The dogs stopped barking around midnight and nothing came, and in the morning the town talked about it for an hour and then didn't.
Elliot spent three days on a straw mattress over a stable, which gave him a great deal of time to think and nothing useful to do with it.
He could breathe if he was careful. He could sit up if he did it in the specific way Lyssara had shown him, using his arms and not his middle, and he could get to the window, and the window was where he spent most of the second and third day: looking down at a dusty street in a town that had watched him get thrown through a wall and had gone back to work.
You are sulking, Etreuf observed.
I'm recovering.
You are doing both, and one of them is free.
He wasn't wrong, which was the irritating thing. Elliot had never been beaten in his life, not properly, not by someone stronger who simply chose the outcome and delivered it. Hollowmere hadn't had anyone strong enough. He kept finding the memory in odd moments, the way you find a bruise: Korran crouching down to his level in the rubble, not unkind, saying grow.
He thought about it so much that by the third day he'd stopped being humiliated and started being interested, which Lyssara said was either a very good sign or a symptom of a head injury.
She was gone most of every day and wouldn't say where until the second evening, when she came back with a bruise on her jaw, four copper, and a bag of dried apricots.
"There's a caravan yard on the east side," she said, dropping the apricots on his chest. "They hire day labour. Nobody asks a name."
"You got hit."
"I got hit once," Lyssara said, with dignity. "By a crate."
She also came back, every day, with the thing Elliot actually wanted, which was information, because she had spent her life in places where you learned to gather it sideways while doing something else, and Serenia was a town where nobody would tell a stranger anything and everybody would tell a co-worker everything.
By the third evening they had the shape of it.
Korran Uldar had come to Serenia twenty-two years ago as nobody in particular: a big young man off the southern roads with no gang, no reputation, and no marks on him at all.
He'd hired on as caravan muscle. Then he'd started going out onto the plains alone.
"Alone," Elliot repeated.
"That's the part everyone says the same way." Lyssara sat on the floor with her back against the wall, her spot, at the door, always. "Every version of the story has it. He'd be gone four days, six days, two weeks. Come back torn up. Sleep for a day. Go out again."
"Hunting."
"Hunting," she agreed. "And there's no guild hall in Serenia town. Nearest one's Ostbridge, which is eleven days east. So there's no tags out here, no crews, no shard buyers, no rules. Just a man walking out into three hundred miles of grass on his own and coming back with another mark on him."
Elliot lay very still.
"How many marks?"
"Nobody agrees. The bath-house woman says a man counted them once, years ago, when Korran passed out drunk in the yard." Lyssara ate an apricot. "She says a hundred and forty-one."
A hundred and forty-one, Etreuf said.
The demon had been quiet for most of three days. He said the number the way a man reads a bill.
You took one, he went on, in a marsh, out of a thing that was eating children in a village nobody has heard of, and it made you fast enough to be startled by yourself. One. A pause. He has done that a hundred and forty times. Alone. Without help, without a hall, without whatever those hunters use, one thing at a time, coming home torn open, sleeping a day, going back out. Something in the voice had changed entirely. Elliot, I want you to understand that I am not saying this to frighten you. I am saying it because I have spent three days angry about losing that fight, and I have finally worked out that I was not beaten by a monster. I was beaten by a man with a work ethic.
Elliot looked at the ceiling.
Twenty years, he said.
Twenty years, said Etreuf. That is what strength costs here. That is the actual price, and every person in this world pays it, and it is desperately, insultingly slow.
On the fourth day he could walk, so he went out and watched Korran Uldar hold court.
It wasn't a court. That was the thing. Elliot had gone out expecting a tyrant doing tyranny, collecting, threatening, being feared in public, and had positioned himself at the edge of the market with a bad ankle and an alibi and settled in to hate the man properly.
What actually happened was that the Bull sat on a stone bench outside the grain exchange for four hours and people brought him arguments.
A well dispute, two families, an hour of it. A merchant accusing a carter of watering the oil. A woman whose neighbour's goats had gotten into her seed. Korran listened to all of it with the expression of a man being slowly bored to death, and then said what would happen, and it happened.
He was not fair. Elliot watched him decide the well dispute in favor of the family that shipped through his yard, and watched the other family take it, because there was nowhere to take it to.
He was also, unmistakably, the only thing holding the place together.
"He's been the law here fifteen years," said the old man from the awning, who had appeared at Elliot's elbow without any noise at all. "There's no magistrate on the plain. Zyrion's tax men come twice a year with soldiers and go away again, and between times there's what Korran says." He sucked his teeth. "You'll want to know about the year eleven."
"I don't know what that is."
"No. You wouldn't." The old man lowered himself onto a crate. "Eleven years back, something came up out of the south grass. Not bandits. A thing. Took the herds first, then the outriders, then it started on the villages down the Sarrow road, Dell, and Little Hask, and the mill hamlet whose name I've stopped saying." His hands were quite steady. "Two hundred and forty people in three weeks. There was nobody to send for. Ostbridge said it'd be four months before a crew could be routed, and if you want to know what that number means, lad, it means no."
"And he went out."
