sleeve ran from his elbow to his cuff, and the dark stain was still spreading, and when he turned to look at her, his face was the face of a man who has just remembered he has a body and is annoyed at it for complaining.
"You are unhurt," he said. Not a question.
"I," she said. "The ward. I had the ward. I could have, I started to draw it, I could have, if I had, if my hand had," and her voice ran down like a child's top.
"You are unhurt," he said again. "That is the part that concerns me. The ward will come. The ward comes when it is ready to come. I have seen binders older than you freeze the same way and live to bind far worse."
She did not know whether to be comforted or insulted. She chose, because she was Mirra, to be both.
He crossed to her in three long strides and knelt, and his hand came to her chin and tilted her face up so she could not look away from him. His eyes were the color of the inside of an oak, and his gaze had the same quality, patient and steady and very, very old.
"Look at me," he said. "Now look at the beast. Tell me what you see."
"A thornbeast," she said. Her voice came out steadier than she felt. "Dead. You killed it."
"Good. Now tell me what you see that is wrong."
She looked. The body was a ruin of bark and bramble, the thorns already beginning to blacken at their tips as the sap that had held them in life began to dry. The shape under the oak was still and dim. The moss where the blood had fallen was smoking faintly, the small threads of vapor curling up and vanishing in the cold air.
"Nothing," she said.
"Look again," he said, and his voice was not unkind, but it did not leave room for not looking.
She looked again. She made herself look the way her grandmother had taught her to look, the way that was not glancing but attending, the way that took time and cost something. The smoke from the moss was black, not gray. The thorns that had scattered lay in a pattern that was not random, they lay in a curve that bent toward the oak's trunk, they lay as though they had been placed. And the place where the first shape had ended and the second had begun, the gap Caelen had put his knife into, was not a gap. It was a seam. It had been stitched.
"It was not one beast," she said slowly. "It was two. Joined."
"Joined with what?"
"With thread. With black thread. I cannot see the thread, but I can see the places where the thread was. The thorns on either side of the seam, they match. They were sewn."
"Good," he said, and this time the word had warmth in it, the way a hand put around a cup has warmth. "That is what I saw. You saw it because you slowed down. The slowing is the ward. The mark on the root is only the chalk. The slow look is the ward itself."
He let go of her chin. He sat back on his heels. The tear in his sleeve had reached his wrist, and when he bent his arm to pull the cloth aside and check the wound beneath, the sleeve rode up.
Mirra saw the tattoo.
It was on the inner side of his left wrist, just below the heel of the palm, in ink the dark blue of a bruised plum. A circle. A line through it. Not the bold, hand-drawn mark he had put on the root with chalk. Smaller. Finer. Done with a needle, done long ago, the lines softened by years but still certain, still legible. The mark of a path that had been walked and would be walked again.
Her breath stopped. Her breath stopped the way a bird stops in mid-air when a hawk's shadow crosses the grass.
She knew that mark. She knew it the way she knew her own name. It was on her map. It was in the corner of the vellum, in her grandmother's hand, set there in the same dark blue ink, with the same fine line, as though the two had been drawn from the same pot at the same table. Her grandmother had copied it from somewhere older, and the place she had copied it from was a place Mirra had never been able to find in any book, and the only time she had seen it outside of the vellum was in the chalk on the root this morning.
Caelen saw her see it. She knew he saw her see it because his hand came down at once, a motion so fast it was almost a flinch, and the sleeve fell back over the tattoo and the mark was gone.
"May I see your arm," she said. Her voice came out steady. She was proud of it for that.
"You may not," he said.
"You are bleeding."
"I am bleeding in places that do not concern you. The arm is one of them."
"The mark," she said. "The mark on your wrist. I have seen it before."
"On your map," he said. Not a question.
"Yes."
He looked at her for a long time. The forest breathed around them. Selka's Friend came forward at last, sniffed the dead thornbeast once, and then circled them both, hackles still raised, and lay down behind them with its muzzle on its paws as though it had decided that whatever came next was not its department.
