Chapter 16: The Farm Track
The wagon had no lantern.
Harren had been specific about that. No lantern, no torch, no exposed flame. Travel by starlight and the faint grey smear of the predawn horizon, and if the sky clouded over, stop and wait rather than risk a light that could be seen from the road. Aiden had agreed without argument, but now, two hours into the journey, he understood the cost: every rut in the farm track translated to a lurch, every stone and gully translated to a shudder that rolled through the wagon bed and into Maren's prone body, and Brice had to brace one hand against the woman's shoulder to keep her from sliding on the layered blankets.
"Slower," Brice said. Not for the first time.
Aiden pulled on the reins. The horse — a broad-chested bay that Harren had called Darrow — dropped from a walk to something barely faster than a deliberate crawl. The wheels ground over a root. Maren's head lolled. Brice caught it, his palm behind her ear, easing her skull back to the folded coat that served as a pillow.
"She's stable," Brice said. "But stable is not the same as fine. The infection is contained for now — I packed the wound with willow bark poultice and bound it clean — but her fever is still climbing. If it crests and breaks on its own, she'll survive the night. If it doesn't—" He let the silence finish the sentence.
Aiden said nothing. He kept his eyes on the track ahead — a narrow corridor of hard-packed earth, no wider than the wagon itself, flanked by hedgerow and scrub oak. The trees leaned in overhead, their branches interlocking to form a low canopy that blotted out what little starlight remained. The air smelled of river water, wet stone, and the green, vegetal tang of living things growing close together in dark soil. Without his dragon senses, the track would have been nearly invisible. With them, he could see the ground in front of the wheels — could read the ruts, the rocks, the places where the earth softened toward the riverbank on his left — and guide Darrow through the worst of it without stopping.
The dragon senses had not retreated since the ridge. He had expected them to fade, the way they had faded every other time — the cage rebuilt, the fire banked, the world contracting back to its human dimensions. But the cage was broken. Not cracked, not compromised — broken, in the way that a dam is broken when the water has found a new channel and will not be redirected. The suppressant was gone. The cage was gone. What remained was the fire, banked and patient, and the senses, running at a low, constant hum that turned the darkness into a landscape of detail.
He could hear the river. Not the crash and churn of a mountain river, but the steady, measured flow of water moving through a flat valley — the sound of current against bank, of silt settling, of small things moving beneath the surface. Frogs, maybe. Or fish. The dragon blood cataloged them without his permission: movement at twelve o'clock, forty feet, small; movement at two o'clock, sixty feet, medium, warm-blooded. He shut it down. Not all the way — he needed the senses to read the track — but enough to keep the noise from swallowing his thoughts.
The Mark pulsed in his palm. Steady. Patient. A beacon that broadcast his position to anyone who knew how to listen. He had wrapped his hand in a strip of cloth torn from his coat, as though a layer of fabric could muffle a signal that operated at the bloodline level. It could not. The woman on the ridge had said as much. But the wrapping served another purpose: it covered the Mark, and the Mark's glow, and the golden scales that crept past his wrist and onto the back of his hand, and if anyone passed them on the track — a farmer, a trader, a late-night traveler — they would see a young man with bandaged hands driving a wagon, not a boy with scales and a beacon and a body temperature that could warm a room.
Lira sat behind him on the wagon's forward bench, her back to the road ahead, facing the way they had come. She had positioned herself there when they left the settlement — had climbed up onto the bench with her one good arm, swung her legs over, and turned herself around to face the dark without being asked. Her injured arm was strapped to her chest with the linen wrapping Brice had made, and her good hand rested on her knee, holding a small hand-axe that Harren had pressed into her grip at the gate.
"You don't know how to use that," Aiden had said.
"I know which end to hit with," Lira had replied.
She had not turned around since. Two hours of watching the road behind them, her head turning at every sound — the snap of a branch, the call of a night bird, the groan of the wagon's wheels settling into ruts. Aiden felt her vigilance like a weight against his back, steady and constant, and did not tell her to rest because he understood that the watching was its own kind of medicine. It gave her something to hold while everything else slipped.
