The trip to Westmill was Cael's idea.
There was a commission he had agreed to months earlier, work that required specialist tools he could not get in Ashfen, and the only supplier worth the trip was in Westmill, half a day's road east along the river. Nessa decided she was coming because she had family in the village before Westmill and had not seen them in two years. I was coming because I was fifteen and fully capable of carrying my own pack, and because I was not going to stay in Ashfen alone for three days with my scarred hands and my thoughts.
The road was ordinary for the first several hours.
Dirt, ruts, river smell. Cael carrying the heavier pack without acknowledging that he was doing it. Nessa pointing out things on the roadside with the specific energy of someone who had been inside Ashfen's walls long enough that the world at large had become interesting again. I walked half a step behind and to the right, which was where Davan had told me to walk when moving through unfamiliar ground with people you were responsible for.
Old habit by now.
The river bent north around the Westering wood, and the road followed the bend, and that was where the ordinary part of the journey ended.
I heard it before I saw it.
Not a sound exactly. An absence of sound. The birds at the wood's edge went quiet all at once.
I caught Cael's arm before I understood why.
He looked at me.
"Something is wrong," I said.
He looked at the road. The wood. The still edge of the trees.
Then the undergrowth at the bend exploded.
What came out was large. That was the first fact I could register. Large enough that my mind tried to recategorize it three times in the first second: bear, no, not a bear; horse, no, wrong shape; wrong shape entirely. The thing that moved through the gap in the trees was a bulk of dense muscle and mottled scale with a head too wide and too low, and it moved with the jerking, repositioning motion of something that did not process the world through eyes alone.
Wild magic beast.
I had heard the phrase. I had read one description in a temple document that had been more interested in the theological implications than the practical ones. I had filed it under things that existed in this world and did not exist near Ashfen.
"Run," I said. "Both of you. Down the road, keep the river on your left, do not stop."
"You—" Nessa started.
"Now."
Something in my voice that I had not used in Ashfen before.
Cael grabbed her arm and moved.
The beast had not fixed on any of us yet. It was orienting, repositioning, turning that too-wide head. Wild magic beasts were not simple animals, but they were not complex predators either. They moved on instinct and heat and whatever sensory framework the local magic had built into them.
I needed it to fix on me.
I had one tool for this that I was not supposed to use again.
My hands were already scarred. The damage was old enough that the skin had hardened into something that was not quite right but was at least stable. Davan had made adjustments to my grip training around it. I had been careful, for a year, about not reopening what had already healed as well as it was going to.
I was going to un-be-careful now.
I opened my hands.
The fire-palm was not a spell. It had never become a spell. What it was, precisely, was a break in my body's relationship to the local magic: a place that should have been a door and had instead become a gap. Heat moved through it without structure, without geometry, without control.
I had spent a year learning not to set myself on fire.
Now I let some through.
The beast turned.
I had its attention.
Good.
What followed was not heroic in any sense I could apply to it after the fact. It was a boy on a road with burning hands and two years of militia-yard footwork and the understanding that he did not need to win. He needed to last.
I moved laterally. I kept noise and heat coming. When the beast lunged I stepped and let the bulk go past, and put more distance between us and the road, which was the direction I needed it not to go. I was not fast enough to be safe. I was fast enough to be interesting.
My hands were getting worse.
I could feel the damage accumulating through the familiar sequence: manageable, serious, wrong. The fire that came through the gap without foundation did not burn cleanly. It did not burn in one direction. It burned through me as much as it burned outward.
I kept the beast's attention for long enough.
I know this because it did not follow Cael and Nessa down the road.
It followed me into the cut at the river's edge instead, where the bank dropped quickly and the water ran fast, and where I had already understood that this ended the same way it had to end.
The beast's claw caught me before the water did.
I was in the air, and then I was in the river.
The cold hit like an answer to a question I had not finished asking.
I had enough time, submerged and moving in a current that did not care about my plans, to understand that this was different from Brindle Hollow.
In Brindle Hollow I had run.
I had been a child. I know that, in the part of me that extends grace. But I had run and lost Mara's hand and spent every year since carrying the shape of that moment against the inside of my chest.
I had not run today.
I had not run, and the people on the road behind me had a chance because of it, and whatever came next for them would be real and continued and would have nothing in it that I needed to apologize for.
The current took me around the bend.
The light above the water went gold, then gray, then dark.
Somewhere up the road, I imagined, Cael had stopped running and turned back.
I hoped Nessa had not let him.
I hoped they kept walking.
I hoped they made it to the family in the village and sat around a fire and Nessa cried a little and Cael stayed quiet because that was what Cael did and eventually the world continued because that was what it did whether or not you were in it to see it.
I thought about the coins in the clay jar.
I thought about Davan's voice: *too tense in the shoulders*.
I thought about Fenwick's ledger, finally organized.
About Cael's hand over mine on the first day, and the way it had taken me four years to stop fighting that.
About Nessa's half-songs, always starting from a different place.
I thought: I loved them.
I had loved them since before I admitted it was possible. Since before I understood I had already crossed the line I was trying to stay behind. Since that first day Nessa sat with her hands flat on the table and I stood up without deciding to.
The water was very cold.
I was not afraid.
That surprised me.
Then it didn't.
Then the river took the rest.
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