The rot started in the fingertips. Sera had seen enough wasting sickness to recognize the progression: black veins climbing past the wrist, the flesh tightening to something that resembled charred leather. But this was no ordinary blight. When she pressed her thumb against a soldier's palm, the tissue yielded like wet paper, and beneath it she could feel the bones grinding, hollowed from the inside.
Eight men lay on pallets in the converted storeroom beneath the garrison's east wing. Candles guttered in wall sconces, throwing uneven shadows across their sheets. The scent was thick, sweet, wrong, a mixture of spoiled honey and copper that clung to the back of her throat.
Sera worked in silence, unwrapping poultices from linen bundles. She had argued against taking this commission until her voice gave out. Three silver marks per soldier, the captain had said. Enough to cover what Ash owed the Thornwood syndicate. Enough to buy another month of searching for her brother.
A groan rose from the far pallet. The soldier there, a broad man with a scorched cuirass still buckled at his chest, clawed at the air with fingers that no longer bent at the second knuckle.
"Hold still," she said, though her voice emerged rougher than intended. She pinned his arm against the cot and examined the wound beneath the bandage. The flesh had receded further since yesterday. Where healthy muscle should have been, there remained a depression ringed with grey, the skin puckered inward as though something had fed upon it from within.
"You there." The voice came from the doorway. Sera did not turn. She recognized the measured cadence, the consonants bitten clean. "The physicker general sent word that you have refused the bleeding protocol."
Lord Aedric Vane entered without waiting for acknowledgment. His boots struck the flagstones in a rhythm that matched his words, deliberate, unhurried. A royal steward's son did not rush, even in the presence of corruption.
"I have refused nothing," Sera replied, still studying the soldier's arm. "I was never offered one."
The man on the pallet whimpered. Sera released him and stood, brushing dried blood from her hands onto her apron. Vane had stopped three paces away, close enough to observe, far enough to remain untouched. His cloak, black wool lined with grey silk, hung motionless despite the draft from the corridor.
"You are aware," he said, "that four men have already died under less qualified care."
"Five." Sera moved to the next pallet and crouched. "The wardmaster's apprentice failed to count the kitchen boy who collapsed during evening meal. He lasted two days. The rot reached his chest."
Vane said nothing. His expression did not change. If anything, the stillness deepened, as though her correction had confirmed something he had already suspected.
"Then you understand," he continued, "why his lordship insists upon rigorous methodology."
Sera lifted the edge of the second bandage. Beneath it, the rot had advanced past the elbow. The soldier's forearm was distended, swollen, the black veins pulsing faintly under candlelight. She pressed two fingers to the pulse point. Weak, thready, but present.
"I understand methodology," she said. "I also understand that bleeding a man whose blood is already turning to sludge will kill him by morning."
"Then what do you propose?"
"I propose you let me work."
Vane stepped closer. For the first time, she noticed the faint dark circles beneath his eyes, the way his jaw remained set even when his mouth opened. He had not slept. Beneath his cloak, the faint clink of a chain suggested a seal worn at the breast, some official mark of office that required constant acknowledgment.
"The garrison commander has requested an audience at the ninth bell," Vane said. "You will attend."
"I have patients."
"You have eight patients." His gaze swept the room. "Six, if the next two follow the established trajectory. One audience will not change that number."
Sera rose slowly. The soldier on the pallet watched her with eyes that glistened in the half-light. She could smell his breath now, sour and faintly chemical, a scent she had never encountered before this outbreak.
"What does the commander want?"
"What every commander wants. Answers. Accountability. A remedy he can replicate without your particular skills." Vane paused, the words hanging between them like a drawn blade. "He is not convinced your skills warrant the trust he has extended."
"And you?"
"I am convinced of nothing." He turned toward the door. "I observe. I record. I report."
"Then report this." Sera gestured at the nearest pallet. "The rot responds to no remedy I have applied. It is not bacterial. It is not fungal. It advances along the meridian lines, which suggests an interference with the humors, but the corruption does not behave like any corruption I have catalogued."
Vane stopped at the threshold.
"You have catalogued corruptions?"
"I have read." She met his gaze without flinching. "Every text the College permitted into the lower district. And some that did not."
Something shifted behind his composure. A flicker, there and gone.
