The caravan pulled out at first light.
Sito sat up on the bench of the lead wagon beside the driver, an old man named Corbin who smelled like pipe smoke and wet leather, and he did not blink once for the first twenty minutes. He was afraid that if he blinked he would miss something.
The road down from the hill was wide and paved and it curled around the slope like a strap around a barrel.
From up here he could see the whole capital laid out below him the way he had seen it a hundred times from the cliff behind the estate. Except now it was getting bigger.
The rooftops slowly came up to meet him.
The thin grey lines that he had always assumed were alleys turned into actual streets with actual people in them, and the people had faces, and the faces had expressions, and some of them were arguing about the price of fish.
A woman leaned out a second-story window and beat a rug against the sill. A boy about his age ran alongside the wagon for half a block with a dead chicken swinging from one hand before his mother caught the back of his shirt and hauled him off.
The smell hit him next.
Bread and horse and smoke and old water and something frying in fat, all of it layered on top of each other to create the scent of a city. His city.
'Holy shit,' Sito thought. 'It's a city. It's an actual fucking city and I've been living on top of it like a gargoyle for seven years.'
He'd read about Epiria.
He could recite its population, its districts, its tax structure, the year its outer canal was dug and the name of the engineer who dug it. He had sat through four separate meetings about the grain levy that fed these exact streets.
He had never once smelled it.
Marcus's voice drifted up from inside the wagon, muffled through the canvas.
"You're going to fall off, you know."
"I'm not going to fall off."
"You're leaning."
"I'm looking."
"You can look from inside, where there are cushions, and where I am."
"There's a wall in the way inside."
There was a pause, and then a long-suffering sigh that Sito was fairly sure had been rehearsed.
"Gods save me from children and their fresh air."
---
The gate was the part that shut him up.
He had grown up looking down at those walls, thinking to himself how big and grand they were. But even all those years of staring at them from afar couldn't have prepared him for how big and grand they actually were up close.
From the cliff they were a grey ribbon around the edge of the world, thin as a thread, and he had always understood "one hundred yards high" as a number, because that was what it was. A number in a book.
The wagon rolled into the shadow of it and the number stopped being a number.
Sito tilted his head back and kept tilting it until the back of his skull touched his shoulders and he still could not find the top.
The stone went up and up and then it stopped being stone and became a pale line against the sky, and the guards walking along that line were just tiny specks.
Then the wagon entered the gate tunnel and the light of morning went out like a snuffed candle.
Fifteen yards of solid rock. Forty-five feet of it.
The air inside turned cold and still and smelled of damp and iron, and the torches set into the walls threw long stretched shadows of the wheels across the ceiling.
The sound changed too. Outside it had been hooves and voices and the creak of the axle. Inside it was all of that coming back at him off the walls, doubled and flattened.
It took almost a full minute for the whole caravan to pass through.
And then the morning light came back and the world opened up and Sito forgot how to breathe properly.
There was so much room.
The land rolled away from the gate in long green waves, all of it open, all of it going somewhere.
Farmland cut into squares by low stone fences. A shimmering river throwing back the sun in pieces as its water flowed. A cart track winding off to the west that got thinner and thinner and finally just disappeared into the haze.
No walls. Not one, anywhere, in any direction he looked.
He had spent seven years inside a box inside a box inside a box, and some part of him had quietly decided that maybe it was better this way.
That maybe if he saw what the world had to offer outside those city walls he would let it seduce him into the comfort of adventure and exploration that his heart yearned for. And that he would lose focus on what really mattered. Getting stronger.
Behind him, the wall shrank.
He watched it until his neck hurt, and then he watched it some more.
---
"Oi. Runt."
Sito turned so fast he nearly did fall off.
Two riders had come up alongside the wagon, both of them in the dark green riding cloaks of the Royal Guard, and both of them grinning like idiots.
"You two have got to be kidding me," Sito said.
Ramsey spread his arms wide. "Behold! Your escort! Twelve of the finest, bravest, most devastatingly handsome men in all of—"
"Ten," said Willem.
"—in all of Epiria, and two of us besides."
"Why are *you* here?" Sito said.
"Volunteered," Willem said.
