The road south was the same road they had come up on, but it did not feel the same at all.
Part of that was the season. They had ridden north in the last of the warm weather. They were going home into the front edge of autumn.
The trees had become a beautiful tapestry of the warm colors of fall, and the light came in low and long by the middle of the afternoon.
The other part of it was that this time Sito knew what was waiting at the other end.
He had spent the whole northward journey with his head hanging over the side of the wagon, watching everything. He did the same for four days going south. Then he stopped.
'Every mile of this is a mile closer to the castle,' he thought.
The four elves, on the other hand, could not stop looking, and that turned out to be the most entertaining thing about the first week.
None of them had ever set foot outside the Mist Forest in their lives. Sereth, the surveyor, spent the entire first day on open ground walking with his head tilted all the way back.
"It does not end," he said.
"That's the sky, mate," said Ramsey.
"I am aware of what it is. I have read about it." Sereth kept walking without looking down, which meant Willem had to steer him around a ditch by the elbow. "I did not understand that it would be above me the whole time. In the forest there is a roof. There is always a roof."
He turned in a slow circle, looking at the empty plain running away from them in every direction.
"How does a person decide where to settle?" he asked.
"Anywhere you like," said Ramsey.
"That," said Sereth, "is unsettling."
---
On the sixth day they came over a rise and Sito saw the herd.
There were perhaps three hundred of them, spread out across a valley floor two miles wide. At first he thought they were boulders, because they were not moving and they were much too big to be animals.
They were the size of houses.
"Fenbacks," said Osric, when Sito asked. "They come down off the high moor about this time every year and winter in the low ground. Harmless as barns, unless you get between a mum and its calf that is."
They were grey-brown and shaggy, enormously broad across the shoulder, with heavy flat heads and no neck to speak of. Moss grew on the backs of the older ones.
Sito watched one of them turn its head, look at the caravan for a moment, decide the caravan was not interesting, and go back to eating.
High above the herd, riding in a loose ragged column, were birds.
Hundreds of them. They were not circling and they were not landing. They held their position over the herd, all of them, as though the air up there had a shape to it that Sito could not see.
"Carrion birds," said Ramsey, in the voice of a man who knows things. "Waiting for one of them to drop."
"They are not carrion birds," said Sereth.
"They're sat over a herd of animals waiting for—"
"They are following the mana."
Sereth pointed up, and he looked delighted, because for once he was the one who got to explain something.
"Three hundred beasts of that size in one valley," he said. "Every one of them has a core, and every core leaks. A little, constantly. All cores do — yours will, when you have one, and mine does now. It comes out of us and it rises and it gathers, and over a herd that size it pools into a column a mile high. Those birds are sitting in it. They will follow that herd until spring."
Ramsey thought about it.
"So they're eating it."
"They are not eating anything. They are birds. It does nothing for them at all." Sereth shrugged. "It is simply pleasant. It would be like asking why you sit close to a fire."
Sito kept watching the birds long after the wagon had gone past.
He could see three hundred animals and a mile of empty air.
Every single person around him could faintly see a column.
'One day I'll see it too,' he thought. 'Five more years and I'll see it.'
---
They stopped that night by a stream, and after the food was done and the horses were seen to, Ramsey nudged him with a boot.
"Go on, then."
"Go on what?"
"You know what." Ramsey settled back against his saddle. "We've had six weeks of elves and mine shafts and treaties and I have not heard that little guitar since the forest."
"It's a rook."
"I know what it is. I've been listening to it for four months." Ramsey folded his arms behind his head. "Play the road one."
So Sito got the rook out of the wagon and tuned it by the fire, and played the road one.
*The first mile takes your whistle,*
*the second takes your song,*
*the third mile takes your name, lads,*
*if you hold it too long.*
By the second time through, all eleven guards had the last line, and Corbin the driver was keeping time on the side of the water barrel, and the four elves were watching the whole thing with the polite bafflement of people observing a religious ritual they have not been briefed on.
By the fourth time through, Sereth had the last line too.
He sang it badly. He sang it very loudly. Willem laughed until he had to put his cup down.
Sito played until his fingers ached, and then played two more, because it was the first night in a week where nobody had looked tired.