Brice worked in the wagon bed. The space was tight — provisions stacked against one side, Harren's bundled blankets against the other, and Maren lying between them on a mattress of straw and folded canvas. Brice had made room for himself at her side, his kit open beside him: glass vials, cloth strips, a mortar and pestle no larger than his fist, a coil of thin copper wire that he had threaded through a bone needle and used to stitch the wound's edges together after the poultice was packed. He worked by touch, his hands moving over Maren's body with the practiced, careful efficiency of a man who had treated injuries in dark rooms before and had learned that the body did not care about lighting.
"You've done this before," Aiden said. Not a question.
"Settlement healer for nine years." Brice's voice was low, conversational, pitched for the wagon's interior. "Before that, I traveled with a surgical caravan up and down the Thornwall — miners, settlers, the occasional cultivator who took a bad fall. You see enough wound work, you stop needing light. You learn to read a body by heat and swelling and the sound it makes when you press on it." He paused, his hands pausing with him. "This is different, though. The wound isn't ordinary. There's energy in it — spiritual residue, maybe, or something else. It resists normal healing. The poultice slows the infection, but it doesn't kill it. Whatever cut her knew what it was cutting."
"Can you keep her alive?"
"I can keep the wound contained. I can manage the fever. But she needs proper facilities — a real herb garden, a clean room, time. Not a wagon bed on a farm track in the dark." He adjusted the poultice, his fingers gentle against the bandage. "She's strong. Whatever she is — whatever Covenant people are made of — her body is fighting harder than any patient I've treated. But fighting hard and fighting well aren't always the same thing."
The wagon lurched. Aiden pulled Darrow left, avoiding a gully that would have dropped the right wheel into a hole deep enough to tip. The horse complied, its hooves finding the firmer ground along the hedge line. The wheels ground over roots. Maren shifted. Brice steadied her.
"How far to the next landmark?" Brice asked.
"Harren said six hours along the farm track to a stone bridge. River crossing. From there, the track joins a wider road for a stretch — a real road, with wheel marks and signs of trade. We follow that east for half a day, then take another branch north toward the academy."
"Two days of travel. Maybe three, with the wagon and her condition."
"Two days."
Brice said nothing. The silence carried the weight of a man who had calculated the same numbers and arrived at a different conclusion about whether two days was achievable.
The sky lightened. Not much — a shift from black to deep grey, the stars fading behind a veil of cloud that had moved in from the west sometime after midnight. The trees thinned. The hedgerow gave way to open fields on the right, dark shapes of pasture and fallow ground stretching toward a treeline half a mile distant. On the left, the river murmured, closer now, its voice a constant undercurrent that the wagon's wheels did not quite drown.
Aiden could see the landscape with dragon clarity. Each field was a map of textures — the short, springy grass of grazed pasture, the taller, tangled growth of unworked ground, the dark squares of kitchen gardens behind stone walls. Farmhouses sat at irregular intervals, their shapes solid and dark against the grey sky, their chimneys cold, their windows dark. Pre-dawn. The farmers were still asleep. By the time they woke, the wagon would be far down the track, a shadow among shadows, and if anyone thought to look for it, there would be nothing to find but wheel ruts that a dozen other carts had made.
At least, that was what Aiden hoped.
He had been turning the ridge encounter over in his mind since they left, running it through the same mental loop the way a tongue finds a broken tooth. The golden fire on the ridge. The farmer who had seen it. The word that Harren had said would spread — by morning, every person in Silverreach will have a version of what they saw. Versions became stories. Stories traveled. Travel reached the wrong ears.
He looked at his hands on the reins. The scales caught the growing light — gold, bright, unmistakable. He had wrapped cloth around his left hand to cover the Mark, but the scales on his right were exposed, the golden plates running from wrist to elbow in a pattern that followed the bones beneath. He could not bandage both arms without making the wrapping look like what it was: concealment. And concealment was its own kind of announcement.
