They walked for three hours before Kira spoke again.
Aldric had spent those three hours doing what soldiers do when there is nothing else to do: he observed. He catalogued. He took everything he could learn about the girl holding him and arranged it into something resembling a picture, the way a scout arranges fragments of information about enemy terrain until a map begins to emerge from the pieces.
She walked at a consistent pace. Not fast, not slow, the kind of pace that eats distance without announcing itself, the kind that a person develops when they have been moving alone for a long time and have stopped thinking of walking as effort. She did not hum or talk to herself. She did not check the road behind her. Most people, even confident people, glance back occasionally. It is an instinct older than language, the need to confirm that nothing is following. Kira did not do this once in three hours, and it was not because she was careless. It was because whatever might be following her did not concern her enough to warrant the motion.
He found that more unsettling than the smoke still fading behind them.
She had good eyes. He could tell by the way her attention moved, never dwelling too long on any one thing, covering the treeline and the road and the sky with the same even distribution that a trained soldier uses on a perimeter sweep. She had done this before. Not the walking, not just the walking, but the moving through a world that might at any moment require her to do something violent, and the readiness that kind of life builds into the body without the person always being aware of it.
She was perhaps twenty years old. Perhaps a little more. It was difficult to tell with people whose faces did not move much.
You haven't asked my name, he said, partly because it was true and partly because he wanted to see what she did with it.
"You didn't offer it," she said.
Most people would ask anyway.
"I'm not most people."
He already knew that. He said it anyway. Aldric. My name is Aldric Voss. I was a sergeant in the Third Harrow Regiment for seventeen years before I died on a battlefield and woke up as this.
"Third Harrow," she repeated. Something moved behind her eyes, quick and brief, there and gone before he could read it properly. "That regiment was disbanded eight years ago."
The information hit him with a weight he hadn't anticipated. Eight years. He had been lying in that ruin for eight years, or longer, with no sense of time passing, no awareness of the world moving on without him. The war he had died in was eight years finished. The men he had served with were eight years older, or eight years dead themselves. His daughter, who had been four years old at her naming ceremony, was twelve now.
He did not let himself follow that thought any further.
Then you know who I was, he said.
"I know what the Third Harrow was," she said carefully. "I don't know who you were."
Is there a difference?
"Usually," she said, and fell quiet again.
They came to a fork in the road as the afternoon light began to turn the colour of old brass. Kira stopped and looked at both paths with the same expression she gave everything, that flat and even attention that committed to nothing. The left road was wider, better travelled, the kind of road that led to towns with inns and markets. The right road was narrower and showed less use, curving away into a tree line that swallowed it quickly.
She took the right road.
The town is to the left, Aldric said.
"Yes," she agreed.
If you're travelling alone you need supplies. Food. Water. A place to sleep that isn't open ground.
"I have supplies."
For how long?
She considered this with characteristic patience. "Long enough."
He decided to try a different approach. Where are we going?
"North."
North is not a destination. North is a direction.
"Most destinations are just directions until you get close enough to see them properly," she said. There was nothing philosophical in her tone. She was not being poetic. She appeared to be stating something she considered a simple fact, and the simplicity of it was somehow more irritating than if she had been trying to sound clever.
He was quiet for a while. The trees closed in around them, and the light changed to the filtered, greenish grey of late afternoon in forest. The road narrowed further until it was barely more than a track, two pale lines worn into the earth by infrequent use. Birds moved in the canopy above them. Somewhere water was running.
Tell me about the village, he said.
She did not answer immediately. He had begun to understand that her silences were not evasions. She appeared to genuinely think before she spoke, not out of caution but out of something more like accuracy, the way a person measures twice before cutting because they find imprecision wasteful.
"What about it?" she finally said.
What happened there. All of it.
"Why?"
Because I was used there and I don't have any memory of it and I find that unacceptable.
This appeared to be the right thing to say. She processed it for a moment, then spoke with the same flat delivery she used for everything, which made what she said considerably worse than it would have been coming from someone who understood the appropriate register for such information.
"I arrived yesterday evening. I needed to know if the northern pass through the Ashfeld range was still open or if the rockfall from last winter had closed it permanently. There was a man in the village who had made the crossing recently. He told me it was open. Then he told three other men what I had asked him, and they decided that a young woman travelling alone to the northern pass was either carrying something valuable or running from something that would pay for information about her. They followed me to the edge of the village."
