Sael stood with his hand still down at his side and looked at the goat.
He was, on balance, confused.
That was a sensation he had not had to sit with very often in the past hundred years. He had spent four hundred of them operating on the working assumption that past a certain threshold, the Corrupted were not recoverable; that the line ran one direction only, and that the kindest thing he could do for any of them was to end the line cleanly and quickly so that what was left of the person at the other end of it could rest.
He had done that, by his last count, several thousand times.
Now, looking at Pebble, he could not say that the assumption had been wrong. Urus was visibly an exception, and the world had a long history of producing exceptions that confirmed the shape of the rule by being unable to be reproduced. The conditions that had let Urus drift loose from the hive were probably particular to Urus; the wound from Caliburn, the burial under stone for three centuries, the precise timing of the waking, the skill that had let him sleep through the seal coming down. None of that was repeatable. Most of the Corrupted Sael had purged would not have survived the conditions long enough for the drift to occur even if it had been available to them.
But...
If he understood the mechanism, and could work out what part of those conditions had broken the line in the first place, then reproduce it deliberately, in a controlled way, on someone who was still in a body...
He let himself follow the thought for a moment, and then he set it down carefully, because following it any further required time and quiet and neither of those were currently available.
Sadly, there were people more people coming. Guards, six of them this time, in slightly better armour than the four already present, and behind the six, a younger man in finer clothes. The lord, Sael assumed. He had the look. He was perhaps twenty-eight, dark-haired, clean-shaven, and his eyes went directly to Sael.
The captain stepped forward, both hands going up slightly.
"My lord, forgive me. I sent a runner to His Grace the moment I confirmed who you were. I would not normally interrupt, but if I had not informed him and he had heard of your presence through other channels, it would have caused... well. Problems, my lord. Considerable ones. He keeps a good house, but he prefers to be told."
"Hmm."
He meant it as polite, and hoped it came out polite. But he was, internally, a little bothered, because he did not want to meet anyone new today, yet there was no version of this where he said that out loud.
So he didn't.
Instead, Sael anchored the shell to hold without him, stepped back from the goat, and turned around, finding the young lord had already inclined his head.
"Lord Archmage. Forgive the intrusion. My captain assures me your work is not yet finished, and I do not wish to interrupt." He gave a small, careful bow. "My name is Halen, house Kessen. I am the lord of Kessenmark."
He straightened.
"We have been hearing the rumours of your return for weeks now and I confess I did not let myself believe it fully until the captain's runner reached me an hour ago. To receive the hero of the Age of Ash on my own soil, on a day like any other—" He stopped, then shook his head briefly. "Lord Archmage, it is an honour I am still working out how to absorb. My house and my hearth are yours for as long as you wish to make use of them."
The introduction came out smooth, unhurried, and clearly practiced. Sael appreciated that. He had met enough young nobles over four centuries to know the variants, and this one sat, on first impression, near the better end of the range.
"I—" Sael started. "Yes. Hello."
He had not accounted for having conversations with strangers today, and Halen's introduction had been good enough that the part of him that worried about first impressions had now taken a side interest in this one. He did not want to do badly. The trouble was that everyone was still looking at him, and his mind had, for a brief and stupid fraction of a second, gone entirely blank.
"Sael," he managed. Then, after a pause he could not figure out how to fill, "Thank you. For the offer."
This was so bad...
"Of course, my lord." Halen said, his gaze then drifting past Sael to the shell hanging in the air behind him. "...May I ask, Lord Archmage, why you have a goat suspended in a containment spell?"
Sael considered how to answer while the shell shifted slightly. Inside it, Urus stirred, and his voice came back, no longer addressed to Sael.
"My lord. My lord of Kessenmark. Please. Ask him to free me. I have done no harm in your lands, on my honour, none. The containment is unnecessary!"
Halen had gone still from surprise as Oz spoke from the wall.
"I still do not understand why you have not killed it."
The silence that followed from the newcomers was unusually thorough, and Sael felt the need to step in and clarify what he thought might be a misunderstanding.
"...It wasn't me," he said. "The goat, I mean. I did not turn him into one."
Halen turned to look at him.
"I want to clarify that, because the situation looks like something it is not. I do not go around turning people into animals." He paused. Then, with a small glance at the rooster on the wall, added, "Except him. But that is different. I assure you."
The young man did not press for the clarification and Sael, for his part, decided not to volunteer it. He just continued his correction of the misunderstanding.
"And to be clear, the goat was already a goat when I arrived. The being inside the goat is not the goat. I respect goats and would not, in the usual course of things, manhandle one. The goat is fine."
The pause that followed was longer than the previous one, but Halen, to his very considerable credit, did not let the silence become uncomfortable.
"...I-I see, Lord Archmage," he said, gently. "Thank you for the clarification."
"Hmm."
A hmm of pride, this time. He had spoken up, clarified the misunderstanding, and the misunderstanding now seemed addressed. That was good. He had done a social thing correctly.
Yet, looking at their faces now; especially the young man's, a small unhelpful thought arrived then, suggesting that perhaps the misunderstanding had not actually been one before he had brought it up, and that in clarifying it, he had introduced the possibility into Halen's mind that it could have been one in the first place, which meant Halen might now be wondering whether Sael went around turning people into animals enough that the clarification had been necessary... oh no.
