They walked until the light gave out.
No conversation about stopping. Hinro just slowed when the sky went that deep orange and started looking at the treeline and Zein understood. His ribs had been talking to him since morning and they had a lot to say about the walking so he didn't argue with the slowing.
Hinro found a spot set back from the road. Not far — just far enough. He moved through the thin trees like he wasn't thinking about it and Zein followed and they didn't speak and the dark came in around them gradually the way it does when you stop moving and actually let it arrive.
They had flint from the dead men. Wood wasn't hard to find. The fire Hinro built was small and low and Zein sat down next to it and his ribs said something sharp about sitting and he sat anyway and looked at the flames and let his body stop for the first time all day.
It was a strange feeling. Stopping. His legs still felt like they were moving.
Hinro crouched across the fire and looked at him.
"Your ribs," he said.
"I know."
"Let me see."
Zein pulled his shirt up. The bruising had come in fully now — purple and black spreading from his left side down toward his hip, the kind of color that means something hit something hard and the body is still arguing about it. Hinro looked at it for a moment without saying what he thought of it.
"Probably not broken," he said.
"Probably," Zein said.
He pulled the shirt back down.
Hinro didn't move for a second. Then he reached over and tore a strip from the inside lining of his cloak — cleaner than the outside — and held it out. Zein took it without saying anything and wrapped his ribs with it, tight, wincing once when he got the angle wrong, and then it was done and it wasn't better but it was something.
"Your side," Zein said.
Hinro looked at him.
"I saw it through the cloak two hours ago," Zein said. "It's still going."
Hinro was quiet for a moment. Then he pulled his shirt up and the wound was bad — long and deep and the edges of it had been trying to close all day without much success. Dark and crusted on the outside and still wet in the middle. Zein tore another strip and handed it over and watched Hinro press it against his own ribs and hold it there and not make a sound about it.
Three years in a slave house. You learn not to make sounds about things.
They sat with that for a while.
---
The bread was the same bread it had always been and there was less of it now. Zein chewed slowly and looked at the fire and tried not to think about how hungry he still was after finishing it.
Hinro was across from him, elbows on his knees, looking at the flames. The hood was down. His ears moved once toward the dark beyond the trees and then settled. The firelight caught the side of his face and made him look older than twenty three somehow. Or maybe not older. Just like someone who had been carrying something heavy for a long time and had gotten used to the weight of it.
The night was quiet around them. Wind moving somewhere above the trees. A bird once and then not again.
Zein didn't mean to ask. It just came out.
"How long were you in that house."
Hinro didn't look up from the fire. "Three years."
Zein didn't say anything to that. Three years was its own answer. Three years in chains in a room that smelled like thirty people and gray food twice a day and Shoulders and Tapper and the particular cruelty of people who have stopped seeing you as a person.
"You were somewhere before that," Zein said after a while.
Hinro picked up a stick from the ground next to him. Just to have something in his hands.
"Two years," he said. "After—" He stopped. Started again differently. "After my clan I just. Walked. Mostly. Didn't really have a direction."
Zein looked at him. "What happened to your clan."
The stick turned in Hinro's fingers.
The fire popped.
Hinro was quiet for long enough that Zein thought he wasn't going to answer.
"We were up in the hills," he said finally. "Eastern territories. Far from everything. Three generations my family had been in those hills. We weren't near any roads, weren't near any human settlements. We weren't bothering anyone." He said it simply. Not bitterly. Just as a fact that had been true and hadn't mattered. "We had never had trouble. Not once in three generations."
He turned the stick in his fingers.
"Then one night they came."
He said it like that. Not building to it. Just — one night they came. Like it was still something his mind couldn't put a proper shape around even five years later.
"Goddesses," he said. "Twelve of them. Maybe more. They came at night and they brought their own light with them — that wrong kind of light, too bright, too cold, coming through the trees from the east. My mother woke me up and her face—"
He stopped.
His hands were still on the stick.
"My father went out to talk to them," he said. "He thought— he always believed you could talk to anyone if you were calm enough about it." Something crossed his face that hurt to look at. "He was wrong about that."
Zein looked at the fire because looking at Hinro's face felt like an intrusion right now.
"They killed everyone who fought," Hinro said. "Chased everyone who ran. The ones who just stood there — the ones who froze — they put in chains." A pause. "My sister froze."
The fire moved between them.
"I was eighteen," Hinro said. "I fought. I thought—" He let out a short breath that wasn't quite a laugh. "I thought I could do something. I had my claws and I was angry and I was eighteen and I thought that was enough."
He put the stick down.
"One of them hit me with something and I woke up and everyone was gone. My clan was gone. The hills were quiet. My father was—" He stopped. "My mother was—"
He didn't finish that sentence.
Zein didn't ask him to.
They sat in the quiet for a long time after that. The fire burned low between them and the night pressed in from the trees and Zein sat with everything Hinro had just put into the air between them and felt it land.
Goddesses.
No reason given. No warning. Three generations of a clan living quietly in the eastern hills and one night twelve goddesses came through and ended it because they felt like it. Because they could. Because there was nobody who was going to stop them or ask them why.
He thought about Elena. About her face. About her mother. About standing on a battlefield at fifteen years old looking across at the goddess forces and thinking they were something holy.
He didn't say any of that.
What was there to say.
"I'm sorry," he said finally. Quietly. Not because it fixed anything. Because it was true and Hinro deserved to hear something true from someone.
Hinro looked at him across the dying fire. A long look. Like he was checking whether the words were real or just words.
They were real.
"I know," Hinro said.
Then nothing for a while.
