The food ran out in the morning.
Hinro checked the pack, shook it once, put it down. Zein watched him do it.
"Nothing?"
"Nothing."
They walked.
---
The first hour wasn't bad. The body doesn't know it's hungry yet in the first hour — it's still running on yesterday, still warm from sleep, still willing to cooperate. Zein's ribs gave their usual morning complaint and he ignored them the usual way and the road was cool and the birds were doing what birds do in the early morning and it was almost fine.
Hinro walked beside him. At some point he slowed slightly and crouched down at the side of the road and picked something up — a small dark berry from a low bush, rolled it between his fingers, smelled it, put it back.
"Not those," he said, mostly to himself.
Zein looked at the bush. "Poisonous?"
"Bitter. Not worth it." Hinro stood and kept walking. "There's better further on if the season's right."
It wasn't the season apparently because they walked for another two hours and Hinro checked a few more things along the road — some moss, a root he dug up briefly and then reburied, some small red berries that he looked at for a long moment before deciding against — and none of it came to anything.
Zein didn't comment on any of it. He just walked and watched and filed away the fact that Hinro knew what to look for even if looking wasn't finding anything today.
---
By midmorning the hunger had opinions.
Not painful. Just loud. The kind that gets behind the eyes and makes everything slightly duller than normal and turns the legs into something heavier than legs. Zein's ribs were worse than they'd been yesterday which was the hunger doing that, he knew, everything hurts more when you're empty, knowing it didn't help.
His foot caught a stone wrong and he stumbled — one graceless lurch, his whole body going undignified without consulting him — and before anything else could come out he said "Vok" under his breath. Low and sharp and in Drakthos.
Hinro glanced at him.
"What was that."
"Nothing."
"Didn't sound like Althari."
"It wasn't." Zein kept walking.
Hinro kept pace with him. Didn't push it. Just filed it away the way he filed most things about Zein — quietly, for later, without making anything of it yet.
They walked on.
After a while Hinro said "Does it mean something bad."
"More or less."
"Sounded like it did."
"The stone deserved it," Zein said.
Something moved at the corner of Hinro's mouth. Not quite a smile. The closest thing to one Zein had seen from him.
The road kept going and the hunger kept being what it was and the morning kept moving the way mornings do when you're just in them with nowhere else to be.
---
Hinro smelled the trading post before Zein saw any sign of it.
He didn't say anything immediately — just his nose lifted slightly and his ears turned and he was quiet in a particular way for a few steps.
"There's a post ahead," he said. "Maybe a farmstead. Something with animals."
Zein thought about the extra blade in the pack. One of the slavers'. Good steel, military weight, the kind of thing a man on a road wouldn't normally be carrying. Worth something to the right person.
"Hood," Zein said.
Hinro was already reaching for it.
---
Three buildings, low and practical. A pen with two horses and a mule who looked like it had been alive longer than anyone and had feelings about it. A cart loaded with covered goods sitting in the dirt. A man outside on a stool working a knife against a whetstone with the slow patience of someone who had nowhere particular to be.
He looked up when they got close.
Took in Zein first. Then his eyes moved to Hinro — hooded, head down, standing half a step behind — and stayed there a beat too long before coming back.
"Travelers," he said. Althari with Aldric underneath it, the vowels flattened and hard.
"Looking to trade," Zein said. "We need food."
The man set his whetstone down on his knee. Didn't say anything. Just waited to see what trade meant.
Zein put the blade on the counter between them.
The trader picked it up. Turned it. His thumb ran along the edge slowly and his eyes did the thing eyes do when they're reading something carefully. Military steel. Well kept. Not something you find on a common traveler.
"Good blade," he said.
"Yes."
"Where from."
"The road," Zein said. "There were men. They had the wrong idea about us. They don't have ideas anymore."
The trader looked at him. A long flat look. Then he looked at Hinro once more — just once, briefly — and something moved through his face that he didn't share out loud. He set the blade down on his side of the counter.
"What do you need," he said.
"Bread. Meat if you have it. Water."
"Well's there." He nodded toward the side of the building. "Wait here."
He went inside. Zein stood at the counter and looked at the mule in the pen. The mule looked back at him with the expression of an animal that had made its peace with everything a long time ago.
The trader came back with a cloth bundle, set it down, went back inside without another word. Zein picked it up. Heavier than he'd expected — real food, actual weight to it, more than fair for the blade.
"Safe road," Zein said toward the door.
"Safe road," came back from inside.
---
They walked until the trading post was well behind them before either of them touched the bundle. Then Hinro took it and opened it and split everything without being asked and handed Zein his half and they walked and ate at the same time because stopping felt wrong after three days of moving.
Real bread. Actual bread with weight and crust and flavor. Dried meat that tasted like something. A small waxed cloth with something soft inside that turned out to be cheese and Zein ate it before he fully understood what it was.
His legs felt better almost immediately. His head came back from wherever hunger had sent it. Even his ribs quieted down slightly.
Hinro ate beside him and said nothing for a while and the road went under their feet and the afternoon came in warm and easy.
"He knew," Hinro said eventually.
Zein chewed. "Knew what."
Hinro glanced at him. "What I am. Under the hood."
Zein thought about the trader's eyes. The way they'd moved to Hinro and stayed. "Maybe."
"Not maybe."
Zein didn't argue with that. "He sold to us anyway."
"The blade was worth more than the trouble," Hinro said. Not bitterly. Not gratefully either. Just the flat honest voice of someone who had learned to take the world as it was rather than how it should be.
They walked on and the afternoon light came down gold through the thin trees and the road climbed slowly without announcing that it was climbing and an hour later they crested something and Zein looked up from watching his feet and stopped.
Hinro stopped beside him.
Caldris.
Still far — the better part of tomorrow — but there. Real and solid and actual at the end of all this road. Stone walls. Towers. The shape of a city that existed and was waiting and didn't care how long it had taken them to get there.
Zein stood and looked at it and didn't say anything for a moment.
Neither did Hinro.
The wind moved through the grass on either side of the road and the light was going golden the way it goes at the end of a long day and Caldris sat on the horizon like it had always been there which it had.
"Tomorrow," Zein said.
"Tomorrow," Hinro said.
They walked down toward it as the light went and the dark came in and the city disappeared into the night ahead of them but it was there now. They knew it was there. That was different.
One more day.