The Golden Wretch. The woman on the ridge had not called him that. Nobody had. The name did not exist yet. But it would, if the stories reached far enough. A boy who burned golden on a ridge above a settlement. A boy with scales. A boy who was not quite human. The names would come. They always did. Elder Fenn had known that — had burned the scrolls and wept, trying to erase a history that could not be erased because it was written in Aiden's blood.
The fire stirred. Not the aggressive, predatory surge of the ridge — something quieter, a shifting of attention, the dragon blood responding to his thoughts the way a sleeping animal responds to a change in the room's temperature. It pressed against the inside of his forearms, warm and heavy, and he felt the scales tighten, the golden plates settling against his skin with a firmness that was not quite organic. They were part of him now. He could feel them the way he felt his own nails — attached, rooted, inseparable from the body they decorated.
He flexed his fingers. The scales moved with them. No resistance, no separation. The dragon blood had claimed his skin, and it was not offering to give it back.
I am what I am, he thought, and the words felt borrowed — too clean for the mess of it, too simple for the weight of what they carried. He was seventeen years old. He had worked wood and hauled stone. He had held his sister's hand in the dark. And now he drove a wagon through a predawn field with scales on his arms and fire in his blood and a mark on his palm that broadcast his location to the people who wanted him dead.
The road stretched ahead. The sky lightened. The wagon moved.
Brice came forward around the fourth hour. He climbed over the provisions, braced himself against the wagon's side, and settled himself on the bench beside Aiden with the careful, deliberate movements of a man whose body was tired and whose joints were reminding him of it.
"She's sleeping," he said. "Real sleep, not the fever-sleep she's been in. Temperature's holding steady. The wound's clean." He paused. "I can't do more for her on this road. The rest is up to her."
Aiden nodded. The track had widened slightly here — the hedgerow giving way to a low stone wall on the left, the river visible beyond it, a dark ribbon of moving water that caught the first grey light of the coming day. On the right, the fields continued, but closer now, their boundaries marked by wooden fences and the occasional gate. Farm country. Civilized, in the sense that people lived here and worked the land and built things that lasted longer than a season.
"Do you know anything about the academy?" Aiden asked.
Brice considered. "Thornwall Academy. I've heard of it — everyone east of the wall has. It's the largest institution for cultivation training on the continent. Built at the southern end of the Thornwall, which makes it the first major settlement you reach coming through from the frontier." He paused. "I've never been. My world is smaller — settlements, farmsteads, the occasional mining camp. The academy is for people with talent and resources, and I have neither."
"You're a healer."
"A healer is a useful pair of hands. An academy cultivator is a force." Brice's voice carried no bitterness — the flat, honest assessment of a man who had measured himself against the world's standards and found the gap too wide to jump. "I can set a bone, stitch a wound, manage a fever. I can't throw fire from my hands or sense a heartbeat through a wall. The academy doesn't need more hands. It needs more power."
Aiden thought of the ridge. The fire. The crystal shattering in his fist. The woman's throat under his grip, her pulse rapid and frightened against his scaled fingers. Power. The word carried different weight now that it was his.
"The academy is where we're heading," he said.
"I know. Harren told me." Brice was quiet for a moment, watching the track ahead, his eyes following the dark line of the wall and the silver glint of the river beyond. "Can I ask you something?"
"You can ask."
"That fire on the ridge. The golden fire. I've treated cultivators for nine years — the occasional burn, the backlash from a failed technique, the spiritual wound that opens when a core destabilizes. I've never seen anything like what Harren described. He said it lit up the sky. He said it turned night to day." Brice looked at Aiden's arms, at the scales, gold-bright in the growing light. "That's not ordinary cultivation. That's something else."
"It's a bloodline," Aiden said. The words came out flat, factual, stripped of the weight they carried. "My family — the Dragonfords — they were bloodline bearers. Dragon blood. It's been dormant for generations. It's not dormant anymore."
"Bloodlines are supposed to be myths."
"So are dragons. But here I am."