"He went out," said the old man. "Alone, because he wouldn't take anyone. Nineteen days. Came back on his hands and knees at the north gate with his arm hanging off, and slept for two days, and when he woke up he had a new mark on him and the killing had stopped." He looked across the square at the huge man patiently listening to a woman complain about goats. "So when you ask me what I think of Korran Uldar, I'll tell you honest: he took my brother's farm in a bad year and he never gave it back, and my brother drank himself into the ground over it. And I'd still stand in front of him if it came to it. Both those things at once. That's what living here is."
Elliot didn't say anything for a while.
"That's the worst thing I've ever heard," he said finally.
The old man laughed, a short dry rattle.
"It's the ordinary thing," he said. "You're young. You'll find out that most places are exactly this, and the only difference is how big the man is."
That night Etreuf made his ask.
Elliot had known it was coming for a fortnight. He'd felt the demon circling it since the tomb, the not-saying, the thinking Elliot wasn't going to enjoy the conclusion of. It still landed badly, because Etreuf chose his moment perfectly, and his moment was the exact hour of the night when Elliot was lying awake doing sums about canyons.
You cannot do it, the demon said, without preamble. The honest way. You understand that now, I hope.
I've had three days of nothing but understanding it.
Then let us be precise, because precision is the only kindness I have. Etreuf's voice was calm and unhurried and entirely without cruelty, which was how Elliot knew to be careful. To match that man you would need a hundred and forty kills, alone, on open ground, starting from a body that cannot yet lift a full pail without whimpering. Twenty years, if you are as good as he is. You are not as good as he is. Nobody is; that is why they call him the Bull and not a name. A pause. And you do not have twenty years. Something opened the wall of the universe to put me in you. That is not a thing that happens to a boy who has time.
Elliot stared at the rafters.
So there's no way.
There is one, said Etreuf. There has been one since the night I arrived, and I have been looking at it every hour for fourteen days.
Elliot's hand went to his chest before the demon said another word. He caught himself doing it.
No, he said.
I have not
You've been building to this since the tomb. Elliot sat up, too fast, and his ribs made him regret it. Say it, then. Out loud. Say what you want.
Very well. Etreuf didn't hesitate. That coin has hung on your neck since before you could walk. It is warm when the world makes that sound and cold every other hour of its existence. It has no power in it, none, I have looked, and I have held things that ate cities and I know what power tastes like. And yet two blades that would not answer a man for eleven years went to pieces the moment it came into their room. A beat. It is not a keepsake, Elliot. It is a locked box. Somebody made it and shut it and gave it to a woman who walked into a valley in the snow, and it has been shut ever since, and I want it opened.
"It's my mother's," Elliot said. He said it aloud, in the dark, and his voice came out wrong.
Yes.
"That's all I have. Not", He stopped, and started again, and made himself get it out level. "I don't have anything else. I don't have her face. I don't know her voice. I don't know one thing she ever said to me. Old Hesk knew her and I never asked him enough and now I'm nine hundred miles away and I can't. I've got a coin. That's it. That's the whole thing."
I know, said Etreuf.
"Then don't ask me again."
I am not asking you to throw it away. I am asking you to
"No."
It came out flat and hard and final, and it surprised both of them.
Elliot had never said no to Etreuf like that. He'd argued, and refused, and dug his heels in about mercy and about people, but always with the door left open, always in the tone of somebody negotiating with something bigger than him. This wasn't that. This was the same voice he'd used walking into the reeds. He's nine. The voice that had stopped being a discussion.
The silence in his skull went on for a while.
...Very well, Etreuf said.
And that was all. No sneer, no counter-argument, no cold observation about sentiment being an expensive habit. He simply stopped, and let it go, and left Elliot lying in the dark with his heart hammering and the strange unpleasant feeling of having won something too easily.
Much later, almost asleep, Elliot thought: He didn't argue.
And then, with the last of his waking mind: He always argues.
What Elliot did not know, and Etreuf did:
A creature that has spent three hundred years in courts learns exactly one thing worth knowing about people, and it is not how to persuade them. It is how to recognize the ones who cannot be persuaded at all, and to notice, very carefully, what they can be moved by instead.
The demon had spent fourteen days watching a boy walk into a marsh for a child he barely knew, hand over his last bread to a man who tried to sell him, and offer a stranger the only road out he had.
Etreuf did not need to win the argument.
He only needed to be there, quiet and patient and entirely reasonable, on the day something happened to somebody else.
He woke before dawn to the dogs.
All of them this time, the whole north side of town, and under the barking a sound he felt rather than heard, a low, wrong, off-key note that went through his back teeth and settled in the place behind his sternum where the marsh-light lived.
Lyssara was already at the window with her boots on.
"How long?" Elliot said, getting up.
"Ten minutes." She didn't turn around. "It's out past the north wells. Whatever it is, it's big enough that the herd dogs won't go at it, and it's been circling, it comes closer and then it goes off, and then it comes closer." Her voice was flat. "Like it's looking for something and hasn't found it yet."
Elliot's hand had gone, without any instruction from him, to the wrapped bundle beside the mattress.
Both blades were singing.