CHAPTER 447: 447: THE ROAD LEARNS NAMES

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The first day taught Mia’s team the usual: who runs a little too hot at noon and needs a push to drink; whose shoulders slope when no one is watching and needs a joke; whose knots are beautiful and whose are the kind you cut instead of trusting. She learned what she already knew and confirmed it. Her picks were good. They were quiet when quiet was the right tool. They laughed with their teeth shut when sound would carry. They walked through water without making a splash big enough to interest a kingfisher.

At the first mirror post — a square of mica sunk into the base of an old pillar from a kingdom that was important to other people long before this one — she put her hand to the copper ring and took the pulse. It came back even and shallow. Om slid the lens into its slot. Hoorius’ clerk — a thin man whose eyebrows had learned to be more expressive than his mouth — wrote down what Om said and then sent back two words: Proceed. Leash firm.

Mia slipped the leash’s feel up along her wrist under the cuff of her glove and decided she could live with it.

They stepped off again.

Two hours later they found the first sign that stories and ground had shaken hands. A line of reed had been mashed into an ugly lane by men who didn’t understand that marsh does not like straight things. Serit grimaced. "Spade-men," he said. "They tried to lay a mat path and the marsh bit them for it."

"Which men?" Kiva asked.

"Skall’s," Mia said, and there was no triumph in her voice. She had known the man. He was not stupid. He was tired a lot and he made patience look like a weapon. "They did not turn back because mud told them to."

They followed the mess long enough to confirm the hunch: it lifted out of the marsh in a long, ugly smear, turned toward the hardpan, and then stopped. Not like a man stops to rest. Like a story that stops because the part that wrote it dropped the pen.

They found three iron pegs in the silt, lined, evenly spaced. Skall’s people, even while failing, had tried to do it right.

"Mark the place," Mia said. They cut reeds, wove a simple triangle with an open center, and propped it above the pegs. Anyone with a soldier’s eye would see it and know: we saw what you did here. It mattered.

At the second mirror post, Om’s glass told a different story. The pulse came back late and sour. The leash’s tug went a hair too sharp. Hoorius’ clerk wrote "returned" in a narrow hand but didn’t say "good." The court had started to smell bad news.

"Proceed," still came.

They did.

They found a rope rubbed deep into a branch where someone had tied a man who didn’t want to stay tied. They found a cook pit covered with a square of moss that had been taken from a different shore: Ants habit of stealing camo where it did not belong to make it look right where it did. They found a scrawl of gravel under a thin layer of dust— like a code for halting for water and breath, no loss.

Kiva crouched by the gravel and ran her hand over it, not wiping, just feeling. "She keeps them alive," Kiva said, not in praise and not in blame. "Even when the ground doesn’t want them."

They found prints that had the right number of toes and the wrong angle of heel for their own people. Kai’s land was near: the dunes began to look like making and not like accident. The flat reeds thinned. The frogs shut up. The air learned a new taste—drier, with a stone that had been in the sun long enough to think it was a cooking plate.

Mia did not look at the mountain. It was not in sight yet. If you think about the top of the hill when your boots are still in the flat, you step wrong.

The third mirror post sat half-buried at the edge of a salt rim that reflected the morning plain back at itself. Om set the lens.

"Regent," he said into the glass. "We are at the last leash. The Princess is safe. We have signs of all three lines. Two are broken in the way that ground breaks them. One is bent but not snapped. We will move to the shoulder of the hill and forest and test it with our eyes."

The clerk’s hand moved. Another set of eyes —Pell’s— leaned into the frame and then leaned out again. The words came back: Proceed. Send names if found. Send bowls if needed.

"Always bowls," Serit muttered, because quartermasters think in bowls, and he didn’t mean it mean, but he meant it.

They stepped off at noon.

Two miles back, in the shadow of a shoulder of scrub, Thea watched with a spyglass that had cost three stings, two promises, and one piece of her pride in a market she was too noble to admit she enjoyed. Her fifty sat so still that birds tried to land on them once before they learned their feathers could stand on end with embarrassment.

"She’s good," Thea said aloud, because admitting a fact does not weaken you. "She stepped right where a lesson would tell her to step. She didn’t step where she could trip and make a song for other people to sing about her."

"Do we tighten?" her second asked — an old woman who pretended motherhood had made her voice soft and whose granddaughter knew better.

"Not yet," Thea said. "We tighten when she lies. Right now she is being every boring thing the court wanted her to be. The only lie here is that I’m not following her, and that one feels like a favor to the Kingdom."

They shifted only enough to keep eyes on the reed break. A small cloud moved along the horizon and decided it had better things to do than rain. Thea drank once — three sips, measured — and smiled because she liked the way victory tasted before you had it.