They rode in silence for a day.
The adrenaline of the river crossing had burned off, leaving only cold exhaustion.
Isfrid broke it.
"Do you actually believe any of it?" Isfrid asked, staring at the passing tree line. "The doctrine. The tribunals. The scripture you quote to bait these magistrates."
Faust watched the reins slip back and forth through Isfrid's hands.
"A century of watching people rot strips your patience for anyone claiming certainty about the afterlife," Faust said. "I believe in medicine because I can watch it work. I know exactly what my hands can and cannot save. As for God—I was baptized in the grandest cathedral my father could find. That rite leashed my demonic half for eighty years. Either the ritual worked because of pure luck, or it worked through a mechanic entirely indifferent to faith. I've never settled which answer is worse."
Isfrid let the coach rock over a rut in the dirt road.
"You said your father stormed out with you the night my great-grandfather found out what you were," Isfrid said. "You never told me what happened to him. Or the rest of them."
Faust touched the silver pendant at his throat.
"They died like ordinary people," Faust said. "Old age and winter coughs. I buried my parents within two years of each other. My brothers followed. I stood at their graves wearing the face of a twenty-year-old, burying the humans who raised me. And then there my wife."
"..."
"The Herzog took her in shortly after he took me. Two strays. We never thought it strange to love each other once we grew up, not until the world explained it to us." He dropped his hand from the pendant. "She was ill for three years. I was already a master physician, and I couldn't cut the rot out of her lungs. That was the year I stopped thinking God was listening."
Isfrid kept his eyes fixed on the road ahead.
He didn't offer any hollow comforts.
"I'm sorry," Isfrid said.
"So am I," Faust said.
The coach rattled onward into the dusk.