Firoxy's obsidian walls came up dark against the evening sky, the lava channels running their slow orange threads through the city like something alive under glass. Lore's legs went unsteady at the sight of them, a different kind of unsteady than the road had made him.
He didn't remember all of the walk back. The days had folded into each other somewhere past the third, his side a constant grinding weight, Vrak setting a pace slow enough to keep him upright and never once complaining about it. What he remembered were pieces — a night under a rock overhang with the rain starting up again, Vrak forcing broth into him past his clenched teeth, the horns riding dark and heavy against Vrak's pack the whole way, their weight never once shifted onto him. He remembered the first sight of the city gates, and his knees nearly going out from under him at the sight, catching himself on Vrak's shoulder.
They didn't make it to their quarters. Ragven found them at the gate — someone had run ahead, word moving faster than two wrecked men on a week-old road — and he was standing there with his arms crossed and his jaw set in a way Lore had never seen on him, not in the yard, not in the council chamber, not once in eleven months.
"Med bay," Ragven said. Not a question, not a greeting. "Now."
They let the healers work on him first. The setting of the ribs was its own kind of violence — a healer's flat palms finding the break by feel, pressing until he understood exactly where it was by the white light that went off behind his eyes, and then pressing again to be sure. The binding came after, wound tight enough that each breath fought the wrap of it. She peeled back what was left of the bruise dressing and went still a moment at the sight of it — the black-purple spread still dark across his sternum, the clear shape of knuckles pressed into it — and looked up at him with a question she already knew he wouldn't answer honestly. He didn't. He said it was an accident. She didn't believe him and didn't push, and finished the wrap in silence.
Ragven waited until they were done, and then he waited until the room had cleared, and then he pulled a chair around backward and sat in it with his forearms crossed on the backrest and looked at Lore for a long moment without saying anything at all.
"Vrak told me the shape of it on the way in," Ragven said finally. "I want it from you."
So Lore told him. All of it — the den, the bones, the skull on the pile, the scent-tracking, the tree torn from the earth, the fight that should have killed him and very nearly did. He kept his voice level through most of it, the way he'd learned to report things, and it only caught once, on the part about Maret. Ragven let it pass without comment.
When it was done Ragven sat with it a while. The lava-light from the channel outside the window moved slow orange across the wall.
"You went into that forest," Ragven said, "alone, at night, against something you had no measure of, with two Knights' worth of intelligence and none of the resources. You are lucky to be alive. Vrak is the only reason you are." His voice hadn't risen. It didn't need to. "If I had known the shape of what you were walking into, I would never have let you go. You understand that."
"I understand it."
"I told you the Order couldn't sanction it. I did not tell you to nearly die doing it anyway." Ragven's jaw worked. "You are worth more to this posting, to me, than one village's two months of nightmares. I need you to hear that, even if you don't agree with it."
Lore held his eyes. "I don't agree with it."
Something that might have been the ghost of a smile crossed Ragven's face and was gone. "No. I didn't think you would." He was quiet a moment. "That's the thing about you I can't decide whether to be proud of or terrified by. Possibly both."
He didn't get up. Lore had expected him to — the reprimand delivered, the matter closed, on to whatever came next — but Ragven stayed in the backward chair with his forearms crossed on the rest, watching him with a patience Lore wasn't used to seeing on him. Ragven didn't wait well. Everyone who'd sparred him knew that.
"You told me what happened," Ragven said. "You didn't tell me how it went."
"I don't know what you mean."
"I mean I've watched you fight for eleven months. I've taken your worst and grinned through it. I know what you look like when you're proud of a kill and I know what you look like when a fight cost you something you didn't expect to pay." He didn't move. "You've had that second look on your face since the gate. So tell me how it went."
Lore looked at the ceiling for a while. The lava-light kept moving slow across it.
"I found where it slept," he said finally. "Before it found me. There were bones. A pile of them, and it added to it without thinking, the way an animal does — and on the top, most recent, there was a child's skull. Cracked. One bite." His own voice had gone flat in his ears. "I knew before Sev and Maret told me anything. I already knew a child was dead in that pile, and I went in to watch, not to fight, and I watched it come home and find my scent in its own bed and I understood I was going to have to kill it before I understood anything else that was happening."
Ragven didn't interrupt. Lore kept going, because once it started it didn't seem to want to stop.
"It should have been clean. It wasn't. Vrak collapsed the leg for me and I got inside and I didn't — " He stopped. Started again. "I wasn't thinking. I wasn't fighting the way I've trained to fight, clean, measured — I acted out of pure emotion, nothing behind it but feeling. I got the head half off and it wouldn't come the rest of the way and I just kept hitting it. Both hands. I don't know how many times. I was screaming something and I don't know what it was." His hands, in his lap, had curled without his noticing. "I've killed things before. Killed men before, at Windas, and it never felt like that. It felt like something came loose in me that I didn't know was tied down."
"What do you think it was," Ragven said. Quiet. Not pushing.
"Everything, I think. The skull. The two months that village spent listening to the trees. Sev's boy in the spring and nobody came. Maret's girl six weeks ago and nobody came. I came, and I still didn't come soon enough, and by the time I understood what that thing had actually done I wasn't fighting an animal anymore. I don't know what I was doing." He made himself say the rest of it. "After. It started raining, and I put my head back and screamed into it, and it wasn't — it wasn't victory. I don't know what it was. Everything that had been sitting in me for weeks, maybe longer, came up at once and there was nowhere else for it to go."
The room was quiet a long moment. Outside, the lava channel ran its slow orange line past the window, indifferent.
"And the names," Ragven said. "Vrak told me there were names."
