They left the skiff on a shingle beach two hours north of Calad and walked inland before the sun was fully up.
By the second day, the coast road had turned its back on the sea. The hills gave way to farmland: dark soil, almost black, the kind that promised more than it ever gave. Crops grew low and twisted, as if even the roots didn't trust the dirt. Far off, windmills turned slowly, creaking like bones that had just woken up, and the sound carried strangely on the wind, as if the island itself were breathing.
Aros walked a few steps behind Gemma, where he could see the road ahead and the road behind and her in the middle of both. He'd taken a gutting knife from the fish market on the way out, a short ugly blade with a cork handle. A poor replacement. He kept reaching for the old one at the small of his back and finding nothing, and every time he did, he saw the pale man on the pier, turning it in the light.
Gemma had been quiet since the boat. In the first weeks after Seborn she had sat by the fire staring at nothing while he fed her soup with a spoon, and for a moment he worried this was that silence come back. Then he noticed what she was doing. Every so often she would stop walking, cup her hands together, close her eyes, and frown.
Nothing happened. Every time, nothing happened.
Between tries she hummed. She always did when she walked: a tune with no words and no proper end, the one her mother used to sing over the dough in Seborn. Aros had heard it so often that he sometimes caught himself humming it on watch.
"It's not working," she said finally, on the afternoon of the second day.
"Good."
She shot him a look. "In the market it came when I asked. Now it won't even look at me."
"In the market you were terrified."
"So?"
"So maybe it only answers when you're about to die." He shrugged. "That seems like a good reason not to practice."
She didn't laugh. She kicked a stone instead and watched it skip along the mud before it vanished into the grass. Her face was hard to read when she was quiet. She looked less sad than busy, like someone listening to a voice in the next room.
They stopped at a narrow stream that cut the road in two. The water shimmered under the wind, thin and silver as a vein. Gemma crouched and dipped her fingers in, and a faint glow followed them through the current, the same glow that used to frighten him on their first nights together. He'd gotten used to it. Or he told himself he had.
Aros crouched beside her. "Careful."
"I'm not using it," she said. "It's using me."
"That's not comforting."
She gave him a sideways look, half amused. "You really hate things you can't explain, don't you?"
"I just like to survive them."
For a moment she smiled, and she looked like what she was supposed to be: fifteen, thin, sunburnt, far from home. Then the smile went away.
Aros watched the water run over her fingers. "We could stop, you know."
"Stop?"
"Go south. Find a fishing village too small for the Priesthood to bother with. You don't owe them anything. You don't owe anyone anything."
"That's not true."
"You're fifteen," he said quietly. "You deserve something that isn't made of running."
She hesitated. "And you?"
His mouth twitched. "I'm not fifteen."
Gemma dipped her hand back into the stream. The glow followed her fingers like a fish following bread. "If we run, the voices follow," she said. "I can't pretend they're not there. And now there's her."
He didn't ask who. They both knew.
"Then let's make them regret whispering," he said.
That got a laugh out of her, brief and bright and gone too fast. The silence afterward hurt a little.
They found the notice an hour later.
It was nailed to a milestone at a crossroads, where the coast road met a cart track running inland toward the hills. The paper was new. The ink hadn't run yet, though the mist had already started to curl its corners. At the top, the golden sun of the Valval Priesthood had been stamped in wax.
Below it, someone with a careful hand had drawn a girl.
The likeness was poor. The face was too round, the eyes too large, the way people draw children when they're thinking of saints. But the hair had been left blank, white paper inside a black outline, and that was enough.
Gemma stopped walking. Aros read the words twice, the way he'd read orders in the war, looking for the part that would kill him.
BY ORDER OF THE SANCTUM OF LIGHT. Sought for her own protection: a girl of fourteen or fifteen years, white of hair, blue of eye, answering to the name GEMMA. She is not to be harmed. Any soul who delivers her to a house of the Priesthood will receive one hundred silver suns and the blessing of the High Servant.
"They know my name," Gemma said. Her voice had gone very thin. "Aros. How do they know my name?"
He didn't have an answer. He'd never said it in Calad. Not once. He'd been careful the way he was always careful.
He tore the notice off the stone, folded it, and put it inside his coat.
"There'll be others," he said. "Pull your hood down. Keep walking."
"A hundred silver suns," she whispered. "That's more than Seborn made in a year."
"Then every farmer on this road just learned what white hair is worth." He took her arm, gently, and turned her away from the crossroads. "Walk."
The fog came back in the late afternoon, low and deliberate, swallowing the edges of the fields one fence post at a time.
Aros noticed the change before Gemma did, which was rare: the birds had stopped. The windmills were still turning, creaking in the distance, but the crows that had been following them since noon had lifted off the furrows and gone.
"Keep walking," he said. "Slowly. Don't look at the ditch."
"What's in the ditch?"
"Someone who wants us to look at it."
The gravel crunched under their boots, louder than it should have. Gemma's hand brushed his sleeve, light and trembling.
Then came the whistle. Short. Sharp. Human.