Brice absorbed that. His expression did not change — not shock, not fear, not the avid curiosity of a man confronted with a legend. Just the steady, measured assessment of a healer who had seen enough unusual things to know that unusual was not the same as impossible.
"Does it hurt?" he asked.
Aiden looked at his hands. At the scales. At the gold catching the first light of dawn, bright and alien and inseparable. "No," he said. Then: "Yes. Not the scales — those are just skin now. But the fire. The blood. It wants things I don't want to give it. It pushes toward—"
He stopped. The dragon blood stirred, and he felt the pull, the subtle, insistent tug toward dominance, toward territory, toward the cold, predatory calculus that had guided his hands on the ridge. The woman's throat. The crystal shattering. The choice to release instead of kill. The dragon blood had not approved of that choice. It had filed it away as a concession, a weakness, a mercy that a proper predator would not have extended.
"Brice," Aiden said. "When we reach the academy — if we reach it — what happens to you?"
"Harren asked me to keep Maren alive for the first day. I've done that. Beyond that—" He shrugged, a small movement that carried the weight of a man whose plans were limited to the next horizon. "I go back to Silverreach, probably. Or I don't. Silverreach may not be safe for me if the Hollow Court comes looking for the people who left in the wagon." He paused. "I was thinking I might keep going. Past the academy. See what the world looks like past the wall."
"You've never been past the Thornwall?"
"Not past Silverreach. I was born there. Raised there. My parents were there, my practice was there, my whole world was bounded by the river and the wall and the people who came through." He looked at his hands — healer's hands, steady and scarred, the hands of a man who had held human bodies together for nine years. "Then a boy with scales walked into my inn carrying an unconscious woman, and my whole world got bigger. Whether I wanted it to or not."
The wagon rolled on. The river murmured. The sky brightened, grey giving way to a pale, clouded blue, the sun somewhere behind the overcast but present enough to turn the world from shadow into shape. Fields, fences, the occasional farmhouse — the landscape of a settled country, people working the land, living lives that did not involve bloodlines or Hollow Courts or the spreading news of golden fire on a ridge.
Lira turned around.
"One road," she said. "Behind us. Empty. But—"
"But?"
"There was a rider. Maybe twenty minutes ago. On the far ridge, the one past the second field. Dark horse, moving fast, heading the same direction we are. Not on our track — on the ridge road, the high ground. Parallel."
Aiden's grip tightened on the reins. "Could be a farmer."
"At four in the morning? On a horse that moves like that?" Lira shook her head. "Farmers don't ride at dawn. They walk to the barn. That rider was going somewhere, and they were going fast."
Brice leaned forward, looking past Aiden toward the rear of the wagon, his eyes scanning the empty track behind them. "Could be a trader. The farm track connects to the river road — there's regular traffic on that during the day."
"Not at this hour," Lira said. She had turned back to face the road, her hand on the hand-axe, her posture straight and watchful. "I'll keep watching."
Aiden looked at his sister. The grey light caught her face — thin, sharp, older than it had been a week ago. She was fourteen. She should have been in Greybarrow, arguing with Mistress Hale about embroidery stitches, complaining to Aiden about the length of chores, living the small, bounded life that a girl in a frontier village was supposed to live. Instead she sat on a wagon bench at dawn, watching for pursuers, armed with an axe she could barely lift.
He did not tell her to rest. She would not have listened, and the watching was its own kind of armor.
The farm track curved right, following the river's bend. The trees closed in again — willows, their branches trailing the water's surface, their leaves a pale, trembling green in the dawn light. The track narrowed. Aiden guided Darrow through the curves, reading the ground with dragon senses, his hands steady on the reins despite the pull of the fire and the hum of the Mark and the constant, low-grade awareness of every living thing within a hundred yards.
Brice had fallen silent. He sat on the bench with his hands on his knees, watching the landscape pass, his expression carrying the distant, inward look of a man recalculating his future in real time. Aiden understood that look. He had worn it himself, in the days after Greybarrow, when the road ahead was empty and the road behind was ash and the only thing left to do was keep moving.