"Elspeth. Toma." Saying them here, in this room, to this man, felt different than saying them in Dorhn — less an act of comfort for someone else and more a thing he was finally admitting to himself. "I asked for them. I told Sev and Maret I carry names, the ones I've lost, the ones I couldn't save — I've got ten on my back already — and I asked for theirs, because I never met their children and I wanted to anyway. I wanted something of them to go on somewhere." He swallowed. "I don't know why it's supposed to help. It doesn't bring anyone back. But I couldn't leave that village with nothing in me for them."
Ragven let that sit a while before he spoke again. When he did, his voice had none of the reprimand left in it at all.
"You know what I think," he said, "is that you've spent eleven months proving to this posting, and to yourself, that you can take anything and keep standing. The fights, the losses, the ten names, all of it. You've gotten very good at carrying weight without anyone watching you carry it." He held Lore's eyes. "This is the first time I've heard you say out loud that it's heavy."
Lore didn't answer that right away. There wasn't an answer that didn't feel like agreeing to something he'd spent a long time refusing to say.
"It is," he said finally. "Heavy."
"Then let it be heavy for a while," Ragven said. "You don't have to carry it standing up every hour of every day. That's not strength. That's just refusing to put a thing down that's already yours whether you're holding it or not." He reached over and set a hand briefly on Lore's shoulder — the good one — and took it away again. "You did right by that village. You did it in a way that cost you more than it should have, and I'm still angry about that, and both things are true at once. Let them both be true. Don't make yourself smaller to fit one of them."
Lore looked at him a long moment. Something in his chest eased a fraction — not the ribs, something under them, something that had been clenched down tight since long before the clearing. Since before Dorhn. Since further back than he could easily name, some knot he'd been carrying so long he'd stopped noticing the weight of it and had only ever felt it in the absence, in moments like this one, when a fraction of it let go and he realized how much had been sitting there the whole time. It didn't vanish. It just loosened enough, for the first time in longer than he could remember, to breathe around.
"Thank you," he said. It wasn't much. It was what he had.
Ragven nodded, once, and let the quiet hold a moment longer before he moved on, because there was more to say and he was not a man who let comfort become delay forever.
He stood, and went to the door, and came back with the pack Vrak had left outside — the horns, still lashed where they'd ridden the whole week home. He set them across the end of the bed and looked at them a long moment, and something in his face changed, the softness giving way to something else entirely.
"Do you know what these are," Ragven said.
"The village called it the Beast of the Wilds. We never had a better name for it."
Ragven ran a hand along the curve of one horn, slow, the way a man touches something he respects. "It's a minotaur."
Lore turned the word over. He'd heard it before, in passing, the way you hear the names of things that live at the edges of stories rather than in them. "I don't know much about them."
"Most Knights don't. They're rare enough that half the Order goes a whole career without seeing one, and the other half only sees the aftermath of one that's gotten loose. Cave dwellers. Deep systems, the kind that go down for miles. They live in packs — a warren, they call it, dozens of them together, and they almost never leave the dark." Ragven's thumb traced an old groove in the horn, something Lore hadn't noticed, a healed scar in the bone itself. "They're dangerous. Mana beasts, same as anything else that lives that long in the dark gets dangerous. But they're territorial, not predatory. A warren holds its ground and doesn't go looking for trouble on the surface. In a century of Order record I can think of maybe four incidents where one came above ground and went after people, and every one of them had a reason — the warren disturbed, driven out, something that broke the pattern first."
"This one was alone."
"This one was alone," Ragven agreed, "in a forest, above ground, for at least twenty-five years by your own account. No warren. No pack. A creature built to live and die in the dark with its own kind, holding a stretch of trees it was never meant to hold, for longer than most Knights have been alive." He set the horn down. "That doesn't happen on its own. Something put it there. Something took its warren, or drove it out, or killed everything it had, and it ended up in a forest a week from anywhere, angry and alone and slowly starving on prey it was never built to hunt, until two months ago it got desperate enough to stop respecting a wall."
Lore sat with that. The grinding exhalation came back to him, the sound he'd felt in his own sternum before he ever saw the thing — the sound of something in constant low pain that had forgotten it was in pain because the pain was all it had left. He'd read it as an animal's suffering. It had been that. It had also been twenty-five years of something worse.
"Do you know what did it?" Lore asked.
"No." Ragven's voice had gone flat and honest. "I don't. I can't tell you what's under the Wildlands south of Dorhn, or what happened to a warren of minotaurs that should still be alive and isn't. I can tell you it isn't nothing, and I can tell you I don't like not knowing." He looked at Lore. "That's not yours to carry tonight. You did what needed doing, and you did it at a cost I'd rather you hadn't paid. Rest. Heal. Let Garron look at what's left of your armor."
He moved toward the door and stopped there, his hand on the frame, and Lore saw something pass behind his eyes — a decision about how much to say and when.
"There's more," Ragven said. "It'll keep until you're on your feet. But you should know it's there before you hear it secondhand." He didn't turn around. "While you were gone, we lost contact with a watch post on the eastern range. Found it three days later. Everyone in it was dead, and it wasn't a minotaur that did it." A pause. "And the ground shook twice more. Different fault lines. Voryn has stopped calling them isolated."
He left it there and went out, and the door closed soft behind him. Lore lay in the lava-lit dark with the horns at the foot of his bed, the wrap tight across his ribs, the ceiling moving slow orange the way it had all night. Somewhere behind his own sternum the grinding exhalation was still going, faint now, an animal sound he didn't think would fully leave him. A watch post, dead. The ground shaking on fault lines that had never shaken before. Whatever had come for him in that forest was a small thing. He didn't yet know the shape of the larger one, and lying there in the dark, he understood that he was about to.