"Then you will find this useful." He reached into his cloak and withdrew a folded parchment, sealed with black wax bearing the sigil of the royal archivists. "A physician at the capital documented a similar affliction forty years ago. The garrison commander believes it may be relevant."
Sera took the parchment. The wax was cold against her palm.
"Why give this to me?"
"Because the garrison commander would not read it." Vane's voice remained flat, stripped of inflection. "And because I have learned, through considerable experience, that those who seek answers rarely find them in the expected places."
He left without another word. Sera stood holding the parchment until the sound of his boots faded, then broke the seal.
The document was brittle, the ink faded to a rust-brown that caught the candlelight. She read it standing, lips moving silently over the cramped script.
Forty years ago, a regiment returning from the Thornwall campaign had reported identical symptoms. The physician's notes described blackened veins, hollowed extremities, a sweet corruption that resisted all standard interventions. The physician had recorded three relevant facts: the regiment had served under a commander who possessed a relic of uncertain origin; the symptoms appeared within weeks of the regiment's exposure to that relic; and the commander had died screaming on the third night of the affliction.
The physician's name had been inked out, replaced with the archivists' stamp of suppression.
Sera set the parchment on the table and walked to the far wall, where a rough map of the garrison hung pinned among requisition forms. She traced the patrol routes marked in red. The cursed soldiers had all served together. They had been dispatched to secure a cache of relics recovered from a collapsed temple in the eastern marches. The cache had included ceremonial armor, funerary masks, and, according to the quartermaster's log, a circlet of blackened silver.
The Hollow Crown.
She had heard the name once before, in Ash's cramped study above the printshop, surrounded by pamphlets and half-burned archives. He had spoken of it as scholars speak of myths, with reverence and careful distance. An artifact of the first Sovereign. A binding of dominion over death itself. A thing that had been broken and scattered centuries ago, its pieces hidden across the realm.
She touched the map. The eastern marches were three weeks' ride. The cache had been moved to the garrison's strongroom upon the regiment's return. If the Crown was there, in that strongroom, then every man who had carried it, every man who had stood within its radius, had been marked.
Sera turned back to her patients. The soldier with the scorched cuirass had fallen into a fitful sleep. His chest rose and fell in shallow rhythm. She checked his bandages, adjusted the poultice on his wrist, then crossed herself in the old way, a habit she had never shaken.
Outside, the ninth bell began to toll. Sera removed her apron, folded it over the back of a chair, and walked toward the door. The audience could wait. The strongroom could not.
She had questions for the quartermaster. Questions about circlets and caches. Questions about why no one had thought to ask them before the rot began its slow, patient work.
The Pale Shepherd did not go to the quartermaster.
She went to the apothecary row instead, threading through the crowd of the market with her head down and her hood drawn tight. The morning sun fell pale and unconvincing over the stalls. A woman haggled over dried sage. A boy with a wooden cart full of turnips whistled tunelessly. Somewhere a dog barked, sharp and continuous, and was silenced by a kick.
Ash Kellis kept a room above a chandler's shop on Crooked Lane, a crooked lane in every sense, its cobbles buckled, its eaves nearly touching overhead so that in winter the snow never reached the ground. She had not been there in eleven months. She had not spoken to Ash in eleven months, not since the night she had walked out of his study and left him standing amid his pamphlets with the ink still wet on his fingers.
She had told herself she was done with his kind. His books, his theories, his beautiful, useless maps of things that did not exist. A disgraced scholar turned pamphlet-smuggler, keeper of forbidden histories and half-burned archives. He had a soft southern lilt that made even his cruelties sound kind. He spoke of the old world as if it were a lover he had lost.
She had left because he had begun to speak of her as if she were a case study.
She climbed the stairs. The wood groaned under her boots. At the top, a door with a brass number that had gone green with verdigris. She knocked twice, paused, knocked a third time in the old rhythm they had used when they were younger and less careful.
A lock clicked. A chain rattled. The door swung inward.
Ash Kellis stood in the gap, blinking. He was thinner than she remembered. The bones of his wrists showed beneath the cuffs of his shirt. His hair, once the dark, dense curls he had been vain about, had thinned and gone partially gray at the temples. He wore no coat. His feet were bare on the cold boards.
"Vant," he said. His voice was the same, warm and faintly theatrical, the southern vowels drifting upward at the ends of sentences as if every phrase were a small, hopeful question. "You are early."
