The hour had grown late, and Sael had been politely declining additional courtesies for the better part of forty minutes.
The meal itself had run nearly four hours. Halen's family had been generous, Sael's company had eaten as though preparing for famine, and the back half had moved at a pace Sael, who had sat through more formal noble dinners than he had ever wanted to in any one lifetime, considered slow even by the genre's usual standards.
Now he stood in the entrance hall of the keep with most of the household gathered around him; Halen, his mother Lady Reyna, an uncle, three cousins, an aunt by marriage, and one elderly woman whose relation to the household Sael had not, despite an evening of trying, been able to firmly establish. Each of them was making the case, separately and together, that he should stay the night.
He was, by his own quiet count, on the seventh polite refusal.
Ilsa had been doing most of the actual work for the past hour. She could decline politely without offending anyone, and she had a particular gift for redirecting a conversation she did not wish to have without anyone noticing it being redirected. Sael appreciated this more than he was likely to tell her directly. He had spent most of the evening trailing in her social wake.
His mind kept drifting back to the meal anyway.
There had been a cousin, Lady Senra, seated to his right, who had carried a high persistent redness across her cheeks from the soup through to the dessert, and whose hand had trembled when she reached for water at the second course, and who had stumbled over the construction of basic courtesies in his direction. Sael had quietly raised the matter with Ilsa as a possible medical concern, and the girl had told him she was fine, grandpa, and Sael had taken her word for it without fully setting the matter to rest.
There had also been the uncle, Vorrin, who had asked whether Sael might consent to a friendly exchange in the practice yard but he had declined as gently as he could manage. Vorrin had not pressed past it, but his disappointment had been visible through the rest of the meal.
The gifts started while Sael was still trying to leave. A bound box from Lady Reyna with silver pipe tools, well-made and genuinely useful. A bottle of wine from Vorrin, offered with a bow that suggested he had decided to be gracious about the duel after all. A folded square of embroidered cloth from the elderly woman of indeterminate relation. Gloves for Orion, a small carved travel chess set for Robin, a bound volume of canonical commentary for Lance. Even Oz, waiting in the courtyard, was sent out with a leather pouch of what Sael suspected was very good grain.
He had learned after Antor that there was no graceful way to refuse this kind of gesture, and that attempting to refuse only escalated the giving. So he accepted everything, with both hands, inclined his head, and said thank you the appropriate number of times.
The final gift came from Halen himself.
It was a slim well-bound volume, navy-blue, with the seal of House Kessen stamped into the corner; a regional history of Eredor compiled by Halen's grandfather, with marginalia in two hands. Halen offered it quietly, with a note that there was a chapter on Yrsult, where one of his ancestor, Jargon, fought.
Sael looked at it for a long moment, and thanked him, and meant it.
The goodbyes were warmer than he had expected. Lady Senra, at the end of the line, finally managed a complete sentence to him: Safe travel, Lord Archmage, delivered in a voice that cracked on the last word, which Sael took in stride.
Halen walked them out to the courtyard.
"Lord Archmage. Thank you for the kindness of the visit. And for what you did at the pass today."
"Thank you for the meal. And for everything."
"Should you ever find occasion to return to Eredor—"
"I will visit."
Halen nodded once, smiled, and stepped back as Sael finally called the cloud.
The construct descended slowly into the courtyard. It came down in stages; at altitude first, where it caught the last of the sunset, then lower, settling above the cobblestones with a small displacement of air that ruffled the torches along the walls. By the time it touched down, every member of the household in the open doorway behind Halen was watching it with open-mouthed attention.
Doing his utmost best to not make eye contact, Sael drew the compass from his coat and opened it.
The needle had started drifting again about an hour ago, somewhere between the fish course and the salad. He had checked it twice since then, discreetly, the second time while Vorrin had been mid-question about lateral footwork. The first time it had been pointing north. Now, in the cool of the courtyard, it was holding steady and clearly westward.
Perhaps the boy was moving?
Sael closed the compass and tucked it away, then turned back to the household.
"Thank you again. For everything."
There were small bows. Lady Reyna inclined her head with both hands clasped and Halen, who had been watching Sael with a slightly different attention since the compass came out and went away again, gave a final bow that was deeper than necessary.
The others began climbing onto the cloud. Ilsa first, with her case. Orion second, still struggling with his overfull bag. Robin third, after a short exchange with one of the household pages about a piece of his crossbow. Lance fourth, with his own bag. Oz flew up last and landed at the front of the cloud without ceremony, glancing back once at the goat with what Sael could fairly call impatience.
Sael walked over to where Urus was standing at the foot of the cloud.
The goat had been sealed since the dip at the wall. Sael had layered the work as carefully as he could; the connection to the hive was suspended, the corrupted residue pinned, and Urus's ability to push at the inside of the body throttled down to roughly the level of a determined housecat with a mild head injury. Pebble, by all external signs, looked again like a goat, albeit one wearing a small visible array along his flank that pulsed faintly blue every few seconds.
"...Do I really have to come?"
The voice was small and reluctant as the goat looked up at him.
"Yes."
"Archmage. I have not been any trouble for several hours. I have demonstrated good faith. The conditions of my—"
"We are not done speaking. You will come."
A small pause, then...
"...Very well."
The goat walked, with visible reluctance, up onto the cloud, and Sael followed before turning at the edge and giving one last bow to Halen and his household, which Halen returned in kind.
