Kael had decided, somewhere between his second and third bowl of porridge, that Thornwick's inn made the best breakfast in the known world.
He was aware he had only ever eaten breakfast in two places — Aunt Soli's kitchen and here — but the evidence felt conclusive. The porridge was thick and warm and came with a small clay pot of something dark and sweet that Aldric had called honey like Kael should have already known that, which he did, obviously. He had just never had it before.
"You're doing it again," Aldric said without looking up from his own bowl.
"Doing what?"
"The staring. You're staring at the honey like it personally wronged you."
Kael set down his spoon. "I'm not staring. I'm studying it."
"There is no meaningful difference."
The inn's common room was quieter in the morning than it had been the night before. A few merchants nursed their tea at separate tables, each with the practiced distant expression of men who had learned not to make eye contact before noon. The mercenaries from last night were either gone or still sleeping. Somewhere in the kitchen, something sizzled.
It felt like the kind of morning that would be nothing. Easy and forgettable. The kind you wouldn't bother to remember later.
Kael would later think about that, on harder days, and almost laugh.
— ✦ —
He appeared at the edge of their table like he had been standing there for a while and was only now choosing to be noticed.
He was small — not short exactly, but compact in the way of a man who had spent years trying to take up less space. His coat was merchant-quality but the collar was worn thin, and he kept turning his hat in both hands like it was a wheel he could steer out of the conversation if things went badly.
Kael recognized him. Corner table, last night. The one who had gone still when Silenthorn was mentioned — stiller than the others, in a way that had felt less like caution and more like fear with a very good mask over it.
"Forgive me," the man said. His voice was the voice of someone practicing calm. "I don't mean to intrude on your meal."
Aldric looked up. Whatever expression he arranged onto his face in that moment was the most professional thing Kael had ever witnessed. It said: you are not intruding, but be aware I am already evaluating you.
"Sit," Aldric said. A command dressed as an invitation.
The merchant sat. He placed his hat on the table, seemed to decide that was too casual, then picked it up again and held it in his lap.
"My name is Torvas," he said. "I trade in cloth. Mostly. Sometimes other things." He paused. "Information, on occasion. When it comes to me honestly."
"And sometimes it comes to you dishonestly?" Kael asked.
Aldric shot him a look. Kael was not sure what the look meant. He suspected it meant let me handle this, which he found slightly unfair given that Aldric had only known him for two days.
"The information I have," Torvas said carefully, "came to me the way most things do. By accident. By being in a room where someone said something they shouldn't have, to someone who wasn't listening as poorly as they looked." He turned his hat once more. "I've been carrying it for four months. I would like to put it down."
Silence.
Outside, a cart rolled past the window.
"You mentioned Silenthorn last night," Aldric said. Not a question.
Torvas went still in exactly the same way he had gone still the night before. "I mentioned a word. I didn't know it would do what it did to the room. I understand it better now." He looked at Aldric, then at Kael, then at his hat. "I also noticed how the two of you reacted. Everyone else flinched away from it. You two —" He chose his next word carefully. "— didn't."
Kael said nothing. Beneath the table, without thinking about it, his hand found his mother's stone in his pocket.
He didn't know why he did that. He had been doing it since Chapter Three and he still hadn't figured out why.
"What is it you want?" Aldric asked. "Plainly, if you can manage it."
Torvas took a breath. "Four months ago, I was moving a shipment through the Greyfen pass — east road, before the fork. One of my carters got sick and I had to make camp a day longer than planned. That night, two men sheltered at the same site. They didn't know I was awake. They spoke for a long time." He hesitated. "One of them mentioned a name. A place. A window of time. All three things together." He looked up. "The name was Silenthorn."
The morning kept being quiet around them. Kael found that impressive, almost insulting. The room should have changed somehow. It felt like it should have.
"What do you want in exchange?" Aldric asked.
Here Torvas shifted, and his whole manner shifted with him, and suddenly Kael could see the merchant underneath the fear. "There's a man in Dunveth. A collector. He has something of mine — a ledger, taken under circumstances I cannot take to a magistrate without implicating myself in the circumstances. I need it back quietly." He looked at them steadily. "I need people who can be quiet."
"We are famously quiet," Aldric said.
Kael did not say anything, which he felt was proof of the claim.
"Dunveth," Aldric continued, in the tone of a man consulting an internal map. "Three hours east. Perhaps four, with the road as it is."
"Half a day," Torvas confirmed. "The collector's name is Brek Solan. He operates out of a building called the Pale Scale — warehouse front, but the back rooms are where he keeps the things he's acquired. The ledger is bound in grey cloth. My name is on the spine."
"And if we find more than one grey ledger?" Kael asked.
"Then you'll know mine because it has a water stain on the bottom corner that looks exactly like a duck."
Kael looked at Aldric.
Aldric looked at Kael.
"We'll need the information first," Aldric said, turning back. "A portion of it. As proof that it's worth the road to Dunveth."
Torvas considered this. "The place they mentioned," he said slowly. "The window of time. One of the men said: Silenthorn moves through the Ashen Roads. Not the named ones. The ones the maps forgot." He folded his hands on the table. "I'll tell you the rest when I have my ledger."
Another cart went past the window. A child laughed somewhere outside. The inn smelled like porridge and woodsmoke and a morning that was already becoming a different kind of day than it had started as.
Kael thought about roads that maps forgot.
He thought about his uncle checking his stance and saying only good.
He thought: I don't know what any of this means yet. But I think I'm supposed to find out.
"We'll go to Dunveth," he said.
Aldric, to his credit, did not argue. He only looked at Kael for a moment in a way Kael couldn't read, then turned back to Torvас with the expression of a man finalising terms.
"We leave within the hour," Aldric said. "You'll wait here until we return. You will not speak to anyone about this. And when we bring back the ledger —"
"You'll have everything I heard," Torvас said. "Word for word. I've been reciting it to myself for four months. I'm not likely to have forgotten."
He stood, took his hat, and placed it back on his head with the careful dignity of a man who had spent four months afraid and was now, perhaps, slightly less so.
"The duck," Kael said.
Torvас paused. "Pardon?"
"On the ledger. The water stain. Is it a duck facing left or right?"
A beat. Something almost like a smile. "Left," Torvас said. "Always looked to me like it was trying to leave."
He walked back to his corner table.
Kael finished the last of his porridge. The honey pot was nearly empty. He thought about roads the maps had forgotten, and the fact that Silenthorn moved through them, and the fact that his mother had given him a stone and told him he would know when to use it, and how he did not know yet, and how he was beginning to understand that not knowing yet was not the same as not knowing.
He was seventeen years old and he was about to go to a city he had never heard of to steal a book with a duck on it.
He had a feeling this was only the beginning of the kinds of things he would do.
— ✦ —
They were on the east road inside the hour, packs adjusted, the inn behind them and Dunveth ahead, and the morning had fully arrived by then, bright and unhurried and completely indifferent to everything they were carrying.
"You didn't let me finish negotiating," Aldric said.
"You were negotiating fine," Kael said.
"I had a second condition prepared."
"What was it?"
A pause. "I was going to ask for breakfast covered."
Kael looked at him.
"It was a reasonable condition," Aldric said, with great dignity, to the road ahead of him. "Information is one thing. Porridge is another."
Kael laughed. It was a short sound, surprised out of him, and it disappeared quickly into the morning air.
But it was there.