They stopped at midmorning. The track had crossed the stone bridge — a narrow, ancient thing, its mortar crumbling at the edges, its surface grooved by generations of cart wheels — and opened onto a wider road that ran east between two rows of poplar trees. A real road. Wheel ruts, horse tracks, the churned mud of regular traffic. Aiden pulled Darrow off the track and into a stand of willows, sheltered from the road by a dense curtain of trailing branches, and climbed down.
The horse needed water. The wheels needed checking. Maren needed Brice's hands.
Aiden led Darrow to the river's edge and held the reins while the horse drank. The water was clear, cold, moving with the patient strength of a river that had been running since before the settlements were built. He knelt and cupped a handful to his face. The scales on his forearm brushed the water's surface, and the dragon blood reacted — a flare of heat, a tightening of the scales, a flash of instinct that recognized the river not as water but as territory, as boundary, as the edge of something that belonged to something else. He pulled his hand back and watched the scales cool.
Territory. The dragon blood was claiming territory. Not the river — not yet, not consciously — but the instinct was there, a root system growing beneath his thoughts, mapping the world in terms of ownership and threat and dominion. The ridge had been territory. The wagon was territory. The woman on the ridge had entered his space, and the blood had responded with the immediate, unthinking aggression of a creature defending its ground.
He had held back. He had chosen restraint. But the choice had cost something — not in blood, not in power, but in the fragile, daily negotiation between what he was and what he wanted to be. Each choice to restrain was a debt, and the dragon blood was patient, and the dragon blood was keeping count.
Brice emerged from the wagon bed, wiping his hands on a cloth.
"Fever broke," he said.
Aiden stood. "She's better?"
"She's alive. The fever broke an hour ago — her temperature dropped, her breathing changed, she's sleeping normally now. The wound is still infected, but the body's fighting it properly. She'll need days of rest, not hours. But the immediate danger has passed." He paused. "She'll wake. I don't know when, and I don't know what she'll be like when she does, but she'll wake."
The relief hit Aiden harder than he expected. He had been carrying it — the weight of Maren's condition, the possibility that she would not survive, the image of arriving at the academy with a body instead of a teacher — and the weight shifted when Brice spoke, not disappearing but redistributing, the sharpest edge of it dulled by the simple, clinical confirmation that she would live.
"Thank you," he said.
Brice shrugged. "I did my job." He looked at the wagon, at Maren's prone form visible through the gap in the canvas covering. "But my job ends here. I'll stay until she wakes — give her water, check the wound, make sure the fever stays broken. Then I need to decide what I'm doing."
"Harren's settlement—"
"Is probably not my settlement anymore. Not if the Hollow Court is coming." Brice's voice carried no self-pity. "Nine years of setting bones doesn't prepare you for what's coming. I'm a healer, not a soldier. But I'm also not the kind of man who goes back to a place that's about to burn." He looked at Aiden. "The academy. How far?"
"A day and a half. Maybe two."
"I'll go that far with you. After that—" He spread his hands, healer's hands, steady and empty. "After that, we'll see."
Lira climbed down from the bench. She stretched — a slow, careful movement, her injured arm held tight against her body, her good arm reaching overhead with the urgency of a limb that had been still too long. She walked to the river's edge, looked upstream, looked downstream, scanned the road they had joined.
"Three carts passed while you were stopped," she said. "Farm carts. Hay, grain, one with pigs. All heading east. No riders."
"The rider you saw?"
"Gone. Either ahead of us or off the road entirely." She knelt by the water, drank, wiped her mouth with her sleeve. "I don't like it. A rider that moves fast and early is a rider with a purpose."
"We're hard to miss," Aiden said. He held up his arm, the scales catching the daylight. "Even without the Mark."
Lira looked at his arm. Her expression carried the particular, quiet weight of a girl who had grown up with a brother and was watching that brother become something her language did not have a word for.
"Wrap your sleeves down," she said. "It won't hide the scales, but it'll make them harder to spot from a distance. And keep the cloth on your hand. The Mark's glow is visible in dim light — I saw it through the wrapping when we were in the trees."
