Claire had found him at the rail after his last match, and by the time she'd finished talking the light over the tournament grounds had gone dim and red at the edges, heading toward evening, and neither of them had much left to say after that. She'd told him to eat properly and walked off with the wolf at her heel, and Ant had sat on alone until the market had emptied out around him.
He didn't remember deciding to leave. It was already decided by the time he woke.
Sleep came anyway, thin and unhelpful, and he woke to the same grey crack of morning he always woke to, his shoulder still throbbing where Irontalon had caught him two days back. He sat up and gave himself a minute before he tried to remember any of the dream properly.
"South," he said, out loud, to nobody. Saying it was easy. Getting there wouldn't be.
He'd need more than a direction to make it there alive.
The cooling rack four streets from his doorway had the same baker's boy tending it every morning, sleeves pushed up, humming something tuneless while he stacked the trays. Ant lifted a second loaf off the near end while the boy's back was turned, wrapped it fast, and had it under his arm before anyone had cause to look twice. The old shame was there, brief and familiar, although it didn't stop his hand from taking it.
A merchant two streets further had left his stall unwatched, a shouted argument two aisles over about a scale reading short, long enough for Ant to take a half-full waterskin and a coil of cord he had no use for yet. Rope was never wasted. Worth keeping as a rule even when you didn't know what it was for.
The coat came last, off a line strung between two buildings where someone had left their washing out overnight, heavier than his own, better stitched, pockets deep enough to hold something. He pulled it on over his own thin layers and kept moving before anyone came looking.
The guards at the southern gate barely looked at him. Checking for contraband, for cargo worth taxing. A man in a coat that didn't quite fit passed beneath their notice without effort.
Past the gate, the road continued across open scrubland, and Ant kept walking.
Step after step, the ground staying even underfoot while his own movement filled in where the city's noise used to be. Other travellers dotted the road ahead and behind, spaced out enough that nobody paid much attention to anyone else. A cluster of academy trainees passed him inside the first hour, their Kithren moving alongside them with the restless energy of animals that hadn't been put to work yet. Not one of them hesitated.
He pulled his attention back to the road, and with nothing else to look at, his mind went back over what Claire had told him.
"I looked into something I wasn't authorised to look into," she'd said, sitting on that bench with her hands gone still in her lap, stiller than they'd been a moment before. Physical trials, reflex testing, aptitude, every candidate got run through the same measures before their ceremony, and she'd gone looking for his after seeing him again in that alley.
"You tested highest in your year, Ant." She said his name plainly, not clipped down to just the surname, though that was how she usually said it, and didn't explain why. "Not near the top. The top, every measure they ran, and nobody ever gave you so much as a reason for what happened after."
He'd told her that wasn't possible, that nobody scored that high and came away with nothing, and she hadn't argued the point.
"That's the part nobody's explained to me either," she'd said, her voice staying level though she'd gone quiet first before she said it. "The file simply closed itself out, unkithered, next candidate, and not one person along the way stopped to ask why."
He tried to hold both of those facts steady at once and couldn't quite manage it. His feet kept moving. His thoughts kept returning to the same place: a boy who scored higher than everyone in that hall, and thirty Kithren that hadn't so much as slowed passing near him. It should have meant something. It clearly had. He just didn't know what, and thinking about it on a flat road with nothing else to look at wasn't giving him an answer, only the same two facts sitting side by side, refusing to add up.
There was more than that, and the more of it was worse. "Two hundred years ago the clan had a Chief named Adran Byrren," she'd said, then paused before she added, "yours." A man who'd built the clan's reputation almost singlehandedly, his bond so strong nothing since had come close to matching it, a Frostmarrow Direwolf paired to a level past sixty that almost nobody touched even now. He'd walked into the wasteland on nothing but what the clan's detection artifact had shown him, and he'd never come back.
He'd asked her what actually happened to a man that strong in a place that supposedly did nothing but sit empty for two centuries, and she hadn't had an answer for that either. Only that the artifact had shown Adran something specific enough to act on, and that he'd gone to Claire's own ancestor in person to say so before he left. Neither the man nor the artifact ever turned up again.
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Ant had argued back, right there on the bench. If something out there could kill a man that strong, the wasteland wasn't the empty rumour everyone treated it as. If nothing had killed him, then the artifact hadn't drawn him out there to find rare Kithren, since a bond like his made that pointless. "You're building a great deal on a tale that's two hundred years old," she'd said, and for the first time since she'd sat down her voice had gone softer, whatever certainty had been behind it a minute earlier already thinning out. He'd said all of it fast, certain of every piece, and it had felt right in the moment, the confidence of a man who wanted an answer badly enough to build one out of nothing.