"He didn't volunteer," Ramsey said. "Captain Osric drew up the list and Will just stood there staring at him until his name was on it. Never said a word. Just stared. Bloody unsettling, that's what it was."
"And you?"
Ramsey put a hand over his heart. "I heard there were elves."
"You heard there were elf women," said Willem.
"I heard there were elves," Ramsey repeated, with tremendous dignity, "and I thought to myself, Ramsey, who better to represent the might and refinement of the Epirian Kingdom abroad than—"
Sito kicked his boot out into empty air, and Ramsey flinched so hard his horse shied three steps sideways.
Willem laughed so loud that two riders up ahead turned around.
"You're a menace," Ramsey said, hauling his horse back into line. "Seven years old and already a menace. What did I ever do to you?"
"You said the Old Man was going to make me cry."
"He did make you cry."
"He did not."
"Willem, did the old goat make him cry?"
Willem considered this with the gravity of a man weighing testimony in court.
"I have heard it said," he replied, "that his highness has a great many strong feelings about slugs."
---
They stopped at midday where the north road crossed a stream, and Marcus finally climbed down out of the wagon, stretched every limb he owned, and stood there in the sun looking like a man who had been personally inconvenienced by the concept of travel.
Sito sat on a rock and worked at a strip of dried apple.
"Can I ask you something?"
"You may ask me anything. I may answer entirely differently." Marcus lowered himself onto the grass with the care of a man who had chosen his trousers for looks rather than sitting.
"Why aren't we using a portal?"
"Ah." Marcus smiled. "I wondered when you'd get to that."
"You complained about them at the council table. So they exist, and you've used them, and this trip is supposed to be urgent. Three weeks on a road doesn't make sense."
"It makes a great deal of sense. It simply just doesn't make sense to you."
Portals between cities were not the same thing as the portals that opened onto dungeons, though the common folk used the same word for both and the scholars had long since given up correcting them.
A dungeon portal was a wound the world made on its own, somewhere, for reasons nobody had ever satisfactorily explained. A travel portal had to be cut by hand.
It required two anchor stones, one at either end, each one seated and fed and tended by a mage who did nothing else for a living.
Opening one tore a hole in the ambient mana between the stones and held that hole open by force, and when it closed the surrounding mana took weeks to settle back into anything like its natural flow.
Every major human city in the four kingdoms had at least one anchor. Some had six.
There was not a single anchor stone anywhere in the Kingdom of Vradia, and there never would be.
"They think it's a wound," Marcus said. "The elves. Not a road. A wound in something living. To their mind a man who steps through a portal to save himself three weeks of riding has cut open the world's belly because he couldn't be bothered with the stairs."
"Do they let anyone do it?"
"In emergencies. War. Plague. Their own people dying." Marcus plucked a stem of grass and turned it between two fingers. "Which tells you exactly how they'd receive a delegation that arrived by tearing the air outside their forest in order to ask permission to dig a mine under it."
Sito chewed on that along with the apple.
"So we ride. Because showing up slow is part of the message."
Marcus looked genuinely pleased. "Your highness, that is a better answer than the one I gave your father, and I gave your father a very good answer."
"And you just wanted me out of the castle."
Marcus put his hand over his heart in a gesture that was becoming familiar. "I am wounded that you would suggest such a thing. Wounded, and also correct."
---
Camp came together fast and quiet, the way it does with men who've done it several hundred times, and by full dark there was a fire going and a pot over it and twelve guards arranged around the light in various states of unbuckling.
Sito came back from the treeline with his hands still wet from the stream and went straight for the pot, because it smelled incredible, rich and dark and faintly sweet in a way that made his mouth water before he'd got within ten feet of it.
A hand closed around his collar and lifted him off his feet.
"Nope," said Willem.
"Hey—"
"Nope." Willem set him down facing the other way and turned him around by the shoulders like a wheelbarrow. "That's beast stew, your highness. Marrow-hog. You put one spoon of that in you and we'd be carrying you home in a box, and I like my job."
Sito stopped struggling.
He knew that. Of course he knew that. It had been in the third book of natural philosophy his tutor had made him read, and Aunt Lia made sure to drill it into his brain that it would be the last mistake he'd ever make.
