Two days of walking reduced everything to essentials.
Blisters on feet. Hunger gnawing at stomachs. The constant, exhausting vigilance of watching for threats that might be anywhere or nowhere. Spencer had read about journeys like this — pages of travel compressed into paragraphs — but living it was different. Living it hurt.
The Caemlyn road stretched east through farmland and forest, dotted with villages that might offer shelter or danger in equal measure. Spencer used Thread Sight constantly now, scanning every traveler they passed for the black threads of Darkfriend corruption.
Three black-threaded figures at the crossroads ahead. Darkfriends.
"Not this way," he said, steering the group toward a farmer's field.
Rand followed without question. They'd done this dance a dozen times already — Spencer said detour, they detoured. The explanations had stopped mattering.
Mat wasn't so cooperative.
"You keep leading us through muck and hedgerows," Mat complained, his thread pulsing with dark suspicion. "Maybe you're the one leading us into traps."
"The road has traps. The field doesn't."
"How do you know? How do you always know?"
Because I can see the threads. Because Darkfriends show up black on my supernatural radar.
"I pay attention," Spencer said.
"You pay attention to things you can't see. Things nobody can see." Mat's hand moved to his pocket — the empty pocket where his coin used to be. "Things go missing around you, and suddenly you know exactly where to walk and where not to."
Rand stepped between them. "Mat. Enough."
"Don't defend him."
"I'm not defending anyone. I'm trying to get us to Caemlyn alive." Rand's golden thread flickered with frustration that was rapidly becoming exhaustion. "Spencer's gotten us this far. Can we save the fighting for after we're safe?"
Mat's jaw tightened. His corruption-darkened thread pulsed with the paranoia that colored everything now, but some part of him — some remnant of the Mat who'd laughed and joked and called Spencer a friend — recognized that Rand was right.
"Fine," Mat said flatly. "But I'm watching you, carpenter. I'm watching every move you make."
You and everyone else.
They pushed through the farmer's field, adding two hours to their journey but avoiding the Darkfriends at the crossroads.
---
The village of Carysford appeared at sunset.
Spencer had been watching for it — a small farming community, too insignificant for serious Darkfriend presence but large enough to have an inn or a barn where travelers might find shelter. Thread Sight showed the village's threads as uniformly white, the clean pattern of people who'd never encountered the Shadow's corruption.
"We stop here," he said. "Find somewhere to sleep."
"With what money?" Rand asked.
Spencer looked at his hands — Aldan's hands, still calloused from years of carpentry. "With trade."
The farmer's name was Alder, and his gate hinge had been broken for three months.
Spencer fixed it in twenty minutes. The muscle memory flowed through his fingers without conscious thought, Aldan's skills serving their original purpose for the first time since Winternight. Hammer strikes, metal shaping, the satisfaction of work well done.
This is what Aldan was supposed to be. A carpenter. A craftsman. Not a Pattern-manipulating anomaly running for his life.
"Good work," Alder said, examining the repaired hinge. "Barn's yours for the night. Hay's fresh, and there's a pump out back."
"Thank you."
"Nothing to thank. Fair trade's fair trade." The farmer's thread pulsed with simple honesty — a man who believed in work and payment and the basic decency of strangers. "You boys running from something?"
From everything.
"Hard times," Spencer said. "Looking for work in Caemlyn."
"Caemlyn's two days east. Stay off the main road after Four Kings — been rumors of trouble there."
Spencer filed that information away. Four Kings was where the Darkfriend ambush happened in the books — the one where Rand had channeled for the first time, unconsciously calling lightning to destroy their attackers.
I need to make sure that still happens. Rand needs to start developing his abilities, needs to understand what he is before Tar Valon.
But I also need to not get killed in the process.
"We'll be careful," he said.
---
The barn was warm and dry.
Mat ate three bowls of the stew Alder's wife had offered, falling asleep mid-sentence with his hand still wrapped around his spoon. The food seemed to calm some of his paranoid energy; his thread settled into something closer to its natural gold, though the corruption still pulsed at its edges.
Rand sat against the barn wall, cleaning his sword with mechanical precision. His golden thread was dim with exhaustion, but something had changed in the way he held himself — a straightening of the spine, a steadiness in the eyes.
He's accepting leadership. Not of others — of himself. He's starting to understand that he can't wait for someone else to save him.
"Spencer." Rand's voice was quiet, pitched not to wake Mat. "How do you do it?"
"Do what?"
"Know things. See things. Every time there's danger, you're already moving before anyone else notices."
Because I have supernatural Thread Sight. Because I can see corruption before it manifests.
"I pay attention," Spencer said. The same lie, worn smooth from repetition.
"There's more to it than that." Rand's thread rippled with curiosity that was slowly becoming certainty. "Moiraine has a Talent. Min sees images around people. And you... you see something too. Something that tells you where danger is."
Spencer was silent for a long moment. The barn smelled of hay and animals, comfortable and warm, and outside the stars blazed in patterns that meant nothing to a man from another world.
"I see threats," he said finally. "Sometimes. Not always clearly, not always in time. But I see them."
"How?"
I don't know. The Codex gives me Thread Sight, but I don't understand the mechanism. I don't understand any of this.
"I don't know how. It just happens." Spencer met Rand's eyes — gray-blue, thoughtful, the eyes of a man who would one day lead armies and break nations. "Does it matter how?"
Rand considered the question seriously. "I suppose not. Not right now." His thread settled into something calmer. "Just... keep doing it. Keep seeing things. I don't know what we'd do if you stopped."
Die, probably. All three of us.
"I'll keep watching," Spencer said.
Rand nodded and went back to cleaning his sword. The conversation was over, but something had shifted between them — a level of trust that hadn't existed before, built on honesty about secrets that couldn't be fully explained.
---
Spencer climbed to the hayloft after the others slept.
The barn's upper level had a door that opened onto the night sky, and Spencer sat in the doorway with his legs dangling, looking at stars that were entirely wrong. No Big Dipper. No Orion. No constellations he'd learned as a child, memorized during camping trips with his father.
I used to look at the same sky my ancestors looked at. Same patterns, same myths, same sense of connection to something larger than myself.
Now I'm looking at something completely different, and I can never go back.
Homesickness hit him like a physical blow. Not for Earth specifically — the apartment he'd rented, the job he'd tolerated, the relationships he'd let drift — but for the idea of it. For the possibility of going home.
I died on a wet highway. I woke up in another man's body, in another world, with powers I don't understand and enemies I can't escape.
And tomorrow I have to get up and keep walking, because Mat needs Healing and Rand needs to reach Caemlyn and the whole world needs the Dragon Reborn to survive.
There's no going back. There's only forward.
Spencer let the grief wash through him — grief for Spencer Kessler, who had died afraid and alone on a road far from anything important. Then he packed it away, in the same mental compartment where he stored Eldrin Cauthon's death and the memory of Winternight's screaming.
Tomorrow, we pass through Four Kings.
Tomorrow, Rand channels for the first time.
Tomorrow, everything changes again.
Below, Mat snored in his sleep — the peaceful sound of someone whose paranoia had temporarily surrendered to exhaustion. Rand's breathing was slow and even, his golden thread steady in the darkness.
Spencer kept watch until dawn, counting threads and planning for dangers that hadn't arrived yet.
The stars wheeled overhead, indifferent and alien, and somewhere in the east, Caemlyn waited with its own share of shadows.
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