He'd said to meet him here, in the middle of the city where the streets had gone to rot, so that's where I stood.

The garrison ran patrols this late, and getting stopped by them meant days of grief I couldn't spare, so I stayed off the open road. What was left of it had cracked and heaved years ago, and I picked my way over the broken slabs slow, watching my feet. He'd chosen the place for the dark. No moon got down this far. The lane ran between two dead houses with their windows gone black, and I waited there until the waiting stopped feeling like anything.

Then he was there.
"Boy." I heard the word before I saw him. He caught my hand and pulled me deeper into the shadow and pressed something into my palm. Paper, folded small. A name on it, and a place, in writing I didn't know.

"That's your mark," he said, low and flat. "Whoever it is, you bring them back breathing. The bounty won't pay for a corpse." His eyes stayed on mine. Then something moved at the corner of his mouth, not quite a smile. "Coin enough on this one to buy back every dream you ever quit on."

I nodded. Men like him didn't want to be answered. They wanted you to understand and then keep quiet about it, and I could manage both.

"Seven days." He tapped the back of my hand and stepped away, and before I'd thought of a single thing to say he was gone into the dark like he'd been a piece of it all along. I stood there a breath longer than made sense. Then I turned for home. Chewing over a man like that got you killed, and I'd trained it out of myself a long time back.

I took the long way, through the backs of the lanes, and stopped at the old tree over the ditch at the end of my street, same as I always did. My weapons were still in the hollow at the root, dry, wrapped where I'd left them. Sword and scabbard. Bow. A quiver, the arrows still sound. I drew it all out and stood a moment while the weight of it came back onto me, and I let myself think the thing I'd been not thinking, which was that a bounty this size was never luck. It meant other people wanted what I now had folded against my chest. It meant most of them were better at this than me.

I said goodbye to the tree before I left. Quiet. Stupid, I know. But it had kept my blade hidden for years and never once given me up, and that was more than I could say for people.

My father was sharpening his sword when I came in.

The lamp had burned down low, but his hands didn't need it, dragging the stone along the edge in that same slow stroke I'd heard under everything my whole life. He didn't look up.

"Night already," he said. "Whose war are you off to fight tomorrow?"

He captained a company. He'd spent his life on other men's fights, for kings, for lords, for whoever laid the gold down, and not once had he taken me out with him. There was a time I'd called that kindness. I'd stopped calling it anything, and standing there with the road still in my legs I felt the old thing come up in me before I could think better of it.

"I'm sick of this," I said. It was out before I meant to let it go. "Look at the house. Coming down around us stone by stone, and it's all you've got to show. Why do you still go and break yourself for other men like some servant? What's it for. What was it ever for."

He didn't stop the stone. He didn't raise his voice, and he didn't argue, wouldn't even hand me the fight so I'd have somewhere to set it all down. He just let the quiet go on.

"There's food in the kitchen," he said.
That was as near to permission as he gave, so I ate. Hard bread, something cold beside it I didn't look at too close. And while I ate I felt his eyes lift off the blade and settle on the bag by the door, on the shape of the bow through the cloth. He knew it for what it was. He had something to say about it. I could see it sitting in him, taking up room. He kept it there, and I didn't ask, because some questions you're better off never getting the answer to, and I'd worked out a while ago that this was one. So we stayed like that, him with the stone and me with the bread, the thing between us left lying where it was. I told him I'd be off early, without really telling him. Then I lay down, and the last thing I heard going under was the stone.

The paper had given a woman. Ria, west of Magria, and that was the whole of it. I had no idea how a man found one name loose across the whole west. But there was Darion. If anyone could turn a bare name into a road, it was him. I carried that down into sleep with me.