"I did not send word I was coming."
"No. You did not." He did not move from the doorway. "I had not thought you would come at all."
"I need to ask you about the Hollow Crown."
Something shifted behind his eyes. Not surprise exactly; Ash Kellis was rarely surprised. Recognition, perhaps. The look of a man who has been waiting for a particular blow to land and feels it at last.
"Come in," he said. "The kettle is on."
The room was exactly as she remembered and entirely different. The walls were still lined with shelves, still sagging under the weight of unbound folios and rolled charts and small leather-bound journals too valuable to be left in plain sight. The desk in the center was still buried under paper. But the order had changed. Before, Ash had kept things in a system only he understood, with markers and ribbons and a private code of symbols in the margins. Now the piles were helter-skelter, recent acquisitions heaped on top of older ones, and there were dark stains on the floor near the window that he had tried to scrub away and failed.
She did not ask about the stains. He did not offer.
"Sit," he said, gesturing to a chair that was already half-occupied by a stack of broadsheets. He moved them without apology, setting them on the floor with the careless reverence of a man who had read each one so often it no longer mattered where it rested. "I will make tea. The water is not quite ready."
"I do not want tea, Ash."
"You want information. I will give it to you with tea. The tea is part of the ritual. You always did refuse to follow ritual." He moved to the hearth, where a blackened kettle sat on an iron trivet. He poured water into a clay pot. His hands were steady. "You look terrible."
"Thank you."
"You look like you have not slept in a week. You look like you have been in the wards. You smell like poultice and old blood. You smell like the Shepherd." He glanced over his shoulder. "Ah. I had wondered."
"Do not call me that here."
"In this room, Vant, I call you what you are. There is no one to overhear. The walls are thick. The neighbors are deaf. The landlady is a saint." He brought two cups to the desk. "Sit. Drink. Tell me what you know about the Crown, and I will tell you what I know, and then you will leave, and I will not see you again for another eleven months, and I will spend those months trying not to write your name in the margins of things I should not be writing."
She sat. She drank. The tea was bitter and smelled of woodsmoke.
"The Hollow Crown," she said. "Tell me."
Ash settled into the chair opposite her. He drew his legs beneath him in the way he had done since they were students together, a habit she had mocked him for then and missed now. His eyes, when he looked at her, were the color of old amber, and there were lines around them she did not remember.
"The Hollow Crown," he said, "was forged in the first age of the Sovereigns, in a time we do not name because naming it would be a kind of permission. It was forged to bind dominion over the dead. Not the dead as in corpses, Vant. The dead as in everything that has ended. Every closed door. Every extinguished flame. Every kingdom that has ever fallen." He paused. "That is the legend. The legend is not entirely wrong, which is the most dangerous kind of legend."
"You said it was broken."
"It was broken. Into seven pieces, by the order of the second Sovereign, who understood what his predecessor had made and was afraid of it. The pieces were scattered. Hidden. Guarded by oaths that were sworn in blood and then forgotten in three generations, because that is what oaths do." He sipped his tea. "One piece was in the eastern marches. A circlet of blackened silver, found in a collapsed temple by a company of sappers during the Saltmarsh campaign. They brought it back to the garrison at Rendhold. They put it in the strongroom."
"Ash."
"Yes."
"The men who carried it. The men who stood near it."
"Yes."
"They are dying."
He set his cup down. The sound was very small in the quiet room.
"I know," he said. "I have been watching the records for months. The deaths began in the lower ranks. Men who had no reason to be near the strongroom, except that they had carried the crates, or cleaned the armor, or simply walked past the door. The rot begins in the hands. It spreads inward. By the time it reaches the chest, the mind is already gone." He looked at her. "You have seen it."
"I have seen it."
"Then you know it is not a sickness. A sickness does not choose. A sickness does not leave healthy men untouched while it takes the ones who walked past a particular door on a particular night."
"What is it?"
"I do not know." He said it without shame. Ash Kellis had never been ashamed of not knowing; he had been ashamed only of pretending. "But I know what it resembles. In the histories I have read, and I have read most of them, there is a condition described in the aftermath of the Breaking. A slow unraveling. A hunger that passes from object to person. The old scholars called it the long forgetting. The body forgets it is alive. The mind forgets it is housed. The spirit forgets it has somewhere to return to."
"That is not a sickness."
"No. It is a claim."