She paused. Adjusted her grip on him slightly.
"I didn't run," she said.
Aldric waited.
"There were four of them. Then there weren't."
Four, he said. The number settled over him like cold water. You killed four men because they followed you.
"I killed four men because they intended to rob me and likely worse," she said, with the measured tone of someone correcting a minor factual error. "The reason matters."
Does it?
"To me," she said simply. "Somewhat."
He thought about that word. Somewhat. Not entirely, not fully, but somewhat. Most people who killed in self-defence were either traumatised by it or defended it loudly, the way people defend things that cost them something. Kira offered it as a footnote to a larger account, a small qualifier attached to an action she had already filed away and moved on from.
Were there others? he asked. In the village. Who saw.
"A few."
And you left them.
"They weren't a threat."
But they'll talk. There will be people asking questions about a young woman with a spear, moving north through the Ashfeld roads.
"Yes," she said, as though this were a weather forecast she had already accounted for.
That doesn't concern you.
"Not particularly."
The track curved and the trees thinned briefly, opening onto a small rise that gave them a view over the canopy to the south. From here, in the failing light, Aldric could just make out the faint smear of dark on the horizon where the smoke from the village had finally begun to disperse. He could not see the village itself. He was glad of that.
Kira, he said.
"Yes."
What is on your list?
The question came out before he had fully decided to ask it. He had been building toward it for three hours, assembling the pieces of her, and the list was the piece that didn't fit the others yet. The precision of those four deaths. The specific destination. The way she had looked at him in the ruins, not with the excitement of discovery but with the recognition of someone finding a thing they had been specifically looking for.
She slowed her pace slightly. Just slightly.
"What makes you think I have a list?"
Because you weren't looking for a weapon, he said. You were looking for me. Specifically. You knew what I was before you moved that stone. You knew where to find me. And people who know those things always have a reason that goes further back than yesterday.
The forest was fully dark around them now, the last of the afternoon light gone without ceremony. Kira stopped walking. She found a large root at the base of an old tree and sat down on it with the unhurried ease of someone who had planned this stopping point in advance, and she set him carefully across her knees with the point facing outward into the dark, which he noted was tactically sound.
She looked up through the gap in the canopy at the first stars appearing in the sky.
"You were a sergeant for seventeen years," she said.
Yes.
"So you gave orders. And you received them."
Yes.
"When you received an order you didn't fully understand yet, what did you do?"
He knew where she was going. He answered honestly anyway. I followed it until I understood it or until it proved wrong.
"Good," she said. "Do that."
She settled her back against the tree trunk with a composure that suggested she intended to sleep, which he found extraordinary given that she was sitting in a dark forest with a cursed demon spear across her knees and at least one group of potential pursuers somewhere behind her on the road.
You're going to sleep, he said flatly.
"I'm tired."
We haven't finished this conversation.
"The conversation will still be here in the morning," she said. "You're a spear. You don't sleep. You can think about what you want to ask me while I do."
He wanted to argue with this. He found, to his considerable irritation, that it was entirely logical.
The forest settled into its night sounds around them. Kira's breathing slowed and steadied within minutes, the breathing of someone who could sleep anywhere, which was either a gift or the result of a life that had required it. Aldric held his awareness open to the dark and the sounds moving through it, soldier's habit, and thought about everything she had said and everything she had not said, and tried to build the map from the fragments.
She had known where he was. She had a destination. She had a list she wasn't ready to share. She had killed four men with what sounded like professional efficiency and felt about it what most people feel about stepping around a puddle.
He was still arranging the pieces when he heard it.
Footsteps on the track behind them. Not one set. Several. Moving carefully, the way people move when they are trying not to be heard, which meant they already knew roughly where they were going.
They were not travellers.
Aldric felt something sharpen in him, some old instinct folding back into place like a blade sliding home into a grip, and he understood for the first time with real clarity what it meant to be a weapon with a mind inside it. He wanted to wake Kira. He wanted to warn her.
But before he could form the words, he felt her hand tighten around him in the dark.
She was already awake.
She had never been asleep at all.