"Your grandmother," Caelen said, "was a binder of some skill."
"She was."
"She drew that mark on her map from a source I would very much like to know."
"So would I."
"Then we are at an impasse," he said. "A polite one."
He stood. He offered her his hand, the right one, the uninjured one, and she took it and let him pull her to her feet. When she was steady, he let go, but he did not step back. They stood face to face in the cold air under the blackbark, the dead beast between them and the path beyond, and the wind brought the smell of sap and wet moss and the faint iron of his blood.
"The thread," Mirra said. "The black thread that joined the two beasts. Who threads a thornbeast."
"A binder," Caelen said. "A binder of a kind I had hoped did not exist this far west."
"A binder who uses thread," she said.
"A binder who uses thread and shadow and old words. A binder who makes two things into one thing and sends the one thing to wait under a tree until a marker walks past."
"The marker," she said. "Me. You."
"Both of us," he said. "Either of us. The mark we drew on the root this morning, the circle and the line, it is a sign as old as the Greenvale. There are those who remember it. There are those who would be very pleased to find a man and a woman walking the old paths with that sign chalked on every root."
"They would send a thornbeast?"
"They would send what they had. A thornbeast is a small thing to them. A thornbeast is a greeting."
The wind rose. The blackbark oak above them groaned, a sound like a ship's timber in a heavy sea, and a drop of sap fell from a low limb and struck the moss between them with a soft, fat sound.
"We cannot stay here," Mirra said.
"No."
"The thread. The black thread that joined them. If a binder made it, a binder can unmake it."
"Yes."
"I can try," she said. "I can try to unmake it. I do not know if I will be able to, but I can try."
He looked at her. The look was the look he had given her in the hold before the warden, when she had asked the question she had carried for six years, and he had answered it with a name and a token. It was the look that meant he was weighing her, not against a scale but against a memory.
"Unmake it how," he said.
"With chalk," she said. "With a mark that breaks the mark that made it. The way you break a stitch. You do not cut the cloth. You find the knot."
"And you know this knot?"
"I know the theory of the knot. My grandmother taught me the theory. I have never undone one in the field."
"Your grandmother taught you to undo stitches made by a binder who threads shadows."
"My grandmother taught me to undo stitches made by any binder. She did not always tell me why."
A breath of something that was almost a smile moved across his mouth. It was there and gone, like the shadow of a bird on the grass.
"Then undo this one," he said. "I will watch the trees."
He stepped back. He drew his long knife again, though the thornbeast was dead, and he took up a position three paces from the oak with his back to her and his face to the forest. Selka's Friend rose, hackles up, and took up a position at his flank. Between man and hound, they watched every shadow that moved.
Mirra knelt by the dead beast.
She took out her chalk. She took out a small knife of her own, the one she used for cutting leather and root and the corner of a vellum. She set the blade aside. She would not need it. She would need only the chalk, and her hand, and the slow look.
She began to draw.
The chalk bit into the earth with a sound like a held breath released. Mirra drew the first line straight, then curved it, then crossed it with a second line, then a third. She did not look at the thorns. She did not look at the beast's empty eye. She looked at the intersection of the lines and the place beneath her hand where the small bright mark of the original binding had been laid into the soil, years ago, by hands she did not know.
She sang the unbinding song. It was not a song. It was a set of sounds arranged in a particular order, low and then high and then low again, with a pause between each one. Her grandmother had taught it to her when she was nine. She had not sung it aloud since.
The first sound left her mouth and the air around the dead beast tightened. The second sound and the thorns along its spine shivered, as though a wind had moved through them that touched nothing else. The third sound and Mirra felt, beneath her palm, the bright mark in the earth begin to pull.
She kept her hand steady. She kept drawing. The fourth sound was the hardest, because it had to be held while she finished the crossing of the chalk lines. She held it. The lines met at a single point beneath the beast's heart.
