The checkpoint appeared out of the morning mist like something out of a different world entirely, a low stone wall cutting straight across the road, a gate manned by two soldiers in blue-gray uniforms Rhys had never seen before, and beyond it, visible even from a distance, buildings too clean and too orderly to belong to anywhere he'd ever called home.
He'd walked two days to reach it, sleeping in short, wary stretches off the roadside, the wolves' teeth marks he didn't have but could still feel phantom-fresh along his nerves. His food was half gone. His legs ached in a way that had stopped being new sometime yesterday. He stopped at the edge of the treeline anyway, well short of the gate, and studied it the way Ren had taught him to study anything unfamiliar before walking into it.
House colors, he thought, taking in the blue-gray uniforms, the crest stitched small over each soldier's heart, a shape like a folded curtain, or a closed eye. Not Thane's black and orange. Someone else's territory first.
He was still working out whether that mattered when a voice spoke from the trees behind him, close enough that his whole body went rigid before his mind caught up.
"You've been sloppy the last two days." A woman's voice, calm, precise, entirely unbothered by his sudden stillness. "Sleeping in the open. Favoring your left side when you walk, which tells me something's still wrong from whatever happened on the road two nights ago. If I'd wanted you dead, you'd have been dead before you ever saw this checkpoint."
Rhys turned slowly, one hand drifting toward the knife at his belt, and found her standing a short distance off among the trees, close enough that she must have been there for longer than he wanted to think about. Pale, silver-blonde hair pulled back in a tight travel braid. Ice-blue eyes that studied him with an unreadable, clinical patience. Practical clothes in muted blue-gray, the same folded-curtain crest small at her collar. A slim, ceremonial-looking blade at her hip that didn't look ceremonial at all in the way she stood near it.
"You're the one who's been following me."
"Since the road." She didn't bother denying it. "Since before the wolves, if I'm honest, though I'll admit that part surprised me. Most seventeen-year-olds with an untrained bloodline gift get themselves killed the first time something with teeth decides they look like dinner."
His stomach turned cold. "You know what I am."
"I know a report reached my House two days ago claiming an active Thirteenth Art heir had surfaced near the border, which every serious person in every serious House assumed was either a lie or a mistake, since that bloodline was declared extinct before either of us was born." Her gaze flicked, briefly, deliberately, to the faint silver lines still visible along his forearms where his sleeve had ridden up. "I was sent to confirm or deny it. Quietly, before anyone with less patience than me got involved."
"And which is it? Confirm or deny?"
"That's the question, isn't it." Something almost like amusement crossed her face, gone as quickly as it arrived. "I haven't decided yet what to put in my report. That depends a great deal on what you do in the next few minutes."
"What I do." Rhys felt the old, familiar heat rising in his chest, the same one that had gotten him nowhere but trouble his whole life, and for once didn't bother trying to smother it. "You want to know what I'll do? I'll tell you what already happened. A man in a gray coat came to my home two days ago and killed the only family I had, because of something I didn't even know I was. So forgive me if I'm not in a generous mood about being evaluated by whoever your House sends next."
Something shifted behind her composed expression, brief but real, there and gone before he could name it.
"House Thane," she said slowly, testing the words. "Not mine."
"Does it matter which House it was?"
"To you, probably not." Her jaw tightened, just slightly. "To the balance between the Eleven, it matters a great deal more than you understand yet. If Thane already has a confirmed report on you, that changes what happens here considerably faster than I'd like."
She stepped forward, out of the treeline, into the thin morning light, and for the first time Rhys saw real uncertainty cross her face, quickly hidden but not quickly enough.
"I have orders," she said. "Confirm what you are. If confirmed, contain you until my House can decide what to do with the information. I was not given instructions for what happens if Thane already knows and is already moving. I don't have a clean answer for you, and I don't like operating without one."
"Then don't." Rhys held her gaze, steady despite the exhaustion dragging at every part of him. "Let me walk past that checkpoint and we both pretend this conversation didn't happen."
"I can't do that."
"Can't, or won't?"
Her hand drifted, almost unconsciously, toward the blade at her hip, and behind her, from the direction of the checkpoint itself, a horn sounded once, sharp and sudden across the quiet morning, the kind of sound that meant something had already been decided by someone other than either of them.
Her eyes widened, just slightly, genuine alarm breaking through the composure for the first time since she'd spoken.
"That's not my House's signal," she said, low and fast, already turning toward the sound. "That's not anyone's signal I recognize."
Rhys followed her gaze toward the checkpoint gate, where the two soldiers who'd been standing bored and half-alert only minutes before were suddenly scrambling into formation, weapons drawn, all of it aimed not at each other, and not yet at him, but at the tree line further down the road, where a second horn answered the first, closer this time, and considerably less friendly.
"Whatever you decide to put in that report," Rhys said quietly, watching the gate soldiers brace for something neither of them could yet see, "I don't think it's going to matter in about thirty seconds."