The word sat in the room between them. Sera did not touch her tea. Ash did not look away.
"The Crown," she said slowly. "You believe it is calling them back."
"I believe it is trying to. I believe the piece in the strongroom has begun to wake. I believe whatever sleeps inside it has felt the touch of living men and remembered what warmth is. And I believe it is hungry." He leaned forward. His voice dropped, though there was no one to hear. "Vant. Listen to me. The blight you see in the wards is the smallest part of this. The smallest symptom. A finger pressed to a dam. If the Crown wakes fully, if the seven pieces are brought together or if the single piece is allowed to remain in proximity to so much living tissue, the long forgetting will not stop at a few dozen soldiers in a garrison town. It will spread. It will take villages. It will take cities. It will take the whole kingdom, piece by piece, until there is nothing left that remembers its own name."
"You are being dramatic."
"I am always dramatic. That does not make me wrong." He sat back. "I have sent word to those I trust. The pamphlet network. The scholars in the southern universities. The archivists in the monasteries who still keep the old records. I have asked them to search for references to the Crown, to the Breaking, to anything that might tell us how to put a piece of such a thing back to sleep without waking the others."
"And?"
"And I have received three replies. One was a refusal couched in theological objections. One was a demand for money I do not have. One was a single line, in a hand I did not recognize, that said: Do not look for the Crown. Let the Shepherd find it."
She stared at him.
"I did not send that," he said. "I do not know who did."
"And you think it is a coincidence that I walked into your rooms this morning."
"I think nothing is a coincidence, Vant. I think the world is a web and we are all of us flies in it, and sometimes the spider lets a thread go slack so that a particular fly will walk into a particular parlor." He refilled her cup without asking. "What did Lord Aedric tell you?"
"How do you know Lord Aedric spoke to me?"
"Because Lord Aedric speaks to everyone who comes within a mile of the Shepherd, and because he has been trying to get his hands on the Crown for eleven years, and because if the piece in the strongroom has begun to wake, he will know before the quartermaster does. He will know before the King does. He is that kind of man."
She watched him over the rim of the cup. "You do not like him."
"I do not need to like him. I need to understand what he wants. Lord Aedric Vane is a decorated war general turned royal steward. He is a veteran of the Saltmarsh Rebellion. He is the old friend of the King. He is also the man who ordered the cache moved from the temple to the garrison. He is also the man who signed the quartermaster's log. He is also the man who has spent eleven years making certain that no one asks too closely what was in those crates."
"You are accusing a lord of the realm."
"I am observing a pattern. Patterns are not accusations. Accusations require intent, and I do not yet know his intent. I know only his effects." Ash set his cup down and folded his hands. "The men who carried the Crown are dying. The Crown is in his strongroom. The Shepherd is in his city. The Prince is in his care. And the King sits in his palace and grows older and does not ask why his oldest friend has become so very interested in antiquities."
"Be careful, Ash."
"I am always careful. I am careful the way a man is careful when he is hiding in plain sight. I am careful the way you are careful when you have been running messages for a decade and have learned which doors open and which ones close on your fingers." He leaned forward again. "I am telling you, Vant. The blight is a symptom. The Crown is the disease. And the man who brought the Crown into the heart of the kingdom is not the man who will save us from it."
"What do you want me to do?"
"I want you to do what you have always done. Run. Listen. Bring back what you find. And this time, Vant, do not wait eleven months to come back to me." He reached across the desk and put his hand over hers. His fingers were cold. "Promise me that. Whatever you find in the strongroom. Whatever Lord Aedric says when you go to him. Whatever the Prince whispers in your ear when no one else is listening. Promise me you will come back to this room and tell me, before the rot reaches anyone else."
She did not pull her hand away. She did not promise.
"I have to go," she said. "The audience."
"Yes. The audience." He released her. "The Prince will be there. Lord Aedric will be there. The Shepherd will be there. You will stand in a room full of people who do not know what is happening under their feet, and you will bite your tongue until it bleeds, and you will come back here at night and tell me what you saw."
"If I come back."
"You will come back." He said it with the soft certainty of a man who had once loved her and had never quite learned to stop. "You always come back, Vant. You just take the long road."
She stood. The chair scraped. The piles of paper shifted. Somewhere outside, the tenth bell began, late and muffled.
"Ash."
"Yes."
