The road never waited.
Lionel didn't walk with destination—he walked with necessity. One step after another, through heat that pressed against the back of his neck like guilt disguised as sun, through fields that had forgotten the shape of harvest, through borders guarded more by fear than soldiers.
He crossed into Druven's Fold first—a cluster of trade posts stitched by debt and drought. The merchants there sold rust as copper, dreams as contracts. Lionel slept near grain sacks, one eye open, one hand wrapped around a stolen coin he never spent. When a guard kicked him aside for blocking the path to a diplomat, Lionel didn't speak. He'd learned what silence bought. It wasn't respect. It was invisibility. And sometimes invisibility was safer.
In Kaerlin's Reach, they burned the poor beneath ceremony.