Out here, alone, with nothing but flat ground in front of him, it didn't feel as solid. He could find weaknesses in his own logic if he tried to look for them. Maybe the artifact showed something that had nothing to do with rare Kithren at all. Maybe a man's strength meant less out there than anywhere else in the world, and the wasteland simply didn't care how high anyone's numbers went. He didn't have an answer for either. He walked, and the questions stayed exactly as unanswered as they'd been at the gate, no smaller for the distance he'd put behind him.
By midday the scrub had thinned into patches, the soil paling underfoot, and by the time the sun dropped low the ground had stopped being scrubland at all. The packed surface cracked into loose plates further on, grass gone entirely where the cracks ran deepest, until there was barely a road left to follow.
Somewhere in the days that followed, he learned exactly how closely the boundary was watched, and every lesson came with his heart going too fast. Riders in the dark, colours he half-recognised, voices that never once sounded certain of what they were patrolling for and rode it anyway. He learned to be flat against the ground before he'd consciously decided to move, learned which shadows were worth a second look and which weren't, learned that a whistle from a handler could turn a Kithren's head away from him a half-second before it noticed him at all. More than once he lay still long enough to lose feeling in an arm, counting his own pulse because numbers took more concentration than he had spare.
None of them found him, though the effort had still worn down most of the nerve he'd started with.
A man came at him out of the grey once, wild-eyed, a pack bouncing open against his hip.
"Turn around," the man said, before Ant had a word out. "Whatever's got you walking this way. Turn around."
"What's out there?"
"Nothing you'll believe till you've seen it yourself." His hands wouldn't hold still. "Three of us started. Proper gear. Bonded pair leading the way. Didn't matter." His eyes went past Ant, toward the city neither of them could see from here, and stayed there half a second too long. "There's still time for you. There wasn't for us."
He didn't wait for an answer. He cut off the track and ran, and Ant watched him shrink into the grey until the distance made him impossible to pick out from anything else out there.
Ant kept walking. Turning back had stopped being a real option somewhere around a tournament bench he wasn't going back to sit on again, but for a dozen steps, maybe more, he let himself actually weigh it as one. That said enough about how unsettled the stranger had left him.
The road ran out for good not long after. A wooden post leaned out of the dirt, its painted marking scoured down to almost nothing, whatever warning it had once carried long since worn away. Nobody had replaced it. Nobody had repaired the ground past it either. He kept walking toward it anyway, and the grey soil on the other side held his weight without giving anything back, no give, no dust, nothing sharp enough to call a smell.
He'd gone maybe an hour past the marker when he heard water.
He nearly missed it. Thin and steady, in a hairline crack in the grey ground he'd have walked straight past on any ordinary day, a patch of dead-looking growth still rooted along its edge. He dropped to his knees and drank straight from it, hands braced either side, until his throat stopped aching.
His own waterskin had split at some point since he'd crossed the marker, a seam giving out under all the flattening and scrambling he'd asked of it, and he'd been rationing what little it still held ever since. He worked it loose from his pack now and looked at the tear properly for the first time: not a clean split, just fabric worn thin enough to finally give. He packed the seam with cord and a scrape of wet earth off the crack itself, the only ground out here soft enough to work with, and pressed his palm against it to test the seal.
It held, mostly.
Not a proper flask anymore, but it would carry water, and that was already more than he'd had before he found the crack. He filled it as full as the seal would take, drank again until his stomach complained, and pushed himself back up. Small thing. It was still the first thing he'd gotten right since leaving the road.
The last of the light went while he was still walking, and he found a shallow hollow with a slab of rock at its back to break the wind. No fire. Smoke would carry too far, and after two patrols had nearly found him already, he wasn't going to be the one giving his own position away. He ate a third of what bread he still had and made himself stop there, though his stomach argued the point for a long time after.
He sat with his back against the rock a while. Not fully silent: small ticks in the stone, a thin whistle of wind through some gap above him, on and off. He'd slept in worse places. He tried to hold onto that instead of the two facts that still wouldn't settle in his head, the score he'd never been told about and the ancestor who'd walked into nothing and never come back.
His eyes were closing before he'd finished deciding to let them.
The last clear thought he had, right at the edge of it, was that this quiet had nothing to do with the city's. Something out here was listening for him to fall the rest of the way asleep before it did anything about it.
He was asleep within a minute of closing his eyes. The same dream was already waiting on the other side of it.