They left early.
Ruth was already outside when they got there. Pack on, eating something wrapped in cloth, leaning against the wall of the guild with the ease of someone who had been waiting long enough to get comfortable doing it.
She looked them over once. Finished what she was eating. Started walking.
They followed.
---
The road out of Caldris ran west before it curved south. The city noise thinned behind them and then it was just the road and the morning and their boots on the dirt.
Ruth walked like she'd been walking all her life. Not fast. Just steady, the kind of pace that eats distance without feeling like it. Zein matched it. Hinro fell a step or two behind the way he always did when there was open space around him.
The first stretch passed without much between them. Ruth wasn't the kind of person who filled silence for the sake of it, which Zein found he didn't mind.
After a while she glanced back at Hinro. Took in the hood, the covered hands, not a piece of skin showing anywhere. She looked at it for a moment the way you look at something that doesn't quite add up.
She looked at Zein.
"What's wrong with him."
Zein didn't hesitate. "His skin. It reacts to sunlight."
Ruth looked at the sky. Solid grey cloud from one end to the other.
She looked at Zein.
"And wind," Zein said. "Wind is also bad for it."
"Wind."
"It's a specific condition. Quite rare."
Ruth looked at Hinro. Hinro was very interested in the road ahead of them. Specifically a stretch of road that contained nothing of note.
She looked back at Zein with the expression of someone who had decided something and wasn't going to say what.
"Right," she said. And turned forward.
Three steps behind them Hinro said absolutely nothing. But something about the particular way he was holding himself said quite a lot.
---
The treeline was another hour down the road. They were maybe halfway to it when Ruth glanced at Zein again.
"You don't speak Aldric."
"No," Zein said.
"But you speak Althari."
"Yes."
She thought about that. "Where are you from that you speak Althari and not Aldric."
"Far from here," Zein said.
Ruth waited to see if there was more. There wasn't.
She looked at the road ahead. "Most places you'll go out here it's Aldric. Althari gets you by in the cities but not everywhere." She paused. "You'll need it eventually."
Zein didn't say anything. She wasn't wrong.
They walked for a bit. Then Ruth nodded at the treeline coming up ahead of them.
"Wald," she said.
Zein looked at her.
"Forest," she said. "In Aldric.
Zein looked at the trees. "Vald," he said.
Ruth stopped walking.
Behind them Hinro made a sound. It was small and he tried to keep it small but it was there.
Ruth turned and looked at Zein with an expression he couldn't fully read.
"Wald," she said. Slower. "W — ald."
"Vald," Zein said.
Hinro turned away from both of them. His shoulders were doing something they didn't usually do.
"Wald," Ruth said again. She pointed at her mouth. "W. Like — wh. Wald."
Zein looked at her mouth. Then tried again.
"Vald," he said.
Ruth stared at him.
Hinro gave up pretending and made the sound properly this time. Not loud. But real.
Something shifted in Ruth's expression. She pressed her lips together. Looked at the trees. Looked back at Zein.
"You'll get the hang of it," she said. And kept walking.
Zein looked at Hinro.
Hinro looked back at him with watering eyes and said nothing. His mouth had done something it didn't usually do and hadn't fully stopped doing it.
Zein looked away first.
---
The forest took them in.
The light changed when they stepped into it — greener, softer, the sky disappearing behind the canopy. The road narrowed to a track and the city was gone completely, just trees in every direction and the sound of the three of them moving through it.
Ruth settled into it like it was familiar to her. She checked the job paper once, got her bearings, folded it back into her coat. After that she just moved — reading the ground ahead, noting things Zein didn't always catch, unhurried.
She tried another word on Zein after a while.
"Baum," she said, touching the bark of a tree as she passed it.
"Baum," Zein said.
Ruth looked at him. Then at Hinro. Then back at Zein.
"That was right," she said. Like she wasn't entirely sure what to do with that.
"Baum," Zein said again.
"Don't push it," Ruth said.
Hinro made the sound again. Zein decided not to acknowledge it.
---
They walked for another hour. The forest got quieter the further in they went. Not in a wrong way — just the deep quiet of somewhere that didn't get many visitors. Ruth moved through it easily. The three of them had found something between them by now, not quite comfort but not friction either. Just three people in the same place going in the same direction.
Then Ruth slowed.
Stopped.
Through the trees, maybe thirty paces off the track, sitting in a small clearing —
A cart.
No horse. No one around it. Just sitting there in the quiet of the forest like it had been there long enough to forget it was waiting for someone.
The three of them stood at the edge of the track and looked at it.
Nobody said anything.