---
The crystal lit for the first time on the ninth night.
He had been carrying it in his coat since Thelvarion and had taken it out and looked at it perhaps forty times, and had not once worked up the nerve to use it.
Every time he got close, he thought the same thing. 'What do I even say? Hello, it's me, I'm on a horse?' And then he put it back in his coat.
On the ninth night he was sitting a little way off from the fire with the thing in his hands, doing exactly that, when it went warm and lit from the inside.
He nearly dropped it in the grass.
"You did not call," said Naeva.
Her voice came out of it perfectly clear, as though she were sitting six feet away, and something in Sito's chest lurched sideways at the sound of it.
"I was going to."
"It has been nine days."
"I know how many days it's been."
"Then why did you not call?" She was not shouting. That was somehow worse. "I have had it in my hand every single night. Every night. And I thought, he is riding, he is tired, tomorrow. And then tomorrow. And then it was nine days, and I began to think that perhaps you had — "
She stopped.
Sito looked at the fire, and at the backs of the sleeping men around it, and felt ashamed in a way he had not felt in a long time.
"I didn't know what to say," he said.
"What?"
"I didn't know what to say to you." He turned the crystal over in his hands. "I've never had anyone to talk to like this. Not ever. Not in my whole life. At home I talk to Aunt Lia and I talk to the guards and I talk to my father about grain, and all of those are — I know how those go. I know what I'm supposed to say. And then I had this thing in my pocket and I'd get it out and I'd think, 'what do I even tell her', and I'd put it back."
There was a long silence on the other end of it.
"That is very stupid," said Naeva.
"I know."
"You could have said *hello*."
"I know."
"You could have said *I am on a horse and the horse is unpleasant*."
"The horse is unpleasant."
"Then you should have said so, nine days ago." A pause. Then, in a smaller voice: "I did not know if it worked. That is the real thing. I have been sitting with it in my hand for nine nights not knowing whether the man had cheated me."
Sito closed his eyes.
"It works," he said. "I'm sorry."
"Yes. You are." Naeva sniffed. "Now. Tell me what you saw today, and do not leave anything out, because I have been extremely bored."
So he told her about the fenbacks, and the birds, and the column of mana he could not see.
He told her about Sereth and the sky. He told her about Ramsey and the road song, and he sang her the part Sereth had got wrong, and she laughed so hard she had to stop him twice.
They talked for two hours.
He fell asleep with the crystal still in his hand, and Willem found it there in the morning and did not say a word about it. He simply picked it up, put it back in the boy's coat, and went to see to the horses.
—-
They reached the town of Greymarch four days later, which was the largest place Sito had seen since the capital, and the first thing he noticed about it was that it was wrong.
It was market day. The market was half empty. The stalls that were open had their shutters propped ready to come down, and there were more men standing around the square with nothing to do than there were people buying anything, and none of them were talking much.
Marcus rode straight to the guild hall.
Sito had read about the Adventurers' Guild since he was four years old.
He had read about the founding charter and the division of the treasury and the seventeen separate disputes the Epirian Crown had lost to them over jurisdiction. He could have recited the guild's obligations to the throne in the event of a general muster.
Yet despite that he had never once seen an adventurer.
The hall was a long, low stone building with a roof that had been patched four different times with four different materials, and the inside smelled of sweat and wet leather and something medicinal. It was loud. There were perhaps sixty people in it, and they were nothing at all like Sito had imagined.
He had imagined warriors.
What he got was a woman in her fifties with a badly set nose arguing loudly about the price of rope.
A boy barely older than Raymond asleep with his arms crossed sitting up in a corner.
Two enormous men seated at the far side eating out of the same bowl in complete silence.
And a thin cheerful man with no left hand explaining something complicated to four teenagers who were clearly signing their first contracts that morning.
Every single person in the room wore a bracelet.
They were plain. A flat band of metal, close to the wrist, nothing decorative about them at all — and when Sito looked properly he saw that they were not all the same metal. The four teenagers had copper. The woman with the nose had steel. The man with no left hand had gold, and people moved out of his way without appearing to notice they were doing it.