"Who sent the message. The one about the Shepherd."
"I do not know."
"But you have a guess."
He looked at her for a long moment. The amber eyes were very still.
"I have several guesses," he said. "None of them are kind."
She left him there, in the room that smelled of woodsmoke and old paper and the faint, sweet decay of secrets kept too long. She did not look back. She did not need to. She knew he would be standing in the doorway, one hand on the frame, watching her go, already composing the letter he would not send.
The market had thinned. The light had changed. Somewhere a piper was playing, badly, a tune that had been old when her mother was a girl. She walked through it without hearing. She was thinking of circlets and quartermasters and the long, patient hunger of things that had been broken and left to wake.
The watch house was two streets down from the fish market and smelled of old lye and older grief. Sera pushed through the low door and ducked under the lintel, one hand pressed flat to the wood because she had learned, years ago, that some doors in the Spirebite swung both ways and not always when you wanted them to.
Captain Maren Dace was not at her desk. The ledger lay open, the ink still damp to the touch. Someone had been writing in it not an hour past.
"Back room," Maren called, her voice thin through the wall. "Alone. Get in here."
Sera slipped past the curtain. The back room was a single cell with a straw pallet and a basin of water gone grey. A lantern hung from a hook and threw everything into long, swaying shadows. Maren knelt beside the pallet, her uniform jacket discarded on the floor, her shirtsleeves rolled to the elbow. Her hands were steady. Her face was not.
"Close the door," Maren said.
Sera closed it. The wood swelled in the frame. The lantern guttered.
"What is it."
"Hush."
The soldier on the pallet was young. Twenty at most, if that. His skin had the colour of tallow, and his breath came in shallow pulls that did not seem to fill him. His eyes were half-closed and tracked nothing. Sera had seen that look before, in the stews and the doss houses, when the winter took someone slow and then faster. She had thought, then, that the body gave up before the mind did. She had been wrong about that too.
"His name is Torben," Maren said. "Fought at the Bridge. Good lad. Steady hand."
"What happened to him."
"I do not know. Found him in the alley behind the tanner's yard. Thought he was drunk. Brought him in. He has not spoken since."
Sera crossed the cell in two steps and knelt on the other side of the pallet. Maren's hands were on Torben's wrist, taking a pulse that must have been there because Maren kept her fingers pressed to it as if she could hold the beat by will alone.
"He is cold," Sera said.
"Yes."
"Cold all the way through."
"Yes."
Sera reached for the blanket. Her knuckles brushed Torben's forearm and she felt something she did not expect: resistance. Not the limpness of fever, not the dry heat of infection. Something underneath the skin, pushing back against her touch, as if the muscle had hardened around a wire.
She pulled the blanket down.
The vines were black. They rose from beneath Torben's collarbone in a cluster, barbed and wet, curling outward across his chest like the fingers of something trying to climb out of him. The thorns were not metal. They were not iron. They were wood, she realized. Old wood. Petrified and dark and threaded through with a faint, moving grain that caught the lantern light and held it.
Sera did not move.
Maren had gone very still. Her breath stopped, then started again, shallow and careful.
"I have seen this before," Sera said.
"Where."
"A cellar. Under a house that burned. A man came out of the fire with these in his back. The thorns went through his shirt and into the doorframe and held him there until the ceiling fell."
"Did he live."
"He screamed for a long time."
Maren's hands tightened on Torben's wrist. Her jaw worked. She had the look of someone trying to be what her rank demanded and finding, at the last, that her body would not answer.
"We have to cut them out," Maren said.
"You cannot cut them out."
"Why."
"Because they are not in him. They are of him. Look at the way they grow. That is not infection. That is architecture."
Maren looked. The lantern threw the shadows long and the thorns moved with them, or seemed to, a slow curling that might have been the draft from the door or might have been something else.
"How long does he have."
"I do not know."
"Guess."
"Hours. Maybe less."
Something changed in Torben's face. The slackness tightened. His lips drew back from his teeth and Sera saw, in the lantern light, that his gums had gone the colour of a bruise. Maren made a small sound in her throat and pressed harder on the wrist. The pulse she was hunting was not there.
"He is going," Maren said.
"No. Wait."