Figures rose out of the mist on both sides of the road. Five, maybe six. Cloaked, hooded, moving with the loose confidence of people who had done this before. Short blades. Two muskets, their barrels patched with copper and rust. Not soldiers. But not farmers, either.
The one in front was already speaking, lowering his hood, spreading his arms in a show of friendliness. "Easy, now. Easy. No one needs to..."
Aros didn't let him finish.
The man had made the mistake every ambusher makes: he'd come close enough to talk. Three long steps, and Aros was inside his reach. He took the musket by the barrel and turned it, and the man's own grip did the rest, twisting his wrist until his fingers opened. One more step, and Aros was behind him, one arm locked across his chest, the gutting knife resting against the soft place under his jaw.
The whole thing took less time than the whistle had.
The others froze. The second musket swung up, aimed at Aros, then wavered, because the only clean shot went through their leader first.
"Tell them to lower that," Aros said quietly.
The man in his grip was broad, sunburnt, with a beard that had been cut by someone in a hurry. He smelled of woodsmoke and cheap tobacco. And, to Aros's considerable annoyance, he was laughing.
"Talon said you'd do that," the man said. "Said you'd have a knife on me before I got through my first sentence. I bet him a bottle you were too old."
"You lost."
"I can see that." The laugh rumbled through his chest. "Lower it, Mott. He's not going to cut me. He's just making a point."
Mott lowered the musket. Slowly. The others followed his example.
"Name's Broko," the bearded man said, as if they'd just met in a tavern. "And you're Aros Kevis."
Nobody had said that name to his face in ten years.
Aros didn't move. Behind him, he heard Gemma take a small, sharp breath.
"Wrong man," he said.
"Sure," Broko agreed cheerfully. "Wrong man. We still need to talk."
"Kevis?" Gemma said.
Aros didn't look at her. He couldn't. He kept his eyes on the five hooded figures and his knife where it was. "Who's Talon?"
"A friend. Of yours, once, if half his stories are true." Broko tilted his head carefully, mindful of the blade. "He runs the Knights of Light. What's left of them. We've had people watching every road out of Calad since a bird came in yesterday saying the fire bowed to a girl at the Purification, and that two Custodians died in the fish market. Under the strap, through the throat. Talon read that part twice. He says only one man ever killed them that way. The Kingslayer."
At that word, Aros heard Gemma stop breathing behind him.
"We're not interested in rebels," Aros said.
"No? What are you interested in? Farmers?" Broko nodded toward Aros's coat, where the folded notice made a corner against the cloth. "You saw the paper. I can tell. Every crossroads from here to the mountains will have one by tomorrow night. A hundred silver suns, Kevis. There are men on this road who'd sell their own mothers for twenty. You'll be sold before the next windmill."
"We'll manage."
"You'll manage for a week. Maybe two. And then you'll sleep, because even you have to sleep, and some farmer's boy will creep up to your fire with a pitchfork and a dream." Broko's voice dropped. The humor went out of it. "Talon has walls. Skariz has walls. The Priesthood doesn't go into Skariz unless it brings an army, and it hasn't brought one in three years. That's all I'm offering. Walls."
Aros said nothing. Walls meant safety. In his experience they also meant cages, and you never got one without the other.
"We go with them," Gemma said.
He turned his head at last. She was standing in the middle of the road with her hood fallen back, white hair loose in the fog, looking at him as she had in the fish market after the ring broke, as if he were a puzzle she had just started to solve.
"Gemma..."
"You said I don't owe anyone anything." Her chin lifted. "So I get to choose. And I choose walls."
Nobody spoke. The windmills creaked. Somewhere out in the fields, a crow came back and landed on a fence post, as if it had decided the danger was over.
Aros lowered the knife.
Broko stepped away, rubbing his throat, grinning. Aros held out the musket. Broko took it, then frowned at the empty pan.
"The flint's in my pocket," Aros said. "You'll get it back in Skariz."
Broko stared at him. Then he threw his head back and laughed so loudly that the crow took off again.
They walked into the fog together, the hooded figures fanning out ahead and behind, the road climbing slowly toward hills that Aros could not yet see. Gemma walked between two of Broko's people. She didn't look back at Aros, and he understood that the questions were coming, all of them, and that he had perhaps an hour before she started asking.
Broko fell into step beside him.
"You saw her price," he said, low enough that the others wouldn't hear. "A hundred suns. Alive."
"I saw."
"There's one on you too. No paper for that one. Nobody prints notices for a man the world thinks is already dead. But it's going around. Quiet. From mouth to mouth, between people who don't need ink."
Aros kept walking. "How much?"
Broko grinned at the fog.
"Fifty. For proof." He clapped Aros on the shoulder. "Seems the Light wants her twice as much as it wants you dead."
Aros didn't laugh. After a few steps, Broko's hand stayed on his shoulder a moment longer than it needed to, and when he spoke again, the grin was gone.
"One more thing. Talon didn't send us out here to rescue you, Kevis." He gave the shoulder a last squeeze, almost gentle. "He sent us to collect you."