He was considering perhaps clarifying this point as well when Ilsa stepped forward and introduced herself as Ilsa Eryndor.
Halen's gaze moved to her properly for the first time, and his expression adjusted.
"Lady Eryndor." He said. "It is an honour. Your house has long held strong ties with Eredor through the eastern trade, and I have read the Duke's correspondence with my late father on more than one occasion. To meet one of his line here, today, with the Archmage..." He stopped, then smiled briefly. "Today has been a remarkable day."
"Likewise, my lord."
Sael appreciated her quietly. Ilsa had taken the conversation off him for thirty seconds, which was thirty seconds in which he did not have to talk about goats, and he was going to bank that.
Alas, Halen turned back to him.
"Lord Archmage, if I may, I would like to extend the offer of hospitality more formally. My table is set for the evening meal in less than an hour. The road will not change between now and tomorrow, and if you and your company would consent to dine and rest at the keep tonight, I would consider it a very great kindness."
Sael was about to politely decline. He had been about to do so for some time, in fact, since the start of the conversation. He preferred to keep moving, especially with Urus contained but not resolved, and he had not been planning to be inside Kessenmark today, never mind sitting at a noble's table for an evening.
So his mouth had formed the first half of thank you, but when there was a small audible sound from somewhere behind his right shoulder: a stomach growl.
Orion's, to be exact. And it was followed, with notable promptness, by another one: Robin's.
Sael glanced behind him, finding the two of them most embarrassed. But it was also unfair of him to decline just because he wasn't hungry, so he turned back to Halen.
"...Thank you," Sael said. "We accept."
Surely, the Urus problem and the mysterious boy could wait the time of a meal, he supposed.
***
Somewhere is the lost kingdoms, nine thousand kilometers west of where Sael was standing...
"How much for your son?"
The woman did not look up at first. She had been sitting on a low wooden bench outside the trading post since the morning bell, with the boy half-tucked into the side of her wool overdress, and she had been waiting for someone to ask the question for most of the morning. She had a price in her head, and had been adjusting it as the hours went by.
The man across from her was a slaver out of the coastal markets, with a wagon at the corner of the square and four bodies already in it, none of them adults.
"Twenty silver," she said.
He looked at the boy without bending down. "Show me his teeth."
The woman did not move to do it herself. She turned to the boy, put her hand under his chin, and tipped his face up. "Open."
The boy opened his mouth and the slaver counted his teeth with his eyes, then nodded once.
"Fifteen."
"Twenty."
"He has bad eyes."
"He sees fine."
"Not what I mean." The slaver finally bent and looked at the boy properly for the first time. "Look at him. One copper, one nearly white. People do not buy that. People are superstitious, and I will have to discount him on the block, and I am not going to do that off my own pocket. Fifteen."
The woman looked at the boy's face, just like she did every day for ten years and grown so used to the eyes that she had to remind herself, sometimes, that they were indeed strange. She had told him from the time he could understand words that there was nothing to be ashamed of in them, and she had said it so often by now that the words had stopped meaning anything to either of them. She had not, until this morning, considered them in terms of resale value.
"My husband is dead three winters," she said evenly. "I have his sister and her two girls in the house, the winter is two months out, and the wheat was bad this year. Twenty silver gets us through, fifteen does not."
"Fifteen and a half, then."
"Eighteen."
"Sixteen, and I am doing you a favour at sixteen, woman. There are three other mothers in this town with children to sell, and the prices have only been going down all morning. You will not get a better offer for him today, and I am the buyer; there will not be another one through here before the snow comes. Sixteen."
She thought about it for a moment, then sighed. "...Sixteen."
The slaver reached into his belt and counted the coins out, holding them out for her. She took them in one hand without quite looking at them and put them inside the front fold of her dress.
The boy had been watching the exchange, and when the coins changed hands, he reached up and gripped the side of her dress with both hands.
"Mother."
"Let go, Eron."
"Mother, please..."
"Let go."
"I can work, I can carry water, and wood, I can sleep in the shed, I do not need anything, please... I don't want to go with this man, I want to stay with you!"
"Eron."
Her voice had not changed. She had not raised it, and she was not angry. She simply reached down and unhooked his fingers one at a time from her dress, working at the small grip patiently until it released.
"You have to go with the man now."
"No! Mother, please—"
"Stop crying! I have told you about that. There are boys your age in the next valley who have lost both their parents and still go to the fields every morning, and they do not cry. You are going to harden a little, and you are going to be a man about this. Do you understand me, Eron? Do. You. Understand?"
The boy did not answer, so she turned to the slaver in the same even tone. "He understands me. He is a good boy and he listens; he will not give you trouble."
The slaver nodded once, put a hand under the boy's arm, and lifted him gently enough off the bench. He walked him the few paces across the square to the wagon, and the boy did not resist, nor did he look back. The slaver opened the rear panel and helped the boy step up, and the four children already inside shifted to make a small space along the bench for him. None of them spoke, because all of them had already learned that there was no other kindness available to offer.
The slaver then closed the panel and the woman stayed on the bench. She watched the wagon roll out of the square and kept watching until it was past the smithy and gone, and then she sat for another moment with her hand pressed against the front of her dress where the coins were. Then she got up, and went back to her sister-in-law's house, and she did not, in the days that followed, mention the boy by name.