He had not known that. He looked at his wrapped left hand, at the faint golden luminescence bleeding through the cloth, and felt the Mark pulse — steady, patient, broadcasting. The beacon that could not be silenced.
They loaded back into the wagon. Aiden drove. Lira resumed her position facing the rear. Brice settled into the wagon bed beside Maren, his kit open, his hands resting on his knees.
The wagon rolled east. The road widened. The poplars gave way to open farmland, the fields green and orderly, the signs of human labor visible in every furrow and fence line. A world that had not burned. A world where people woke at dawn and fed their animals and grew things in the soil and lived within the small, bounded circle of their days.
Aiden drove through it with golden scales and a dragon's eyes and a mark that pulsed with every heartbeat, and he thought: I used to live in a world like this.
The thought did not sting. The thought was clean, precise, the clear-eyed recognition of a distance that could not be crossed. Greybarrow was ash. His mother was dead. His sister was armed and watching for riders. The boy who had lived in that world was gone, replaced by something with scales and fire and a blood that whispered about territory and dominion and the cold, efficient calculus of the kill.
He was still Aiden. He was still the boy who held his sister's hand. But the boy was smaller now, and the dragon was larger, and the road ahead was long and bright and full of things he could not yet name.
The Mark pulsed. The wagon rolled. The river ran beside them, cold and clear and indifferent, carrying its water toward the sea the way the world carried its people toward whatever came next.
They heard the singing before they saw the source.
It was evening — the second day on the road, the sun low and red behind a bank of cloud, the shadows long and blue across the fields. Aiden had pushed the pace when the road allowed, guided Darrow through the worst ruts with dragon senses, and covered more ground than Brice had thought possible. Maren had woken twice — brief, glazed intervals where her eyes opened and she said nothing, registered nothing, and fell back into the deep, exhausted sleep of a body that had been burning and was now cooling. The wound was clean. The fever was gone. She was recovering, slowly, the way a tree recovers from a fire — not healed, but alive, and capable of growing back.
The singing came from the west. Not a single voice — a chorus, rough and unpracticed, the sound of multiple people singing without a conductor and without apology. The tune was unfamiliar, something with the rolling, repetitive structure of a work song, the kind of melody that kept time for hands that were building or digging or harvesting. The voices were male, mostly, with one or two higher notes threading through the bass.
Aiden pulled Darrow to a stop. The wagon creaked. The singing grew louder.
Brice leaned forward. "That's a work crew. Road crew, probably — there's a stretch of the river road that floods every spring. They send crews out to rebuild the causeway."
"At this hour?"
"They work until sundown. Then they camp, eat, drink, and sing. It's the only entertainment they get for weeks." Brice paused, listening. "We could go around. The fields to the north are open — the wagon could cross them if the ground is dry enough."
"No." Aiden's voice was flat. The dragon blood stirred — not with aggression, but with the sharp, clear assessment of a creature that understood risk and preferred to face it directly. "Going around draws attention. We drive through. We're a wagon on a road. That's all."
He flicked the reins. Darrow walked. The wagon rolled forward, and the singing grew louder, and the work camp appeared around a bend in the road — a dozen canvas tents, a cookfire, a cluster of men sitting on logs and benches, eating from tin plates and drinking from clay cups and singing a song that had no name that Aiden knew.
They looked up as the wagon approached. Faces turned. Conversation paused. The singing faltered, not stopping but thinning, the voices trailing off one by one as eyes found the wagon and the driver and the girl facing backward on the bench and the figures in the wagon bed.
Aiden kept his hands low, his sleeves down, his face forward. The scales were covered — not hidden, not truly, but enough to pass in the fading light. The Mark was wrapped. His eyes, he knew, were still wrong — the slit pupils, the golden iris — but the brim of his hat shadowed them, and the wagon moved past the camp at a steady walk, and the road stretched ahead, and—
"Ho!" A voice from the camp. Deep, cheerful, the voice of a man who had been singing and drinking and was not inclined to be suspicious of anything that did not threaten his supper. "Traveler! Where bound?"
