They didn't talk about the Waldgreif.
They all knew it was still up there. That was enough.
Zein got the cart moving first — found the handle at the front, tested the wheel that had sunk into the soft ground, got it loose with two hard pulls. It was heavier than it looked. The equipment inside shifted and settled and the cart groaned in a way that felt too loud for everything around them.
"Salazar," Zein said. "Can you push."
"My arm —"
"One arm."
Salazar put his good hand against the back of the cart and pushed and between the two of them it started moving. Slow. The wheel needed grease and wasn't getting any and the sound it made on the forest floor said exactly where they were to anything that was listening.
Ruth walked point. Sword sheathed but her hand close to it. Her shoulder was wrong and she was managing it the way she managed things — keeping her arm close to her body, not raising it, not mentioning it. Hinro walked the rear.
He was moving. That was the thing. Whatever the wild magic had done coming out of him it was still doing something on the way back — a tightness in how he was carrying himself that wasn't quite pain and wasn't quite exhaustion but lived somewhere between the two and wasn't going anywhere soon. His claws were still out. He hadn't put them away.
Zein looked back at him once.
Hinro looked back.
Neither of them said anything.
---
The forest didn't attack them.
Which was almost worse. The Waldgreif was up there — Hinro's ears moved toward the canopy twice in the first ten minutes and both times Zein's hands tightened on the cart handle and both times the forest just sat there. Just the cart wheel on the soft ground and their feet and the particular silence of something watching that had decided not to act.
Yet.
The word sat in Zein's head the whole walk. Not yet.
The cart was slow. Slower than walking comfortably, and every groan of the wheel felt like an announcement. He kept his eyes moving — trees, canopy, the shadows between the trunks, back to the canopy. Hinro's ears were the only reliable thing. When they moved Zein's whole body went ready. When they settled he let out the breath he'd been holding and kept walking.
Ruth didn't look back. She read the track ahead and kept the pace steady and said nothing and Zein got the sense she was doing the same thing he was — keeping it together through the walk the way you kept things together when stopping wasn't an option.
Salazar pushed with his good arm and after about five minutes of silence said quietly — "How much further."
"Half hour," Ruth said. Didn't look back.
Salazar nodded. Pushed. Was quiet for a bit.
Then — "The equipment in the cart is very important." Still quiet. Just talking. The way some people talked when the alternative was only the forest and the silence and the thing somewhere above them. "My master specifically requested the rune components. He uses a particular grade that only one merchant on the south road carries. It affects the inscription quality. Most rune smiths use the standard grade but Master Edren says the difference is significant once you understand what to look for."
Nobody responded.
The cart wheel groaned.
"He's the best rune smith in Caldris," Salazar continued. "Probably in the whole kingdom actually. He taught me everything I know about inscription work. The foundation techniques, the layering method, the way you read a rune after it's set to check for weaknesses. Three years I've been his apprentice and I still feel like I'm only at the beginning of what he knows."
"Good," Zein said. Meaning stop talking.
Salazar heard the meaning. He was quiet for a few minutes.
Hinro's ears moved toward the canopy.
Everyone stopped.
Ruth's hand went to her sword. Salazar pressed himself against the side of the cart with the resigned expression of someone who was very tired of being afraid and was doing it anyway. Zein held the cart handle and didn't breathe.
The canopy moved.
Wind. Just wind.
Hinro's ears settled.
Zein let out a long slow breath.
They kept walking.
"I want to be a master rune smith myself one day," Salazar said after another few minutes. Quieter than before but still going. "And a weapon smith. My master says I have good instincts for the work. He doesn't say things like that to everyone. He's careful with praise. So when he says it it means something."
"Salazar," Ruth said.
"Yes."
"Quiet."
"Right. Sorry."
He pushed the cart in silence for another stretch. Then he reached into the back of it with his good hand — lifting the latch one-handed, feeling around inside without looking — and pulled out a folded cloak. Dark, well-made, heavier than it looked. He held it out toward Hinro without making anything of it.
"Disguise cloak," he said quietly. "Rune enchanted. My master made it." He paused. "It won't change what you look like. It just makes people's eyes not — stick. They look and something tells them there's nothing interesting and they move on. It's a subtle inscription. Not flashy." He shrugged his good shoulder. "It's better than nothing."
Hinro looked at the cloak.