The mark in the earth released.
It came up like a splinter drawn from under skin. Mirra felt it leave the soil and pass through her chalk and into the air, where it hung for a moment, a small bright spark the color of pine resin held to sunlight, and then it was gone. The chalk beneath her hand was warm. The earth beneath the chalk was cool and ordinary and unmarked.
The thorns along the beast's spine began, slowly, to soften. They did not fall. They changed. They became bark, ordinary bark, rough and grey and splitting. The beast's body, which had been stiff and wrong, relaxed against the ground. It looked, then, like any dead animal in a forest, the prey of something larger, the leaves already beginning to settle over it.
Mirra lowered her hand.
Behind her, Caelen let out a breath that was not quite a laugh.
"It is done," he said.
"It is done," she said.
She sat back on her heels. Her wrist ached. Her throat ached. The chalk in her hand was dust and a stub. She closed her fingers around it and stood, slowly, and brushed the dirt from her knees.
Selka's Friend came and pressed its nose against her palm. The fur was warm. The breath was warm. The hound's eyes were brown and ordinary and looked at her the way any hound looks at the person who has just done something it does not understand but approves of.
Mirra scratched behind its ear.
"Thank you," she said, to no one in particular, and to several people at once.
They walked on.
The afternoon shortened. The light through the canopy went from gold to copper. Mirra did not speak. Caelen did not speak. The hound padded between them, its brush sweeping the leaf litter. The forest grew quieter as they went deeper, the way a room grows quieter when the people in it have agreed, without words, not to speak.
The waystation appeared between one step and the next.
There was no path to it. There was no clearing around it. The trees simply stepped back, the way a crowd steps back from a pyre, and the building stood in the gap they had made. It was small. It was made of blackbark timber, the same as the trees, and it had been standing long enough that the boundary between it and the forest had begun to soften. A vine had grown up the eastern wall and into the thatch and out again through the thatch and down the western wall, a single green thread stitching the building to the ground.
Caelen stopped.
Selka's Friend stopped.
Mirra stopped.
"No," Mirra said, very quietly. "No, no, no."
She said it before she knew why she was saying it. She said it because the small bright sense that her grandmother had taught her to read, the sense that felt for bindings, had woken in her chest like a struck bell, and it was telling her that there were many. There were dozens. There were so many that the count blurred, the way stars blur at the horizon.
Caelen drew his long knife.
He did not speak. He walked to the door of the waystation, which was ajar, and he put his shoulder against it and pushed it open.
Inside, the light was dim and green. It came through the thatch in thin lines. It fell across a floor of packed earth and across a low table and across six pallets arranged against the wall, three on each side. On each pallet lay a figure. They were men and women. They were dressed in the clothes of travelers, of different years and different places, the cloth of their garments faded in different ways. Their eyes were closed. Their hands were folded over their chests.
Each pair of hands held a map.
Mirra stepped inside. The air was cool and still and tasted of dust and of the faint, dry sweetness of old paper. She knelt by the first pallet. The figure on it was a woman, old, her grey hair spread on the pallet like a fan. Her hands were folded over a piece of vellum that had been laid against her chest, and the edges of the vellum had grown into the skin of her palms. They had grown into it the way a graft grows into the bark of a tree it has been bound to. The vellum was one with the woman. The map was one with the woman. The woman was one with the waystation.
Mirra reached out and stopped, her hand an inch from the vellum.
"Don't," Caelen said.
"I wasn't going to touch."
"You were going to see if it was warm."
She looked up at him. He stood in the doorway, his knife in his hand, his face unreadable.
"Yes," she said. "I was going to see if it was warm."
"It isn't warm."
"No."
She stood and went to the next pallet. The figure on it was a man, younger, his beard still brown. His hands held the same map, fused the same way. She went to the third. The fourth. The fifth. The sixth.