Aiden did not stop. He raised one hand — the unwrapped hand, the one without scales, a small wave that carried no more information than courtesy required. "East," he called. "Road's clear?"
"Road's clear! Watch the causeway — it's washed out a hundred yards past the bridge. We're fixing it come morning." The man paused. His eyes moved over the wagon, over Aiden, over Lira. "You're the one, aren't you?"
The words landed like stones in still water. Aiden felt the dragon blood tighten, felt the fire press against the inside of his chest, felt the Mark pulse — once, hard, as though the beacon had heard the question and answered it.
"The one what?" Aiden said.
The man stood. He was large, broad-shouldered, his face weathered by sun and wind and the particular hardness of a life spent working outdoors. He held a tin cup in one hand and a piece of bread in the other, and his expression carried the mixture of curiosity and wariness that Aiden was learning to recognize as the universal human response to something unusual.
"There was a rider came through yesterday evening," the man said. "Passed our camp at speed. Dark horse, dark clothes. Stopped at the crossroads an hour east and talked to the gate watch. Asked about a wagon. Asked about a boy with —" He paused, choosing his words with the careful, deliberate selection of a man who was not sure he believed what he had heard. "With golden scales."
The camp was quiet now. All the singing had stopped. The faces turned toward the wagon, toward Aiden, toward the brim-shadowed eyes and the bandaged hands and the sleeves that covered more than sleeves were meant to cover.
Aiden held the man's gaze. The dragon blood whispered threat assessment: one large male, unarmed, four others within reach, no spiritual signatures detected. He shut it down.
"We're just passing through," he said. His voice was steady. "Thank you for the road report."
He flicked the reins. Darrow walked. The wagon rolled. The work camp fell behind, its voices resuming — quieter now, the singing replaced by conversation, the conversation carrying Aiden's name or a description of him or the word golden or the word scales or the word boy strung together into the beginning of a story that would travel faster than the wagon.
Lira turned her head. She had heard everything.
"A rider," she said. "Yesterday evening. Someone is following the road, asking questions."
"Or someone was sent ahead to ask questions. The Hollow Court has reach. They have people in every settlement along the Thornwall."
"Could be the same rider I saw."
"Could be."
The road stretched ahead. The causeway was washed out — a complication, but not a crisis. They could ford the river elsewhere, or wait for morning and the road crew's repair. Two options. Two choices. Two ways forward, each with its own cost.
But the rider. The questions. The golden scales, named and described and moving ahead of them like a herald, announcing their approach to every gate watch and settlement along the river road. The Mark pulsed. The dragon blood whispered. And somewhere behind them — miles, maybe; hours, certainly — someone was following the trail that a boy with golden scales left in the dust.
The wagon rolled. The river murmured. The sun sank.
And from the wagon bed, a sound. Not a voice — not yet. A shift, a movement, the creak of a body adjusting on its mattress of straw. Brice was beside her in an instant, his hands finding the wound, checking the bandage, reading the body by touch.
"Maren?" he said. "Can you hear me?"
A pause. The wagon rolled. The wheels turned.
Then Maren's voice — thin, scraped raw, barely more than breath shaped into sound.
"Not the academy." A whisper, urgent, the words of a woman who had been dreaming and had surfaced with a single, burning thought. Her eyes opened — glassy, unfocused, seeing nothing and everything. Her hand moved, found Aiden's wrist where it rested on the bench, gripped it with a strength that did not match the body it came from. "Don't go to the academy. They're waiting."
Her eyes closed. Her grip loosened. Her hand fell back to the straw, and her breathing deepened, and she was gone — pulled under by the weight of a body that had said what it needed to say and could say no more.
The wagon rolled on. Aiden stared at the road ahead, his sister's back against his, the dragon blood humming in his veins, the Mark burning in his palm. The road to the academy stretched before them, clear and bright and empty.
And somewhere on it, they were waiting.