Just the embers going quieter and the dark pressing in and two people sitting with something that couldn't be fixed.
---
Hinro heard them first.
Of course he did.
His ears turned toward the road and his whole body went still in the way it had gone still yesterday morning — that taut listening stillness — and Zein caught it and went still too without asking why.
Voices. Low. Coming from the road. Two men, maybe three, the sound of boots on packed dirt and the creak of something being carried or wheeled. Travelers moving at night to cover distance. Normal. Ordinary. The kind of people who moved through the world without thinking about it because the world had never given them a reason to think about it.
Hinro didn't move.
He just — became less. Like he knew how to take up less space, make less sound, become something the dark could swallow if it needed to. Zein watched him do it and understood without being told that this was not the first time Hinro had hidden from ordinary people on an ordinary road just to avoid what their ordinariness would do to him if they saw him.
The travelers passed maybe twenty feet from where they sat.
Zein could see them through the thin trees — two men and a boy, lantern swinging, unhurried, talking about something mundane. The boy said something and one of the men laughed. They walked and the lantern swung and they had no idea that anyone was in those trees and no idea what it cost someone to sit in the dark and watch them pass freely on a road that was supposed to belong to everyone.
They disappeared around the bend.
The road went quiet again.
Hinro's shoulders came down slightly. Just slightly. His ears settled.
Neither of them said anything about it.
There was nothing to say about it that wasn't already sitting plainly in the air between them. Zein had hidden too — he could have walked out to that road and those men would have seen a young man by a fire and thought nothing of it. He had stayed in the trees anyway. He didn't examine why too closely. It just hadn't felt like something he was willing to do.
The embers were almost gone.
Hinro lay down and pulled his cloak around him and turned toward the dark.
Zein lay down too.
---
Hinro dreamed of home.
The hills in the wet season. That deep green that got into everything. The smell of cookfire and wet earth and the particular smell of his mother's hands when she held his face — grain and something warm underneath, something that was just her.
She was outside grinding grain the way she did every morning. Her hands moving in the rhythm he had fallen asleep to a hundred times as a child. Her ears — same shape as his, same small tilt at the top — turning toward the sounds of the clan waking up around her. Children. Cookfires. His father's voice somewhere behind the shelter saying something to one of the elders.
She looked up and saw him.
Her whole face opened.
Zingara, she said softly. Her child. Her boy.
He sat beside her and she kept grinding and didn't stop looking at him every few seconds the way she always did — like she was making sure he was still there, like she had always been a little afraid of losing him and had never said so directly. His sister came around the side of the shelter and threw something at his head — a pebble, a bit of bark, something small and annoying — and laughed when he flinched and he told her to stop and she didn't stop and his mother told them both to behave and nobody behaved and the morning was warm and green and exactly what it was supposed to be.
He wanted to stay.
He knew what was coming.
The light changed.
Just — changed. One moment the warm morning light of the wet season hills and then something else entirely. Cold and bright and wrong. The kind of light that didn't belong in those hills, didn't belong anywhere that was supposed to be safe. Coming through the trees from the east. Growing.
His mother's hands stopped.
Her ears went flat.
Hinro, she said. Different voice now. The voice she used when something was wrong and she was trying not to show how wrong. Hinro get inside.
He couldn't move. Dream or memory or both — he couldn't move and he knew what was coming and it came anyway.
His father walking out to meet the light. His father's voice — calm, even, the voice of a man who believed in words — saying something in Althari toward that cold brightness coming through the trees. Patient. Respectful. Treating them like people who would respond to being treated like people.
The sound that followed.
His father not walking back.
The screaming starting somewhere on the other side of the camp and then everywhere at once.
The light flooding in between the trees and behind it twelve goddesses — maybe more, he had never been able to count them, there were always more than he expected — moving through his clan like his clan was something in their way. Their faces were beautiful. Their faces were completely empty of anything that saw his people as people. They moved with the particular efficiency of beings who have never been told no and have never needed to be.
He watched a woman he had known his whole life go down and not get up.
He watched children running and being caught and not getting away.
He watched his sister freeze — just freeze, standing in the middle of it all with her hands at her sides and her eyes wide — and one of the goddesses look at her and walk toward her with a chain and his sister not move, not run, just stand there and let it happen because sometimes the body just stops working when it sees something it cannot process.
He fought.
He remembered fighting. Claws out and eighteen years old and so angry he couldn't see straight and it hadn't mattered at all. Not even a little. One of them looked at him — just looked at him, the way you look at something minor and annoying — and said something in Elyris and whatever it was it picked him up and put him down hard and when he woke up the light was gone and the hills were quiet and—
His mother was near the shelter entrance.
She wasn't moving.
Her hands — the hands that had ground grain every morning of his entire life, the hands that had held his face, the hands he had fallen asleep listening to — were still.
He woke up.
Hard and fast with his hand on the blade before his eyes were open. Heart going. The dream pulling back already from the edges but leaving everything that mattered right where it always left it.
The camp was dark and quiet. Embers dead now. Trees above him. Zein asleep on the other side of where the fire had been, breathing slowly, face slack, completely gone under.
Hinro sat up.
His side ached. His hands were steady. He looked at where the embers had been and breathed and let the dream finish receding and sat with what was left which was the same thing that was always left — his mother's face when she looked up and saw him in the morning. Before. When the hills were still green and the world was still whole.
He sat with it for a while.
Then he lay back down and looked at the dark sky through the thin trees and listened to the night which was quiet and smelled like nothing like home and breathed until his heart settled back into something ordinary.
Two more days to Caldris.
He closed his eyes.
Did not sleep for a long time.