The questions come through Isolde's management instead of all at once, which is the only reason the afternoon doesn't become something I can't follow. There are twenty-three peoplethat live here. Eleven of them came through the routes I started. Three crossed on papers I forged. One of them is alive because I found her in a ditch outside a checkpoint with two broken ribs and cost me a safe house I never used again.
She recognizes me before I recognize her. She's taller now. She doesn't speak — just presses her hand briefly against mine as she passes, and I stand there holding some sort of feeling I'm unsure of.
I deflect everything else. The gratitude sits wrong, like wearing something that belongs to a version of me that doesn't exist — a version that did all those things cleanly. I moved medicine because I couldn't stop hearing the screaming. I saved people because I had burned people and the math never came out even but I kept trying anyway. Being thanked for it feels like a lie told about me.
Leoric is talking to no one, which means everyone is talking at him sideways. I catch fragments while I help Isolde with the supply inventory: the Ash Commander. The children at Vareth. A story about a prisoner line redirected onto an unofficial road during a battle that officially never happened. He hears them, but does nothing.
Isolde passes me a bundle of dried cloths and lowers her voice so only I can hear. "They're afraid of him," she starts. "But not all the stories are the same. Vareth wasn't the only one. There was a prison convoy near Marrowfen that vanished from its records and arrived at a healer's camp three days later. A work camp outside Draven Hollow emptied the night before processing orders came through. Someone changed the routes. Someone changed the reports."
I look at Leoric before I can stop myself.
Isolde follows my gaze. "I'm not saying he's safe, Corrine. I'm saying fear doesn't always remember accurately."
Later, two children decide I'm trustworthy based on evidence I don't fully understand, and I end up on the ground with them while they show me a bird's nest they found — abandoned. I explain why the bird put the branches that way. They listen with complete focused attention that only children have, treating information like something precious.
When I look up, Leoric is watching from six meters away. He comes to stand beside me after the children are called inside. We watch everyone settle into their night routines — fires banked, voices dropping, the quiet of people who have been living carefully for a long time.
"You created this."
"I built the supply lines. The people built the rest."
"That's not what I mean."
"I know what you are implying." I glance at the fire. "It doesn't balance anything."
We stand in it. The shared weight of having done terrible things and still tried, years later, in quieter ways, to put something back. It doesn't redeem anything. It's just true. I catch myself staring at him and wanting him to think well of what he saw tonight. It appears inside me before I've made room for it, and it lands badly, because wanting his approval means there's something else niggling at me.
I'm close enough when I turn toward him that the choice is obvious to both of us. The firelight catches the scarred side of him. I don't look away from it. He doesn't move back. Three seconds where what happens next is entirely available.
Then he shifts — not away, just the smallest adjustment, the breath of a choice made carefully, and I understand why, but understanding doesn't make it less present between us. I step back, and the distance returns.
"Isolde will have the documents ready in the morning."
"Yes."
I walk back and I know without turning that he is watching me go. I know without understanding it that hatred isn't what is between us anymore, I don't really understand what is, so I just keep walking.
12
LEORIC
The cabin smells of rot and old ash when we push the door open, which tells me it has been uninhabited long enough to stop being dangerous and start being merely unpleasant. Either way, we have no choice with the storm. Wind hammers the shutters. Theren takes the escorts two hundred meters to a structure with a better roof, and he gives me the look he reserves for decisions he has already calculated and found wanting before I've finished making them. I let him have it. There is nothing in that look I haven't already said to myself.
Corrine gets a fire going faster than I expect. She uses the dry bark stacked near the wall with efficiency like she knows how to build warmth from almost nothing. By the time I've checked the door, windows, and floor for structural failures, the fire is alive. She sits close to it with her coat still on and her hands extended toward the heat, and her silence is heavy. I've spent enough time studying her quiet to know which ones are for thinking. This one is.
I sit across the fire and don't open conversation. The wind whistles through every gap in the planking.
"Isolde told me things," she starts finally. "About Marrowfen. About Draven Hollow."
"Did she?"
"You changed the routes."
"Those change."
"Leoric." Her voice drops, she has stopped performing and means it instead. "I'm not asking for a tactical answer."
I focus on the orange flames rather than at her. "The orders were wrong. I had the authority to alter them. So I did. That's the whole of it."