Then the cloud lifted.
It rose slowly through the courtyard, then more quickly past the upper walls of the keep, then faster still as Kessenmark fell away below them into the broader dark of the valley. Sael watched the lights of the town shrink and exhaled, quietly relieved.
He was, in fact, full of questions.
Most of them were about Urus. Not about Urus the general; that part was historical record and operational concern, and Sael could think through it at leisure. About the other thing. What Sael had felt when his hand had been on the goat's head: the mechanism by which the Corrupted were folded out of themselves and into the hive. He wanted to study it properly. The window was rare and would not present itself again in any useful form for a very long time, and if there was a thread he could pull on that led to a means of severing the connection, or of breaking the hive entirely...
He kept the thought small and folded it away. Time enough for that.
Twenty minutes into the flight, Orion straightened up sharply and pointed back the way they had come.
"Master. Look."
Sael turned.
Three small balls of fire were rising into the night sky from the ground far below them, one then the next then the next, each climbing in a clean arc several hundred metres into the dark before fading out.
Sael walked to the edge of the cloud and focused. They were probably half a mile up at this altitude, and perhaps three miles south of the source of the fireballs by now. He sharpened his vision through a spell, and the ground came into focus.
A small dark figure on the road just outside the south gate of Kessenmark, with a shepherd's staff in one hand and the other raised. As Sael watched, the figure raised the hand again and another fireball climbed into the air after the previous three.
It was the young man, Dan.
***
The cart had bars instead of walls, and by nightfall the boy had learned there were twelve others inside it with him.
Some were old enough to have grey in their beards. Some were young. One girl near the front could not have been more than fourteen, and when the moonlight shifted through the bars, the boy saw a pale mark under the skin of her wrist, thin, silver and shaped almost like a broken ring.
The guards stopped the cart when the moon was high and passed food through the bars: hard bread, strips of dried meat, and a waterskin watched so closely that no one dared drink more than their share. When the boy received his bread, he held it in both hands for a moment, because it was warm from the sack and smelled better than anything he had eaten in two days.
"Psst."
He looked up.
A large man two places down was watching him with his eyes fixed on the bread.
"You eating that?"
"...Yes," the boy said.
"Doesn't look like it." The man leaned forward, smiling without warmth. "Give it here if you're just going to stare."
The boy looked at the bread again. He did not want to give it away, but he wanted even less to find out what the man would do if he refused, so he began to pass it over when a hand caught his wrist.
The man beside him had not spoken since they were loaded into the cart. He was lean, dark-haired and dark-skinned, with a scar pulling slightly at the corner of his mouth, and he did not look at the boy when he spoke.
"He has his ration," the scarred man said. "You have yours."
"I ate mine."
"Then you should have eaten slower."
The large man's smile disappeared. "You protecting strays now?"
"I'm telling you to leave his food alone."
"He was giving it to me."
"He was afraid of you."
The cart had gone quiet enough that the boy could hear the wheels turning under the floorboards and the faint clink of every chain whenever the road shifted beneath them. The scarred man released the boy's wrist and tapped the back of his hand once.
"Eat," he said. "You'll need it."
So the boy ate.
The bread was hard enough to hurt the roof of his mouth, but he chewed fast anyway, while the large man watched him with a face that grew uglier by the second.
"When these chains come off," the large man said, "I'll remember this."
The scarred man finally looked at him. "Good. Remember your own food next time."
The large man surged forward, and his chain snapped tight before he could reach them. Iron suddenly struck the side of the cart hard enough to make everyone flinch.
"Shut your mouths in there!"
A guard rode alongside the bars, spear haft raised for another blow. He looked from the large man to the scarred one, then to the rest of them.
"One more word, and I start breaking fingers."
To that, no one answered.
The guard struck the bars once more, then fell back beside the road as the cart lurched forward again.
The boy finished the bread down to the crumbs in his palm, while the scarred man watched the road ahead and the large man watched them both, then, looking past, he gasped out of surprise as something caught his eye. He pointed without meaning to, the crumbs still on his hand.
The scarred man followed the gesture, finding in the dark of the treeline beside the road, perhaps thirty paces back, there were eyes.
Pairs of them. Low to the ground, set wide. The moonlight caught in them and gave them back in small twin reflections, and the boy counted six pairs, then eight, then more, appearing one after another along the line of the bushes as though they had been there for some time and had only now decided to be seen.
The cart slowed as one of the other prisoners said something quietly that did not form into a word. A second guard had noticed. He was rising in his saddle, peering, and then his head whipped fully around as he saw what the boy had seen, and he reached for the horn at his belt.
"DIREWOLVES!"
He sharply blew the horn once.
"DIREWOLVES, NORTH SIDE OF THE ROAD! TO ARMS! TO ARMS!"
Boots scrambling at the front of the cart. Steel ringing. Voices shouting back along the column, the call being passed up and down the line.
The eyes in the bushes did not move at first, then, as one, they came forward.
The bushes parted, and the shapes that came out of them were not wolves the boy had ever seen described, not in the way the village men talked about wolves in winter. These were larger. Taller at the shoulder than the cart horses were at the saddle. Black and grey along the back, with their breath visible in the night air, and the foremost of them lowered its head and looked directly at the cart.
A long sound came out of its chest, that another wolf behind it took up, and another after that, until the air around the road was full of it.