"They're licenses," said Willem, when Sito asked. "Division and tier. You sign with the guild, they band you, and the band says what you're allowed to take work on."
"Division?"
"What kind of work you do." Willem nodded toward the far wall. "Beast and monster. Bounty. Dungeon crawl. Escort. There's a few others. Most people pick one and stay in it their whole life, because the one you're good at is the one that doesn't kill you. You can license for more than one, but you have to pass for each, and you're starting at the bottom of each ladder when you do."
"And the tiers?"
"Ten of them." Willem counted them off. "Copper, bronze, iron, steel, silver, gold, platinum, adamant, orichalcum, mithril."
Sito looked around the room again.
"So which are you?"
"I'm not guild. But if I signed tomorrow they'd band me silver, and I'd be gold inside two years, and gold is where I'd stop." Willem said it without any particular feeling about it. "Gold's tend to be around Third Circle. That's a good long career and a pension. Ramsey the same."
"And Osric?"
"Osric's Fourth. That'll probably get em' platinum." Willem tipped his head toward the room. "There's four platinums in this kingdom that I know of by name, and I know all four names, and so does everyone in here."
"What about above that?"
"Adamant is usually Fifth Circle. Masters." Willem shrugged. "That'd be similar to Lord Benedictus. Also Duncan Elbrus and Ragnar and the rest of them. Eight in Epiria, and every soul in this hall could name all eight."
"And after that?"
"Orichalcum's Sixth. You'd be talking about your father, my lad." Willem paused. "And mithril's the top of the ladder and nobody's worn it in living memory. There's a plate on the wall in the guild house in the capital with the last name on it, and the date's four hundred years back."
Sito looked at the bracelets going around the room. Copper, copper, iron, steel, copper, bronze.
Mostly copper.
"Tier isn't Circle, though," said Osric, from behind them, and Sito jumped. "Don't go making that mistake, your highness, it'll get you killed one day. Circle's what's in you. Tier's what the guild will let you sign for, and that's your Circle and your record and your division all mashed together. I'd take a gold beast-hunter with twenty years on him over a platinum who's spent his career walking merchants to Whitbury. Every single time."
---
The notice board took up the whole of the north wall, and it was organized by division, and Marcus went to it like a man who had done this before.
BEAST & MONSTER was the left third. There were perhaps forty papers pinned to it, most of them small and dull — a boar cull, two separate notices about something eating chickens, a nest of something in a quarry.
There was one in the middle, on a larger sheet, and the first thing on it was the date.
The date was written enormously. It was twice the size of anything else on the page, in thick black clerk's ink, and it took Sito a moment to work out why that was strange.
Under the date was a single word.
*HOLLOW*
And under that, the tier.
*GOLD*
"Why's the date so big?" said Sito.
"Because it's a hollow," said the thin man with no left hand, who had come up beside them without either of them noticing. His gold band caught the light. "Beg pardon, my lords. Couldn't help it."
Marcus turned. "Please."
"A hollow eats cores. That's the whole of it. And every core it eats, it gets stronger — not a bit stronger, properly stronger, and fast." The man tapped the enormous date with two fingers. "So the tier on that page was true on the day it was written. It's a lie by now and everybody knows it's a lie. That's why the guild writes the date bigger than the grade. It's the only notice on that wall where the rating ages like milk. The longer it sits the worse it stinks."
"How old is it?"
"Eighteen days."
Marcus was very still.
"There was a party on it," he said.
"There was. Seven of them." The man's cheerfulness went out of him like a candle. "Four came back."
"Composition?"
"Two gold, one of them beast. A silver. Rest were iron and steel." The man shook his head slowly. "And that's the bit that's been sitting badly with me all week, my lord. It was a gold notice, so it needed a gold party, and they made a gold party out of whoever was standing here. Two of the ones that didn't come back were escort men. Escort. On a beast job. Took it because the purse was good."
"And you?"
"Me?" He held up the arm that ended at the wrist. "I'm beast division, twenty-two years, gold, and I'm the wrong side of fifty with one hand. I turned it down on day two and I've been in this hall drinking about it ever since."
He looked at the notice again.
"I'd not go near it now," he said. "That's not gold anymore. I don't know what it is, but I do know it's trouble."