Gorvani's gates are ahead. Whatever's waiting behind them, we'll deal with it.
But right now, walking beside him on this road, with a sleeping child and a grateful woman and a man whose leg I set because that's what I do, something feels different. He didn't just carry the weight. He fit into the work. Followed my lead without questioning it, without posturing, without making it about the oath.
He just helped.
I don't say anything about it. But I notice.
KOVREN
They gave us a room above the tavern. Small enough that I cannot stand upright in it; the ceiling beams force me into a permanent duck that makes every movement feel like an apology for my own size. Narrow bed, washstand, one window overlooking the square.
The woman from the road spoke to the settlement leader, a gray-haired man called Harren, and whatever she said was enough. That, and the fact that Maren set her husband's leg on the side of a road and asked for nothing in return.
The village needs a healer, even for a day. Maren is a healer. Simple math, even for people who would rather not have a Bogatyr sleeping inside their walls.
I take the corner furthest from the bed and fold myself down until my back is against the wall, knees drawn up, taking as little space as I can manage. The bed would not hold me, and the chair would splinter, so the corner is the only option that does not involve destroying the furniture. Maximum distance, though the room is too small for it to matter. The habit is older than thought.
Maren drops her pack on the bed and stretches, rolling her shoulders, pressing her fingers into the knots at the base ofher neck. She crosses to the washstand and spends a long time washing her face, her hands, scrubbing the last traces of dried blood from her arms, then the road dust from her face.
The room fills with the clean smell of water and underneath it, the smell that is hers alone: dried herbs, woodsmoke from the farmhouse that still clings to her hair, and something warm beneath all of it that I have no name for but that the bond has made impossible to ignore.
I watch her. Not the way I watch the street, all threat assessment and angles of approach. Quieter than that. The line of her shoulders. The way her wet hair curls against her neck. The small sounds she makes, relief or exhaustion, as the water does its work.
She catches me looking. I hold it one beat too long before I turn my gaze to the window. The delay is a mistake. I know it even as it happens, but something in me has stopped trying to look away from her as quickly as I should.
The village sounds are strange. After so many years of empty roads and silence, the press of life on all sides feels wrong. Footsteps below us. Voices through the walls. A child laughing somewhere, the sound cutting through the evening like something bright and sharp.
Maren sits on the edge of the bed, facing me. Her feet don't touch the floor. She looks small against the pillow, in this room, in this village. Small and tired and still not afraid.
“What's out there, Kovren?”
I don't pretend to misunderstand. She's been watching the tree-line since the ditch. She heard the scream behind us that first night, and the silence since hasn't reassured her. She's a healer, not a fool.
“Something I've been tracking.” I keep my voice level. “For a long time.”
“How long?”
“Eight years.”
She lets that settle. I see her working through it. The lines around her eyes tighten the way they do when she's assessing damage.
“And it's been tracking you back.”
“Yes.”
“That's what hurt you. In the ditch.”
“Yes.”
“What is it?”
The fire is burning low in the hearth. Someone left wood for us, stacked by the door, a grudging kindness. The light flickers across the walls and turns the small room into a shifting landscape of shadow.
“It used to be a man,” I say. “A Bogatyr. Something happened to him. Changed him. The rage that lives in all of us, the berserker, it took him over. Ate him from the inside until there was nothing left but the fury and the hunger.”
Her eyes don't leave my face. “Can that happen to any Bogatyr?”
“Yes.”