All six held the same map. The vellum was different in each pair of hands. The ink was different in each. The hand that had drawn it was different in each. But the map was the same. The line that marked the path from the clearing to the thornbound oak was the same. The line that marked the path from the oak to the waystation was the same. The small mark, in the same place, that meant the waystation.
Mirra sat down on the packed earth, in the green dim light, and put her hands in her lap.
"They came," she said. "They followed the map. They got here."
"They stopped here," Caelen said.
"They stopped here. They were tired. They sat down. They looked at the map. They, I don't know, they fell asleep."
"They didn't fall asleep."
"I know they didn't fall asleep."
The hound had not come inside. It stood in the doorway, its ears back, its tail low, and it looked at Mirra with the patient attention of a creature that had seen this before, or something like this before, and knew that the humans in the room were going to need a moment.
Mirra looked at the maps in the hands of the dead.
"The map is a binding," she said. "A small one. A lure. It pulls you toward the waystation. Once you're here, you sit down, and you look at it, and the map grows into you. You become part of the place."
"You become part of the place," Caelen repeated.
"Yes."
"Why?"
"Because," she said, and her voice was very small, "because the waystation needed to be kept. Because someone, a long time ago, built it and bound it and then went away, and they needed it to keep standing. They needed it to keep offering shelter to the people who followed the map. So they made the maps a kind of seed. Whoever followed one, whoever held one long enough, became the soil the waystation grew in."
Caelen was quiet for a long time.
"You said the marks were stitched," he said.
"Yes."
"You said the marks were stitched into the soil. By a binder."
"Yes."
"The same binder who made the marks on the clearing. The same binder who made the thornbeast. The same binder who is, presumably, the reason my hound thinks a tree is a man."
"Yes."
"Then the binder who built this place is the same binder who built everything else."
"Yes."
"And you don't know who the binder is."
"No."
He looked at the pallets. He looked at the maps. He looked at the door, where Selka's Friend stood sentinel.
"We are going to leave this place," he said. "We are going to leave it now. We are not going to sit down. We are not going to take the maps. We are going to walk out the door and we are going to keep walking until we are out from under the blackbark."
"Yes," Mirra said.
She stood. She did not look at the pallets again. She walked to the door. She put her hand on Selka's Friend's head as she passed and felt the hound lean into her palm, briefly, the way it leaned into her when it was glad.
They left.
The light outside was lower than it had been. The copper had gone to bronze. The trees pressed closer, as though they had moved while they were inside, the way trees in stories are said to move, though Mirra had never known one to. She did not look back. She did not slow down. She matched her stride to Caelen's, which was longer than hers, and she did not complain about it, and he shortened it, slightly, without saying anything.
They walked.
The forest thinned. The blackbark gave way to oak, then to birch, then to the long grass of the hill above the Inn. The light was almost gone. The first stars were coming out, the small hard ones that come before the larger, softer ones, the way the small candles are lit before the great ones in a hall.
Mirra stopped at the top of the hill.
"Caelen."
He stopped.
"Someone is following us."
He did not turn. He did not draw his knife. He stood very still, and she stood very still beside him, and Selka's Friend stood very still behind them, and the three of them listened to the grass.
There was a sound in it. A small sound. The sound of a step that was trying not to be a step, and failing.
"Show yourself," Caelen said, and his voice was the voice he had used in the doorway of the waystation, low and even and final.
The grass parted. A figure stepped out of it. It was a man. He was not young and he was not old. He was dressed in a coat of undyed wool, and his boots were soft, and his hands were empty, and his face was a face that Mirra had seen before, in a clearing, in a different light.
The Masked Scholar.
He was not masked now.
Mirra looked at him. He looked at her. The wind moved the long grass around them, and the stars came out, one by one, above the Inn, above the forest, above the place where the blackbark began.
"You undid it," he said.
"I undid it," she said.
"Good," he said. "Then we can begin."