Sera leaned in. The thorns were closer to her now, near enough that she could smell them. The scent was not rot. She had expected rot, had braced for it, the way one braces for a blow. What came instead was older. Leaf mould. Wet bark. The sweet, fungal breath of a forest floor in autumn, of something that had been growing for a very long time and had only just begun to push through.
The cluster at his collarbone shuddered.
"Maren."
"I see it."
"Maren, step back."
"I see it, Sera."
The first thorn came through the skin of his throat. It did not break the skin so much as unfold from it, petal by petal, as if the flesh had been a bud that had only been waiting. Torben's mouth opened. No sound came out. His chest hitched once, twice, and then the second thorn followed the first, rising from the hollow of his throat like a finger pointing at the ceiling. The third came through the soft part under his jaw. The fourth through his eye.
Maren was on her feet. She had not made a decision to stand. Her body had simply carried her backward until her shoulders hit the wall. Her hands were at her sides and they were shaking. She did not try to hide it.
The thorns kept coming. They spread down his chest and across his shoulders. They forked and reforked, each new branch darker than the last, the bark wet and gleaming, the thorns sharp and curved in toward his body as if to protect whatever was growing underneath. By the time the lantern steadied, Torben was gone. What lay on the pallet was a thicket, black and dense and faintly breathing, and the breathing was not his.
Sera stood very still. Her hands were at her sides. She could feel her own pulse in her throat, loud and close, and she thought of the empty house on Grieve Street and the door she had not opened.
"He was a soldier," Maren said, from the wall. Her voice was thin. "He served the King."
"He served someone," Sera said.
"What does that mean."
Sera did not answer. She was watching the thorns. They had stopped growing, but the breathing had not stopped. The thicket rose and fell, slow and shallow, as if whatever lived inside it had settled in and was listening.
The lantern guttered again. The flame leaned. Maren made a small, choked sound.
"We have to bury him," Maren said.
"You cannot bury that."
"Then what do we do with it."
"We burn it. All of it. The pallet too. The straw. Whatever he was wearing. You do it yourself, Maren. You do not let anyone else near it. You do not let the gravediggers near it. You take it past the river gate and you do not stop until the fire is white."
"And then."
"Then you come find me."
Maren pushed off the wall. She was steadier now. The shake had gone into her hands and stayed there, but her eyes had the look Sera had seen on the bridge the night the Shepherd walked across the stones. The look of someone who had decided what the next minute would cost and had agreed to pay it.
"There will be more," Maren said. It was not a question.
"Yes."
"How many."
"I do not know. But whoever did this to him did not do it tonight. They did it weeks ago, maybe months. They have had time to plant others."
Maren looked at the thicket. The thorns caught the lantern light and held it like small, black mirrors. Somewhere inside the mass, something shifted, and Sera heard a sound she had hoped never to hear again: the soft, wet crack of a seed splitting open.
"There is an audience tomorrow," Maren said. "The Prince will be there. Lord Aedric will be there. The Shepherd will be there."
"Yes."
"And you will be there too."
Sera looked at her. Maren's face was drawn, the freckles standing out like flecks of ash on a pale ground. She had not slept. She had not eaten. She had been on her knees beside a pallet that was no longer a pallet, watching a man she had known for six years become a thing she could not name.
"I will be there," Sera said.
"Then bring me something back. Anything. The colour of a ribbon. The name of a song. The way a man holds his cup when he thinks no one is looking. Bring me something I can use."
"I will."
"Swear it."
Sera did not swear. She had learned, in the stews and the doss houses, that oaths were a kind of coin, and that the people who asked for them were usually the ones who would not pay them back. She crossed the cell instead. She took Maren's hand. She held it, firm and brief, the way one holds a hand when there is no time for anything else.
Maren's fingers closed on hers. The shake moved between them, a current that neither of them pretended was not there. Then Sera let go. She stepped back. She looked once more at the thicket on the pallet, at the breathing that was not Torben's, at the thorns that curled inward like the teeth of a trap that had not yet closed.
She turned and walked out of the back room, past the open ledger with its wet ink, past the curtain, past the door that swung both ways. The night air hit her face and she stood for a moment in the street, breathing it in, letting the cold wash the smell of leaf mould out of her lungs.
The piper had stopped. The market was empty. Somewhere a dog was barking, and then it stopped, and then the only sound was the wind off the river, coming in low and patient through the alleys of the Spirebite.
She began to walk. She had a long road to take, and she had not yet begun it.