Behind both of them, men in iron suits came out of the treeline in a line, and the line kept going, and the valley afternoon held all of it in its broad, unhurried light.

The older woman walked to the edge of the rest stop and looked across it — at the cauldron, at the light, at Jake floating above it — and then her eyes moved to the leader of the eastern men, and she smiled.

It was not a warm smile. It was the smile of a blade being turned in good light — the same smile Jake had seen on Granny’s face in Chelsea’s sitting room the smile of a woman who found the world privately, sharply amusing and had learned to let only the edge of that amusement show.

"Bearfang," she said, looking at the leader.

Her voice carried across the rest stop with the ease of a voice that had spent years being listened to.

"It’s been a while."

-

A few minutes earlier.

Eskar was running away from those men, not even glancing back. His life mattered to him and nothing else.

He ran with the particular self-loathing of a man who knew exactly what he was doing and did it anyway, because the alternative was dying at a rest stop on a valley road and that helped nobody, and he had spent fifteen years telling himself that kind of thing and it had never once made the running feel clean.

The curve of the valley road took him around the hill’s shoulder and out of sight of the rest stop, and he ran another fifty meters before his legs and his conscience reached an agreement that stopped him.

He bent over on his knees, chest working hard, and stared at the packed dirt of the road and thought about Jake’s face — that specific expression, the bad dream worn on a waking face — and felt something move through his chest that was not comfortable to feel.

He straightened.

He turned around.

He had made it perhaps twenty steps back toward the rest stop when the figure came around the hill’s curve behind him.

Not running either. Walking with the same patient, unhurried pace it had used leaving the rest stop.

It was one of the men in civilian clothes, blade drawn, moving with the compressed economy of a trained professional who had been given one instruction and needed nothing else to complete it.

Eskar raised his sword.

The figure kept coming.

He was good. Eskar recognized it well, the way veterans recognized it — in the weight distribution, the grip, and the angle of approach that closed options without appearing to.

This was not a man who fought. This was a man who finished things.

The figure’s blade came in fast and low.

Eskar parried — the impact ran up his arm with the specific resonance of a heavy strike, more power behind it than the man’s frame suggested — and stepped back, and the figure followed without pause, pressing, not giving him room to reset, and Eskar understood very quickly that this engagement was going to resolve badly if something didn’t change.

Something changed.

The arrow came from the left — from the treeline beside the road, from a shadow between the trees that hadn’t had anyone in it and then did — and it took the figure in the shoulder with enough force to spin him half around.

Not a kill shot.

Not yet.

But the follow-up came before the figure had finished processing the first: a second arrow, same origin, same composed, unhurried precision, this one finding the gap between the shoulder and the neck where the civilian clothes didn’t cover.

The figure went down.

Eskar stared at where it had been standing.

Then he looked at the treeline.

She walked out of it the way she’d walked out of the Greyswood — simply not present and then present, the transition unremarkable, as though the forest had held her for a moment as a courtesy and now released her because she had somewhere to be.

The short bow was already slung back across her shoulder. Her dark eyes moved from the fallen figure to Eskar with the clean efficiency of someone completing an assessment.

Behind her, from further back in the trees, the older woman emerged.

And behind the older woman, the sound of iron — the particular sound of armored men moving through undergrowth, deliberate and unhurried, in numbers that Eskar’s trained ear began counting and stopped at somewhere past twenty.

Lady Ankerita Solhani looked at Eskar.

"What happened?" she asked. She could tell that something had happened to his group and it seemed like he was being chased.

"Yes," Eskar said. He was still breathing hard. He didn’t apologize for it.

"Where is the boy?"

Eskar looked at her.

Then at the older woman behind her, who was watching him with the sharp, settled eyes of someone who had long since learned to read people quickly and trusted her readings.

"Rest stop," he said.

"Back around the hill. They — "

He stopped, thinking of omitting the reason he was here alone and started talking again.

"We were ambushed. My men are down. They have Jake — they have him on something—"

He heard himself and understood how it sounded.

"I know how that sounds."

"No," the older woman said, stepping forward. Her voice was unhurried and completely certain. "You don’t know how it sounds to us."

She looked at Ankerita. "Fe-cauldron."

Ankerita’s expression didn’t change. Her hand moved to the short blade at her hip and rested there, not drawing, not yet. "How many?"

"I lost count," Eskar said honestly.

"More than I expected. They had figures — fighters, professional; they moved like — I’ve never seen anyone move like that."

"Sealers," the older woman said.

The word arrived with the flat weight of a familiar and unpleasant thing.

She looked at Eskar with an expression that had settled into something harder than it had been thirty seconds ago. "Take us there."

Eskar looked at the figure dead in the road. He looked at the treeline, where the armored men were still emerging in a line that kept going. He looked at the older woman’s face, which had the particular quality of a thing that had already made every relevant decision and was simply waiting for the world to catch up.

He turned back toward the rest stop.

"This way," he said.

Eskar knew that he couldn’t do anything right now and only hoped that the group killed all of his men. And he didn’t register their particular interest in things or what exactly happened to Eskar and his men.