Looked at Salazar.
Salazar held it out and waited and didn't push it.
Hinro took it. Put it on. Settled it around his shoulders.
Nothing dramatic happened. The cloak just sat there looking like a cloak. But something changed — the way the light fell around him, the way the eye wanted to move past rather than stop. Zein looked at him directly and could see everything clearly — the ears, the eyes, the structure of his face — but he understood immediately what it was doing. Not hiding. Just making the truth easier to miss.
"Does it work," Hinro said.
"Ja," Salazar said. With the quiet satisfaction of someone whose master's work had just done exactly what it was supposed to do.
Hinro's claws finally went away.
---
The second half of the walk was better than the first.
Not good. Still the forest, still the Waldgreif somewhere above them, still the cart wheel making its announcement to anything within earshot. But the cloak helped — not just for Hinro, for all of them somehow, like one small thing going right had given everything else slightly more room to breathe.
Hinro's ears moved toward the canopy one more time near the end. Zein caught it and went ready and this time Ruth stopped too and all four of them stood there in the track for a long moment listening to the forest be absolutely quiet in the particular way that wasn't silence.
Then Hinro's ears settled and they kept walking and nobody said anything about it and ten minutes later the trees started thinning and the canopy started opening up and the grey afternoon sky appeared in bigger and bigger pieces and then they stepped out of the treeline and onto the road and the forest was behind them.
Zein stopped pulling the cart.
Everyone stopped.
The open air came in like something physical — wider, cleaner, the sky going in every direction without trees getting in the way of it. Caldris was visible in the distance, the road running straight toward it, empty in both directions. The Waldgreif had not followed them out.
They stood there for a moment and just let that be true.
Salazar sat down on the back of the cart without asking. Let out a breath that had been building since the clearing. Looked at his arm, at the wrapped wound, at the three people who had come into the forest for a routine job and found him and fought something that killed the last group and were all still standing.
"Thank you," he said. To all three of them. The way people said things when words felt inadequate and they were saying them anyway. "I was in there two days. I didn't know if anyone was going to come. And then you came and the Waldgreif and —" He stopped. "Thank you."
"You already said that," Ruth said.
"I know. It still doesn't feel like enough."
Ruth looked at him for a moment. Something in her expression moved slightly — not quite a smile, something that lived near one. She turned away.
She looked at Zein.
Then at Hinro.
Then back at Zein.
"Are you two together," she said.
Completely flat. Like she was asking about road conditions.
Zein looked at her. "What."
"Together," Ruth said. "The two of you. You've been checking on him since before we left the forest. He got hit in the ribs and you noticed before he said anything. This morning you bought him the cloak first." A pause. "Not judging. You've got nothing to complain about if that's how you roll."
Silence.
Zein looked at Hinro.
Hinro looked at Ruth.
"We are not," Hinro said.
There was a quality to it that Zein had not heard from him before. Not anger exactly. Something that lived in the same building as anger and was currently very much at home.
Ruth raised an eyebrow. "You don't have to —"
"We," Hinro said. "Are," he said. "Not," he said. Each word its own full stop delivered with the complete seriousness of someone who needed this to be understood.
Ruth blinked.
Zein was fairly certain he had never seen Ruth blink at something before.
Salazar looked between all three of them with the expression of someone who had arrived without a map and was trying to work out the terrain.
"I'm just saying," Ruth said.
"We are not," Hinro said again. The fourth time. Still just as serious as the first.
"Okay," Ruth said. She looked at Zein.
"We're not," Zein said.
"You bought him the cloak first," Ruth said.
"He needed it more," Zein said.
"Mm," Ruth said.
Hinro made a sound. Not a word. Just a sound. It contained a significant amount of information.
Salazar opened his mouth.
"Don't," all three of them said. At the same time. Without looking at him.
Salazar closed his mouth. Looked at the road. Decided the road was extremely interesting.
---
They walked.
The cart wheel complained the entire way and Salazar, once the initial silence had passed, talked. Not thoughtlessly — he kept his voice down and he wasn't oblivious, he understood that everyone around him was hurt and tired and had just survived something. But the words came out of him the way they came out of certain people — like the alternative was worse, like silence was something that needed to be filled before it filled you.