All beast meat carried mana. A core filtered it. Too much at once and you got a hangover from the gods. Far too much and you got mana poisoning followed by, more often than not, a funeral.
And an unawakened body, with no core in it at all, had nothing to filter anything with. One mouthful was enough.
"Sorry," he said. "Wasn't thinking."
"Nothing to be sorry for." Willem was already ladling something else into a bowl from a second, smaller pot set off to the side. "Osric said the head chef had them pack you your own. Salted meat and barley. Deeply, profoundly boring. Here."
Sito took the bowl and sat down by the fire and ate his deeply boring barley, and somewhere in the middle of it a thought surfaced.
The curry. The one his father made him eat every night without fail, the same dish every single evening while the King and Queen worked through whatever the kitchen had dreamed up that day.
It gave him goosebumps. It filled him with warmth from the inside out.
He looked down into the barley.
'Huh,' he thought.
Then Ramsey started an argument with the cook about salt, and the thought went wherever thoughts go, and Sito let it.
---
"Right." Ramsey dropped down onto a log across the fire and pointed at him. "Marcus says you brought that little instrument of yours."
"It's a rook."
"He says you brought it. Where is it?"
Marcus was already reaching for his spatial ring. He turned it once and the rook appeared in his hand, small and worn and exactly the right size, and he passed it over the fire with the unhurried air of a man who had been waiting all day for someone else to bring it up.
Sito took it and checked the tuning while eleven grown men pretended not to watch him.
"What do you want?"
"Something with a tune," Ramsey said.
"Something we can shout," said Osric, from the dark on the other side of the fire. It was the first thing the captain had said all evening.
So Sito played them the road song.
The first mile takes your whistle,
the second takes your song,
the third mile takes your name, lads,
if you hold it too long.
So leave it with the woman
who waves you down the lane,
she'll keep it on the windowsill
till you come and ask again.
He got through it once alone. The second time round, half of them had the last line, and by the third time all twelve of them had it and Ramsey was banging a tin cup on his knee in a rhythm that had nothing to do with the one Sito was playing.
Till you come and ask again.
They made him do it four more times.
"Where'd you learn that?" Willem asked, when they'd finally worn it out.
"Made it up."
"Course you did," Ramsey muttered.
The fire had burned down. A couple of the men had gone to their rolls. Osric had walked off to check the pickets and hadn't come back.
"One more," Willem said. "Quiet one, if you've got one."
Sito looked at the coals for a moment.
Then he played the one Aunt Lia used to sing, the one she'd sung at the side of his crib before he could crawl and had kept singing long after he was too old to admit he still wanted it.
Count the sparrows on the wall, my love,
count them one and two.
When the dark comes up the hill, my love,
I'll be counting too.
Count them slow and count them soft,
count them till you're through.
And if you lose your place, my love,
I'll be counting too.
Nobody banged a cup.
The tune continued. Dredging up memories of melancholy and nostalgia for all with ears to hear.
When he eventually stopped, the loudest thing in the camp was the fire settling, and one of the horses shifting its weight somewhere behind him.
Sito set the rook across his knees and didn't look up, because he was seven years old and he had a very strong suspicion about what several grown men's faces were currently doing.
"Right," Willem said eventually, and his voice came out slightly wrong. "Off to bed you go, your highness."
---
Marcus lay back with his hands behind his head and looked up through the branches at a sky absolutely crowded with stars, and thought about what Duncan had said outside the castle gate.
He'd spent the day watching for it and hadn't found it. The road was clear. The guards were good, better than good, and the boy—
The boy had crossed forty-odd miles of open country on a hard bench, eaten a bowl of the worst food in the caravan without a single complaint, and then made twelve tired soldiers shout at a fire like they were sixteen and drunk in Hallowgrove.
Then he had put them all to bed like children.
Seven years old.
'And that is before I have even seen him hold a sword,' Marcus thought. 'Gods. What did they put in that boy.'
He turned over, and out past the edge of the firelight, up on the shoulder of the hill they'd camped beneath, something moved through the long grass that was not the wind.
It moved carefully. It moved like it did not want to be seen.
And then it stopped, and settled, and watched the fire burn down.