They brought Cort back over his horse.
Nobody said much on the way out of the Greyswood. The group had the closed, inward quality of people carrying something that needed to be carried quietly for now, the particular mercenary grief that was less about the specific person — though it was about that too — and more about the recalibration.
The reminder.
The clearing's insistence on the fact that the work was real and the risks were real and the contracts were paid in more currencies than silver.
Jake rode at Eskar's right.
He rode carefully, because the horse's movement and his ribs had reached an agreement that involved him breathing in shallow installments and holding his left arm slightly away from his body, and any deviation from this arrangement was immediately and loudly reported on. He was managing. He had, it turned out, a reasonably high tolerance for pain, which was either good news about his constitution or bad news about the frequency with which pain had been finding him.
The System was quiet.
That was the thing he kept returning to, in between the shallow breaths and the management of the horse situation. The system was quiet in a way it hadn't been quiet in a long time — not dormant, not inactive, just still.
Watching, maybe. The way it sometimes went still when he was about to learn something.
Usually, though, the stillness was preceded by commentary.
This was the part he hadn't told anyone. Couldn't tell anyone, really, without a significant amount of explanation that would raise more questions than answers. The system had a mode — not a voice, exactly, but something adjacent to a voice, something that arrived in his thoughts with a dry, light quality that felt distinctly external even when it was happening inside his own head — that he'd come to think of as the wit. It showed up when he was doing something reckless, or when he was being lazier than even his own standards excused, or occasionally just when a situation had an irony worth noting.
He'd been tossed ten feet by a hegoblin, hit the ground hard enough to knock the air completely out of his lungs, and lay there staring at the sky while a woman who looked exactly like a video game character killed the creature that had just thrown him.
And the system had said nothing and done nothing.
Not a graceful entrance, Altoras. No injury noted: try to sustain fewer of these. Not even the baseline pulse that usually accompanied moments of actual danger — just silence, clean and deliberate, the kind of silence that had a shape to it.
He turned this over in his mind as the Greyswood thinned around them and the valley road appeared ahead, pale and even in the afternoon light.
You went quiet when she showed up, he thought, not really expecting an answer.
The system pulsed once, noncommittal.
Useful, Jake thought.
They stopped at the valley's midpoint.
Not planned — Wyla needed the halt, though she didn't say so, and Ossian's head was still ringing enough that the break served him too.
There was a natural rest point where the road widened beside a low stone wall, an old boundary marker of some kind, with a broad flat area of packed grass beyond it where travelers had clearly been stopping for years. A firepit, cold and old. A water trough, fed by a trickle from the hillside, is enough for the horses.
Eskar called the stop, and the group dismounted without complaint.
The other group was already there.
Five men, at first count. Then a sixth, stepping out from behind the horses. Civilian clothes — not the rough practical civilian of farmers or laborers, but the neat, deliberately unremarkable civilian of people who had chosen not to look like what they were. Good boots and fabric. The kind of nondescript that costs money to achieve.
They were resting, as the mercenary group was resting, with the easy posture of people in no particular hurry, and they watched Eskar's group arrive with the specific quality of attention that was very carefully not staring.
Eskar assessed them in the five seconds between dismounting and reaching the water trough.
Armed, under the clothes. Moving with the controlled ease of trained men who were performing relaxation. Not local — something in the equipment, the cut of the fabric, suggested a distance traveled. Not obviously hostile, which was the relevant metric for now, but not obviously anything else either.
He brought his horse to the trough, let it drink, and after a moment's pause said, to no one in particular and to all of them at once, "Long road?"
The man nearest the stone wall — the oldest of them, perhaps fifty, with a weathered, patient face and grey at his temples — looked up.
"From the east," he said.
"Greyswood?"
"Beyond." There was a pause.
"We've been searching."
Eskar let the horse drink. "For what?"
The man glanced at his companions.
Then back at Eskar. "A boy," he said.
"Young man, by now. Eighteen, perhaps nineteen. We have a — description."
"Descriptions are easy to have," Eskar said.
"Helpful ones are rarer."
"He would have a mark," the man said.
"On his shoulder, left shoulder, we believe, though it may be right."
He seemed to be choosing his words with the care of someone who had said this many times on many roads and had learned to calibrate how much to give before asking.
"Like a jade star. Green, with the points clearly defined. The size of a palm, perhaps."
Eskar's hands on the bridle went very still.
It was not a visible stillness. He had been doing this long enough to keep his stillness interior, to let the surface of him continue at the pace it had been going while the inside of him stopped completely and made a very rapid series of decisions. He finished his adjustment of the bridle. He let the horse drink for another three seconds.