Master Edren's layering technique and why it produced cleaner inscriptions than the standard method. The specific grade of rune components and what made them different at a molecular level which Salazar didn't fully understand yet but his master had explained three times and he was getting closer. The workshop in the east quarter and the particular smell of it — hot metal and something herbal from the rune ink — that Salazar had decided was the best smell in the world.
"He has a forge as well," Salazar said. "Most rune smiths don't. They outsource the metalwork. But Master Edren says if you want to make a truly good weapon you have to understand every step of making it. The rune inscription and the metal it goes into are one thing. They affect each other. You can't separate them."
"Mm," Zein said.
"That's why I want to be a weapon smith as well as a rune smith," Salazar said. "Master Edren thinks it's ambitious. I think it's just — complete. You know? Doing the whole thing."
Ruth walked ahead and said nothing.
Hinro walked in silence. His ear moved once toward Salazar mid-sentence and then settled and he went back to watching the road ahead and Zein could tell he was not fully over the Ruth question and was going to need some time with that.
"He has a saying," Salazar said. "Master Edren. He says the rune is only as good as the hand that inscribes it and the hand is only as good as the mind behind it and the mind is only as good as the patience it was built with." He paused. "I think about that a lot."
Nobody responded.
"I've written it down," Salazar said.
"That's good," Zein said.
"I have a notebook," Salazar said.
Hinro's ear moved toward Salazar this time rather than the canopy. Not threat. Something closer to the particular weariness of someone absorbing a great deal of information they didn't ask for.
Zein caught it and looked away before he did something with his face that he'd regret.
---
The city gates came up as the light went golden.
Same guard, same post, same efficiency. He looked at them when they reached the front — Zein, Ruth with dried blood above her eye and her arm held carefully, Hinro in the disguise cloak, Salazar with his wrapped arm blinking in the late afternoon light. The guard's eyes went to Hinro and moved on in exactly the way the cloak intended, landing on the cart instead.
He looked at the cart. At the general state of all of them.
"Two Drel each," he said.
Zein looked at Hinro. Hinro looked at the guard. Neither of them moved.
Ruth already had the coin out. She put it on the ledge without a word.
The guard swept it off. "Move through."
Zein looked at Ruth.
"We'll sort it later," she said. Like it was nothing. Like she hadn't just paid for three people.
They went through.
---
The mercenary hall was quieter at this hour. A few people at tables, the same man behind the counter with the same papers. He looked up when they came in. Took in the four of them — the injuries, the state of their clothes, the particular look of people who had been somewhere bad and come back from it. He'd clearly seen that look before because nothing in his face changed very much.
Ruth put the job paper on the counter.
"Fertig," she said. "Der Wagen. Wir haben ihn zurückgebracht."
Done. The cart. We brought it back.
The man looked at the paper. Looked at Ruth's shoulder. Looked at Hinro and then past him the way people did with the cloak on. Looked at Zein.
"Der Waldgreif," he said.
"Noch draußen," Ruth said. "Schreib es auf. Für künftige Aufträge in diesem Teil des Walds."
Still out there. Note it. For future postings in that part of the Wald.
The man held her gaze for a moment. Then he opened his ledger and wrote something and without being asked counted out coin in three separate piles and pushed them across the counter.
Ruth took hers. Zein took his. Hinro took his.
Salazar watched this with the slow expression of someone putting together a picture they hadn't expected.
"You're mercenaries," he said.
"Trying to be," Zein said.
Salazar looked at all three of them. At Ruth's shoulder. At Hinro. At Zein who had fought a Waldgreif with rocks and a cart handle and had come back standing.
"Right," Salazar said. Slowly. Like the word was carrying more weight than words usually carried.
Then — "My master's workshop is in the east quarter. If you need somewhere to clean up before you find lodging —" Too quick, too eager, the way people offered things when they'd run out of other ways to say thank you. "He wouldn't mind. He's generous like that. Master Edren is a very generous man."
Ruth looked at Zein.
Zein looked at Hinro.
Hinro's ear moved once. Not yes, not no. Just acknowledging that something was being decided and he was present for it.
"Lead the way," Zein said.
Salazar's face did something that was entirely smile and he turned for the door.
Ruth fell into step beside Zein.
"Still not judging," she said quietly. Not looking at him.
Zein looked at her.
She was already looking straight ahead.
From behind them Hinro made a sound.
Salazar wisely said nothing.