I woke to an empty house. My father had already gone, off to whatever field had bought him this season, and he'd left no word for me. That was his way. I'd long stopped waiting on the mornings for it to be some other way. Not quite no word, as it turned out. Packing up, I found a note pushed down into the bag, folded and sealed, and on the outside, in his hand, one name. Darion. Nothing for me. Only for him. I turned it over the once in the grey light and left it shut. None of my business, I told myself, and if that was only near enough to half the truth, it held well enough to lean on.
I put what fruit we had into the bag and saddled the horse in the grey before real light. The lanes around the house run too tight to ride, so I led him out by the reins, and the city let go of me slow, one crooked street handing me to the next, the houses growing thinner and meaner as I went, until the road finally opened its mouth and the country sat waiting past the walls. And right there, where the last of the city gave out, someone was waiting.
Tag. Fifteen, if he'd even got that far. One of the ones the companies had hauled out of Dalf in a chain line and turned loose once feeding him cost more than he was worth. He came running the second he saw me, out of breath, that hope plain all over his face.

"Can I come with you?"
"No." I didn't soften it. Where I was going was no place for a boy with no blade and no cause to bleed. Let him follow and one of us ends up burying the other, and I didn't care to learn which. So I gave him the only decent thing I had. "Stay safe, Tag. I'll be back before you've finished missing me."

I didn't look at him when I said it. I had a long way to go, and the west wasn't the sort of thing that came down off its own ground to meet you halfway.

I set off.
The west was a long way off, and the first thing the road owed me was Darion.

He'd been a friend of my mother's, back when there was still a court to be a friend inside of. A council man, one of the last of them, in the last fortress the kingdom held before it quit being a kingdom. If anyone alive could look at a scrap of paper and tell me where a woman named Ria had gone to ground, it was him.

I took the paper out again while I rode, telling myself I'd missed something the first time. Ria, west of Magria. The same two things it had told me the last ten times I looked. But there was a mark down in the corner I hadn't given a proper eye to in the dark. A feather. And an arrow driven through it.

I didn't know what it meant. Darion would.
I put my heel to the horse and he gave me what he had left, which by then wasn't much. He'd been running hard a long while. "Little further," I told him. "We stop the moment there's a decent spot for it." I don't think he believed me. He kept on anyway.
The spot came up on its own, ahead and off the path. A low hill under a stand of trees, a thin stream running down beside the road. Good enough for the both of us.

"All right," I said. "Looks like it's your turn to rest."
I call him Red. He made that sound at me, the one I've never quite worked out, and when we came in under the trees he stopped dead, square and neat, without my telling him to. I climbed down and pulled the saddle and the bags off him and set them in the grass.

"Rest here a while," I told him, and dug the feed out and laid it down for him. He ate it slow, left some, turned his nose off the rest. That's his way. I gave up arguing him out of it a long time back.

The hill and the trees ran together overhead into one low green roof. I put my back to the biggest trunk, let my head go back against the bark, and shut my eyes. Only meant it for a moment.
When I opened them again Tag was standing over me.

"Were you sleeping?" he said, easy as you like. "Shall we go?"
"Go where?" I was still half under, and the sight of him there made no sense to me at all. I got up and went to the stream and put the cold water over my face and came back, and for a while I didn't say a thing, only looked at him and saw to my shoes.

Then I looked at him straight. "Didn't I tell you to stay safe. Didn't I tell you not to follow. Where do you reckon you're going, tagging on after me like this."

I kept it off my face, but he felt the anger anyway. He always could. He didn't say a word, and the not saying said plenty.

That was when I marked the horse behind him. A Trattenian. I looked at it, then back at him. "Where did you get that."

The horse tossed its head. Tag dropped his eyes to the ground. "It's mine," he said, barely above nothing.

I set two fingers to the bridge of my nose and breathed out slow. "Tag. Listen to me. This is a bad idea, you coming. Go home."

He didn't move. He stood there with that flat stubborn set to him, and then he walked over to the Trattenian and put himself beside it, quiet, staring down at the dirt.

I took a long breath. There was no turning him back now, and the both of us knew it. "Fine," I said. "But you follow me. Word for word, step for step. No mistakes."

He nodded.
I didn't waste more on it. I got the map out and set us against it, made sure we were still pointed the way we ought to be. "Let's go," I said, and looked at him, and he looked back, and I gave him the one nod.

And so the two of us started out for Roggs.